Industrial Modernity

This content was translated using artificial intelligence and may therefore contain errors.

Empires

For the overwhelming majority of human history, Eurasia was indisputably the center of the world: the supercontinent is the largest interconnected landmass in existence, has by far the largest population to this day, and has always accounted for the largest share of the global economy. Eurasia also has two significant characteristics: first, its territory lies along an east-west axis, mostly in temperate zones, which means a vast expanse of arable land. Second, the existence of a literally mediterranean sea and an ocean with predictable seasonal winds (the Indian Ocean with its monsoons) enabled a degree of connectivity and exchange unmatched anywhere else in the world. As a result, from early in history we can observe the development of numerous sedentary powers along all of Eurasia's coastal margins: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, India, and China, among others.

All these societies eventually established direct and indirect connections with one another, enabling a level of material, cultural, scientific, religious, biological, and philosophical exchange that for millennia had no parallel anywhere else on the planet. This interconnection allowed advances and discoveries made in different areas to feed into one another, accelerating the development of the region as a whole.

These sedentary societies, linked by sea routes, were also connected by a vast dry ocean: the steppes of central Eurasia. This great plain, stretching roughly between present-day Poland and Korea, has been one of the most consequential and overlooked factors in the course of human history. This immense space, inhabited since the Bronze Age by a long succession of nomadic, horse-riding peoples, had gateways to all the great sedentary societies, reaching into China from the west, India from the northwest, the Middle East from the north, and Europe from the east. Historically, the relationship between these societies and their nomadic neighbors was contradictory, often fruitful and frequently violent, but it also created an alternative and complementary route to the sea lanes, one found on no other continent, that spurred the exchange of goods, ideas, and people.

In this way, the vast amount of available land, the temperate climates, and the routes of exchange not only produced numerous civilizations, but also made possible an ongoing dialogue between them that accelerated their development. It was thanks to this that, from early in human history until the 16th century, Eurasia's level of material and technological complexity remained far above that of Oceania, the Americas, and sub-Saharan Africa.

However, not all regions of Eurasia followed the same historical trajectory. Broadly speaking, over the centuries we can observe the rise and fall of great empires whose size, might, and prosperity made them almost immune to external threats at their peak. In other words, these great powers generally saw no existential threat in their known world and gradually developed a fairly stable imperial ecosystem: in antiquity we see Rome alongside Persia, alongside the Kushan Empire in India, alongside the Han dynasty in China. Later, we have the Ottoman Turks next to the Safavid Persians, next to the Mughals of India, next to Ming China, separated by the sea from Tokugawa Japan. Time and again, empires fell and rose again in the same places and with comparable borders.

But there is one important exception to all this: Europe.

This continent, which is actually a peninsula of Eurasia, had its great imperial experience with Rome. But after the fall of the empire (a tortuous process spanning a millennium between the 5th and 15th centuries AD), Europe never reunified itself or the Mediterranean world it had once dominated. Instead, and unlike the rest of the supercontinent, Europe came to be home to a series of small and medium-sized powers in constant competition with one another.

The relative fragility of the emerging European states created a geopolitical reality in which conflict posed genuine existential dangers. By the time Europe emerged from the Middle Ages and entered the early modern period—around the 16th century, after a millennium of constant, multidimensional competition among a multitude of states whose complex allegiances changed all the time—a dynamic balance of power had been forged. It was precisely in this spirit of constant competition that the kingdoms of Western Europe (first the Iberian kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, followed by France, England, and the Netherlands) invented an unprecedented political structure: transoceanic empires. A century after Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas, we saw the emergence of the first wave of globalization: a Spanish Empire stretching from Sicily to Buenos Aires and as far as the Philippines; Portuguese trading posts in Africa, India, and China; and even a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki, Japan.

It was during this period that the seeds of what would later blossom into Argentina were planted. The Río de la Plata Basin, located at the convergence of a vast river network in the heart of South America, gave the future Argentina a socioeconomically secondary role (compared with the great pre-Columbian capitals such as Cuzco or Tenochtitlan, and with a lower population density than Mexico or Peru), but a strategically crucial one within the fabric of the Spanish Empire. At the same time, its status as the last Spanish bastion before Cape Horn, which links the Atlantic and the Pacific, made it a central hub for interoceanic navigation, a fundamental pillar of global empires.

The irreversible transformations brought about by the planetary exchange of people, plants, ideas, weapons, bacteria, bullion, and manufactured goods did not stabilize Europe, but deepened its conflicts. Broadly speaking, and vastly oversimplifying, we can trace a succession of three hegemonic powers on the continent, each of which enjoyed around a century and a half of splendor: Spain (1500-1648), France (1648-1814), and the United Kingdom (1814-1945). In fact, the history of our country clearly tracks these different hegemonic transitions.⁴Our first cities were founded during the golden age of Habsburg Spain. With the rise of France, Spain entered a succession crisis and in 1700 saw a French prince of the Bourbon dynasty, which still reigns today, ascend to its throne. The Bourbons brought with them a series of centralizing administrative reforms from the court of Versailles, importing tensions that would erupt in both the French Revolution and the Spanish American revolutions of independence. On the other hand, a key event preceding the May Revolution was the British invasions, which were in turn an episode in the Napoleonic Wars; the last great, desperate bid to save French hegemony from Britain's rise.

The 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries were absolutely crucial to the accumulation of wealth and knowledge and the development of institutions. But it was with the arrival of the 19th century that the real qualitative leap took place: the emergence of industrial modernity.

The modernizers

Originating in Europe in the 18th century, industrial modernity took just two centuries to transform the lives of the vast majority of the Earth's inhabitants. Beginning with the invention of the steam engine, humanity discovered how to harness ever greater amounts of energy, which led it to build more and better machines, capable of producing more and better things. This ushered in the period of most rapid development in the planet's history. In two hundred years, we went from using firewood for heat, traveling by cart, and sailing to harnessing nuclear energy, building bullet trains, and sending probes to Mars. In turn, this revolution in technology and production generated previously unimaginable levels of widespread prosperity: the percentage of people living in extreme poverty fell from 85 % in 1800 to less than 10 % in 2024, while the present era is the first in history in which more people die from problems related to obesity than to malnutrition.

In many ways, the foundations of the modern world rest on the fundamental transformation of the oceans: over the past 500 years, advances in navigation turned that vast mass of water covering 70 % of the Earth's surface from the great barrier that allowed isolated civilizations to exist into the avenue that brought all of humanity into an uncomfortable proximity, sustained by two great aquatic monuments: the Suez and Panama canals.

