A Geopolitical Essay

PART III – FROM YESTERDAY TO TODAY

The World Order in the Multipolar Transition (2008–2025)

The year 2008 marks the beginning of a prolonged phase of turbulence. The financial crisis that erupted on Wall Street turned into a global recession, shattering the myth of the American model’s infallibility: for the first time since the end of World War II, the shock came from the system’s core rather than its periphery. The images of Lehman Brothers’ collapse and massive public bailouts shook confidence in US leadership and opened up space for alternative narratives: the Washington Consensus appeared vulnerable, while other models of modernization — starting with the Chinese one — gained political credibility and symbolic traction.

Meanwhile, the “war on terror” dragged on without a clear strategic conclusion. Afghanistan became an endless conflict, Iraq descended into sectarian chaos, and power vacuums generated new threats such as the Islamic State, which, from 2014, controlled vast areas between Syria and Iraq for years. The interventions in Libya and Syria, presented as efforts to protect civilians or stabilize the region, ended up accelerating state collapse and fueling migration flows that placed Europe under intense pressure. The West retained military and technological superiority but struggled to translate it into a durable political order.

It was in this context that Russia re-entered the global stage with determination. The 2007 Putin speech in Munich was the manifesto of its comeback; the 2008 war in Georgia was the operational demonstration of Moscow’s willingness to defend its sphere of influence by force. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the 2015 intervention in Syria confirmed the end of uncontested unipolarity: Moscow no longer accepted U.S. supremacy and reaffirmed its strategic autonomy. With the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia definitively broke the post-1991 European equilibrium and forced the West into coordinated military, energy, and financial responses, bringing deterrence and bloc logic back to the forefront.

At the same time, China accelerated its rise. The Belt and Road Initiative has extended infrastructure networks and political influence across Asia, Africa, and Europe. Naval projection in the South China Sea has consolidated maritime claims. Meanwhile, technological competition in 5G, artificial intelligence, and semiconductors has turned Beijing into Washington’s primary systemic challenger. The U.S.–China rivalry became the central axis of the emerging order, characterized by tariffs, export controls, investment screening, supply-chain diplomacy, and competition over technological standards. The American response took the form of the “pivot to Asia,” the construction of functional coalitions (QUAD, AUKUS), and the reconfiguration of supply chains to reduce critical dependencies.

Europe experienced a succession of crises that tested its cohesion — sovereign debt, Brexit, migration waves, pandemic — but the war in Ukraine acted as a catalyst: the EU, together with NATO, regained relative strategic centrality, coordinated unprecedented sanctions, initiated selective rearmament, and redirected its energy trajectory to reduce dependence on Russian gas. U.S. leadership was reaffirmed as the cornerstone of the Western camp, but the system did not return to unipolarity; rather, it entered a transition in which American power remained dominant but was compelled to negotiate with assertive rivals and more autonomous partners. The notion of “multipolarity” proliferated in Russian and Chinese rhetoric. Middle powers, such as Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, and Brazil, sought to carve out a space for themselves and pursue their own agendas. The so-called Global South demanded fairer representation and proposed alternative grammars of cooperation.

The Middle East remained an unstable crossroads. Iran advanced its nuclear program and consolidated networks of regional influence; Israel normalized relations with various Arab states through the Abraham Accords, only to re-enter a cycle of war in Gaza in 2023–2024 that spread toward Lebanon and Iran. Russia and China exploited every opening left by the United States to expand their diplomatic and economic influence, from the Gulf to the Horn of Africa. The COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2022) served as a second watershed, revealing the fragility of global value chains, accelerating digitalization, and expanding the perimeter of national security to encompass healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and strategic logistics.

The resulting picture is one of hegemonic transition: American leadership has not collapsed but is contested on multiple fronts; Western cohesion has been revived, albeit with divisions due to differing national interests. Competition is hybrid and plays out in outer space, cyberspace, commodity markets, digital platforms, and the AI race. Nuclear deterrence has returned to center stage; the arms race has resumed; and high-intensity conflicts between major powers are no longer unthinkable. The “long peace” of the Cold War and the unipolar illusion are relics of the past: we now live in an era where every equilibrium is provisional and every crisis can become systemic.

The Structure of Globalization in the Fragmentation Era (2008–2025)

The period between 2006 and 2008 marked the end of a paradigm: not the end of globalization, but the end of its universalist, efficiency-driven version. If, in the bipolar era, globalization was mainly an institutional architecture, and in the unipolar moment, a planetary acceleration based on open markets and capital liberalization, after 2008, it became more fragile, unequal, and contested. The gears did not stop, but began to grind unevenly: shocks, crises, and new strategic priorities reshaped their anatomy.

The financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers was the defining event and breaking point. The system shook from the center outward, risking collapse. Central banks, led by the Federal Reserve, acted as lenders of last resort for the global economy, expanding their balance sheets, stabilizing credit, and supporting institutions that were too interconnected to fail. The bailout averted the abyss but accelerated a profound transformation: financial power became more concentrated, inequality widened, and consensus for unrestrained market openness eroded. In the United States, where deindustrialization had already devastated the Rust Belt, the shockwave translated into millions of lost jobs, a fractured social contract, and resentment that became a political platform. The notion of capitalism that socializes losses and privatizes profits has entered common sense, becoming fertile ground for economic populism and political nationalism.

