(This is a slightly revised version of my article to be published in Newsweek Japan on September 8.)
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The Post-Cold War Era and the Expansion of American Power
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The international situation today can broadly be described as the “post-Cold War” era. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which divided the world for decades after World War II, ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the United States as the overwhelmingly dominant global power.
This was sometimes called a G1 world. Later, with the rise of China, people began talking about a G2 world—or, alternatively, a G-Zero world, on the grounds that no single country was now powerful enough to dominate the international system.
Such labels are usually invented by think tanks or experts hoping to make a name for themselves. Since they inevitably capture only one aspect of reality, there is not much point in arguing over which label is the “correct” one.
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Postmodernism and Euphoria
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Even during the Cold War, beginning in the 1960s, young people in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan increasingly rebelled against the frameworks created by “grown-ups”—the state, corporations, and other established institutions.
In the United States, opposition to the military draft during the Vietnam War provided a major catalyst. In Western Europe and Japan, there was growing resentment against “capitalists” for creating inequality, exploiting workers, and depriving people of their humanity.
Even the central ideals of modernity—progress, parliamentary democracy, and rationalism—came under skeptical scrutiny. Hippies, free love, and even the practice of Zen became fashionable.
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A broad collection of ideas and movements—including decentralization, grassroots democracy, respect for minority rights, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and suspicion of giant corporations—came to be grouped under the label postmodernism.
As the Soviet Union collapsed, the American political thinker Francis Fukuyama advanced the idea of “the end of history.” His argument, broadly speaking, was that the great modern goals of freedom, democracy, and the market economy had essentially been achieved. As the economy became globalized, the nation-state would lose much of its significance.
The French thinker Jacques Attali, meanwhile, helped popularize the idea of the “nomad”: a highly educated and capable individual able to operate across national borders and racial or ethnic divisions.
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At first glance, these ideas seemed to herald a new world beyond modernity. But they also reflected the euphoria produced by the West’s great victory represented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. That euphoria would eventually collide with reality.
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American Hubris: “Exceptionalism”
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The United States had long possessed a belief that, because America had a special mission to democratize the world, it deserved special treatment—and could therefore get away with things that other countries could not. This is one version of what is known as American exceptionalism.
Its origins probably lie partly in the pride Americans felt when they broke away from Britain and Europe (I’m not referring to the current situation, but to the late 18th century). To many Americans in the early years of the republic, “international law” was essentially a set of rules devised by the great European powers to suit their own interests. America had its own ideas and its own interests.
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That attitude has never entirely disappeared. There remains a particularly strong American distrust of international organizations and institutions. It can be seen today in Trump’s disregard for WTO rules and his hostility toward the International Criminal Court.
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Democratization by Force: The Neocons and “Regime Change”
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After the terrorist attacks of September 2001 killed thousands of Americans, the rise of the neoconservatives, or neocons, became increasingly conspicuous, as did their advocacy of “regime change.”
This approach rested on the idea of America as an exceptional nation: the United States has a mission to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world—even by military force if necessary—and should not allow itself to be constrained by international legal principles such as territorial integrity and the prohibition on the use of force. This thinking gained influence among both Republicans and Democrats.
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A number of organizations and NGOs emerged that sought to bring down authoritarian governments—in other words, to promote regime change. Many received funding from the U.S. government. They provided money to local opposition movements and advised them on political tactics.
In this way, pro-Russian or authoritarian governments fell one after another—in Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, Egypt in 2011, and elsewhere. The result was to deepen suspicion of the United States among former socialist countries and authoritarian developing nations.
This, in turn, helped create the conditions for today’s alignment among China, Russia, and North Korea, as well as the rise of the so-called Global South—which, it should be remembered, is hardly a coherent organization.
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Trump’s America: Back to the Age of Imperialism
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Trump put a stop to much of this activity. Presumably, one of his motives was to prevent Democratic-leaning organizations from using government funds for such purposes. In 2025, his administration crudely dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which administered much of America’s foreign assistance. That move was part of the same trend.
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At the beginning of his second administration in 2025, Trump appeared eager to stop virtually any war he could, apparently with an eye on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But after failing to achieve his goals in Ukraine and Gaza, he shifted sharply.
In January 2026, the United States intervened militarily in Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro. At roughly the same time, Trump tried to force Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States. Then, in February, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed.
By this point, Trump’s rhetoric and actions increasingly looked less like twenty-first-century diplomacy than a retreat into nineteenth-century imperialism.
That may at least be less hypocritical than the neoconservative practice of expanding America’s sphere of influence under the banner of “freedom and democracy.” But it is hardly a way to win friends—and it leaves the United States with little claim to moral superiority over China or anyone else.
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Economic Globalization
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After World War II, the U.S. economy reached the height of its power. But it was not long before the hollowing-out of American manufacturing began. Cheap manufactured goods poured into the United States, first from Japan and then from South Korea and other Asian countries. Ironically, these countries were taking advantage of the very system of “free trade” that postwar America itself had championed — partly as a means of breaking into the colonial empires and protected markets of Britain and France. The United States increasingly found itself on the defensive.
American manufacturers required profit margins far higher than those of their Japanese counterparts. Unlike Japanese companies, which traditionally relied heavily on bank financing, American companies depended more on equity markets and therefore faced stronger pressure to generate profits and returns for shareholders.
They responded by moving production overseas. Japanese and Western European companies did much the same, expanding production into lower-cost Asian countries and, in some cases, into the United States itself. Corporate activity became increasingly global.
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Then the Soviet Union collapsed and China entered the world economy on a massive scale. It was around this time that the word “globalization” came into widespread use.
