How we got here: a reminder

After the cold war ended, around 1990, America went from being one of two superpowers, to being the global "hyperpower". The World Trade Organization aspired to create a single global market. Russia was reduced to being a source of natural resources for the German-led EU. China's one-party state was an anomaly that would inevitably politically modernize. Resistance to the global order came from a handful of rogue states - North Korea, the last true socialist state, and various Muslim countries opposed to Israel.

But change brewed under the surface. In Russia, Primakov envisioned an eastern alliance between Russia, India, and China, and Dugin sought a new ideological basis for eastern resistance to the west. On the borders of the Muslim ummah, mujahideen fought on half a dozen fronts, emboldened by the fall of the Soviet Union. China strengthened Pakistan, North Korea sold missiles to the Middle East, Pakistan spread nuclear knowledge to other Muslim countries.

The 9/11 attacks turned the American ideological hegemony into an overtly military one. Bush occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and forced Pakistan to fight its own jihadis (the alternative being an overt Indian-American military alliance). The nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea became the center of interminable diplomatic processes. US military commands were created for every continent, and the NSA spied on the entire Earth.

Under Obama, the hegemon tried to be more inclusive. The world economy was governed by the G20, not just the G7. The president was the son of an African man, and grew up in an Asian Muslim country. He dabbled in supporting Islamist democracy in the Arab world, and made a nuclear deal with Iran. In America itself, racial (and gender) diversity became an obsession.

But none of this was enough. Russia was reborn as defender of tradition and as the armory of a multipolar world. The 9/11 terrorists, who sought for years to recreate the caliphate in Iraq, moved to Syria in the aftermath of the Arab spring, unleashing a wave of migration into Europe that overturned the center-left consensus there, in favor of right-wing nationalism. China ceased hiding its strength and announced a project of economic integration stretching across Asia. And finally, in America itself, a celebrity billionaire revealed himself as a nationalist strongman and acquired the presidency despite opposition from almost the entire media and political establishment.