The Stagnant Order. and the End of Rising Powers

In 1898, as the United Kingdom joined other powers in carving up the once mighty Qing empire, British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury warned a London audience that the world was dividing into “living” and “dying” nations. The living were the rising powers of the industrial age—states with growing populations, transformative technologies, and militaries of unprecedented range and firepower. The dying were stagnant empires, crippled by corruption, clinging to obsolete methods, and sliding toward ruin. Salisbury feared that the ascent of some, colliding with the decline of others, would hurl the world into catastrophic conflict.

Now, that era of power transitions is ending. For the first time in centuries, no country is rising fast enough to overturn the global balance. The demographic booms, industrial breakthroughs, and territorial acquisitions that once fueled great powers have largely run their course. China, the last major riser, is already peaking, its economy slowing and its population shrinking. Japan, Russia, and Europe stalled more than a decade ago. India has youth but lacks the human capital and state capacity to turn it into strength. The United States faces its own troubles—debt, sluggish growth, political dysfunction—but still outpaces rivals sinking into deeper decay. The rapid ascents that once defined modern geopolitics have yielded to sclerosis: the world is now a closed club of aging incumbents, circled by middle powers, developing countries, and failing states.

This reversal carries profound consequences. Over the long run, it may spare the world the ruinous cycle of rising powers—their quests for territory, resources, and status that so often ended in war. In the near term, however, stagnation and demographic shocks are spawning acute dangers. Fragile states are buckling under debt and youth bulges. Struggling powers are turning to militarization and irredentism to stave off decline. Economic insecurity is stoking extremism and corroding democracies, while the United States drifts toward thuggish unilateralism. The age of rising powers is ending, but its immediate aftermath may prove no less violent.

THE AGE OF ASCENT

Despite the fad of likening China to a rising Athens and the United States to a threatened Sparta, true “rising powers” are a modern phenomenon. They emerged only in the last 250 years, with the Industrial Revolution, when coal, steam, and oil freed societies from the Malthusian trap, in which every bit of new wealth was swallowed by more mouths, keeping living standards stuck at subsistence. For the first time, wealth, population, and military might could expand in tandem—compounding rather than offsetting one another—allowing countries to amass power on a steady upward trajectory. This transformation rested on three forces: technologies that turbocharged productivity, burgeoning populations that swelled workforces and armies, and military machines enabling rapid conquest.

The preindustrial world had none of these dynamics. From the year 1 to 1820, global income per person rose barely 0.017 percent annually, or just under two percent per century. With poverty the norm, shifts in power came only in fits and starts, usually by squeezing scarce resources. Chinese and Indian empires eked out agricultural surpluses, Venice and the Ottomans taxed trade, Spain and Portugal plundered silver, and the Habsburgs and Bourbons expanded through dynastic marriages. Military breakthroughs—cavalry under the Mongols or gunpowder under the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires—reshaped the balance for a time, but rivals eventually adapted. Even the United Kingdom’s vaunted fiscal-military state simply wrung more from scarcity.

The Industrial Revolution broke scarcity’s grip and made productivity the foundation of power, vaulting societies from medieval to modern in under a century. A Briton born in 1830 entered a world of candles, horse carts, and wooden ships; by old age, that same person could ride a railroad, send a telegraph, and walk streets lined with electric lights, factory goods, and indoor plumbing. In one lifetime, per capita energy use multiplied five- to tenfold.

This upheaval produced the first modern rising powers. In the nineteenth century, per capita income growth expanded at 30 times its preindustrial pace, and the gains were concentrated among a handful of states, creating vast asymmetries in power. The United Kingdom, the United States, and the German states jumped from furnishing less than ten percent of global manufacturing in 1800 to more than half by 1900, while their per capita incomes roughly tripled. China’s and India’s shares, by contrast, fell from over half of world output to under ten percent, and the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Russians remained largely agrarian, their industries swamped by imports. By 1900, populations in leading industrial nations earned about eight to ten times more per person than China or India, and several times more than those in Russia and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. What had once been rough parity became the so-called Great Divergence between the West and the rest.

