Nothing is certain and everything is possible

History does not move in straight lines but in cycles. An empire rises, grows, reaches its peak, lives in abundance, loses what made it great, an empire rises. The Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Netherlands, Great Britain, the United States. Not only has it happened many times throughout history, it has never not happened. This cycle has shaped human civilization since time immemorial. The only real question is: where exactly are we in the current cycle?

The answer is simultaneously uncomfortable and no longer particularly surprising: we are at a turning point.

The United States has been the dominant world power for approximately eighty years. They rebuilt the postwar world according to their own vision, shaped its financial architecture, prioritized its security. For most people alive today, this is simply the way things are. It feels permanent. History argues otherwise.

Ray Dalio spent decades studying how dominant powers rise and fall. His conclusion is unambiguous: every great empire in history has traced the same arc. A rising power builds wealth through productivity and discipline. At its peak, it begins spending more than it earns, debt accumulates. The currency weakens. Internal conflicts grow as the gap between rich and poor widens. Eventually, the costs of dominance exceed what the system can bear. The empire does not collapse overnight. It is a process that resembles erosion. Driven by internal and external factors.

What makes the present moment particularly significant is that this erosion is now visible in the numbers. The United States carries a national debt of over 35 trillion dollars. Interest payments alone are becoming one of the largest line items in the federal budget, competing directly with defense and social spending. This is not merely a financial problem. It is a signal. Historically, the most reliable early indicator that a dominant power is heading toward decline is neither military defeat nor diplomatic failure. It is debt.

Dalio also identifies a second dynamic that typically accompanies this phase: the breakdown of internal cohesion. Wealth concentration, political polarization, and the erosion of shared institutions tend to accelerate precisely when a society can least afford it. The United States is displaying all three simultaneously.

When an empire fractures, it creates a power vacuum for a new one. Enter China.

China pursues a different strategy. Patient, long-term, and largely undisturbed by the electoral cycles that force Western democracies toward short-term thinking. Its economic rise is historically unparalleled. Its geopolitical ambitions have grown likewise. Whether China will become the dominant world power within the next ten to thirty years is not certain. But it is historically logical.

Norwegian researcher Jørgen Randers spent decades modeling where global development would lead. His conclusion, published in the book 2052, was not optimistic but precise: the world would not end in a dramatic collapse. It would slow down. Growth in the developed world would stagnate as aging populations, resource scarcity, and short-term political thinking would prevent the kind of decisive action that long-term challenges require. Meanwhile, emerging economies would continue growing, shifting the center of gravity of the world economy southward and eastward. Crucially, Randers also predicted a global trend toward less freedom and more authoritarian government — a shift he described as both inevitable and connected to economic stagnation and resource scarcity. The transition would unfold so gradually that most people would not notice it until it had already taken place.

This assessment was made over a decade ago and immortalized in print. So far it is being confirmed, with no reason to assume this will change.

The transition from one world order to the next is never clean. It is disorderly, unpredictable, and shaped by forces that cannot be fully anticipated. What is called a "wildcard" in English might be called a joker in German. The current transition is shaped by three wildcards — they will determine the outcome of this transition more than anything else.

The first is climate change. This is the most predictable of the three, which makes it no less dangerous. Weather patterns and events are becoming more volatile and extreme. Food production across large parts of the Global South is being disrupted. Migration will accelerate — not as a political choice but as a physical necessity. People do not move because they want to. They move because staying becomes impossible.

The political consequences of this migration are already visible. Societies under pressure tend not to seek structural explanations. They seek simple explanations and scapegoats. This dynamic drives the rise of extreme political movements at both ends of the spectrum, destabilizes governments, and makes long-term policy more difficult precisely when it is needed most. Climate change is therefore not merely an environmental crisis. It is a political accelerant.

The second wildcard is the competition between authoritarian control and liberal democracy. This is historically not a new conflict, but it is experiencing a revival — because the long-presumed winner is faltering and authoritarian control wants to seize this opportunity. China, Russia, and Iran are among the examples of a governance model that places control and state influence above individual freedom, sometimes to extreme degrees.

What makes this competition unpredictable, however, is that the teams are changing. The United States, once the uncontested leader of the liberal democratic world, is moving with large strides toward authoritarianism. The rise of populist movements, the erosion of institutional checks, and the growing willingness to deploy state power against political opponents are not features of liberal democracy — they are features of its decline. Randers predicted exactly this as well: a global shift toward authoritarianism, not only at the periphery, but in the most liberal of all democracies.

The historical record offers guidance here too. Authoritarian systems tend to function well during phases of rapid economic development. They are efficient at mobilizing resources, suppressing dissent, and executing long-term strategic plans. Their vulnerability arises not only when prosperity stagnates. It also arises when prosperity grows. Because beyond a certain point, it is not inadequate personal means that is the primary constraint on freedom — it is the authoritarian regime itself. Rising living standards raise individual expectations and reduce dependence on the state. People want a voice, but the state often does not want to hear it. Authoritarian systems struggle with this transition. Whether China will master it is one of the defining questions of this century.

This is made more complex still by the rise of BRICS as a coherent geopolitical bloc. What began as an economic categorization has gradually become a political project: an alternative architecture for a world that does not wish to operate exclusively within Western-designed institutions. The expansion of BRICS and its growing influence signal something elemental: the current world order is not regarded as immutable. This perception has consequences.

The third wildcard is AI. This one genuinely deserves the label, because we have no historical analogue for AI. Every other major technological transition — industrialization, electrification, the internet — can at least be analyzed through patterns that emerged in retrospect. With AI, we are operating without precedent.

What increasingly seems probable is a dramatic reduction in the cost of nearly everything that is produced, consumed, or offered and demanded as a service. If nothing costs anything, what value does it have? What does this do to markets, income distribution, social cohesion, and ultimately political stability?

We do not know. AI brings with it both opportunities and risks that are historically unparalleled. Will AI defeat diseases considered incurable and answer the great unresolved questions of the universe? Or will the algorithms trigger a nuclear war that would mean the end of humanity?

The most important thing to understand about these three wildcards is that they do not operate independently. They are interconnected, and their interactions are where the real unpredictability lives.

Climate-driven migration creates social pressure. Social pressure destabilizes democratic systems and creates openings for authoritarian governance. Authoritarian governments facing domestic pressure may be more willing to deploy AI-enabled military capabilities. And AI-driven economic disruption could itself trigger the kind of social fragmentation that makes populations susceptible to authoritarian appeal.

This does not mean that catastrophe, suffering, and violence are inevitable. The power cycles of history have been navigated before — sometimes violently, sometimes not. What history suggests is that transitions of this magnitude tend to be underestimated by the people living through them. The stability of recent decades has created an expectation of continuity that the underlying structural data does not support.

The United States is not disappearing. China is not yet dominant. The outcome of the authoritarian-democratic competition is unresolved. The trajectory of AI remains unknown. What is clearly visible, however, is that the world order that has defined the last eighty years is under assault from multiple directions.

We observe past and future history from a safe distance. Right now we are being reminded that our time, too, is part of history — and we are right in the middle of it.

Sources:

Randers, Jørgen. 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012

Dalio, Ray. Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail. Simon & Schuster, 2021