Something Is Going to Happen

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, July 16, 2026

 

Internet discourse in 2026, glazed with irony and generational despair, regularly repeats a mantra, “Nothing ever happens,” a phrase that gets at the suspicion that even the bizarre and never-ending succession of  news, driven in large part by the titanic publicity operation that is the American president, somehow comprises mere pseudo-events. There is in it a sense that we are being cheated of genuine world-historical and epochal transformation. That none of our remaining problems is soluble, or even perturbable. To these detached souls I have good news and bad.

 

The good news is that something is going to happen soon enough. The bad news is that you aren’t going to like it. Both conjectures proceed from a set of powerful geopolitical echoes from the decades that preceded the calamitous “short 20th century,” spanning the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty-first century analogues of the dynamics that produced that bloody age are again at play, and while the conflicts that may emerge as a result might not look like world wars — global, total, and regime-reordering — they will be far more momentous than regional skirmishes or upticks in unrest.

 

The worst may yet be avoided, of course. But to break the analogy between the past calamitous epoch and our own, we would do well to at least understand it.

 

***

 

As in the decades preceding the First World War, today we find ourselves dealing with an unraveling European security order. In the 19th century, it was the fraying and ultimately the dissolution of the so-called Concert of Europe that brought about the era of realpolitik and the zero-sum thinking that led to global war.

 

The Concert of Europe emerged, following the disastrous Napoleonic Wars, from a series of negotiations at the Congress of Vienna, where the continent’s great powers agreed, in measures implicit and explicit, to subordinate imperial ambition to systemic stability. In Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger writes that this “unique state of affairs occurred . . . because Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values.” “There was not only a physical equilibrium” of hard power “but a moral one” as well. The balance of power reduced “the opportunities for using force,” while “a shared sense of justice” reduced its desirability. Paul Schroeder, in The Transformation of European  Politics, 1763–1848, argues that something like an international rules-based order — decried in our moment by post-liberals of all stripes — confounded the brute self-interested calculus ascribed to international affairs by realists. “A competitive balance-of-power struggle gave way to an international system of  political equilibrium based on benign shared hegemony and the mutual recognition of rights underpinned by law,” he writes. Decades of relative peace and stability on the continent enabled the development of modernity itself. It was 1815, rather than 1789, that “launched Europe on a century of genuine political, social, and economic progress,” writes Schroeder. Kissinger sums up the Concert’s success: “No war at all took place among the Great Powers for forty years, and after the Crimean of 1854, no general war for another sixty.”

 

Cracks in the Concert, however, were visible even before Crimea: from the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s to the 1848 revolutions across Europe. Nationalism, realpolitik, and revisionism had their apogee during the unification of Germany between 1866 and 1871. The consultative mechanisms built at Vienna became impotent performances rather than military and diplomatic bulwarks against conflict. Great-power politics simmered and then exploded with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

 

Now, it seems clear that something akin to a second concert of Europe held steady in the greater West roughly between the end of the Cold War and around the day before yesterday. This second concert was rooted in the hard-power realities of the Soviet threat and in shared values among the continent’s powers. It formalized and dramatically expanded institutional mechanisms for consultation and deliberation — the Congress of Vienna gave way to the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the G-20, and so on. America played a role in the second concert that Britain had in the first: that of a semi-external but nearby guarantor and mediator capable of projecting great power onto the mainland if necessary. Kissinger says that Britain was “the nation that maintained the European equilibrium”; its ability to play this part was “sustainable because it strove for no territorial gains in Europe.” Not even Greenland.

 

To be sure, this analogy goes only so far. The United States has been hegemonic since 1991, whereas Britain’s power in the 19th century was merely preponderant. Britain then pursued a goal of equilibrium in Europe; the U.S. has sought a kind of peaceable dominion. During the Concert of Europe, Britain could maintain the balance of power simply by “supporting the weaker against the stronger,” as Kissinger put it, whenever potential flash points emerged. During the second concert, however, the U.S. did much more. It built alliances. It underwrote global trade. It provided public goods in the form of a stable currency, an international payments system, and a permanent conventional military and nuclear presence on the continent. And it utterly dominated every soft-power channel imaginable, from film and music to fast food.

 

And yet the Europe that America built under this second concert is dying — or has died — of the same causes that killed its antecedent. Nationalism has resurged to challenge supranational shared values that seem increasingly metaphysically lightweight and practically impotent. A new, loosely confederated populist network encompasses movements as disparate as MAGA in the U.S., Orbánism in Hungary, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. At the same time, tensions within and rivalries among European powers are reemerging, and revisionist powers on the frontiers are once again challenging the status quo. Just as Russia’s southward and westward expansionism had once destabilized the Concert of Europe, its similar expansionism today has destabilized the second concert. Meanwhile, international institutions and consultative mechanisms have become performative, and Europe’s alliance structures ineffectual.