This great exchange left no corner of the planet unshaken, and the rise of enormous transoceanic empires redefined the global balance of power. While the various European powers seized key resources, took up strategic positions, and struck at weak flanks, the old continental empires' responses came late, were generally inconsistent, and were almost always inadequate. Thus, in two hundred years, empires of titanic proportions that had previously been invulnerable faced collapse after collapse.

If the Industrial Revolution was the economic pillar of industrial modernity and the factory was its great legacy, then the French Revolution was its political pillar, and its great legacy was the concept of the nation-state. From this point on, all the inhabitants of a country came to be considered equal members of a nation, a revolutionary concept in a world where people tended to have a plurality of overlapping identities that became more diffuse the farther one moved from the capitals and the closer one came to poorly defined borders. And it was in this totalizing identity that the French revolutionaries hit upon one of the most powerful political forces in history: mass mobilization.

The population's mass participation in various aspects of public life gave governments a tool they could deploy with great effectiveness in projects as different as nation-building, the consolidation of new political systems (both democratic and authoritarian), and the launching of total wars. So successful was this model that over the next two centuries it became the standard organizational form for states around the world, and across most of the planet other forms of human organization became difficult even to imagine.

The French and Industrial Revolutions both shaped the processes of Spanish American independence as the Spanish Empire spiraled into terminal crisis. Throughout the early decades of the 19th century, various subjects across different viceroyalties gradually built modern nation-states as the course of politics drew new borders; a complex process that led to recurring internal struggles, repeatedly delaying a more firmly established national order that would allow the region to develop its economic potential.

At the same time, the logic of industrial modernity opened up unprecedented possibilities for imperial expansion while at the same time changing its logic. Many places once considered vital declined in importance, while virtually unknown corners of the planet took center stage if some critical, scarce industrial input was found there, such as coal, rubber, guano or, later, oil. One emblematic case is Manaus: during the rubber boom, this city, built in the heart of the Amazon, briefly became one of the richest places in the world.

Despite British hegemony, the complex balance of power on the continent could not be broken, and Europe remained impregnable throughout the 19th century, even as it took control of the rest of the world: its great powers also included Russia, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy and the Ottoman Empire.

By the late 19th century and early 20th century, we see a new and very different phase of globalization firmly established. The celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm called this period the age of empire. Here I take the liberty of proposing another concept, not an alternative but perhaps a complementary one: the age of globalizations. The inspiration for this suggestion lies in the fact that the height of European power was not really marked by a single global system, but by the coexistence of several imperial systems globalized in parallel.

Put very briefly: from the Industrial Revolution onward, a European power's imperial game was based on the premise that it was easier to conquer other parts of the world than to conquer Europe, and that doing so was necessary to avoid being conquered yourself. Now, industrial modernity requires a large supply of specific inputs, scattered around the world, to produce manufactured goods, and access to markets to sell them. Since these empires have little incentive to trade freely with their rivals, each empire would ideally have to acquire colonies around the world in order to put together a complete industrial production system that would allow it to compete on the international stage.

This leads to a logic of perpetual expansion in search of new territories to gain access to their resources and markets. Not only that: the very logic of imperial competition also leads powers to acquire territories not because they are of particular value to the power itself, but to deny them to a rival. In this way, with relative peace in Europe, the industrial powers consumed whatever pieces of planet Earth they could, until by the early 20th century virtually the entire globe was under direct colonial or semicolonial domination, or governed by some offshoot of European culture, as was the case in the Americas.

In Argentina's case, the consolidation of an effective national government and the end of its civil wars with Julio A. Roca's accession to the presidency in 1880 created a political setting that could take advantage of the new technologies that had become firmly established over the course of the century. As a result, Argentina became a destination for extensive capital investment that transformed its economic structure and integrated it into the global European imperial order in a lucrative but subordinate role; essentially, as an exporter of raw materials, mainly agricultural, in a system that has gone down in history as the agricultural export model.

Faced with the advance of this global system, Eurasia's traditional empires confronted a stark dilemma: either embrace industrial modernity or suffer the consequences. And this is because, as historian Stephen Kotkin pointed out, industrial modernity is not just a socioeconomic change or a shift in production; it is a geopolitical imperative and an existential imperative. Industrial production and its most important consequence, industrial warfare, represented an abrupt shift in the existing balance of power. While the year 1700 was marked by a certain parity in military capabilities across Eurasia, by 1850 the supremacy of the industrial powers was undeniable. And from the moment someone figured out how to build steel ships, all the other peoples of the world had to get their own steel ships or suffer the consequences.

However, there are a few things we need to point out when we talk about modernity, because it is one of those terms where our basic assumptions work against us. We live in a modern society, in which being modern is itself seen as a good thing. If you read in a history book that this or that emperor was a “modernizer,” you assume he is being praised. Yet modernization is one of the most complex, thankless and generally dangerous tasks a government can undertake, because, plain and simple, it is one of those projects that make everyone hate you at the same time. Let's consider the great continental empires of Eurasia during the Industrial Revolution, whether Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Qing dynasty in China or Qajar Persia.⁵One notable absence is India, whose own imperial implosion in the 18th century and subsequent British conquest probably made the advent of the Industrial Revolution possible. Over the decades, as they accumulated military defeats at the hands of increasingly industrialized armies, all these empires recognized the existential imperative to modernize and took steps to do so. They correctly recognized that military superiority lay in new weapons systems, and that those weapons came from better technology. So they decided to send cohorts of their brightest young people to study in industrialized countries and learn their techniques, then bring them back to serve the emperor. To a greater or lesser extent, this happened. The problem was that these young people also brought back ideas; modernizing ideas. They learned not only how to make cannons, but also how to found political clubs, newspapers and trade unions. On their return, they became aware of the relative backwardness of their societies, economies, customs and institutions. And from this they concluded that industrial modernity was a package deal. If they were to ensure their society's survival in a modern world, the entire society had to become modern. And who should shoulder the heavy task of leading this modernization? “The modernizers,” said, naturally, the modernizers.

Facing them, we often find monarchs bewildered, incredulous or furious at what they saw as either flagrant ingratitude or acts of treason. This opened up an initial vulnerability in the imperial structure: monarchs failed to control or direct the perpetually unsatisfied demands of the modernizers.

As this unfolded, the monarch was also losing credibility among the regime's loyalists, who were almost always its conservative wing. They tended to be just as perplexed, but with their sovereign, whom they saw as a monarch turning his back on everything that had made the empire great while spending fortunes trying to imitate the ways of his enemies, all by funding the ungrateful, inexperienced modernizers, whose ideas were proving increasingly dangerous. Added to this were the empire's own subjects, who were beginning to encounter the novel concept of the nation and adopting identities that threatened to tear the multicultural empire apart from within. And this story repeated itself, over and over, in every empire.

