MW The U.S.-China rivalry is killing global supply chains. Your portfolio needs a 'home court advantage.'

By Brendan Simms

Globalization is giving way to geopolitical power cartels and a structural shift toward domestic, state-subsidized industries

Countries increasingly will make geopolitical and economic deals to achieve their individual nationalistic goals.

The Great Powers have returned. Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Donald Trump's ill-thought-out attack on Iran, and China's threats towards Taiwan, all suggest that we are in a new era.

The future global order could take many shapes. Whether there will be a hegemon playing a role comparable to that played by the United States after the end of the Cold War is doubtful. America will remain immensely powerful, but its ability and willingness to act in this way seems increasingly debatable.

A revived liberal international system based on the broadly shared management of climate change, migration and the global economy also seems unlikely. Indeed, much of the world - including Trump, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and virtually the entire Global South - never accepted that the liberal international system existed in the first place.

If Trump's approach persists, it is more likely that the U.S. will build a traditional Chinese-style tributary system which will extend to much of the globe - especially Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and parts of Asia - but by no means all of it. The only other power which might conceivably act as a hegemon is China, but it is and always has been ideologically opposed to any such role, which requires the provision of global public goods, such as the safety of the sea lanes, in return for the recognition of supremacy.

The establishment of an illiberal Great Power cartel, by contrast, is possible, and was actually attempted by the Trump administration in early 2025. Trump seeks economic deals to relocate factories back to the U.S., while China's President Xi Jinping wants to go down in history as the 'good emperor' who united China by securing Taiwan, and Russia's President Vladimir Putin hopes to re-establish Russia as a Great Power.

It is conceivable that all three men could reach a deal which involved economic concessions by China to the U.S.; Trump abandoning Taiwan but absorbing Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, and Russia being left in control of much of Ukraine. Russia and America might also collaborate to protect Christians in the Middle East and Africa, and perhaps to limit the Iranian nuclear program. Any such arrangement would mark the end of the old Anglo-American, now Western universalist world system and a return to the historically traditional balance-of-power politics.

The election of either a Democratic or Republican internationalist U.S. president in 2028 would not guarantee a return to the globalized world of 2010. Former President Joe Biden did not reverse Trump's China tariffs after 2020; he continued the protectionist trend with the introduction of the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts.

The successors to the second Trump administration, whoever they may be, Republican or Democrat, may slow the speed away from globalization towards more protectionist policies, but they are unlikely to change the underlying direction of travel. Besides, even if subsequent U.S. governments were to break with Trump's legacy, the relationships he will have broken may not be easily repaired. Bridges, once burnt, require more than good intentions to rebuild.

It is therefore probable that the great economic decoupling between the U.S. and China will not only deepen bilaterally but go on to embrace ever greater parts of the world. Trump has already abandoned the Biden-era distinction between a clearly defined area of non-cooperation and a much wider space of continued trade.

But even if this resumes under a subsequent administration, it will prove impossible to maintain in practice - first, because of the nature of the world economy itself, which is increasingly driven by the sensitive technological advances that the West does not want to share with China (and other systemic rivals); and second, because, while the process of decoupling was started by the West, it will be completed by China, as it seeks to mitigate its own vulnerabilities.

In short, it is unlikely that the global powers will suspend their rivalries in order to concentrate on the existential risks to mankind. A "world state," which some saw as inevitable around the turn of the millennium, is now an ever more remote possibility.

Similarly, deeper international cooperation between the major global actors is unlikely. Planetary solidarity to address climate change, overpopulation, poverty and all the other common threats to the welfare of the world may be desirable, but is wildly improbable. Instead, the Great Powers will probably try to weaponize these challenges against their rivals. The arc of history today bends not towards cooperation, but competition.

Brendan Simms is director of the Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge, and author of "The Return of the Great Powers" (Basic Books, 2026).

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-Brendan Simms

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May 30, 2026 09:35 ET (13:35 GMT)

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