 

***

 

Similarities in global political economy during the pre–First World War era and ours are also striking. As I write, the global economy is seemingly both booming and at a precipice, as economic indicators lag and flash red geopolitical warning signs immediate (petroleum supply shocks) and long-term (a turn against free trade). The economic, technological, and cultural fruits of the Concert era continued to multiply, too, even after the geopolitical order that underpinned them had started to show signs of strain. This period of wonders and plenty had different names: the Belle Epoque, the Great Victorian Boom, the Gilded Age. But the best way to describe what was happening from roughly 1820 to 1914 is that the world experienced the first great age of globalization.

 

In books such as Globalization and History and Power and Plenty, the Irish economist and historian Kevin O’Rourke and his co-authors measure globalization in terms of factor price convergence — especially the international convergence of the prices of labor and of capital. In the 18th century, the price of wheat in Scandinavia had little to do with the price of wheat in the United States. Capital markets were crude and unresponsive. Labor crossed borders and oceans at a crawl. Driven by industrial technologies that reduced the cost and effort required to move people and things, all of this changed, and quickly. For example, Ireland in 1850 was a peasant economy freshly savaged by the famine. Thanks to the rapid globalization of factor prices, just 20 years later, in 1870, rural real wages in Ireland had climbed to 73 percent of those in Great Britain, and to 92 percent by 1913. (In one of the ironies of globalization that would produce its own antithesis, it’s plausible that this convergence furnished the Irish Republican Army with the surplus capacity to throw off the British yoke.)

 

This era famously saw mass migration across the Atlantic to the U.S. as well as within countries on the continent. And it saw British and later American capital financing the construction of a truly global economy. It also prompted backlash. Cheap immigrant labor suppressed wages for native-born Americans, the commodification of the global food supply perturbed Europe’s politically powerful agrarian landlord class, and so on. The wrath of the have-lesses — for globalization’s absolute benefits are hard to argue against, not that that stops anyone — took many forms. One of the most familiar and ubiquitous was the tariff.

 

By the second half of the 19th century, European governments were raising grain tariffs to protect their agricultural sectors. Germany, under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, encouraged the “marriage of iron and rye” — an alliance between industrial and agricultural protectionists that insulated both from international competition. France followed. Even in Britain, free trade’s ancestral homeland, Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform League, a pressure group formed at the turn of the 20th century, brought that country to the protectionist side. U.S. tariffs were consistently high from the Civil War onward, but with the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, the U.S. halted the mobility of labor as well. Other great powers passed their own immigration quotas, intervened aggressively in capital markets, and used currency controls and other tools to institute protectionism. These maneuvers alone couldn’t stop global integration. But combined with the simultaneous breakdown in international cooperation, they catalyzed the catastrophes of 1914.

 

It’s hard to overstate the Great War’s effect on economic connectivity. To pick one stylized factoid from O’Rourke et al.: It took Britain until 1973 for exports to make up as large a proportion of its GDP as they did in 1913. That’s because — and here I’ll rely on the reader’s general knowledge — the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s did not go well either.

 

Stephen Krasner, the prominent international relations scholar and  political economist who later served as the head of the State Department’s internal think tank during the presidency of George W. Bush, published “State Power and the Structure of International Trade” in 1976, a foundational text for what is often called “hegemonic stability theory.” His core argument is that the structure of international trade is in large part explained by the distribution of power among states. Specifically, free trade flourishes when there is a single dominant hegemonic power that has both the capacity and the incentive to vouchsafe openness. By contrast, under multipolarity, protectionism reigns. The hegemon, he argues, benefits from openness because its economy is big, productive, and competitive. And it has the political and military might to enforce universal rules, absorb the costs of free riders, and install global public goods such as stable currencies, common modes of exchange, and freedom of navigation (through, for instance, strategic straits).

 

The historical record bears this out. Most relevant to the analogy under consideration, British hegemony in the 19th century helped usher in the first era of globalized free trade. The decline of the British Empire and the reemergence of multipolar politics in the years before and after the Great War caused isolation, encouraged autarky, and led to retaliatory policies. American hegemony after 1945, then, gave rise to the world you grew up in. Its relative decline seems poised to reproduce the world in which your grandparents and great-grandparents lived.

