In 2017, President Donald Trump was almost the only nationalist populist leader in the West. Liberal democracy — its protection at home and its promotion abroad — was the political default across America and Europe. The United States’ marquee conference for hard-right conservatives, CPAC, featured only one major foreign speaker that year, Britain’s Nigel Farage, who had just resigned as leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party after a successful Brexit campaign.
Eight years later, Trump has been joined on the world stage by a plethora of right-wing populists, and nationalism has gone mainstream. CPAC 2025 was a verifiable international event, with guests ranging from Argentina’s President Javier Milei to Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, among many others.
But while it’s clear that nationalism is having a moment, for now it’s just that: a moment.
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Making the West great again will not just aid populists politically. It will do something more important: Inspire Westerners on both sides of the Atlantic for decades to come. Youth throughout America and Europe, instead of being told they are members of a paradisical global society, will be brought up understanding they are part of an ancient and storied civilization. The countries which make up that civilization will have disagreements. But like a family, they will understand that they all share one common, civilizational home.
Anthony J. Constantini writes about foreign policy and international political movements. He is a PhD candidate in American history at the University of Vienna.
Success in great-power competition requires rigorous and unsentimental net assessment. Yet the American estimation of China has lurched from one extreme to the other. For decades, Americans registered blistering economic growth, dominance of international trade, and growing geopolitical ambition, and anticipated the day when China might overtake a strategically distracted and politically paralyzed United States; after the 2008 financial crisis, and then especially at the height of the COVID pandemic, many observers believed that day had come. But the pendulum swung to the other extreme only a few years later as China’s abandonment of “zero COVID” failed to restore growth. Beijing was beset by ominous demographics, once unthinkable youth unemployment, and deepening stagnation while the United States was strengthening alliances, boasting breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and other technologies, and enjoying a booming economy with record low unemployment and record high stock markets.
The rise and fall of great powers often begins with flawed self-diagnosis.
A new consensus took hold: that an aging, slowing, and increasingly less nimble China would not overtake an ascendant United States. Washington shifted from pessimism to overconfidence. Yet just as past bouts of defeatism were misguided, so is today’s triumphalism, which risks dangerously underestimating both the latent and actual power of the only competitor in a century whose GDP has surpassed 70 percent of that of the United States. On critical metrics, China has already outmatched the United States. Economically, it boasts twice the manufacturing capacity. Technologically, it dominates everything from electric vehicles to fourth-generation nuclear reactors and now produces more active patents and top-cited scientific publications annually. Militarily, it features the world’s largest navy, bolstered by shipbuilding capacity 200 times as large as that of the United States; vastly greater missile stocks; and the world’s most advanced hypersonic capabilities—all results of the fastest military modernization in history. Even if China’s growth slows and its system falters, it will remain formidable strategically.
Such a commitment is not just a policy, but a signal of the capabilities of the United States, its allies, and partners. The Chinese Communist Party is inordinately focused on perceptions of American power, and a critical input in that equation is its estimation of Washington’s ability to pull in the allies and partners that even Beijing openly admits are the United States’ greatest advantage. Accordingly, the most effective U.S. strategy—the one that has most unsettled Beijing in recent years and can deter its adventurism in the future—is to build new, enduring, and robust capacities with these states. A sustained, bipartisan commitment to an upgraded alliance network, coupled with strategic cooperation in emerging fields, offers the best path forward to finding scale against the most formidable competitor the United States has ever encountered.
KURT M. CAMPBELL is Chairman and Cofounder of The Asia Group. He served as Deputy Secretary of State and Indo-Pacific Coordinator at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.
RUSH DOSHI is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as Deputy Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration.
So Sam Adams is said to have responded to the news of fighting at Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775, arguably the most consequential day in the history of New England.
That day, most agree, marked the beginning of the American Revolution. There had been other acts of violence, by both Britons and Americans, as they jostled over a host of issues relating to Britain’s imperial overreach.
It will be important not only to remember the story but to remember it well. As Milan Kundera wrote, “The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
But in the spring of 1775, low-level squabbling gave way to armies in the field shooting at each other, outside Boston. The so-called “shot heard round the world,” in Emerson’s phrase, was the first volley in a long war, followed by a struggle to establish the 13 Colonies as a coherent nation.
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These ideas were nourished by pamphlets, Election Day sermons, and newspapers — it would be difficult to overstate how important printing and literacy were to the founding generation, especially in Boston. Far from being derided, intellectuals and scientists were critical to the Revolution’s success. One Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, translated his scientific prestige into stunning success as a diplomat to France, our essential ally. Another, Joseph Warren, was a doctor, much admired for his work inoculating patients against smallpox, before he was killed at Bunker Hill.
