Adam Tooze The Energy Giants Face Off

Dr. Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University.

In the early 1910s, Winston Churchill ordered the conversion of Britain’s giant fleet of dreadnought battleships to oil fuel from coal. In so doing, the story goes, he ushered in the age of oil power. He also effectively anointed the United States — at the time the world’s largest producer of oil — as the 20th century’s natural hegemon.

If global competition is inextricably interwoven with technology and energy, how states power themselves could predict how the next world order takes shape.

Today, China is a classic example of a power state. It pursues energy in every direction, harnessing an army of scientists and industrial R&D. The United States, at least through the end of the Biden administration, seemed to be in the same game. Thanks to shale, the United States surged ahead of Saudi Arabia in the oil and gas stakes. There was a retro, Tinkertoy aspect to President Joe Biden’s emphasis on U.S. steel, but the United States was at least competing in green energy.

Then came the second Trump administration, itself the product of a generation of radicalization in the American conservative movement. There are elements of its politics that are relatively conventional: the talk of energy dominance, the use of blunt force to secure a sphere of influence. But then there is the climate denial, the attacks on science, the phobia of wind turbines. In its darkest incarnation, the administration embraces a vision of conservatism somewhere between steampunk and reactionary 19th-century Catholicism.

The problem is, of course, that steampunk isn’t real and solar panels are, that artificial intelligence needs gigawatts of power and that drones are a menace to battleships — even of the Trump class. Cutting loose from 21st-century physics, electrical engineering, the markets and international community may help the administration stick it to the libs, but pandemics are real, Venezuelan oil really is sticky and the modern U.S. Army really does run on batteries, not push-ups.

The anti-systemic, postfactual quality of U.S. power and its obsession with oil did not originate with Donald Trump. Remember Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and 2003? The Chinese do. The determination with which Beijing has pursued alternative energy for the last generation reflects its desire not to be subjected to the whims of Washington and its violent and capricious politics. China today is first and foremost a giant fossil energy power — by far the largest the world has ever seen. But its principal energy source is one the United States does not control: coal. And, true to the Soviet example, the backbone of China’s energy system is industrial electricity — but now it’s electro-tech. To eventually replace its coal-fired power stations, China has encouraged private entrepreneurs to build innovative factories for batteries and solar panels that now command world markets.

On the horizon is the promise of a global power system based not on foraging for oil but on farming the sun. That system won’t come without its own complications. By contrast with the grotesque caricature presented by America today, it is tempting to paint China as a haven of light: clear waters and green mountains, as President Xi Jinping likes to say. But its system, too, has a dark side. Solar farms in Tibet and power lines in Xinjiang have imperial stakes. The region’s economics are a mess.

But China’s is the real dialectic of modernity, not Mr. Trump’s W.W.E. version. Does a world order come out of this unequal competition between energy giants? Do new blocs of power and influence form between the petrostates and countries that buy into a greener future made in China? No one can see that far ahead. The outlook, for now, is for multipolar disorder lavishly powered with cheap energy: a polycrisis with drones and heavy crude.

Monica Duffy Toft The World Splits in Three

Dr. Duffy Toft is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

The post-World War II rules-based order is collapsing, and the world’s most powerful states are reaching for a dated playbook: spheres of influence. Russia has invaded Ukraine twice. China has militarized the South China Sea. The United States has seized Venezuela’s sitting president and publicly threatened to acquire Greenland from a NATO ally by force. What unites these actions is a shared premise: Great powers must expand or die.

During World War II, the leaders of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union met at Yalta and effectively divided Europe into rival blocs — one managing an open system that gradually delegitimized colonialism, the other a closed system sustained through repression. The participants knew that allowing the Soviet Union to trample the sovereign aspirations of Eastern Europe was savagely unfair, but the alternative was more war. The arrangement worked because it was negotiated, bounded and served the mutual interests of leaders entering an age when worldwide conflict could mean extinction.

What’s taking shape today has no guarantee of similar success. Instead we are entering a world where great powers seek domination without rules, limits or agreed boundaries. It is sphere logic without sphere discipline.

Three key features of today’s spheres undermine their ability to create a stable world order. The first is that the current power consolidation is not a response to the imminent threat of another world war. The Yalta Agreement of 1945 was forged among exhausted states to prevent a return to global conflict. The spheres now taking shape offer no comparable stabilizing benefit. If anything, they may lead the world down the opposite path.