Productivity gains unleashed a population boom. Preindustrial societies had barely grown, with populations doubling only once in a thousand years. Industrialization shattered that ceiling: in the nineteenth century, the global population grew about ten times as fast as it had, on average, from year 1 to 1750. Mechanized farming, sanitation, electricity, refrigeration, and new medicines lifted global average life expectancy by more than 60 percent from 1770 to 1950, allowing populations to double every generation or two. Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States led this surge, followed by Japan and Russia, while China, India, and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires lagged behind. By World War I, armies that had once numbered in the tens of thousands could muster millions.

Manpower fueled industrial militaries—the third ingredient of rising power. Preindustrial warfare was brutal but limited. Armies were generally small, seasonal, and parasitic, living off the land and moving only as fast as hoof or sail allowed. With crude weapons and poor logistics, wars were frequent but indecisive, often dragging on for decades. Industrialization upended that world. Railroads, steamships, and telegraphs made mass mobilization possible, while rifles, machine guns, and heavy artillery multiplied killing power. By the early twentieth century, industrial empires controlled four-fifths of the globe, turning the map into a patchwork dominated by a handful of rising powers.

Together, these economic, demographic, and military revolutions pulled every region into a single arena. The value of global trade expanded tenfold from 1850 to 1913, and even long-insulated empires such as Tokugawa Japan and Qing China were forced into the fray. For the first time, nations confronted a stark choice: industrialize or be dominated. From that scramble emerged a small roster of great powers, each forged through a few exceptional routes.

One was national consolidation, in which the first industrializing region of a fragmented land conquered the rest. Prussia hammered Germany together, Satsuma and Choshu built modern Japan, Piedmont spearheaded Italian unification, and the industrial North in the United States crushed native nations, defeated the secessionist, slave-holding South, and expanded westward. Another route to power was totalitarianism, as former empires pursued breakneck industrialization under ruthless dictators—Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Mao Zedong’s China—at staggering human cost. A third route was to become a protectorate. China, having watched postwar Germany and Japan rebuild under U.S. protection, leaned toward Washington beginning in the 1970s to extract capital and know-how before breaking away in this century to pursue primacy. These were the doors into the rising power club—and all opened under the extraordinary technological, demographic, and military conditions of the industrial age.

FROM TAILWINDS TO HEADWINDS

Those doors are now closing. Productivity is slowing, populations are shrinking, and conquest is growing harder. Today’s technologies, remarkable though they are, have not remade life as the Industrial Revolution did. An American apartment from the 1940s, with a refrigerator, gas stove, electric lights, and telephone, would feel familiar today. By contrast, an 1870s home, with an outhouse, water well, and fireplace for cooking and heat, would seem prehistoric. The leap from 1870 to 1940 was transformative; the steps since, far less so.

Transport speeds have flatlined: just 66 years separated Kitty Hawk from the moon landing, yet half a century later, cars and planes still move at twentieth-century velocities. The energy sector has shown similar inertia, with fossil fuels still providing more than 80 percent of global supply—virtually unchanged since the 1970s, despite trillions invested in renewable energy sources. Longevity has plateaued as life expectancy gains in advanced economies have slowed or even reversed. The number of scientists has risen more than fortyfold since the 1930s, yet research productivity has declined by roughly the same margin, now halving every 13 years. Business R & D has more than doubled as a share of GDP since 1980, but productivity growth and startup formation have each fallen by half in advanced economies. Even the digital revolution has proved fleeting; after a brief surge in the late 1990s, productivity growth sank back to historic lows.