Ted Widmer, a consulting editor for this special issue of Globe Ideas, is the author of “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.” He helped to create the George Washington Book Prize, awarded annually to a book about the founding era.
In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 enslaved people disembarked. Of the roughly 10.7 million people who survived the passage across the Atlantic in the nearly four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, nearly 5 million were sent to Brazil – almost five times as many as to Jamaica and more than fourteen times as many as to North America. More slave ships left for the West African coast from the Americas than from Europe; the majority of those vessels sailed from Brazil, where slavery was abolished only in 1888. The foundations of modern Brazil are poured over the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade.
Yet, though the history of Brazilian slavery is not “untold”, the histories of Caribbean and North American slavery are generally better known among anglophone readers. Two new books by distinguished historians of slavery, Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic history of slavery by Ana Lucia Araujo and Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic slave trades by David Eltis, offer a correction, emphasizing the longevity and scale of slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic. In Enslavement: Past and present, another distinguished academic, the sociologist Orlando Patterson, shows the relevance and utility of his theory of slavery as “social death”, a powerlessness whose malignance structures slave societies and persists long after emancipation. What follows, however, from recognizing that Brazil was first, last and largest in Atlantic slavery? Slavery existed long before the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade; are the ruins of the slave-ship dock under Rio relics of the longue durée of enslavement or evidence of the violent birth of the modern world?
Browse a shelf of popular science books in physics and you’ll often find a similar theme. Whether offering insights into The Hidden Reality (2011), Something Deeply Hidden (2019) or Our Mathematical Universe (2014), these books hint at an underlying, secret world waiting to be unravelled by physicists – a domain beyond our sensory perception that remains their special purview.
‘It’s akin to knowing everything about sand dunes … but not knowing what a grain of sand is made of’
Over its history, physics has delivered elegant and accurate descriptions of the physical Universe. Today, however, the reality physicists work to uncover appears increasingly removed from the one they inhabit. Despite its experimental successes, physics has repeatedly failed to live up to the expectation of delivering a deeper, ‘final’ physics – a reality to unify all others. As such, physicists appear forced to entertain increasingly speculative propositions.
Yet, with no obvious avenues to verify such speculations, physicists are left with little option but to repeat similar approaches and experiments – only bigger and at greater cost – in the hope that something new may be found. Seemingly beset with a sense of anxiety that nothing new will be found or that future experiments will reveal only further ignorance, the field of fundamental physics is incentivized to pursue ever more fanciful ideas.
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It may even require that we abandon doing physics altogether, in the attainment of an expanded reality that not only accepts but encourages the possibility of difference and more. Or, as the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin once put it, what we require are ‘the realists of a larger reality’.
Adrien De Sutter completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany. An interdisciplinary researcher specialising in science and technology studies and the history and philosophy of science, he focuses on the philosophical, sociological and political implications of fundamental physics research.
In 1904, Henry James decided to return to America. He was feeling isolated at Lamb House in Rye. In a letter to Grace Norton, he wrote: ‘The days depart and pass, laden somehow like processional camels – across the desert of one’s solitude.’ Since the flop of Guy Domville, his dreams of success as a dramatist had been dashed. The Wings of the Dove had been published in 1902, followed by The Ambassadors in 1903, in serial form. The Golden Bowl – written in little more than a year and, for many, his sovereign achievement – was almost finished. Now, after this awesome outpouring, he was ready to review his homeland, last visited in 1882.
James’s reasons for returning were complex, some obvious and professional, others psychological and obscure. Family drew him back, just as it had subtly hurried him on his way in 1875, when he left America, first for Paris, then for London. Planning his itinerary, James wrote to his nephew Harry: ‘I can’t tell you how I thank you for offering me your manly breast to hurl myself upon in the event of my alighting on the New York dock, four or five weeks hence, in abject and craven terror.’ (One can only imagine the tremulations this caused in young Harry’s manly breast.)
He also began work on what he pointedly called the New York Edition of his preferred writings. The commercial failure of this work, with its ruminative prefaces and startling omissions, led to years of clinical depression. In a letter to Morton Fullerton, one of his late passions, James wrote: ‘The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life … This loneliness (since I mention it!) – what is it still but the deepest thing about one?’ For this noblest of modernists, it was the saddest confession.