Second is the nature of America’s current leadership. The world’s most powerful democracy is now led by a president who has inverted a century of U.S. foreign policy, which sought to make the world safe from war in support of free trade. President Trump has made clear his admiration for President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia — not so much as individuals, but as autocrats capable of using state power to advance and maintain their own power. All three men have revised history in ways that support a demand for muscular, militarily coercive foreign policy.

The third is that today, geography alone can no longer sustain spheres of power as it once did. Even as the Trump administration seeks to dominate the Western Hemisphere, American influence still relies on alliances, overseas bases and centrality in global finance and trade. China, too, has constructed extensive global networks through trade, infrastructure finance and technology. Even Russia remains dependent on global markets through energy, food and arms exports. None of these states can retreat into self-contained bubbles without undermining the overlapping networks needed to maintain their power.

The retreat that is already well underway is self-defeating. Some of the most existential threats that will confront great powers this century — future pandemics, climate change, weaponized artificial intelligence, cyberattacks and transnational terrorism — simply cannot be managed alone. As the world fractures once more into rival spheres, the cooperation needed to address those threats is withering.

The emerging landscape promises stability but delivers only uncertainty and accumulating dangers: more flashpoints among nuclear-armed powers, more nuclear proliferation, less cooperation on global threats and a system structurally incapable of mitigating the risks it creates.

Matias Spektor The Global South Pushes Back

Dr. Spektor is a professor of politics and international relations at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil.

Great power politics has returned in a familiar register: coercion, intervention, hierarchy. The United States, China and Russia are once again asserting privileged claims over regions, trade routes and political alignments — often through tools that stretch or sidestep the legal restraints that were supposed to define the post-Cold War era.

States shaped by the imposed hierarchy of the last century are now central to the next chapter of global history. These are countries — nations such as India, Brazil, South Africa and Iran — that have experienced varying degrees of occupation, tutelage or external constraint. As a group, they are deeply divided by styles of governance, security considerations and development strategies. But they share a political grammar forged by domination and resistance. For them, sovereignty is not an abstraction. It is a hard-won asset, something that is easily threatened and will be fiercely defended.

That shared experience does not produce unity of thought or action among the nations that are often collectively referred to, however imperfectly, as the global south. But it does produce agility. Across continents, the governments of middle and small powers increasingly hedge rather than align, forum shop rather than commit and bargain transactionally rather than submit. They diversify trade, reroute finance, cultivate alternative partners and keep their options open. The defining resource of many of these states today is not ideology, but the power to choose — and to make their choices consequential in this new geopolitical landscape.

As the most powerful nations jockey for dominance, their competition takes place in a world of dense economic interdependence and mounting planetary stress. Supply chains, payment systems, energy flows, data networks and food markets have all become instruments of pressure. Interdependence no longer restrains power; more and more, it is weaponized, rerouted and rationed. Influence travels through markets and infrastructure as well as through armies.

Where there is power, resistance follows. Coercion can still extract short-term concessions, but it also accelerates diversification, pushing states to build exit options in finance, technology and security. The harder great powers press — militarily, economically or technologically — the more they invite backlash. It may not always be dramatic defiance, but instead quieter obstruction through delay, dilution, selective compliance and strategic ambiguity.

The next world order probably will not resemble a stable concert of powers or a neat division of the globe into rival camps. It will likely be rougher, more improvisational and more contested — shaped by great powers trying to draw lines and by states with living memories of hierarchy constantly testing, bending and renegotiating them.

In a world of interdependence and crisis, hierarchy does not end contestation. It multiplies it.

Rush Doshi America Cedes the Stage to China

Mr. Doshi was the deputy senior director for China and Taiwan affairs at the National Security Council under President Joe Biden. He is a scholar at Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations.

For the first time in more than a century, the Americas appear to be Washington’s highest priority — to the detriment of time and attention on Europe and Asia, and to the ultimate benefit of Beijing.

The administration’s pursuit of a “Fortress America” offers no refuge against China’s growing power. And building it through imperial adventures risks repeating the mistakes of other great powers that similarly misdiagnosed the true sources of national strength as territorial control instead of technological mastery.

In the 18th century, China and Russia myopically built spheres of influence on the Eurasian steppe while Britain won the century by perfecting the steam engine. In the 19th century, Europeans fixated on the scramble for Africa while the United States leaped ahead by inventing electrification and mass manufacturing.