Some forecasts claim that artificial intelligence will turbocharge global output by 30 percent per year, but most economists expect it to add only about one percentage point to annual growth. AI excels at digital tasks, yet the toughest labor bottlenecks are in physical and social realms. Hospitals need nurses more than they need faster scans; restaurants need cooks more than ordering tablets; lawyers must persuade judges, not just parse briefs. Robots remain clumsy in real-world settings, and because machine learning is probabilistic, errors are inevitable—so humans must often stay in the loop. Reflecting these limits, roughly 80 percent of firms using generative AI reported that it had no material effect on their profits, in a McKinsey Global Survey on AI.

Even if AI keeps advancing, major productivity gains may take decades because economies must reorganize around new tools. That offers little relief for today’s struggling economies. Global growth has slowed from four percent in the first decades of the twenty-first century to about three percent today—and to barely one percent in advanced economies. Productivity growth, which ran at three to four percent annually in the 1950s and 1960s, has fallen close to zero. Meanwhile, global debt has swollen from 200 percent of GDP 15 years ago to 250 percent today, topping 300 percent in some advanced economies.

The demographic outlook is equally bleak. Today, nearly two-thirds of humanity lives in countries with birthrates below replacement levels. Most industrialized nations are literally dying powers, shrinking by hundreds of thousands each year—some by millions—and emerging markets are not far behind. Only sub-Saharan Africa still has high fertility, and rates are declining even there. Recent estimates suggest that the global population will begin falling in the 2050s.

The implications for national power are stark. As labor forces contract and retiree ranks swell, growth in major economies is projected to decline by at least 15 percent over the next quarter century, and for some, the hit will be several times worse. Making up that loss would require productivity gains of two to five percent a year—the breakneck pace of the 1950s—or longer workweeks, neither of which is realistic amid slowing innovation and mass retirement. Demographic decline also rules out any phoenix-like recovery. In the industrial era, even countries shattered by war could roar back: Germany after World War I, the Soviet Union and Japan after World War II, and China after its “century of humiliation” all returned bigger and stronger within a generation. Today, as populations shrink, lost power may be gone for good.

At the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, September 2025 Jeenah Moon / Reuters

With neither economic growth nor demographic revival to count on, conquest might seem the last path to rising power. Yet that route, too, is narrowing. The spread of industrial technologies—railroads, telegraphs, and electrification—facilitated state building and decolonization, quadrupling the number of nation-states in the world since 1900. Since then, more than 160 foreign occupations have been mired in insurgencies, as cheap rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades turned villages into kill zones. Nuclear weapons raised the risks of conquest to existential levels, while precision-guided munitions and drones now allow even ragtag militias such as the Houthis to cripple ships and tanks. Meanwhile, the spoils of conquest have shrunk: land and minerals once enriched empires, but today nearly 90 percent of corporate assets in advanced economies are intangible—software, patents, and brands that cannot be plundered.

For aspiring great powers in the developing world, the climb is steeper still. Multinational companies from wealthy states dominate capital and technology, while global production has become modular, consigning latecomers to low-value roles—assembling goods or exporting raw materials—without a chance to build globally competitive firms of their own. Foreign aid has dwindled, export markets are contracting, and protectionism is spreading, pulling up the export-led ladder that past risers once climbed.

Historical churn has slowed dramatically. With few exceptions, the countries that were rich and powerful in 1980 remain so today, while most of the poor have stayed poor. Between 1850 and 1949, five new great powers stormed onto the scene, but in the 75 years since, only China has. And it may be the last.

MIND THE GAP

As the world’s preeminent power, the United States sets the pace against which others rise or fall—and at the start of the twenty-first century, that pace was abysmal. In 2001, the country suffered the deadliest attack on its homeland. Over the next decade, it fought two of the three longest wars in its history, costing hundreds of thousands of lives, including those of thousands of Americans, and spending $8 trillion, without securing victory. In 2008, it suffered the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, other economies closed the gap. Between 2000 and 2010, China’s GDP in dollar terms—the clearest gauge of a country’s purchasing power on international markets—jumped from 12 percent to 41 percent of U.S. GDP. Russia’s share quadrupled; Brazil’s and India’s more than doubled; and Europe’s major economies also made meaningful gains. To many observers, these shifts heralded an epic power transition—what the writer Fareed Zakaria memorably called “the rise of the rest,” ushering in an allegedly “post-American world.”

