CHRONICLES OF THE NEW WORLD DISORDER (1990 TO 2022)
PART 1: FROM THE LOOM TO THE WORLD FACTORY | Part 1: Editorial
The following text is taken from Part 1 of our “Chronicles of the new world disorder” from our Geoeconomic Forum publications, which provides a brief summary of current conflicts and how we arrived here since a very promising new start of the world 1990s:
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“No Russian head of state since Peter the Great has aligned himself so closely with the West as Vladimir Putin,”
enthused the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2002. The senator’s name: Joseph R. Biden. Exactly twenty years later, that same Biden, now President of the United States, faced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—as a bitter adversary. Added to this is a smoldering conflict over Taiwan, and the United States itself, which under Trump broke international law at will. What happened in those two decades that we have strayed so far?
To understand this, we travel back to the 1990s. We embark on a journey around the world: to South Korea, China, India, Venezuela, Somalia, Egypt, the former Yugoslavia, Turkey, the territories of the “Islamic State,” Russia, and its neighbouring countries Georgia and Ukraine. In doing so, we assume the role of advocatus diaboli: we examine events and developments from their perspective and explore the motivations of their regimes.
Geoeconomics Strikes at the Heart of the West
Politicians and the media speak of a turning point. The coronavirus pandemic had already shaken the global economy to its foundations. Now sanctions, export controls, the economic war against Russia—and the technological conflict with China—are further disrupting the order.
In Berlin, Brussels, London, and Washington, the reaction was one of dismay. After decades of supposed peace, Russia appeared to challenge them—apparently without cause. They had given themselves over to the belief that they were living in a stable world governed by international agreements. In this rules-based order, every country could achieve prosperity and peace. Suddenly, dependencies on raw materials and supply chains were being deployed against the West.
A new term is circulating within the Western establishment: geoeconomics. It describes the use of economic power—trade, sanctions, raw materials, and technology—to enforce geopolitical objectives. Suddenly, Western governments are experiencing this logic directed against themselves. Yet this belief had always been deceptive. In this series, we show how the West has, for decades, used economic power under the guise of the rule of law and rules.
But there was another surprise: in the Global South, hardly anyone proved willing to place their own population on a starvation diet merely to wage an economic war against China or Russia in defence of Western interests cloaked in tenuous value rhetoric.
Tracing the Causes
This series combines theory and reportage. We explain how free trade and a liberal economic order enable growth—while at the same time setting in motion processes of creative destruction that lead to disruption and distributional conflicts. In the end, the powerful often prevailed—and shaped markets into monopolies and oligopolies, just as the West did after the Cold War, when currency crises swept from Latin America to Russia and onward to Asia, and the IMF effectively sold countries off.
In the first part of our journey, we show how Western Europe and the United States used their dominance to control world trade and international financial markets. They praised free markets as long as their own corporations, Wall Street, and political leaders profited. In truth, geoeconomics had never disappeared. The rest of the world was simply too weak to turn it against us.
Instead of a genuinely open global market economy, neoliberal logic consumed capital that societies had built up over generations: physical, social, and cultural capital. At the same time, the United States brought international institutions—from the United Nations to the WTO to the IMF—under its influence. Thus, it created the appearance of a rules-based order whose rules it adjusted to its own advantage.
A Balanced Perspective?
In the second part, we examine how powerful states impeded the democratization of the United Nations—and how countries such as Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Somalia fractured under the new world order. After years in which Western states had supported Islamist actors in various conflicts, terrorism eventually struck the United States itself.
What followed was a sweeping response—and a departure from the rules that had previously been preached to others. At the same time, we trace regimes from Georgia to Venezuela to the Arab Spring: What logic drives them? Why do they wage war against their own populations? And how do U.S. interventions and regime changes, paradoxically, drive global democracy toward the brink—often ending in civil wars or in even more authoritarian regimes?
In the third part, we follow the rise of the BRICS countries. Each resists Western hegemony in its own way: India through protectionism, China through assertive mercantilism, Russia through outright militarism.
The once world-dominant Europeans, by contrast, struggle with their continued marginalization. In their disunity and indecision, they replace substance with declarative value rhetoric, while draining Eastern European countries, alienating Turkey, and devastating Ukraine—and European institutions themselves risk sliding toward failure.
China’s Rise and America’s Eroding World Dominance
In the fourth part, we describe how the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 caused the pendulum to swing back like a sledgehammer. The United States gradually lost its hegemony. Despite all Western attempts at obstruction, China achieved nothing less than the greatest transformation of global income distribution in human history.
Above all, China challenged the United States. Yet Washington continued to cling to its exclusive interpretative authority—even after triggering the largest financial crisis of modern times. We will show that when Beijing was denied an appropriate place in international organizations, it simply founded its own.
This new rivalry now places numerous countries on China’s periphery under pressure, as illustrated by the examples of Myanmar and Thailand: strategic constraints and economic dependence intensify domestic political tensions.
In the West, responses to crisis, instability, and precarious finances increasingly resemble what had long been criticized in autocracies: the curtailment of freedoms, growing repression, and the erosion of the separation of powers. Indeed, the United States is transforming into an empire like any other, intent on keeping its vassals within its sphere of influence.
Today, the international order resembles a pillow into which someone has fired a shotgun: norms, alliances, and trade flows scatter wildly through the room like feathers—and land in new, as yet unknown places. How to restore order remains unclear. But how we arrived here can be traced in this chronicle.
Full book series available here:
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