Materially, globalization continued, but its logic changed. China’s growth has reoriented global value chains, shifting an increasing share of production from basic manufacturing to advanced electronics, with a notable concentration in other Asian countries. Global prices fell, but asymmetric dependencies and structural vulnerabilities increased. The “flat world” illusion gave way to the realization that interdependence creates winners and losers, both between countries and within societies. Beijing’s centrality in critical nodes — such as rare earths, electronics, solar panels, batteries, and active pharmaceutical ingredients — revealed how efficiency had eroded security margins.

The pandemic acted as a stress test. In 2020, the simultaneous shutdown of factories, ports, and supply routes created shortages of essential goods, even in the most advanced economies, including semiconductors, medical devices, basic medicines, fertilizers, and grain. National security was redefined in terms of domestic production capacity and guaranteed access to strategic inputs. Firms and governments have redesigned supply chains, reshoring where possible, near-shoring to proximate regions, and friend-shoring with politically trusted partners. The just-in-time logic and minimal inventories gave way to resilience, characterized by redundancy, strategic reserves, supplier diversification, and shortening of supply chains.

Onto this trajectory was grafted systemic U.S.–China rivalry. The 2018 trade war evolved into a technological and geoeconomic competition, characterized by export controls, investment restrictions, entity lists, and bans on components and software in sensitive sectors, including semiconductors, AI, biotechnology, and telecommunications. Without abandoning multilateralism, Washington brought industrial policy and economic security back to the center. The CHIPS and Science Act incentivized advanced microelectronics; the Inflation Reduction Act linked energy transition, green supply chains, and domestic manufacturing employment. In parallel, technology alliances were forged with Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and the EU: coordinating standards and controls became a tool for containment and co-development among industrial democracies. The EU has designed a strategic compass and plans for autonomy in energy, defense, and critical technologies. In Asia, Japan, India, and South Korea have pushed for diversification away from China.

Energy and food security returned as priorities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the unprecedented sanctions regime exposed Europe’s deep dependencies, Ukraine’s role in grain production, and Belarus’ role in fertilizers. The commodities trade was restructured, with parallel circuits for Russian oil emerging, producer country cartels strengthening, and export restrictions on rare earths, lithium, chips, and wheat multiplying as instruments of pressure. The partial exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT, the freezing of reserves, and the weaponization of finance showed that payment infrastructures and reserve currencies are tools of power. Interdependence became weaponized interdependence: a network of nodes and chokepoints through which selective coercion could be exercised.

Regionalization advanced. The USMCA renewed North American integration; the RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership among Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) consolidated a vast Asia-Pacific economic space; differentiated partnerships multiplied between Africa and China or India and ASEAN. Subsystems emerged in which economic cooperation reflected political and security alignments. The universal openness of the unipolar era was reversed: protecting technological advantages, preventing knowledge leaks, and reducing dependence on potential adversaries became priorities. Governments returned to center stage with subsidies, tax incentives, selective procurement, inbound and outbound investment controls, and technical standards with geopolitical functions.

The social effects were profound. The erosion of the middle class in advanced economies, insecurity in deindustrialized regions, and the perception that benefits accrued to cosmopolitan elites fueled protest movements and sovereigntist forces. In the United States, this dynamic crystallized in Trump’s election and the selective renegotiation of trade openness; in Europe, it translated into calls for industrial protection and “strategic autonomy”; in mature democracies, the idea took root that growth and cohesion require public protection and targeted investment, not mere deregulation.

Technologically, a bifurcation emerged: on one side, the U.S.–EU–Asian ally bloc; on the other, a Sino-Russian sphere seeking to replicate supply chains and platforms, ranging from microelectronics to 5G networks, operating systems, and digital payments. Regulatory fragmentation mirrored industrial fragmentation, characterized by incompatible standards, divergent compliance regimes, and conflicts over data governance. The global network remained interconnected, but the thread holding it together grew taut and less neutral: standards, lists, licenses, and sanctions were drawing de facto economic and political borders.

Overall, globalization from 2008 to 2025 underwent a change in nature. It became less universal and more segmented; less efficiency-oriented and more security-oriented; less spontaneous and more driven by political decisions. Supply chains shortened and duplicated, inventories became a virtue, redundancy an insurance policy. The rhetoric of free trade gave way to technological sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and resilience. The infrastructures built to connect — such as SWIFT, submarine cables, cloud systems, and platforms — emerged as arenas of power and potential levers of exclusion. This came at a cost: a more resilient world is more expensive and, at least in the short term, less efficient; regionalization reduced economies of scale; supply chain duplication introduced friction. But the price was deemed acceptable in exchange for lower systemic vulnerabilities.