But the tide soon turned. In the 2010s, most major economies fell back. Brazil’s and Japan’s shares of U.S. GDP were cut roughly in half. Canada, France, Italy, and Russia each lost about a third of their relative economic weight, while Germany’s and the United Kingdom’s shares contracted by about a quarter. Only China and India continued to climb.

The 2020s have been harsher still. India is the only major economy still keeping pace with the United States. From 2020 to 2024, China’s GDP fell from 70 to 64 percent of U.S. GDP. Japan’s plunged from 22 to 14 percent. The economies of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all slid further, while Russia’s is sputtering after a brief wartime bump. The combined economies of the countries of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia have also shrunk—from about 90 percent of U.S. GDP a decade ago to just 70 percent in 2023. “The rise of the rest” has not merely slowed; it is reversing.

Nor is a comeback likely. The apparent rise of new powers in the early years of the twenty-first century was always misleading because GDP is a crude measure of strength. What matters more are the foundations of a robust economy—productivity, innovation, consumer markets, energy, finance, and fiscal health—and on those fronts, most challengers are faltering. Over the past decade, only India and the United States have gained in total factor productivity, which measures how efficiently a country translates labor, capital, and other inputs into economic output. Japan has stagnated while others have slid backward, throwing in more inputs but producing less growth. In advanced industries, the gap is wider: U.S. firms capture more than half of global high-tech profits; China barely manages six percent.

The United States’ advantages extend further. Its consumer market is now larger than China’s and the eurozone’s combined. It is the world’s second-largest trader, yet it is among the least trade-dependent, with exports making up just 11 percent of GDP—one-third of which goes to Canada and Mexico—compared with 20 percent for China and 30 percent globally. In energy, it has vaulted from net importer to top producer, enjoying prices far below those of rivals. And the dollar continues to dominate reserves, banking, and foreign exchange. Total public and private debt in the United States is enormous—about 250 percent of GDP in 2024 and likely to climb with the extended tax cuts Congress passed in July—but still lower than that of many peers: in Japan, it exceeds 380 percent; in France, 320 percent; and in China, it tops 300 percent once hidden local government and corporate liabilities are included. Moreover, from 2015 to 2025, debt in the United States edged down slightly, while it rose nearly 60 percentage points in China, more than 25 in Japan and Brazil, and nearly 20 in France.

Demographics will further drag down U.S. rivals. Over the next 25 years, the United States will gain about eight million working-age adults (a 3.7 percent increase), while China will lose roughly 240 million (a 24.5 percent decline)—more than the entire labor force of the European Union. Japan will shed about 18 million workers (25.5 percent of its labor force), Russia more than 11 million (12.2 percent), Italy around 10 million (27.5 percent), Brazil another 10 million (7.1 percent), and Germany over 8 million (15.6 percent). Aging will compound the pain. During the same period, the United States will add about 24 million retirees (a 37.8 percent increase over today), but China will add more than 178 million (an 84.5 percent increase). Japan, already saturated with seniors, will gain 2.5 million retirees (a 6.7 percent increase). Germany will add 3.8 million (up 19 percent), Italy 4.3 million (up 29 percent), Russia 6.8 million (up 27 percent), and Brazil 24.5 million (up a staggering 100 percent). For two centuries, rising powers were propelled by swelling youth populations; today, major economies are losing workers while piling up retirees—a double blow that no challenger has ever faced.

Besides the United States, only India—the world’s most populous country, with a workforce projected to grow into the 2040s—seems to be partly shielded from demographic decline, raising its hopes to be the next rising power. Yet India suffers from a crippling dearth of skilled workers. As of 2020, nearly a quarter of working-age adults had never attended school, and among those who did, four out of five lacked basic math and science skills. In total, nearly 90 percent of young people fall short of essential literacy and numeracy. The problem is magnified by brain drain: India sends more skilled migrants to advanced economies than any other country. One study tracking the 2010 cohort of India’s Joint Entrance Examination takers—the gateway to elite technology institutions—found that within eight years, more than a third of the top 1,000 scorers had moved abroad, including over 60 percent of the top 100.

