A New Historic Era
The East Wing of the White House has an interesting history. It was first constructed under Theodor Roosevelt as an entrance for visitors to congregate. In 1942, it was converted into a two-story building that served as a cover for an underground bunker. Today, it is being demolished to make way for the Trump Ballroom. Financed by private donors, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, the Society of Architectural Historians commented that it ‘will be the first major change to its exterior appearance in the last 83 years’. At the same time, the post-war system is in a period of restructuring. American globalisation is coming to an end, and with it, the unipolar era.
The misnamed ‘rules-based order’, which has structured global relations for 80 years, is being dismantled, giving way to a multipolar system composed of vying regional spheres of influence. That the East Wing is undergoing its first major structural change since the Second World War - razing the old in preparation for the new - is a visual metaphor almost too perfect to ignore. Because this is the essential purpose of the Trump Administration. It is not to resist multipolarity, but to manage it, and in many cases to accelerate the process. The twilight of the United States as unrivalled superpower is twinned with a state and corporate-led realignment in which the global system is being redefined.
The sprawling American apparatus has proven increasingly unsustainable. The wars undertaken in pursuit of empire dominance have constituted strategic failures in military overreach. In parallel, the centres of the world economy are shifting southwards and eastwards, and the United States is no longer the default safe haven for capital. The authors of a report produced by the Boston Consulting Group are in no doubt about the direction of travel: ‘the Global South is where the future is being built. These economies will account for the lion’s share of global growth well into the future, defining the next wave of economic opportunity. They also hold what the world needs: critical resources to secure global supply chains, young and expanding workforces, and growing consumer markets’. It is not outlandish to hypothesise an economic and geopolitical volte-face between parts of the existing core and parts of the erstwhile periphery.
Among the many repercussions, commodity markets are becoming less fixed around the dollar. ‘Today, a large and growing proportion of energy is being priced in non-dollar-denominated contracts,’ says Natasha Kaneva, head of Global Commodities Strategy at J.P. Morgan. There are indications of de-dollarisation in the bond markets. A recent report published by the London Stock Exchange Group is clear about the consequences: ‘If globalisation and multilateralism do reverse, and trade becomes more focused in regional trade-blocs, with less dollar denomination of international trade flows, the dollar’s role as a global trade invoicing and reserve currency may be diminished’. These alterations are tectonic in nature. In this way, the policy of the Trump Administration is not merely an eccentric aberration. It is epiphenomenal: an effect of the inescapable underlying tendencies organic to global capitalism in the 21st century.
The Western Hemisphere
We will cycle through some examples to make the point, starting with the dissolution of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Much of the media coverage on this issue focused on the impact on foreign aid channels, a move condemned by many humanitarian organisations. But the role of USAID could not be reduced to altruism. This was the mechanism for US soft power on the world stage, carefully crafted over a period of decades, spanning over a hundred countries. In these settings, non-military forms of action could be taken to shape outcomes to suit US interests, from election interference to leveraging open markets. This infrastructure has been wholly uprooted, making obsolete a previously crucial platform.
The once unrivalled global empire is retrenching in favour of ‘transactional and zero-sum’ relations as it stakes out hegemony in the Western hemisphere. Now, Europe is in the crosshairs for political and economic subjugation to the United States. The increasingly abrasive nature of direct political interference in this regard is proportional to the obsequiousness of the European and British political leadership. The latter has very little to do with placating Trump’s latest personal gripe in the soap-opera version of diplomacy broadcast by the major news outlets. That is merely the theatre for a dawning geopolitical reality. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said of American headquartered interventions into the country’s election in May: ‘I can’t remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the western democracies’.
Key institutions are being reorganised against this backdrop, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The White House sought a buyout of the whole organisation, offering employees a voluntary redundancy package, with the aim of bringing the agency into line with Trump Administration priorities. According to the aide of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, this meant ‘a greater focus on the western hemisphere, targeting countries not traditionally considered adversaries of the US’. It is within this lexicon that the threats against Denmark and Greenland exist. In the same vein, this is also how the apparently outlandish comments about Canada becoming a 51st state should be appraised: that the US is seeking hemispheric vassalisation.
No more so can we see this than with Europe. The continent has become a regional hub for retooling the American arms economy. At Trump’s insistence, military spending is being drastically increased, with the purpose of delivering a flow of contracts to US manufacturers. Meanwhile, EU exports to the United States have cratered by 22% in 2025. In other words, this represents a one-way extraction and provides a glimpse into the future role of Europe as an American protectorate.
It is in this context that we once more quote Friedrich Merz, who recently issued the following stark warning: ‘…in the coming weeks, months and perhaps within a few years, it will be decided whether Europe will remain an independent economic power in the global economy or whether we will become a pawn of the major economic centres in Asia or America’. The former BlackRock representative, like the European Commission, is planning ‘sweeping economic reform’ apparently to auger against such an outcome. But what he and the European leadership have in mind is more of the same: massive cuts to government spending, combined with the surge in funding for militarism.