Now the United States risks distracting itself by trying to govern Venezuela and seize Greenland while China is dedicating vast sums to winning the technologies of the future, from artificial intelligence and robotics to quantum computing and biotechnology.

Already, China’s economy is roughly 30 percent larger than the United States’ by purchasing power, its industrial base twice as large, its power generation twice as high, and its navy is on track to become 50 percent larger by the end of this decade. It leads in new technologies like electric vehicles and next-generation nuclear reactors while the United States increasingly depends on it for everything from antibiotics to rare-earth minerals.

Dominating the Americas does little to change this. The Western Hemisphere has only about 13 percent of the world’s population and a shrinking share of its economy and manufacturing capacity. If prioritizing the Americas means fewer resources are devoted to Asia, that is a poor trade, one that risks ceding the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region to Beijing’s influence. America would fall behind China technologically, depend on it economically and risk being defeated by it militarily. The result would be a Chinese century.

For America, the only path to balancing China’s sheer scale is to renew American strength at home and leverage the collective power of U.S. partners by building “allied scale” abroad. An “Americas first” fixation on the Western Hemisphere complicates that. It distracts leaders from the task of domestic renewal and alienates allies and partners. Seizing Greenland from Denmark, for example, would fracture NATO and drive Europe closer to China. That would be strategic malpractice.

Beijing appears to recognize that in statecraft, focusing one’s energies on the right question matters. For Washington, the central strategic question of the 21st century is not whether the United States can build a bastion in the Western Hemisphere. It is whether America, after a century as the world’s most powerful, advanced and prosperous country, will renew the true sources of strength or pass the torch to China.

Margaret MacMillan Expect Continued Chaos

Ms. MacMillan is a historian and a former warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

In the last decade or so, a lot of people got bored with looking at a future that promised more of the same. Moving fast and breaking things, or at least shaking them up, seemed bold, radical and novel. Well, here we are. The international order that we all got used to — in retrospect, to the point of complacency — is in bad shape, perhaps fatally so.

Whatever next? Will President Trump order the seizing of another head of state? Yet another Russian-flagged tanker? Will President Xi Jinping of China decide that the time has come to reunite Taiwan with the mainland? Will the sun rise tomorrow? We are living in a time of what’s been called radical uncertainty. We are in a transition in which the previous system is unraveling but we don’t yet know what comes next. Maybe things will resolve soon into a new normal. But if history is any guide, we shouldn’t count on that but instead brace ourselves for a prolonged period of volatility.

Predictability, which is essential for global peace, is not a feature of this world. In fact, making predictions would be a mug’s game. There are too many disruptive factors, such as unpredictable electorates, trade wars, artificial intelligence (and its attendant investment bubbles), aging populations and a warming planet. Revisionist powers break the rules and abandon norms to invade or threaten their neighbors. Some international arms agreements are allowed to lapse or are simply ignored, and others that badly need updating — such as those against nuclear proliferation or the militarizing of space — are left untended.

Existing outside of an agreed framework of rules leaves all of us much more vulnerable to the whims of the decision makers, who must make it up as they go along. And there, too, there is not much cause for optimism. Do we really think the current crop of leaders and their advisers — indeed, do we think any of us — are up to coping well with the multifarious challenges we face? Leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, who is assiduous in putting up monuments but less good at providing services and prosperity. Or an isolated President Vladimir Putin of Russia, with his bubble of courtiers who assure him he is always right. Or Mr. Trump, in what is still the world’s most powerful nation by most measures, who relishes the exercise of power at home and abroad, but whose attention flits between building a new ballroom at the White House and waging an undeclared war on Venezuela.

In this unpredictable world, instead of order we can expect hot spots, where great powers strive to achieve exclusive spheres of influence and clash wherever they meet on land and sea: China and the United States over Taiwan and the Pacific, India and China along their common border, or Europe and its eastern border with Russia.

Smaller powers may scramble to find shelter under one aegis or another, but, as happened before 1914, shift allegiance if they can see a better deal. This constant rearranging carries its own risks. Great powers — and middling ones, too — have throughout history been drawn into the quarrels of their protégés. Wars can start by accident. But once started they are hard to control or end, and can consume all in their way, like a forest fire.