 

Everyone from the 19th-century Manchester liberals in Britain to the 20th-century American internationalists understood all too well the connection between economic integration and peace on the one hand and protectionism and war on the other. Paul Kennedy, the preeminent historian of Europe, argues in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that free trade and great-power cooperation during the Concert of Europe were, in the minds of the men who built that world, a means to such an end. Perhaps the most influential prophet of the free-trade faith, British Member of Parliament Richard Cobden, wrote that “free trade is God’s diplomacy and there is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace.” The Americans who built the second concert knew as much too. Cordell Hull, America’s top diplomat from the Depression through the Second World War, recounted in his memoirs that “toward 1916 I embraced the philosophy that I carried throughout my twelve years as Secretary of State. . . . Unhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war.”

 

The parallels to the present are not perfect, but they aren’t subtle either. The second great wave of globalization, roughly from 1945 to 1991, has built a global economy that is more deeply integrated today than it was in 1914. Post-Covid “decoupling” notwithstanding, global supply chains in everything from semiconductors to pharmaceutical precursors remain tightly integrated. Tariff policy is more complex. Tariffs on Chinese goods today have secondary and tertiary effects that, say, tariffs on Argentinian wheat in 1880 didn’t. More to the point, we aren’t in a global depression. Yet. But the language of economic nationalism is, for the first time in 80 years, spoken by the world’s largest economy. The U.S. is conducting — unevenly — a trade war through aggressive industrial policy and a set of tariffs pointed at friend and foe alike. While so far global integration seems to be weathering the storm, the most important bilateral relationship in that order is cracking.

 

According to a wide-ranging survey that measures flows of goods, capital, people, and information across borders, globalization remains near its peak. But, critically, the share of U.S. imports directly from China fell from a high of 22 percent in 2017 to 13 percent in 2024 and to 9 percent in the first three quarters of 2025. The share of each country’s trade flow from the other has decreased by about one-quarter since 2016. When the aperture is widened to include not just trade but also foreign direct investment, equity stock holdings, international patenting, scientific collaboration, tourism, web traffic, and so on, American-Chinese connectivity has dropped by 42 percent in the past ten years. There are, no doubt, many good and shrewd reasons for us to decouple from the totalitarian IP thieves who gave us Covid. But as a historical matter, the cleavage is no less portentous. Especially in light of the third and perhaps most troubling echo we hear from the past.

 

***

 

Tufts University scholar Michael Beckley examined 150 years of data on “peaking powers” that hit major economic setbacks. Not a single country in Beckley’s dataset quietly retrenched or became more peaceable in decline. A few — Japan in the 1970s or the U.S. in the 1880s — constrained their competition to their export economies. But the most dangerous cases, autocracies facing rising protectionism, followed a familiar and disturbing playbook, amping up domestic mechanisms of repression and making grabs for territory abroad. That’s because, as Beckley puts it, slumps “raise the specter of future decline” for a peaking power’s rulers, who “fear that the country’s moment in the sun is about to end.”

 

Imperial Russia — peak year 1899 in Beckley’s dataset — responded to its economic slowdown by abandoning economic competition in the Far East and pivoting to military occupation of Korea and Manchuria. Imperial Germany’s trajectory is similarly instructive. At the beginning of the 20th century, it grew fearful of its own Einkreisung (encirclement) by the Triple Entente. As Hal Brands (who in 2023 collaborated with Beckley on a book called Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China) describes Berlin’s July 1914 decisions, policymakers “understood very well that they were running a serious risk at the very least of a war against France and Russia in Europe.” And “they did it anyway because they worried that the alternative, which was sort of accepting containment, economic and military . . . would be intolerable.” Japan, in the run-up to Pearl Harbor, made the same calculation despite the knowledge that a protracted war with the United States was almost certainly unwinnable. “If I am told to fight regardless of consequence, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second and third years,” Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto told the Japanese prime minister. In the event, the proximate cause of the Pearl Harbor attack was . . . an oil supply shock, precipitated by U.S. policy decisions.

 

In each case, a power that feared that its strategic window was closing opted for aggressive, catastrophic gambles rather than managed decline. Who are the dangerous peaking, or waning, powers today? The obvious ones.

 

Start with Russia. It had its problems in the 1990s and early 2000s, to put things mildly, but as Beckley’s study and others make clear, its trajectory fundamentally changed with the global financial crisis of 2008, which exacerbated Russia’s overreliance on commodities like oil and gas and highlighted its demographic challenges. This led to a more coercive policy toward its former Soviet vassals and the erection of institutions meant to secure Moscow’s influence along the EU’s and NATO’s expanding borders. The invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022, in Brands’s and Beckley’s framework, are classic examples of peaking-power gambits.