And so we arrive at the perfect nightmare that is modernization. The modernizers will never be satisfied, and their demands will grow more far-reaching over the decades, frequently turning them into revolutionaries. Something similar happens with the conservatives, whose growing frustration and desperation will often turn them into reactionaries. In the middle of all this there is always a monarch who, with painful frequency, will try to meet all these demands at once, with advances, retreats, concessions, dialogue and repression: political parties are legalized and banned; rebels are executed and prisoners freed; newspapers are opened and closed; constitutions are signed and suspended; languages are legalized and entire populations massacred. The Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II, the Chinese emperor Guangxu and the Russian tsar Alexander II have gone down in history as prime examples of the inherent difficulty of modernization.

And all this taking place in an extremely hostile geopolitical context, with the industrial powers lying in wait for their moment to strike. With the sole exception of Meiji Japan, no Eurasian empire would truly remain standing by the end of the First World War.

Nevertheless, Europe's imperial logic also had its limits. With the world virtually out of land to colonize, the European powers turned their cannons on one another again: two world wars in less than thirty years brought an end to one of the periods of greatest military, economic and sociocultural supremacy the world has ever seen.

The superpowers

As I noted in the introduction to this book, this process was particularly destabilizing for the Argentine Republic, which, in thirty years, saw the destruction of the world order around which it had built a model for the country, a model for the economy, and a model for society. To this must be added the fact that Argentine society had undergone the deepest and most rapid transformation in its history during the half-century heyday of the agro-export model (1880-1930). This presented the political class of the time with a double challenge, as it attempted to reconcile a country and a world order that would have been unrecognizable to its predecessors just a few decades earlier.

In place of the traditional European system of parallel empires, two superpowers emerged in the mid-twentieth century whose antagonism would, through action and reaction, shape the world we have known: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America.

As for the former, much of the history of the twentieth century is marked by the rise and fall of one of the most extraordinary political processes humanity has ever undertaken. For the only time in history, a handful of highly motivated people embarked on the project of founding an entire civilization solely on the basis of a school of philosophy: dialectical materialism. The result was the construction of a state, a society, Armed Forces, a culture, an art, and a geopolitical vision born of Soviet socialism.

This gave rise to a continental superpower encompassing one-eighth of the world's landmass and the planet's third-largest population. Its revolutionary, universalist, and evangelizing spirit also placed it inherently at odds with the established world order: Soviet ideology itself held that its model was the only legitimate form of human organization, while all other governments and societies were nothing more than inherently evil systems of exploitation to be destroyed by any means possible; a fate that, moreover, was inevitable under the premise that history has scientific laws and human development advances inexorably toward communism.

Added to this ideological framework are the constraints of geography. Despite its efforts to break radically with the past, the Russian Revolution was not “Russian” for nothing, since it inherited the territories (and, with them, the geopolitical problems) of the old tsars. Russia, in any of its iterations, probably faces the most paradoxical geopolitical situation in the world: an enormously vulnerable great power, in constant danger, that is also perpetually a victim of its own successes. A state that, time and again, finds that the better it does, the worse off it is in terms of its own national security.

To understand this paradox, we must go back to the origins of modern Russia in the old Grand Duchy of Muscovy, a territory located squarely on the great Eurasian steppe, landlocked, without defensible natural borders, and surrounded by enemies. In this setting, the strategic imperative is to conquer all neighboring territories to eliminate threats, acquire more resources, and grow larger to compensate for the lack of geographical barriers. But once this stage is complete, the Russian leadership realizes that its fundamental situation has not changed. It then proceeds to conquer the neighbors of its neighbors, and then the neighbors of the neighbors of its neighbors and the neighbors of the neighbors of the neighbors of its neighbors, and in a couple of centuries it ends up building a colossal empire stretching from Poland to Korea.

At its peaks, Russia has managed to geographically “anchor itself” at certain key points: the roughly 800 km linking the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains on its western flank, the 200 km separating the Carpathians from the Black Sea on its southwestern flank, the Caucasus Mountains and the mountain ranges and deserts of Central Asia on its southern flank, and the Pacific Ocean on its eastern flank.

At first glance, this would seem to be a strategically idyllic situation: Russia has managed to accumulate resources and territories to strengthen itself, has natural barriers that allow it to secure defensible borders, and its vast size gives it strategic depth in the event of an attack. Yet this is the moment when it becomes a victim of its own success. These campaigns of conquest in every direction turn it into a colossal power that all its neighbors regard with caution or fear, but this does not leave it with fewer borders and fewer neighbors, quite the opposite. And to complicate matters even further, these neighbors are not small principalities, emirates, or city-states, but rather many of the world's great powers, such as Germany, Turkey, Iran, India, China, and Japan, which have strategic reasons to form coalitions against Russia.

At the same time, the vast material and human resources Russia accumulates through its conquests can never be put to full use. Its immense expanses require enormous amounts of capital to be developed to their full potential, capital that will never be available because those conquests were made possible by huge land armies. And the more Russia conquers, the more soldiers it needs to control ever more territory and fight ever more enemies of ever greater power, ensuring that it will never have the capital to develop its economy enough to win the geopolitical game it finds itself caught up in.

And, to complete the picture, we must point out that Russia can never be a naval power either. The reason is once again geographical: for an island nation such as the United Kingdom or Japan, it is relatively easy to be a naval power, since all it really needs to guarantee its national security is a single fleet stationed in the surrounding sea. In fact, as islands, they can invest much less in their land forces and build a powerful fleet with relatively few people. In Russia's case, Moscow needs not one but four fleets: a Baltic Sea fleet, an Arctic Sea fleet, a Black Sea fleet, and a Pacific fleet. So, instead of being able to invest in one great fleet, it has to divide those resources four ways; resources consisting of whatever is left in the Defense budget after funding one of the world's largest land armies. And all this only for any one of these fleets to have to compete against the entire German Navy in the Baltic, the entire Japanese or Chinese Navy in the Pacific, the entire Turkish Navy in the Black Sea, not to mention other maritime powers in places such as the North Sea or the Mediterranean, where the Italian, French, British, or U.S. fleets lie in wait.

Even so, having inherited this geopolitical nightmare and flying the flag of an ideology that implicitly declared war on the rest of the planet's powers, by the mid-twentieth century, Stalin's Soviet Union had achieved one of the greatest political and military feats in history: the formation of a socialist bloc stretching from East Germany to northern Vietnam, with some 900 million people and some 35 million km2; that is, around a quarter of the Earth and a third of humanity.