The Indian economy amplifies these weaknesses. Labor and industry remain constrained: more than 80 percent of workers are in the untaxable informal sector, and nearly half of all industrial sectors have contracted since 2015. Infrastructure and trade are also limited: India’s busiest port handles only one-seventh the volume of China’s, and a quarter of the country’s trade with Europe and East Asia must pass through foreign hubs, adding three days in transit and roughly $200 to the cost of every container. Finally, the heralded services sector is narrow, with growth concentrated in IT firms that cannot absorb a vast labor force, leaving about 40 percent of college graduates in their 20s unemployed. India will remain consequential—its market large, its military strong by regional standards, its diaspora influential—but it lacks the foundations for true great-power ascent.

CHINA’S GAMBLE

If any country can defy today’s headwinds, it is China. It produces a third of the world’s goods and turns out more ships, electric vehicles, batteries, rare-earth minerals, solar panels, and pharmaceutical ingredients than the rest of the world combined. Industrial hubs such as Shenzhen and Hefei can take a design from prototype to mass production in days, powered by the planet’s largest electric grid and a vast robot workforce. Beijing bankrolls research, directs firms, and stockpiles resources, while its AI strategy prizes rapid, low-cost deployment. Scale gives China leverage. It can flood markets to bankrupt competitors, as it did with solar panels, and churn out strategic goods—from drones to ships to rare earths—faster than any rival. On the asset side of the ledger, China looks unstoppable.

On the liability side, however, China’s position is far weaker. Its growth model rests on three perilous bets: that gross output matters more than net returns, that a few showcase industries can substitute for broad economic vitality, and that autocracy can deliver more dynamism than democracy. These gambles have generated spectacular output, but at mounting costs—and history shows that such liabilities are usually decisive.

Over the past two centuries, states with deeper net resources—what remained after providing for their people, sustaining their economies, and securing their homelands—prevailed in 70 percent of disputes, 80 percent of wars, and every great-power rivalry. Nineteenth-century China and Russia looked imposing on paper, with the largest economies in Eurasia, but their liability-ridden empires were repeatedly outmatched by smaller, more efficient rivals: Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union funneled vast resources into strategic sectors, spending nearly twice as much as the United States on R & D as a share of GDP and employing nearly twice as many scientists and engineers, while pumping out steel, machine tools, nuclear technology, and oil, gas, and other raw materials. It built giant dams and railways and leapt out to an early lead in the space race. Yet these feats produced islands of excellence in a sea of stagnation, and the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed not for lack of megaprojects but because its broader economy rotted away.

Visitors at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, September 2025 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

China today is running into a similar trap. Its investment-driven model relies on ever-larger inputs to generate ever-smaller returns, with each unit of output now requiring two to three times more capital and four times more labor than in the United States. To keep headline growth going, Beijing has flooded the system with credit, creating more than $30 trillion in new bank assets since 2008. By 2024, its banking system had swollen to $59 trillion—equal to three times its GDP and more than half of global GDP.

Much of this debt is sunk in empty apartments, loss-making factories, and bad loans—assets that look like wealth on paper but are really IOUs that may never be paid. Property and construction, once nearly 30 percent of the economy, have imploded, erasing an estimated $18 trillion in household wealth since 2020. The blow to Chinese citizens has been harsher than that which hit Americans in 2008 because Chinese families had invested more than twice as much of their net worth in real estate. With many middle-class households stripped of their life savings, disposable income has stalled at $5,800 per person and consumption at 39 percent of GDP—roughly half the U.S. level and far below what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan sustained during their industrial booms. Demand has cratered, and prices have now dropped for nine straight quarters, the longest deflationary slump any major economy has suffered in decades.