As economist and former Scotsman editor George Kerevan wrote in 2024: ‘Europe no longer poses an economic threat to US interests and no longer needs to be placated or defended.’ In a bout of apparent joviality in the Oval Office, Trump revealed he was seen as ‘the president of Europe’. One anonymous EU diplomat put it bluntly: ‘He may never be Europe’s president, but he can be its godfather. The appropriate analogy is more criminal. We’re dealing with a mafia boss exerting extortionate influence over the businesses he purports to protect’. In the same way as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte referred to the President as ‘Daddy’, such squalid colloquialisms are reflective of something more concrete.
We can also see the range of techniques normally reserved for destabilising countries in the Global South being applied in the Western hemisphere. This is illustrated, in part, by the promotion of disruptive national-populist movements and parties. The vice-president, JD Vance, cherry-picks his meetings on UK visits, aiming to consolidate a political wing in the UK. Gone are the formalities. At a recent far-right rally, Elon Musk spoke in blunt terms: ‘...whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth’. He continues to push the idea of a civil war in the UK regularly on his social media platform.
This phenomenon should not be primarily understood as ideological collusion among the international Right, but as a strategy to weaken social cohesion and exacerbate fragmentation. Measures intended to empower oligarch disrupters and consolidate external political authority around Washington.
Tariffs And Rising Power Blocs
Trump has been a supporter of tariffs over the course of his career. Ostensibly, there are two primary factors offered to rationalise ‘Liberation Day.’ First, that Washington wants to reduce the US trade deficit. This lends itself to the well-worn rhetoric around American good grace being exploited by foreign freeloaders. Second, they reflect the ‘America First’ agenda to reshore manufacturing and aid in job creation.
But here, there are real and understated complications. Such an agenda requires addressing labour shortages, exacerbated by deportations, and training programmes to reskill millions of workers. Supply chains would need to be domesticated, entailing high levels of state planning and infrastructure investment. To scale up, this would require time and deep cultural change. All the while, JP Morgan’s chief global strategist, David Kelly, warns that the US is ‘going broke slowly’. US household debt hit a record $18.59 trillion in the third quarter of this year, up by $197 billion from the second quarter. Last month, layoff figures surged to 150,000. ‘This is the highest total for October in over 20 years, and the highest total for a single month in the fourth quarter since 2008’, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas research.
It is in this context that transnational private sector interests, asset management firms, and multinational corporations are increasingly looking to other parts of the world system. Perhaps it is more dynamic to conceptualise the tariff programme as something like a knife, designed to carve out multipolar grooves in the international system, remodelling global trade rules and alliances in the process. For instance, the tariffs on China are encouraging higher levels of South-South trade and, by extension, enhanced political coordination. In a fascinating report published by S&P Global, the authors find that leading Chinese firms are ‘heading to the Global South amid rising US tariffs on Chinese goods’. Furthermore, this trend is expected to continue as companies look to diversify into ‘other markets with stronger growth prospects than at home’.
Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lawrence Wong, concurs: ‘The tariffs have certainly impacted America’s standing in south-east Asia - there is no doubt’. Mr Wong continues: ‘We are in the midst of a great transition: to a multipolar world, a post-American order’. Analysis in the Financial Times refers to China extending its sphere of influence, and notes that Southeast Asian countries are finding Beijing a more reliable partner than Washington. Here we can momentarily return to the gutting of USAID soft power in the region. It provided $837 million to countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2024 alone. It cannot be overstated how pivotal such interventions, over a period of decades, have been in relation to shoring up American influence. As Susannah Patton of the Lowy Institute deduces: ‘Global policies like the USAID funding cuts have a big long-term impact on US soft-power in south-east Asia’.
These shifts are already precipitating structural changes in the architecture of the old global regime. Without much fanfare, Vietnam joined BRICS as a partner country after the US imposed a 20% tariff on exports. The US had been Vietnam’s most important export market after the embargo on the country was eased in 1993, producing low-cost consumer goods in the clothing and tech retail sectors. Now, it is less reliant on the West, as it develops trade corridors and harmonises with the economies of the Global South, and expands into digital products, electric cars, and infrastructure investment. In the years ahead, expect these nascent economic arrangements to become further institutionalised around BRICS, and for soft-power cultural exports from East Asia to increase in prominence.
We can see similar indications of American detachment in Africa. As Malawian historian and Professor, Paul Tiyambe Zelezan argues: ‘U.S. policies appear set to deepen this disengagement, with cuts to multilateral institutions, frozen development assistance, and a diminished role for Africa in global decision-making forums. This strategic neglect has intensified Africa’s pivot toward alternative partners. China and Russia have deepened their economic and security engagements, while Gulf states, India, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and Latin American countries are expanding their economic and diplomatic presence’.