The Narrative of Globalization: From Integration Promise to Resilience Politics (2008–2025)

The 2008 crisis represents not just an economic downturn, but a rupture in collective trust. The idea that globalization would automatically generate widespread prosperity faltered. The “end of history” optimism of the 1990s suddenly looked naïve. Images of foreclosed families, billion-dollar bank bailouts, and unemployment lines cracked the narrative of perfectly efficient markets. Globalization has become the target of criticism, with criticism coming from both the left for its promotion of inequality and precariousness, and from the right for the loss of sovereignty and erosion of border control. The cracks first seen in Seattle in 1999 became a mainstream political issue; the language of “1% versus 99%” entered the public debate, and movements such as Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests, and climate activism questioned whether GDP growth was an adequate measure of well-being.

In the United States, this new narrative fused with the wound of deindustrialization: hollowed-out cities, stagnant wages, and social epidemics. From this emerged economic populism, which viewed globalization as a betrayal of the social contract. “Make America Great Again” promised to overturn the logic of indiscriminate openness through the renegotiation of treaties, selective tariffs, and the relocation of critical supply chains. This marked a shift in perspective: globalization was no longer a destiny, but a choice conditioned by national interests.

Internationally, the narrative also shifted. China, which had joined the WTO in 2001, was increasingly described as a free rider exploiting Western rules; the concept of “strategic competition” emerged. Washington spoke of technological decoupling and reducing dependence on Beijing in critical sectors; Beijing responded with the “dual circulation” doctrine, which placed domestic market and technological sovereignty at the center, and relaunched the Belt and Road Initiative as an alternative infrastructural and symbolic project. The pandemic accelerated the shift in tone: global supply chains became synonymous with vulnerability; terms like “resilience,” “friend-shoring,” and “near-shoring” entered the lexicon. The Biden administration crafted a narrative that did not reject integration outright, but rather filtered it: national production for strategic goods, technology alliances among like-minded partners, and de-risking rather than full decoupling. In Europe, the Commission adopted the semantics of “strategic autonomy” and “digital sovereignty”; the Green Deal became a tool of economic security, aimed at reducing dependencies and competing in the technological race. Yet over-regulation and bureaucratic inertia persisted within the EU, acting as paralyzing viruses.

The war in Ukraine brought this transformation to its climax. The arsenal of financial sanctions, partial exclusion from the SWIFT system, and freezing of reserves demonstrated that interdependence can be leveraged as a geopolitical weapon. The “democracies versus autocracies” frame returned to Western public discourse; the goal was no longer to integrate everyone but to strengthen the camp of like-minded partners and isolate systemic rivals. Globalization became an arena of confrontation.

The result is a conditional and selective narrative: openness, yes, but compatible with job protection, health security, and supply-chain resilience. Political classes promise de-risking, not isolation; yet the message is clear: interconnection must serve national interest. The story of the “global village” gave way to that of the “fortress” to be defended; rhetoric became pragmatic and anxious, speaking the language of protection, sovereignty, and deterrence, befitting an era in which global order has once again become competitive.

Economy and Finance in Fragmented Globalization (2008–2025)

The 2008 crisis inaugurated a regime of economic policy in which central banks became permanent protagonists, characterized by zero interest rates, quantitative easing, and expanded balance sheets. Abundant liquidity supported markets but fueled bubbles and inequality. Growth slowed, productivity stagnated, and faith in global openness eroded. Finance remained the most integrated circuit of globalization, but its politicization increased: sanctions, compliance requirements, and extraterritorial standards became levers of power.

China accumulated trillions of dollars in reserves and emerged as the world’s great creditor, while the United States saw its twin deficits and public debt soar, yet retained the dollar’s primacy as reserve currency and settlement medium. The use of reserves as a sanctioning tool pushed some countries to diversify assets and currencies, but no functional substitute for the dollar emerged. Parallel payment systems and local-currency settlement mechanisms were tested to circumvent restrictions—a process of adjustment rather than monetary revolution.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine brought economic security back to center stage. Chips, medicines, fertilizers, and energy became strategic goods; targeted tariffs and export restrictions multiplied; reshoring and friend-shoring plans proliferated. The United States invested in semiconductors, AI, data centers, and energy; China accelerated its push for technological self-sufficiency under plans like Made in China 2025 and its dual-circulation strategy. Global trade did not stop, but it changed geography: the Global South’s weight grew, intra-Asian trade expanded, and South–South corridors consolidated, reducing the centrality of the transatlantic trade.

The American economy, despite a reduced manufacturing base, remained a leader in frontier technologies and intangible assets: software, cloud, AI, intellectual property, media, and platforms. The challenge was twofold: maintaining innovative primacy while rebuilding industrial capacity in critical sectors, within a capitalism that had become explicitly “national” and selective. Finance continued to operate through global networks, but production regionalized; trade flows became politicized; sanctions and technological restrictions fragmented the world economy into partially connected blocs. This is security globalization: less efficiency and more redundancy, less universalism and more regulatory competition, less neutrality and more national power.