Another liability is human capital. While Beijing lavished funds on infrastructure, it neglected its people. Only one-third of working-age adults have finished high school—the lowest share among middle-income countries. By contrast, when South Korea and Taiwan were at China’s income level in the late 1980s, roughly 70 percent of their workers had high school degrees, a foundation that enabled them to move from assembly lines into advanced industries and achieve high-income status. In rural China, malnutrition and poverty push many children to drop out by middle school. The result, as the economist Scott Rozelle has shown, is hundreds of millions of young workers unprepared for a modern economy, just as the low-skill construction jobs that once absorbed them disappear.

Demographics and fiscal strain compound the pressure. If China’s elderly formed a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest and fastest growing—nearly 300 million today, projected to exceed 500 million by 2050. By then, just two workers will support each retiree, down from ten in 2000. Yet the safety net is threadbare. Pensions cover only half the workforce and will run dry by 2035. Eldercare is weaker still. China has only 29 nurses per 10,000 people, compared with 115 in Japan and 70 in South Korea. And a withering workforce is shrinking the government’s revenue base: tax receipts have fallen from 18.5 percent of GDP in 2014 to under 14 percent in 2022—less than half the average among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Beijing hopes to boost its economy by subsidizing strategic industries. But those sectors are too small to offset the collapse of real estate—electric vehicles, batteries, and renewables together made up barely 3.5 percent of GDP in 2023—and many are becoming liabilities themselves. Subsidies have spawned gluts, price wars, and “zombie” industrial zones reminiscent of the ghost cities of the property bust. China’s automakers churn out twice the number of cars the domestic market can absorb, and nearly triple the number of EVs. Solar firms added 1,000 gigawatts of capacity in 2023—five times the rest of the world combined—pushing prices below cost. High-speed rail has piled up about a trillion dollars in debt, with most lines running at a loss. Nearly a quarter of Chinese industrial firms are now unprofitable, the highest share since 2001 and almost double the share a decade ago, while the country’s top five tech giants have shed $1.3 trillion in market value since 2021.

And despite more than a trillion dollars in subsidies over the past decade, China still depends on the United States and U.S. allies for 70 to 100 percent of some 400 critical goods and technologies. Semiconductor chips, for example, have surpassed crude oil as the country’s largest import, yet domestic production covers less than one-fifth of demand. At the cutting edge, China is almost entirely reliant on foreign suppliers. After Washington’s 2022 export controls on AI chips, the U.S. share of global AI computing power jumped nearly 50 percent while China’s was cut in half, leaving the United States with a fivefold lead. That episode underscored what the scholars Stephen Brooks and Benjamin Vagle have called “excludable commercial power”: across R & D–intensive industries, the United States and its allies capture more than 80 percent of global revenues. In normal times, that dominance yields market power; in a crisis, it becomes a weapon—China could lose 14 to 21 percent of GDP in a trade cutoff, compared with just four to seven percent for the United States.

These vulnerabilities are compounded by China’s political system. The Chinese Communist Party has turned autocracy into an economic straitjacket, tightening its grip on the private sector and steering capital toward politically connected firms. Venture-backed startups have plunged from roughly 51,000 in 2018 to barely 1,200 in 2023, according to reporting by the Financial Times. Foreign investment has dropped to a three-decade low, while capital flight has risen, with tens of thousands of millionaires and hundreds of billions of dollars leaving each year. The result is a brittle economy—formidable assets on the surface, but festering liabilities below.