Although in many respects the Kremlin can be considered to have reached the height of its global influence by the time of Stalin's death in 1953, Russia was once again a victim of its own success, since the existence of this socialist bloc led by a Soviet nuclear superpower was alarming enough to bring about the most powerful, improbable, and heterogeneous set of alliances ever seen in history. A network of alliances designed and led by the United States.

The United States can, in a sense, be considered the anti-Russia, not only in terms of antagonism and rivalry, but also in its geopolitical essence. Unlike Moscow, Washington could not have been more favored by geography: it never had powerful neighbors, it was able to expand rapidly and without great difficulty until it reached a continental scale, the center of the country contains both some of the world's most fertile land and one of its finest river networks (the Mississippi basin), and its location in North America places it at a safe distance from all the various dangers of the Eurasian world.

Thanks to this, less than a century after its founding, it had managed to fulfill its first three strategic imperatives: to become a two-ocean naval power, to establish itself as the hegemonic power in North America, and to become the hegemonic power in the Western Hemisphere. It was also around this time, in the late nineteenth century, that it became the world's leading economy, although its influence in the concert of nations still fell short of its potential (similar to China's case in the first quarter of the twenty-first century).

However, two world wars and the Soviet rise led Washington to become permanently involved in global affairs, since Stalin represented a challenge it could not ignore: a power capable of unifying Eurasia. Preventing this scenario is the fourth strategic imperative of the U.S.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, Eurasia has always been the center of the world because of its size, population, and resources. If a power were to achieve hegemony in Eurasia, it would have the resources to produce more steel ships than the United States, and with that, the two oceans flanking the North American power would cease to be two great walls and become avenues for invasion, destroying any semblance of national security.

Faced with this possibility, the U.S. adopted a strategy of containment resting on two fundamental pillars. First, it managed to consolidate a ring along the edges of Eurasia to contain any possible Soviet advance, financing the reconstruction of both its allies and former rivals and giving them access to the U.S. market. Thus, Norway, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Thailand, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines, the island of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, among others, would act as a great pancontinental containment barrier.

At the same time, preferential access to the U.S. market and the direct support they received allowed these allied countries to recover rapidly, while fear of socialist revolution led them to develop different versions of the welfare state, markedly improving the quality of life of their citizens as a whole. In this way, the alternative modernity proposed by Soviet socialism also helped shape its rivals, which incorporated many of its social policies through a model of greater state intervention in order to build a new political and social compact: in many respects, the postwar capitalist world, in which the interests of the working class could not be ignored, is markedly different from the capitalist world that preceded it.

Second, Washington adopted an economic and trade strategy that would make it possible to finance this vast security architecture. The United States emerged from World War II with the most powerful navy on the planet and the only one with a truly global reach: in 1945, Washington had 6,768 warships, accounting for 70% of the world's ships and total tonnage. This enabled it to launch a series of policies that would reshape the structure of the global economy.

One of its first moves was made jointly with the Soviet Union, though for different reasons: to dismantle the European imperial system that had led to the world wars. From that point on, the countries emerging from decolonization would become the preferred battleground between the two superpowers.

The demolition of the old European imperial system of parallel globalizations enabled the consolidation of a new model: from the mid-20th century onward, the United States not only had the world's most powerful fleet, but deployed it in such a way as to ensure that it had the most powerful fleet in every ocean. Since then, it has patrolled all the seas, ensuring freedom of navigation and preventing, broadly speaking, both private and state piracy. This has made it possible for all its allies, at least in theory, to trade with one another. The old logic of competition for territory and resources was gradually replaced by a more efficient international division of labor, consolidated through increasingly global value chains.

It is from this point onward that we see an acceleration in industrial and logistical standardization around the world, with the introduction of things we consider perfectly mundane but that were absolutely revolutionary at the time. A prime example was the shipping container, invented in the mid-1950s in the U.S. and standardized internationally in 1965, which revolutionized trade by facilitating intermodal transport between ships, trains, and trucks, enabling previously unthinkable integration across logistics, production, and trade.

Industrial Argentina

Faced with this bipolar landscape and a series of converging adverse factors, Argentina had to seek a new development model. Its traditional European markets, recovering from the war, adopted protectionist policies and massive subsidies for their agricultural sectors to ensure greater food security in the event of a third world war. Although this process began as a series of individual national policies, the Common Agricultural Policy was established in 1962 to turn it into a shared, regionally coordinated objective, and today it accounts for around a third of the European Union's total budget. For Argentina, this process essentially meant losing the fundamental pillar of its agricultural export model, while few alternatives seemed available elsewhere around the globe: the socialist bloc was a difficult market because of the ideological confrontations of the Cold War, the Global South was going through the chaos of early decolonization, and the U.S., the world's largest market, has always been a direct agricultural competitor to Argentina's farming sector.

Various Argentine governments, most notably Peronist ones, chose to deal with this situation by implementing projects to industrialize the national economy through what became known as ISI: import substitution industrialization. The logic behind these projects was to foster domestic industries in order to reduce the traditional dependence on the core economies, make technological leaps, and create better-paid industrial jobs that would encourage the expansion of the domestic market, which would, in turn, consume the industrial goods it generated itself.

Although ISI, both in Argentina and in other countries in the region, represented a qualitative leap in the technological and industrial base throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and was a response to the adverse global landscape of the postwar period, this model also faced major geopolitical challenges. First, industrialization took place in a country with a small population, which grew from some 16,000,000 to 23,000,000 people between 1945 and 1970, limiting the size of the domestic market it sought to foster. Second, to attract the capital needed to develop this industry, Argentina had to compete with the countries of Eurasia, whose key geographical position in the Cold War made them priority destinations for reasons that were more strategic than economic. Third, Latin America was not only a secondary theater of the Cold War; because the region was characterized more by internal than international conflicts, U.S. interventions focused on promoting techniques of counterinsurgency and domestic repression, generating enormous social costs and destabilization.

Neoliberalism and the End of the USSR

During the first postwar decades, this global economic structure rested on a kind of gold standard that had emerged from the Bretton Woods agreements: all countries would trade in dollars and then be able to use those dollars to buy gold from the vast U.S. reserves. However, this was abruptly brought to an end by President Richard Nixon, who, fearing a growing drain on gold reserves, unilaterally abolished the system in 1971. From that point on, the U.S. dollar was backed solely by market confidence.

But faced with the imperative of sustaining the global financial system it had built, the U.S. offered its allies an alternative to gold: from then on, when countries running trade surpluses accumulated dollars in their reserves, they could sell them to Washington in exchange for Treasury bonds. And this was how, in the last quarter of the 20th century, the United States found a way to sustain its global empire economically by selling its debt and buying its own currency in a complex financial circuit.

