We need nationalist sentiment. But we have the wrong kind.
America, once the clear global hegemon, is retreating from its previously dominant leadership position in the world order. The decline of America on the world stage has been predicted for decades, encouraged by the rise of China and its compounding manufacturing success. Except that what was once an observation limited to a measure of economic power has become something more complex. Intertwined with the decline of international respect for the internal operations of the U.S. and the rise of the private–state nexus, our world order has become something unprecedented, one that is more than ever dictated by global capital.
America’s hegemonic rise was secured by two key factors: the establishment of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency in 1944 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The “Unipolar moment” came to define its stature, and it was consistently supported by the international institutions and alliances that surrounded it.
By 2008, it began to be contested. The global financial crisis granted China a relative gain by devastatingly hurting the U.S. Having a state-controlled economic system gave China a stronger reputation and allowed it to nurture international alliances, emerging relatively unscathed from the global devastation. China, through its inward focus, became a desirable ally, admired (in varying degrees) for its fiscal savvy. The crisis exposed the promised prosperity of the new global neoliberal economic system as something more vulnerable to great loss than was predicted.
But China doesn’t necessarily want to lead the global order like the U.S. once did. America has been willing to accept domestic shortcomings and less long-term opportunities for its citizens in exchange for a greater outward stature in the global arena—spending on an increasingly larger military, offshore production, and bailing out private industry before regulating it. China is, in comparison, fiercely unwilling to do the same. China’s goal is for domestic fruitfulness, not to be responsible for the good of the “global environment”. China seeks a multipolar world, comprising multiple powerful countries. It doesn’t want the U.S. to return to another unipolar moment, but it doesn’t want it to necessarily fail either.
And another unipolar moment isn’t inherently what this Trump administration wants either. Voters mistake Trump’s desire for self-enrichment of his and his family’s wealth as the same as wanting enrichment of the interests of the U.S. as it once was, in his foreign policy. That he is chasing, and will catch, another unipolar moment. But he only sees that for himself - not the country. Devastatingly, the U.S. has become so disenfranchised that his supporters hoped that even if he was lying, they would somehow become enfranchised off the fragments of success he’d dropped from his own pile. When in reality, since the unipolar moment of the U.S. in 1991, wealth inequality has continued to increase and will only get worse. Today, the bottom 50% of the population holds less than 4% of the nation’s wealth. 1
America has declined into a unique position of an internal animalistic scramble for enfranchisement. The rise of Trump and political polarisation are both side effects and accelerants of this great scramble.
Trump does not need a unipolar moment, because that would be too costly for his personal riches. In fact, his personal unipolar moment relies on internal disenfranchisement, and a misinformed population that will, to a large extent, allow for his self-enfranchisement. The investment in the $TRUMP Meme Coin, a personal business venture in Qatar, and the Abu Dhabi state-backed firm MGX's investment of over $2 billion in a Trump family associated business, all occurred within the past 12 months. Trump’s foreign policy goals are personal, not public. Subsequently, allies of the U.S. must (and have) nurture strong alliances outside of the U.S., diminishing its global influence on allied partners, in anticipation of a decline of U.S. national prosperity and reliability. China then achieves its broader goal of a multipolar order.
We are in a unique moment where no state both wants and is in a position to be a global hegemon. What we have instead is a system where states want to succeed in the global market through the success of their associated firms. Subsequently, the market is now dictating our international order. We have a system where capital wins and market now rules.
In a society where the market rules, it no longer values individuals as it once did, independent of their contribution to the monetary system. Sovereignty is ceded in service of capital. We have begun a hyper-capitalist order. The global influence of companies such as Nvidia, Plantir, Google, and Meta are rising. In the traditional sense, a multipolar order is therefore now the world order, and firms exist within it as well. The days of having a global hegemon in the traditional sense, one that sets moral global norms, are gone. Global trust in international these norms and the institutions which uphold them is declining, and in its place, there is a rise in alliances between states and companies. Together, they established the new norms and rules, creating a hybrid norm-setting process between the state and the global company.
Ironically, right when we need international governance the most is when its gone. In the face of distrust in international institutions, the most realistic agenda for managing the influence of companies on a state’s population (e.g., AI regulation, social media age limits, personal data storage) and returning to a prioritised state-backed protection of its citizens is a nationalist agenda. China, in this way, is a step ahead – it has already nationalised much of its digital world.
Currently, the type of nationalism that has emerged among many nations, including the U.S., has capitalised on the need for this protectionist sentiment. But it’s the wrong kind of nationalism. The state needs to be protected from the firm, more than from its own civilians.
References
Dharmendra Naidu, John Elkington, William Davies, Roshan Naidu, and Ravi Naidu. "American Hegemony at a Critical Juncture, Lessons from History's Great Powers." Frontiers in Political Science 7 (2025). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2025.1511913.