While there is an attempt to negotiate multipolarity, that does not mean rivalry between states and blocs of states is any less relevant. Quite the opposite. This is an erratic process, in which great power conflict will permeate through proxy battles for resources and political leverage. Trump likes to take full credit for preventing the Pakistan-India drone and missile conflict in May of this year from escalating into a protracted military standoff. But Chinese economic entanglement was likely influential to the outcome, owing to the strategic value placed on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. This project represents the most significant investment in China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, ‘a massive China-led infrastructure project that aims to stretch around the globe’. It includes financing for infrastructure such as highways, ports, and power plants. Despite intermittent security and diplomatic setbacks, complicated by warming relations between the US and Pakistani leadership, this project is building vital anchors in regional trade. This is partly to provide ease of access for Chinese energy imports from the Middle East, a region to which we will turn in future editions.
Meanwhile, the United States is refocusing on its own sphere, which aims to include South America. Expect, therefore, more military and non-military operations around Venezuela. Concurrently, the result of Milei’s libertarian economic doctrine has effectively handed Argentine sovereignty over to the United States through the debt colonialism conferred by Washington’s $40 billion bailout. And as the US now accepts China as a peer rival, it is scaling down forces in eastern Europe, in a pivot towards its own borders and the Indo-Pacific.
Needless to say, these complex and historic processes are not the brainchild of Donald Trump. Instead, he is best understood as a cipher for wider class forces navigating the end of American unipolarity. In many ways, he is seen as the ideal President to sell this recalibration in American grand strategy to a domestic audience. Through utilising populist slogans and the rhetoric of economic nationalism, his bombastic claims to American renaissance in truth mask a more pragmatic engagement with global capital and shifting power relations within the world system. By actively encouraging other powers to assume greater regional responsibility, the aim is to reduce America’s global burdens while maintaining influence through economic leverage, selective engagement, and a reset of its strategic partnerships.
The Home Front: Collapse And Reconstitution
These events are a preamble to the many ways in which the process will reflect back into Western societies. The end of liberal globalisation will necessarily impact existing institutions and norms. As alternative poles of attraction in the international order emerge, so too will flows of migration diversify, resulting in attempts to discipline labour and rebuild the domestic workforce. The democratic elements in Europe and the United States are likely to recede in the name of pragmatism. Talk of a ‘global village,’ once in vogue in the World Trade Organisation, with its semi-porous borders and universal Westernising culture, as promoted at the high point of globalisation, is a thing of the past. The President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, admits previously held orthodoxies are no longer: ‘The first quarter of the century has come to an end. And it has brought about a sea-change in global affairs. The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality’.
Right-wing nationalism and increasingly forms of ethnonationalism nest within this context. These questions are not rooted solely in the rhetoric or political magnetism of populist leaders, or reducible to a cultural backlash against ‘woke capitalism’, but in the material changes produced by the global transition and the inability of Western economies to deliver sustainable and redistributed economic growth. Ironically, far from bolstering the West in the multipolar world, national chauvinism further erodes its once dominant position, while unravelling the social fabric internally. A narrower set of interests may benefit from the disarray, in the form of billionaire disruptors looking to exploit matters. In similar vein, prominent figures like Reform’s Richard Tice, the multi-millionaire CEO of the Mayfair-based asset management company Quidnet Capital Partners LLP, can present as ‘British patriots’ before jetting back to the United Arab Emirates. Talk of rebellion against ‘globalism’ is cheap when it comes to this burgeoning phalanx of the transnational elite.
Once again, the Trump Administration is setting the pace. Take American universities, for example, some of the most revered academic institutions in the world. The varied attacks on them, and especially on foreign students, are creating a hostile environment. Even if they wanted to study in the United States, student visas are subject to clearance involving enhanced social media screening to detect ‘any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States’. Six thousand student visas have been revoked. This, and much else, has eventuated in a 19% drop in international students coming to the US. That’s around 78,000 students who will now go elsewhere. Interestingly, statistics show that while the number of students going from Europe to the United States has remained relatively stable, 70 percent of those opting not to enrol at American universities are from Asia.
In further acts of self-isolation, the United States has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation, and the Paris Climate Agreement. It has sanctioned the International Criminal Court and pushed the World Trade Organisation into a ditch. Stewart Patrick, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, reflects the disintegrating liberal worldview: ‘America was unlike anything that had come before. It was based not simply on US hegemony but on America’s strategic decision to embed its might in an expanding framework of institutions and law open in principle to all countries. This order-building project was an act not of charity but of enlightened self-interest. Rather than a global order that constrains great power privilege, Trump envisions a regionalised one in which powerful nations pursue spheres of influence...’