This change in strategy coincided with a loss of U.S. industrial competitiveness, particularly after the 1973 oil crisis, which also led to stagflation (the unusual combination of high inflation with little or no economic growth). In turn, the crisis, which hit manufacturing hard, accelerated the sector's sustained decline in the face of competition from other industrialized economies, such as Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. It is worth noting that all were allies during the Cold War and that the United States had subsidized their economies in various ways. This trend would be reinforced even further in the following decades by the entry of the People's Republic of China into the global economy.

Although China's history in the 20th century is long and complex, the part that interests us basically begins when the victory of the Chinese Revolution led by Mao Zedong places Beijing in the socialist bloc led by Stalin. However, growing tensions between Mao and Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev,⁶Tensions stemming from Khrushchev's decision to denounce his predecessor in the strongest possible terms during the so-called “de-Stalinization policy” in 1956. would lead to a complete break between the two socialist giants known as the Sino-Soviet split. This led Mao to begin mending ties with Washington and bring China into the large anti-Soviet bloc in the 1970s. After his death, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, launched the Reform and Opening Up Policy in 1978, which brought an economic revolution to China and transformed it into the factory of the world we know today. But I'll discuss this country in much greater depth in chapter 3, so let's leave it there for now and pick up the thread of the story.

As for the social costs of this transformation, this process of “deindustrialization” of the U.S. economy saw manufacturing's share of total U.S. employment fall from nearly 40% in 1943 to around 21% in 1980 and around 8% in 2024. This trend also hit the working class hard, as many of the gains it had made in previous decades were gradually eroded by a combination of business closures, increased automation, and the relocation of factories to other countries with cheaper labor. These adverse consequences for the working class, together with stagflation, contributed to the substantial increase in inequality in U.S. society. To give one example, real wages did not rise significantly in the following decades.

This phenomenon unfolded alongside changes in Western economic thought, driven by the economy's poor performance in the 1970s. The academic and political response was marked by the rise of neoliberalism, based on ideas such as that many of the functions the state had taken on would be performed more efficiently in private hands, that market deregulation would revive growth, and that reducing the tax burden on the most prosperous sectors of society (essentially, the upper classes and large corporations) would give the economy renewed dynamism. In other words, with the fear of socialist revolutions in the West now in the past, neoliberalism proposed abandoning the postwar sociopolitical pact and proposed a governing alliance between the upper and middle classes against the interests of the working class.

Globally, the two most emblematic figures who ushered in the neoliberal era were U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Among the most notable features of their agendas was a set of conservative policies marked by a strongly anti-union stance on labor, strong support for the free market in trade and finance, and tax policies that distinctly favored the wealthiest sectors of society (indeed, over his two terms, Reagan reduced the tax rate in the highest bracket from 70% to 28%).

At the same time, this process was accompanied by an extraordinary technological revolution in computing, which created a new industry within the U.S. itself, a new engine of the country's economic growth. In turn, innovations in information technology also accelerated and deepened the development of another sector that would experience a boom in the 1980s: finance.

The new processing and communication capabilities brought by the technological revolution gave the financial sector the material tools to reap exponentially greater benefits from Reagan’s measures, such as reducing inflation by raising interest rates, lowering the tax burden and deregulation. In turn, the sector’s new dynamism also allowed US companies to take advantage of this favorable environment for their interests by consolidating and becoming large multinationals that would benefit from an increasingly globalized world.

In Argentina, these ideas were first implemented under the last dictatorship (1976-1983) and Economy Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, who launched the first experiment in deindustrialization in Argentine history. The logic behind this rested, on the one hand, on the neoliberal premise that a more open, less protectionist economy would eventually generate greater growth. It also had a logic of internal repression, seeking to eliminate the industrial working class, seen as the greatest risk factor for a possible socialist revolution. Nevertheless, neither the deindustrialization begun by the dictatorship nor subsequent experiments in liberalization have ever managed to fully dismantle the industrial fabric established by Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s, which gave rise to the following half-century of strategic stalemate in which Argentina routinely alternates between models of economic openness and protectionism without ever settling on a definitive course.

The tenets of ascendant neoliberalism seemed to be vindicated by the collapse of the socialist governments of Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although, once again, the fall of the USSR is a long and complex story, in short, it was the policy of de-Stalinization initiated by Khrushchev that led to the gradual erosion of ideology among party cadres. Faced with ever-worsening material conditions and the regime’s loss of legitimacy, the Soviet elites themselves eventually abandoned the system in favor of another model that would benefit them more. And this was how the only experiment in human history to create a model of civilization inspired by a school of philosophical thought ended up committing societal suicide less than seven decades after its founding.

Postmodernity

The close of the 20th century seemed to usher in a new era for humanity. With the collapse of the socialist bloc, a triumphant West theorized about a new era of thought: a postmodernity. The last great ideological conflict over the best economic system seemed to have been resolved in favor of free-market capitalism. And the best political system to accompany that economic system seemed to be liberal democracy: “Markets prefer democracies,” the political science textbooks of the time repeated.

According to this view, all that was needed was to keep liberalizing economies and opening their markets to international trade. Every country in the world would do what it did best and import the rest. This would make everything cheaper and all of us richer. As societies grew wealthier, their new middle classes would inevitably demand greater political representation, and that would inexorably lead to democratization. And the more democracies there were in the world, the greater the peace: “Democracies do not go to war,” international relations experts repeated in those years.

Thus, in a prosperous, democratized, commercially open and economically interdependent world, all conflicts would gradually dissipate. War would disappear because there would no longer be anything to gain from it. National politics would be reduced almost entirely to administering a few regulations here and there. A more prosperous society would be better educated, and a better-educated society would tend to be more secular, according to the conventional wisdom of the time.

The advent of the internet, that information superhighway, would turn the planet into one great global village. Never had so many people had so much access to so much information. Never had so many people been able to debate so freely and on such an equal footing, without fear of repercussions of any kind. In this great global marketplace of ideas, the best ideas would inevitably triumph, since this market, like any other, regulates itself, technocratic logic decreed.

This peace, prosperity and interconnectedness would bring humanity ever closer together, and the borders between countries would gradually fade. People would increasingly become “citizens of the world” and finally leave behind nationalism, the serpent’s egg that led to the totalitarianism of the 20th century, the prevailing historical interpretations maintained.

This world without poverty, without conflict, without politics would also, naturally, be a world without history, since history would have come to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union. This was, in essence, the great neoliberal dream that seemed to be taking hold in the 1990s. The irony is that in many respects it seems almost indistinguishable from Karl Marx’s communist dream: a utopian world without poverty, without war and without a state.

