George Friedman
There are two analytic principles worth repeating before delving into the raft of tariffs the Trump administration issued last week. The first is that we have entered into an unanchored world order, a state in which one geopolitical era transitions to the next. All things that were certain in the past have become uncertain – the storm before the calm that I applied to U.S. politics.
The second is the distinction between geopolitical imperatives and geopolitical engineering. Geopolitical imperatives force nations to act in certain (and predictable) ways. Geopolitical engineering is how nations manage their geopolitical imperatives, a process that requires balancing a nation’s domestic politics between those who welcome the new reality and those who oppose it. The outcome is predictable, even if the process by which it emerges is less so, apart from the outcome dictated by geopolitical reality.
With that in mind, the current geopolitical reality is this: The world order that had been in place throughout the 20th century has eroded, and a new era is being engineered. We are in a period in which the norms of the past century are no longer relevant. It is an infrequent and unsettling time, but throughout human history, this has been a normal abnormality.
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