GATHERING STORMS

The age of rising powers is ending, and the fallout is already fueling conflict. One threat is that stagnating states are militarizing to reclaim “lost” territories and maintain great-power status. Russia has already rolled the dice in Ukraine and, if unchecked, could set its sights on wealthier neighbors such as the Baltic States or Poland. China might attempt something similar against Taiwan. For these once rising powers now facing stagnation, conquest can look tempting—a way to seize resources and respect, absorb populations in some cases nearly twice as wealthy per capita as they are, and allow their leaders to pose as empire builders rather than stewards of decline. Fear sharpens the impulse, as Western prosperity threatens to lure away borderlands and incite unrest at home. Both Russian President Vladimir Putin, haunted by the Soviet collapse in the 1990s, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, wary of a repeat of the 1989 nationwide protests that culminated in the Tiananmen Square crackdown, stoke anti-Americanism and revanchism to shore up their rule—and with success. Russians endure staggering losses in Putin’s war in Ukraine for cash payouts and patriotic spectacles, while China channels unemployed youth into nationalist boycotts and celebrations of Xi’s promised rejuvenation.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have quintupled military spending relative to the United States and its allies since 2000, echoing earlier cases when embattled powers—Depression-era Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s—poured resources into arms, betting that if they could no longer buy influence with growth, they could bludgeon their way to dominance instead. Precision weapons and drones give small states new tools of defense, but they may also convince Putin and Xi that quick victories are possible. In a dictator’s echo chamber, what looks suicidal to ordinary people can feel like destiny.

Another threat is rampant state failure among debt-ridden countries with fast-growing populations. In the nineteenth century, industrialization turned demographic growth into economic dividends by moving peasants into factories. That path is now closed. Manufacturing is commodified, automated, and dominated by incumbents, leaving latecomers stuck in low-value niches. Sub-Saharan Africa still has only 11.5 percent of its workforce in industry, barely more than it had three decades ago. India’s 2014 “Make in India” campaign promised a manufacturing takeoff, but the sector’s share of GDP has stalled at around 17 percent, and its share of jobs has shrunk. In the Middle East, oil rents have funded urban modernization but not broad-based industrialization.

At a Nippon Steel plant in Kimitsu, Japan, May 2025 Issei Kato / Reuters

Many poor countries have reaped the life-expectancy gains of modernity but without an economic revolution, turning population growth into a liability. The UN has estimated that 3.3 billion people now live in countries where interest payments on debt exceed investment in health or education. Since 2015, GDP per capita has flatlined across much of Africa and the Middle East, savings and investment have collapsed, and youth unemployment tops 60 percent in some countries. These pressures are fueling turmoil: roughly a third of African states are in active conflict, and jihadist violence in the Sahel has exploded since 2015, with extremist groups such as Boko Haram and affiliates of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (or ISIS) operating across more than a dozen countries. As people flee from the turmoil, migration has soared. As of June 2024, the UN Refugee Agency counted more than 120 million people forcibly displaced worldwide.

The spiral of state failure could magnify a third threat: the advance of antiliberalism within democracies themselves. After the Syrian war drove nearly a million refugees to Europe, ethnonationalist parties surged across the continent. A similar shift has unfolded in the United States amid record migration at the southern border during the Biden administration. Public trust in government has collapsed—falling in the United States from nearly 80 percent in the 1960s to about 20 percent today—while automation and inequality have hollowed out middle classes and inflamed identity politics. Authoritarian powers exploit these fissures: Russia bankrolls and amplifies extremist movements, China exports surveillance tools, and both flood their Western adversaries with disinformation. Liberal democracy has historically thrived in eras of growth, opportunity, and cohesion. It is far less clear whether it can withstand an age of stagnation, mass migration, and digital subversion.

As liberal democracy corrodes at home, liberal internationalism is unraveling abroad. In a world without rising powers, the United States is becoming a rogue superpower, with little sense of obligation beyond itself. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership was one part virtue, three parts self-interest: protecting allies, transferring technology, and opening up the U.S. markets were the price of containing a rising rival. Allies publicly accepted U.S. primacy because the Red Army loomed nearby and communism commanded hundreds of millions of adherents. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, the demand for U.S. leadership collapsed with it. Today, with no Red Menace to fight and only an amorphous liberal order to defend, the phrase “leader of the free world” rings hollow even to American ears.