 

The case of the People’s Republic of China is, if anything, even more pat. Brands and Beckley argue that China is rising militarily while declining economically and demographically at the same time — the most combustible combination suggested by their model. “These slumps may not immediately alter the balance of power,” Beckley writes, “but they raise the specter of future decline in the minds of a rising power’s rulers.” This “can incite aggression and expansion that a nation more optimistic about its economic prospects might avoid.” China’s working-age population peaked around 2015, and it has a lower total fertility rate than any Western country. Its construction sector has imploded, and post-Covid growth has decelerated sharply. The “de-risking” and “supply-chain resilience” efforts of multinational corporations have been aimed squarely at China, while its largest trading partners move to protect domestic alternatives to its cheap exports. And Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power comes at the expense of the post–Deng Xiaoping reforms that — for better and worse — had made China a global power in the first place. Free and open markets afforded China a favorable long-term economic trajectory and room to maneuver. But present conditions, buffeted by economic shocks (such as the Strait of Hormuz crisis) narrow its options and prospects considerably.

 

According to the peaking-powers rubric, the PRC’s ideological pathologies, namely its unique brand of state capitalism, also make a major lash-out more likely. The Chinese “characteristics” of its economy tightly link its geopolitical and industrial interests, thereby driving a mercantilist and coercive foreign policy similar to those of the panicky empires of the early 20th century. So Xi has reversed liberalizing economic policies in favor of industrial command and control, aggressive foreign direct investment, foreign lending via the sputtering Belt and Road Initiative, the forceful assimilation of Hong Kong, and a provocative military posture in the South China Sea and elsewhere. Beckley and Brands think that Taiwan is the likeliest upcoming flash point. The island is “the epitome of a place where China’s leaders might think that near-term aggression could radically improve their country’s long-term trajectory,” and the window for such a gambit is the back half of this decade.

 

Several recent developments might make Beijing think the time is nigh. American precision-munitions stockpiles have been drawn down as a result of the resupply of Ukraine and military operations against Iran. The modernization and reforms of the defense-industrial base that are needed to refill the magazines will take years to bear fruit. And the rhetoric of the second Trump administration has grown conspicuously more accommodating to Chinese ambition. Figures such as Elbridge Colby have argued openly for husbanding American power and, subtextually, for backing off the commitment to Taiwan’s sovereignty: language that Beijing can easily read as a softening of will. Regional allies such as Japan might be reading things the same way, which would explain their recent moves to remilitarize.

 

Most alarming, perhaps, is that China’s nuclear arsenal has more than doubled in a few years. U.S. intelligence now assesses that the PRC is building options “at every rung of the escalation ladder,” including next-generation weapons and low-yield tactical warheads for use on battlefields. China is still officially wedded to a minimal-deterrence, “no first use” nuclear posture, but its growing arsenal looks more like the kind you’d build if you were preparing to challenge the global status quo.

 

***

 

In the run-up to and sometimes even during the First World War, public discourse among the future belligerents was bizarrely and tragically exuberant. The British had spent the decade since the Boer Wars on a program of cultural militarization intended to counter the decadence and “physical deterioration” that they fretted would doom their empire. War hero Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scout movement in response to this worry, and Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts led the National Service League, giving speeches about “war as a tonic of character” as he advocated the mass training of civilians in rifle marksmanship. There was in Germany what the intellectuals called the Augusterlebnis, the experience of August, in 1914 — a kind of euphoria. Kaiser Wilhelm II declared that the little excursion against France would be over “before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Novelist Thomas Mann welcomed war as a “purification, . . . for is not peace the element of civil corruption?” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes out of retirement to declare that, although England must endure an “east wind” that would be “cold and bitter,” a “cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” Rupert Brooke exulted, “Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour, / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!” The poet died of sepsis on his way to Gallipoli.

 

If the end of that epoch was marked by the conviction that conflict was coming, and it was a good thing, then the end of this epoch might be marked by the conviction among the “nothing ever happens” set that the conflict can’t possibly come, and that that’s too bad. This is to some degree understandable. Geopolitics, like everything else, has migrated into virtual space, breaking the link between rhetoric and action and allowing every constituency on earth, up to and including heads of state in command of nuclear arsenals, to do statecraft as performance, as Twitter dunk. Every day brings new histrionic warnings about calamity, consumed at a digital remove by a cynical public unable to believe that anything real is at stake. Even markets have stopped flinching.

 

Two dinosaurs, in a meme, look up at the streak in the sky. One says to the other: “Relax, it’s priced in.” But not everything is priced in. Something is going to happen.