In September of this year, the White House called an unprecedented gathering of hundreds of US generals and admirals from across the world. In other words, the top cadre in the military leadership. But rather than delivering a lecture on global threats, this was instead an exercise in empire turning inwards. Trump’s address railed against the ‘radical left Democrats’ in charge of San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. ‘They’re very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within’. Going further, and in typically brazen form, the President argued these ‘dangerous cities’ should be used as ‘training grounds for our military…because we’re going into Chicago very soon’.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is funded to the tune of $75 billion over four years. This amounts to more than most of the world’s militaries and would rank among the top twenty in terms of spending. ICE agents form the backbone of what is referred to as the Deportation Industrial Complex. They don’t wear a standardised uniform, but they do wear masks and balaclavas. ‘Accountability and oversight are needed to protect communities from the wave of masked, unidentifiable federal law enforcement officers who are violently arresting residents across the country’, argues Allie Preston, senior policy analyst for Criminal Justice Reform at American Progress. The promotional materials dispersed to recruit ICE agents borrow from a straightforwardly fascistic aesthetic. Military leaders have ordered the National Guard to develop a ‘quick reaction force’ to respond to civil unrest.
The activation of the repressive functions of the American state is not in itself a new phenomenon. But today it is the confluence of global and domestic events which moulds the nature of American power in the multipolar era at home on a more fundamental basis. In that setting, it is impossible for the nature of society to remain sealed off to events, as we can see with a quickening pace. Thomas Paine once said, ‘America’s cause is in large measure the cause of all mankind’. However you feel about that statement, it is undeniable that the consequences of a post-American order are historic in nature. In its wake, the gravity of the transition will impact everything. From international institutions, the structure of the global economy and war, to democracy, class relations, and civil liberties.
Scottish Nationalism In The Multipolar Age
The kind of world that Winnie Ewing wanted to stop to get on, does not exist today. It is being phased out with each passing week. So too, the circumstances which condition the idea of Scottish independence are of a different order. As a small and embryonic state, Scotland could be subject to further asset stripping at the mercy of larger powers. These trends are already in place, given the extent to which Scotland’s national wealth is being extracted through Foreign Direct Investment deals. The First Minister has also been seeking investment from Ming Yang, a Chinese energy firm. Whereas in the past this may have attracted controversy, today it is viewed in more realist terms.
But Scotland is very much on the periphery, and a site of profit extraction. Its natural endowments are sold off to global capital with minimal oversight. The so-called green transition has been a process of expropriation: vast offshore wind reserves are leased to multinationals. Revenues flow out, while local economies remain stagnant. Freeports, marketed as tools of regional regeneration, function as subnational enclaves for capital, not strategic engines of development. The Scottish Government operates as an interface for corporate lobbying and outsourcing, constrained by fiscal dependency and ideological conformity.
Without an industrial strategy and without monetary control in the form of an independent currency, multipolarity may further expose Scotland’s vulnerability to predatory capital. And as the Western hemisphere comes under totalising American control, Scotland too will be compelled to make its contribution to rearmament. That includes keeping Trident, which is a US, not a British, maintained and operated system.
The European Union, as we have begun to examine, is also grappling with the global flux. Even if an independent Scotland could join, which is difficult, the case for doing so would need re-evaluated if it is to be intellectually honest. It is also possible that the UK Government may seek greater convergence with the EU in a bid to limit exposure to global headwinds as states congregate in regional trade blocs. Notions of Scottish exceptionalism are also being tested like never before, as the rise of Reform and concern around immigration grows. In the same breath, the political crisis in the UK is not going away. Instead, it is going to intensify as the post-war world order ruptures around it.
Unpredictable challenges and insurgencies will arise, as the two-party system teeters, dovetailing with the systemic problems in the British state and the UK’s low-growth economy. As commentators like Andrew Marr now accept, the British political establishment is, in his own words, collapsing: ‘My greatest fear is that we come to feel, before too long, that these past wildly turbulent years were relatively calm and kindly ones’. On identifying the symptoms, if not the cause, he is right.
Independence Captured has been relaunched to chart the course of these events. Each of the major themes and claims made in this edition will be elaborated. We will investigate emerging trade blocs; changing diplomatic alliances and partnerships; globalisation and de-globalisation; corporate power; state repression, civil liberties and democracy; migration and nationalism; social movements and political disruption.
Part commentary, part briefing, the aim will be to root these global developments back into the Scottish scene and the independence question, exploring the new dilemmas confronting Scottish nationalism in the multipolar era.
Excellent writing. Sums up global "order" since I studied Modern Studies at school in the 70s! In Scotland, we need to keep global perspective in mind? 2014 is history; any campaign for Scottish Indy has to be informed by the ('orrible) geo-politics of the now & probable near future?
You nailed it.