Implicitly, the very notion of democracy also began to change during this period. The establishment parties in the West, on both the left and the right, made a pact among themselves through which the concept of democracy gradually ceased to mean government by the will of the majority and was replaced by the concept of defending minority rights. For the parties of the left (and by this I mean the Democratic Party, the Labour Party, Spain’s PSOE, the French socialists, etc.), this offered an opportunity to advance their social and cultural agendas by focusing on issues affecting minorities and subaltern groups, which quickly gained visibility in the mainstream of political debate: gender inequality, racial discrimination, Indigenous peoples, sexual diversity, refugees, among others.

However, by accepting this pact, they guaranteed protection for the minority that matters most to the parties of the right: the only universal minority; that is, the economic minority; that is, the rich. Once the logic is accepted that, in a democracy, the will of the majority cannot be used against minorities, votes cannot be used to seriously redistribute wealth.

Having narrowed the scope of what was considered politically correct to discuss, for a time the parties seemed to gravitate toward a center: the parties of the right became more culturally progressive, and the parties of the left became more economically conservative.

In terms of concrete proposals, the conventional wisdom of the post-Cold War era was given iconic expression by John Williamson in a 1989 article. In it, he listed ten specific reform proposals for Latin America that would be implemented in one way or another across the globe. These reforms consisted of fiscal discipline, reordering public expenditure, tax reform, financial liberalization, a competitive exchange rate, trade liberalization, openness to foreign investment, privatization, deregulation and protection of property rights. As this set of policy recipes gained popularity, it ultimately went down in history as the Washington Consensus.

In Argentina’s case, the government of Carlos Saúl Menem embodied the contradictory synthesis offered by this early postmodernity. Menem was a traditional Peronist caudillo from the provinces far from Buenos Aires who later boldly embraced neoliberal ideas. In domestic politics, he sought to leave behind the conflicts that had marked decades: his visit to Admiral Isaac Rojas, a symbol of the most virulent anti-Peronism, was meant to represent a kind of reconciliation across Argentina’s political spectrum, while his pardons for military commanders from the dictatorship and revolutionary leaders sought to bring the conflicts of the Cold War to a close. Internationally, Menem enthusiastically accepted US hegemony while supporting the expansion of the multilateral system in those years. And finally, in economic terms, he firmly followed the line set by the Washington Consensus and, through sweeping domestic liberalization, implemented a substantial reduction in the national state’s capacities and the country’s second major wave of deindustrialization, whose unsustainability would ultimately be demonstrated in the great crisis of 2001.

Arguably, the greatest neoliberal experiment has been the European Union. Toward the end of the 20th century, after having self-destructed in two world wars and nearly becoming the battlefront of a third, the continent finally seemed to leave behind fifteen centuries of conflict. Borders between countries were dissolving, prosperity was spreading from west to east and north to south, nationalisms were evaporating, politics was being replaced by the technocratic governance of Brussels, and a European identity was emerging that promised to be the beacon lighting the way for the rest of humanity. An emblematic phrase of the era, which circulated on the internet for years, captured this concept well by stating that “[b]eing British means driving a German car to an Irish pub for a Belgian beer, then traveling home, grabbing an Indian curry or a Turkish kebab on the way, sitting on Swedish furniture, and watching American shows on a Japanese TV.”

From the 1990s onward, we saw more and more trade integration projects around the world: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States and Mexico; economic integration between Brazil and Argentina, leaving behind two centuries of rivalry (MERCOSUR); the transformation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from an anti-communist security alliance into a much broader framework for multilateral integration; and Washington’s great hemispheric project, a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

However, there was still some unfinished business on the global chessboard, and none was as complex for the U.S. as the question of what to do with China. The survival of this socialist giant (which was also the world's most populous country) posed a political, economic, and even theoretical problem for a U.S. that was simultaneously at a high point of its power and fully subsumed within neoliberal logic. On the one hand, the existence of a Marxist-Leninist government in a country of that size with the potential to become a future superpower represented a strategic threat to Washington. It would have made sense to sabotage China's rise while the balance of power so strongly favored the U.S. On the other hand, the People's Republic of China had been making notable progress in its economic reforms and trade liberalization, demonstrating both a capacity for change and major economic opportunities for U.S. capital. However, unlike the Soviet Union,⁷The USSR's leadership abandoned the project in December 1991 following a failed coup in August and a severe deterioration in the regime's economy and reputation as a result of the reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev (economic opening, easing of censorship, etc.). when the Chinese government was threatened by the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the Party did not hesitate to use coercion to remain in power. This led part of the U.S. political class to demand punitive measures against China, which carried the risk of isolating it and interrupting its “normalizing” process of integration into the world economy. Ultimately, Washington continued to cooperate and trade with China, and allowed it to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). This attitude toward the only potential rival the U.S. had in the 1990s cannot be fully explained without considering the neoliberal ideological bias: the idea was that China would grow richer and, as this happened, a new middle class would emerge that would inevitably democratize the country in time. Or, at least, that is what much of the academic literature of the 1990s maintained.

The end of the end of history

Curiously, the same year that China joined the WTO, the neoliberal dream suffered a severe blow when a group of men decided to put an end to the “end of history” on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, with the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. Along with the towers, the illusion that greater prosperity, interconnectivity, or modernity would almost automatically resolve human conflicts also came crashing down. Indeed, one of the great ironies was the discovery that cutting-edge technologies could be used to spread seemingly archaic ideas such as the medieval concept of holy war.

On the geopolitical front, September 11 almost completely clouded Washington's strategic thinking, as it threw itself into a series of military adventures in the Middle East in the name of fighting terrorism, adventures that proved as futile as they were damaging. In turn, this situation gave many of its rivals a window of opportunity to continue their development (China's modernization, North Korea's development of an atomic bomb, the expansion of Iranian influence in the Middle East) or recover some of what they had lost (Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 and its annexation of Crimea in 2014).

During this period, U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere reached a low point with the rise of numerous left-wing governments in Latin America. Cases such as those of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela posed a complex challenge for Washington, since they symbolized a rejection of the neoliberal agenda while simultaneously remaining within the norms of the democratic order that had become established in the region. These governments sought to build greater autonomy by expanding and multiplying multilateral forums that excluded Washington, and even managed to defeat the FTAA, the largest U.S. neoliberal project for the Western Hemisphere, at the 2005 Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata.