As a result, U.S. strategy is shedding values and historical memory, narrowing its focus to money and homeland defense. Allies are discovering what unvarnished unilateralism feels like, as security guarantees become protection rackets and trade deals are enforced with tariffs. This is the same logic of raw power that helped spur two world wars, and the consequences are already visible. Multilateral institutions are paralyzed, arms control regimes are collapsing, and economic nationalism has surged.

What looms is not a multipolar concert of great powers sharing the world, but a reprise of some of the worst aspects of the twentieth century: struggling states militarizing, fragile ones collapsing, democracies rotting from within, and the supposed guarantor of order retreating into parochial self-interest.

SILVER LININGS

If today’s dangers can be managed, however, the end of rising powers could ultimately produce a brighter future. For centuries, the rise and fall of great powers unleashed the bloodiest wars in history. Without new challengers, the world may finally gain reprieve from the most destructive cycle of all: hegemonic rivalry.

As the political scientist Graham Allison has noted, in the past 250 years there have been ten cases of a rising power confronting a ruling one. Seven ended in carnage. One can debate his case selection, but the basic pattern is clear: rising powers have sparked a catastrophic war roughly once a generation.

A world without rising powers will not end conflict, but it may lift the specter of those system-shattering struggles. Violence will persist—stagnation and state collapse could even make local conflicts more frequent—but such clashes are unlikely to carry the global scope, ideological zeal, generational duration, and apocalyptic potential of hegemonic contests. Shrinking populations and slowing economies could sap the ambition and capacity for continental conquest—or for a rebound, once faltering powers stumble. A less dynamic world may also yield a more pragmatic contest between liberal and authoritarian-kleptocratic systems rather than the totalizing crusades of fascism and communism, which emerged from industrialization’s upheaval and sought to remake humanity. History will not end, but its most catastrophic chapter might.

That restraint may be reinforced by what the political scientist Mark Haas calls a “geriatric peace.” Aging societies face ballooning welfare costs, shrinking pools of military-age recruits, and risk-averse electorates. On the eve of World War I, the median age of the major powers was in the mid-20s. Today, it exceeds 40 in every great power except the United States (which is just under 40), and within a decade, a quarter or more of their citizens will be seniors. A century ago, young societies stormed into world wars; in the twenty-first, gray powers may be too weary and wise to try.

Awaiting public transit in San Diego, California, March 2025 Mike Blake / Reuters

If a world without rising powers proves calmer geopolitically, economics may also be brighter than expected. Even without another industrial revolution, new technologies are improving daily life, and humanity is healthier and more educated than ever. Slower productivity growth and aging populations may temper GDP, but they need not prevent a quieter revolution in living standards, creating a future in which societies grow richer in knowledge and healthier in body even as they grow smaller in population.

Another source of optimism lies in today’s demographic asymmetry. Advanced economies are capital-rich but labor-poor, while much of the developing world—especially Africa—has the reverse profile. In principle, this sets the stage for a new division of labor: aging societies supply savings and technology, and younger ones supply workers, creating a symbiosis that could sustain global growth even as individual nations slow. The flow of remittances, skills partnerships, and cross-border investment are early signs of this new relationship, and digital platforms are easing coordination. Yet none of this is automatic. The politics of trade and migration are turning inward, and absorbing large migrant flows without disrupting societies remains a daunting challenge. Without careful management—rules-based migration channels, secure borders, worker protections, and new models of remote collaboration—what could be a growth pact may instead collapse into backlash. The opportunity is real, but so are the obstacles.

Forecasting is a perilous business. Demography can be measured, but technology and politics often surprise, and today’s certainties may look naive a generation or even a few years from now. What can be said with confidence is that for two and a half centuries, global politics was driven by the rapid rise of great powers, and the forces that made such ascents possible are now receding. That does not guarantee stability, but it does mark a profound shift: the familiar struggle between living and dying powers is winding down, and another story, its outlines still obscure, is beginning to unfold.

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