If 2001 was the great ideological blow to postmodernity, the global financial crisis of 2008 marked the end of the neoliberal dream of ever-growing prosperity. After decades of increasing deregulation and speculation, the major global financial markets plunged into their worst crisis since the Wall Street crash of 1929 and unleashed a global recession that primarily hit Western economies. This was particularly harsh in both the U.S. and Europe, where the consensuses of the 1990s were already beginning to creak and the seeds of what would blossom into growing political extremism in the years to come were becoming visible. Likewise, the response to the 2008 crisis reflects the end of the United States' unipolar moment and the dawn of a multipolar world, with the emergence of new, more horizontal forums for cooperation, such as the G20 or BRICS.

The second decade of the 21st century was, in many ways, even worse for the model of neoliberal globalization. The human tragedy of the Arab Spring⁸The name given to a series of pro-democracy and anti-government protests that took place almost simultaneously across the Arab world in 2011. Although these protests brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, they failed to replace them with democratic governments. In other cases, such as Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the protests eventually developed into armed uprisings that triggered civil wars whose consequences can still be seen today. called into question the idea that global democratization was inevitable, while the refugee crisis it unleashed put even more pressure on the vision of an open, interconnected, multicultural world.

Shortly afterward, the prospects for neoliberal integration suffered two major blows just months apart in 2016. First, the Brexit referendum⁹The vote in which the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. dealt the harshest blow yet to the dream of a unified Europe. Soon afterward, the election of Donald Trump put the world order in check, as it came to be led by a man who questions its very foundations.

The emerging powers of the new multipolar world, far from following postmodern predictions, have been marked by the rise of powerful nationalisms asserting distinct civilizational identities, such as Narendra Modi's nationalist Hinduism, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's pseudo-Ottoman Islamism, or Vladimir Putin's Eurasian vision of the Russian World. However, the greatest challenge in this regard comes from the People's Republic of China, which, far from moving toward political liberalization, has consolidated its position as a major Marxist-Leninist power, bearing Xi Jinping's personal stamp. More serious still for U.S. interests, Beijing has also developed concrete projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative,¹⁰Announced in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative is a collection of Chinese infrastructure projects in more than 150 countries, including ports, airports, railways, gas pipelines, oil pipelines, bridges, tunnels, telecommunications, and power plants. which represent an alternative vision of globalization, encapsulated in the concept of a Shared Future for Humanity.

In this context, and as it has stepped further back from the conflicts in the Middle East, Washington has now begun to place renewed importance on its interests in Latin America. Renewed U.S. interference coincided with the weakening of the various South American governments and turned the region into an arena of geopolitical contestation from the second half of the 2010s onward. This, in turn, encouraged a pattern of political alternation that has marked the region ever since, whether in the fall-rise-fall of Peronism in Argentina, the Rousseff-Temer-Bolsonaro-Lula saga in Brazil, Peru's eight presidents in a decade, or the odyssey from “Chile despertó” to José Antonio Kast's victory.

Pandemic

And it was amid all these converging factors that the second decade of the 21st century ended with the detection of a strange new flu in the city of Wuhan that would soon unleash what we now know as the coronavirus pandemic.

As those of us who lived through this just over five years ago will well remember, in the blink of an eye COVID-19 turned the world on its head and left it upside down: lockdowns, closed borders, repatriations, face masks, tests, vaccines, remote work, shortages of various products, bankrupt businesses, overwhelmed hospitals, mass graves; all hellish images that the general public has made an effort to put behind it, but whose indelible mark on our collective psyche remains.

First of all, the pandemic, which according to some estimates may have killed as many as 25 million people worldwide, laid bare the deep vulnerabilities of a truly globalized supply and production chain and how fragile national economies are in the face of them. This, in turn, helped popularize a concept that, across much of the world, seemed to have been brought down along with the Berlin Wall: protectionism.

On the other hand, the pandemic intensified preexisting diplomatic tensions between states, as in the case of Sino-American relations, as well as underlying polarization within countries. Against this international backdrop of growing hostility, the world witnessed the outbreak of numerous conflicts, notably the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Added to this was the normalization, within public debate, of political positions once considered unacceptably radical. And all this while governments were rapidly losing credibility in the eyes of their citizens.

Faced with the economic chaos of the pandemic and the years that followed, most governments tried to keep their economies afloat through various stimulus and social assistance measures, but thanks to the nature of the crisis, two sectors found themselves positioned to gain the most: technology and finance.

As for the technology sector, it had never been as vital as it was during those years. For months or even years, millions of people worked exclusively online, turning computers, cameras, microphones, video call apps, and a good internet connection into essential tools. Under lockdown, delivery apps were often an unavoidable necessity. In people's personal lives, cell phones, tablets, video games, streaming platforms, pornography, and online casinos became central sources of entertainment, emotional support, or intimacy. With the real economy in crisis, the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies offered a virtual store of value that seemed immune to factory closures, mass layoffs, and currency devaluations. At the level of public discourse, a climate emerged in which traditional institutions were losing legitimacy, including major media outlets, both government-aligned and private. In their place, social media gave a voice to a growing number of dissenting views that became more popular as their extremism hardened. And just as humanity was leaving the pandemic behind, at a point when even greater dependence on technology no longer seemed possible, a new development appeared before the world's eyes, one that promises to change the world entirely and forever: artificial intelligence.

Closely tied to technology, the financial sector was able to gain an enormous advantage in a global economy in crisis by presenting itself as a much more reliable option than the real economy. While governments simultaneously sought, on the one hand, to save their populations through various lockdowns and, on the other, to keep their national economies afloat through various stimulus measures, the financial sector became a haven for colossal amounts of capital constrained by restrictions on consumption and wary of the real economy. This also coincided with the boom in a new sector that brought technology and finance together as never before: fintech, or financial technology, which expanded investment options around the world and made them more accessible.

Ships and debt

This has been a summary of the history of a world that passed through several stages of integration: first, limited exchange across a Eurasian system that generally left the rest of the world on the sidelines, followed by the emergence of the first transoceanic empires of modernity, transformed into industrial empires whose colonial systems built parallel globalizations, replaced by the bipolar competition of the Cold War, before finally arriving at a truly globalized economy that we have seen flourish over the past three and a half decades.

Now, as the world leaves behind the first quarter of the 21st century and moves toward its midpoint, there are growing signs that this system simply cannot continue as we know it.

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, the key organizing factor of industrial modernity, from its very beginnings, has been naval power, and in its current iteration, this is reflected in the fact that the U.S. has maintained the most powerful fleet in every corner of the world. Today's world order, transoceanic trade, and global economy have been built on this naval supremacy. But there are growing doubts about how much longer this will remain the case. In fact, Washington lost its status as the country with the world's largest fleet by number of ships in 2020, when Beijing knocked it off the top spot. Still, it is worth noting that this figure is less conclusive than it may seem at first glance, since the U.S. fleet remains much larger in terms of total tonnage. Put another way, China has more, smaller ships, while the United States has larger and more powerful ones.

Even so, this remains a telling sign of shifts in the balance of power and reveals underlying medium-term trends. Take aircraft carriers, for example: they are the world's most powerful and prestigious conventional weapons systems, and the true backbone of naval power. The U.S. maintains eleven aircraft carriers, while the People's Republic of China has three and is building its fourth. But in 2010, China still had none, while the United States has maintained between eleven and fifteen since the 1950s. Beijing also has a major advantage in shipbuilding capacity: in 2023, China produced the majority of the world's ships, while U.S. shipyards produced less than 1 %. In any case, the Chinese fleet does not have to become the most powerful in the world to radically reshape the global system: it only needs to become the most powerful fleet in the Western Pacific.

In addition to the direct and visible challenge that China's rise poses to U.S. supremacy, there is the fact that all this is taking place in the context of an increasingly multipolar world populated by a range of great powers and secondary powers. One strategically interesting case is the Republic of India, already the world's fifth-largest economy and on course to end the decade as its third-largest. Given its vast human, material, and economic resources, it would not be far-fetched to envision New Delhi achieving naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean in the medium term.

To these external challenges facing Washington must be added an immense external challenge: its level of national debt. Although the U.S. economy remains the largest in the world and has consistently accounted for around 25 % of global GDP for decades, its growing debt amounts to more than 125 % of its GDP and more than a third of the world's debt, also placing it eighth among the world's most indebted countries. This situation is the result of the system that emerged after 1971, when the U.S. opted to preserve its hegemonic financial position through perpetual borrowing. In fact, after Nixon's decision, it took Washington less than fifteen years to go from being the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. And while for decades U.S. debt seemed somehow immune to the constraints faced by other economies, thanks to the dollar's role as a global store of value, it has begun to show some worrying signs in recent years. In 2013, debt surpassed GDP. By 2024, the U.S. was adding a trillion dollars to its debt every hundred days and spending more on debt servicing than on defense. This is where Ferguson's law is worth mentioning: it holds that a power that spends more on debt than on defense cannot remain a power for much longer.

Faced with this scenario, in which debt appears set to keep growing for the foreseeable future, the question naturally arises of just how sustainable this is, and the prospect of a possible U.S. default in the coming decades no longer seems impossible. Now, if this hegemony within the current system seems increasingly untenable in military and financial terms, how will Washington maintain its supremacy?

A new chessboard

Although many trust that the United States' still-vast comparative advantages, its blessed geography, its capacity for innovation, and its political and institutional system will triumph once again, there is a strategically sound argument that questions whether all this is worth it. This line of reasoning points to the immense costs of maintaining the current world system and asks whether the U.S., rather than remaining a guarantor of order, might be better off starting to act as an agent of chaos.

This argument gains even more force when one points out the great irony that one of the main beneficiaries of the current system has been the People's Republic of China, which has not only managed to flourish within it, but has thereby been able to become the most formidable rival the United States has ever faced. In fact, the Soviet Union's GDP was around 30 % of U.S. GDP, while China's is currently around 66 % and, in terms of GDP at PPP,¹¹Gross domestic product at purchasing power parity (commonly known by the English acronym PPP) measures a country's output adjusted for differences in the cost of living, estimating the size of different economies based on what money can buy in each. In some respects, it can be a more accurate measure than nominal GDP, which is measured in dollars, and it usually yields higher figures for developing economies. is already 25 % larger. In turn, in the quarter-century since it joined the WTO, China has become the main trading partner of more than 120 countries around the world, displacing the U.S.

On the other hand, Beijing is much more interdependent with the global economy: international trade accounts for around 40 % of its GDP, exports remain the engine of its growth, and it is the world's leading importer of numerous essential resources, such as food and oil. Washington, in this respect, is a much more closed, more self-sufficient economy, in which international trade accounts for around 25 % of GDP, and around 30 % of all its foreign trade is with Mexico and Canada.

In light of this, the United States faces several options. By far the riskiest would be to try to halt China's rise through some form of direct confrontation—a conflict in which its victory is far from guaranteed. But it could also simply withdraw from the world's oceans, refocus on its hemispheric sphere of interest in the Americas, and let the ensuing chaos derail its adversaries.

To a large extent, many of the foreign policy decisions of Trump's second term point in this direction. On the one hand, his imposition of higher military budgets on NATO member states is symptomatic of his reluctance to continue guaranteeing European security. On the other, his interventions involving the Panama Canal, his kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his pressure on Cuba, his fixation on Greenland, and his direct support for Javier Milei's government in Argentina reflect a growing strategic prioritization of the Western Hemisphere, which could entail a global retrenchment.

At the same time, as its debt becomes a virtually unpayable sum, previously unthinkable options become more plausible. The most extreme case would be a possible default, which could make sense within the zero-sum logic of geopolitics, since 30 % of the debt is held abroad. Although a U.S. default would be immensely damaging to the country and the dollar would never regain its current status, the global economic chaos it would generate if timed for a tactically opportune moment (in effect wiping out much of other countries' savings in one fell swoop) could end up harming others more than the United States itself.

Nonetheless, regardless of what Washington does and the damage it causes along the way, the global trend is irreversible. Both the bipolar moment of the Cold War and the unipolar moment that followed the Cold War were just that: moments. The balance of power between the U.S. and the rest of humanity has clearly been shifting and, one way or another, the geopolitical ecosystem is returning to the equilibrium it has generally always maintained: a relatively anarchic multipolar system of numerous great powers and secondary powers.

However, this will mean a radical change in the global fabric of production and trade, as the various powers settle into their respective spheres of influence, consolidate regional blocs, and reshape the world we have known. Although our world is still in transition, by 2050 a more settled picture will have emerged.

On this new chessboard with no global hegemonic power, Argentina, far from the main centers of international rivalry, will gain renewed geopolitical value as one of the few corners of the planet that are both among the most sheltered and the most self-sufficient. Its location at the mouth of a major river system in southern South America, its immensely resource-rich territory, and its geopolitical stability give it an enormous advantage in becoming a key hub on a continent that has significant advantages when it comes to establishing itself as an autonomous bloc through regional integration within a fragmented global system.

To secure this objective, Argentina will also have to maintain its internal cohesion through the reconfigurations that the globalized world and the diverse human communities that inhabit it will undergo. As we will see in the next chapter, our country also has a significant advantage in this regard, having built its collective identity on the foundations of a form of nationalism that is civic and even strikingly adaptable, which will prove an invaluable card to play over the course of the century.