For Western and Japanese corporations, operating globally was nothing new. But to elites in the former Soviet republics, China, and many developing countries, it sometimes looked quite different: Western corporations seemed suddenly to be moving in, exploiting their countries’ weaknesses, using the power of money to seize economic interests, impose political systems, and even change local values.
Together with the idea of “regime change” discussed above, “globalization” thus came to be regarded in many of these countries as virtually synonymous with American imperialism. Developing countries increasingly rallied under the banner of the “Global South” as a counterweight to the advanced industrial countries.
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Supply Chains
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Economic globalization led companies to build networks across national borders for procuring machinery, components, and materials — what we now call supply chains. Behind this was a simple reality: a product no longer had to be made entirely within one country. Companies could obtain the best machinery and components from different parts of the world and assemble them somewhere else.
This way of thinking was initially less familiar to many Japanese manufacturers, which traditionally produced a large proportion of their components within their own corporate groups and domestic supplier networks.
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Apple provides a classic example of the new model. Rather than manufacture its products in the high-wage United States, it sourced sophisticated components from Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere, contracted with companies such as Taiwan’s Foxconn, and had final assembly carried out in mainland China, where wages were then much lower.
When someone like Donald Trump raises tariffs country by country, he disrupts the supply chains of American companies themselves. That is the world we now live in.
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The Frustration of Modernity: Bubbles, Bursts, and Bubbles Again
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The sheer size of the U.S. economy enables the country to maintain enormous military power. And because the United States is also a giant consumer and importer — American private consumption is roughly one and a half times that of China — it has enormous leverage over countries whose economies depend heavily on exports to the U.S. market.
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But the American economy has in fact grown beyond its underlying strength in part because of bubble-like forces. Fiscal deficits and abundant liquidity have helped sustain this expansion, but they have also contributed to repeated cycles of bubbles and crashes. Each time one of these bubbles bursts, the entire world economy seems to go into convulsions.
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The Frustration of Modernity: The Return of the State and Populism
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As American-style capitalism begins to reveal its limits, postmodernism is also facing a severe test. During the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020, strong state authority suddenly became necessary. And to ordinary people in advanced countries suffering from economic inequality and unemployment, postmodernism increasingly looked like little more than the hypocrisy of intellectual elites. As noted above, many began demanding that the state use its power to redistribute wealth from the rich to themselves.
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The Trump administration, meanwhile, places naked power above the modern values of freedom and democracy, while downgrading — or simply ignoring — the alliance system and pursuing power games with other “great powers” such as China and Russia. In this sense, the Trump administration seems to inhabit the imperialist world of the nineteenth century and earlier.
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The Frustration of Modernity: The Degradation of Public Discourse
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In Europe, the United States, Japan, and Russia alike, there has been a conspicuous decline in the quality of elites who discuss politics, economics, and society. Their perspectives have narrowed: some talk endlessly about politics while scarcely considering economics, for example.
In the United States, techniques have been refined for winning popular support by replacing reality with a compelling “narrative” or an applause-winning label. Calm debate based on facts has correspondingly lost ground.
Republicans, for example, routinely throw the label “socialist!” at Democratic candidates. It is a political trick designed to associate Democrats with the negative image of the old Soviet Union and thereby discredit them. Yet “socialism” can mean very different things. A Nordic-style system combining a market economy with a strong social safety net might in fact suit many of the needs of Americans today remarkably well.
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An Age of Chaos
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The world is thus moving deeper into chaos. The global alliance system is fraying, and countries are increasingly being left to pursue their own paths and fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy, which has continued to expand with the help of ever-increasing government debt, now faces the danger of another periodic bursting of its bubbles.
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The U.S. military, which has long possessed overwhelming power, has proved unable even to guarantee the security of the Strait of Hormuz and has fallen behind in adapting to inexpensive new weapons such as drones. America has lost much of its shipbuilding capacity, while it has also proved unable to halt nuclear proliferation to countries such as North Korea.
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At the same time, AI threatens not only to eliminate jobs but potentially to usurp human knowledge and eventually subordinate human beings themselves — the possible emergence of the “Singularity.”
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The modern values of freedom, democracy, and individual rights are being trampled underfoot. The world risks being torn between, on the one hand, a return to the imperialist law of the jungle and, on the other, a value-neutral technological world dominated by AI, “room-temperature” nuclear fusion, quantum computing, genetic engineering, brain-wave manipulation, and other technologies — a kind of “techno-nihilism,” to use a term of my own.
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Humanism — Putting Human Beings at the Center
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I believe humanism offers a way out of this chaos. In Japan, the word is often used in the narrower sense of compassion or benevolence. Historically, however, humanism emerged in Renaissance Europe. Its essential proposition was that judgments about the world should be grounded not in the dogma of the Church but in human beings themselves. This intellectual shift helped make the subsequent development of modern science possible.
Jeremy Bentham famously spoke of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” In this tradition, economic growth should ultimately serve the rights and well-being of individual human beings.
Humanism could therefore become a banner under which we resist all forms of domination: authoritarian and coercive states, imperialism, populist mass rule, the excesses of capitalism, and even a future dictatorship by AI.
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Planetary Defense: Asteroid Deflection
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If human beings want to stop endlessly fighting over the interests of individuals and nations, perhaps we should all start defending the Earth together.
NASA in the United States and JAXA in Japan are developing technologies for dealing with asteroids that might threaten Earth — sending spacecraft toward them and, if necessary, changing their trajectories by impact of collision or other means.
The United States and China currently lead much of the competition in space. But when it comes to precisely navigating a spacecraft toward a distant asteroid and landing on or closely approaching a tiny target, Japan is actually in a very strong position.
I hope the day will come when young people of Generation Z can bring AI aboard as a partner, devote their energies to planetary defense — and make a living doing it.
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In such a world, there is something we Japanese must do.
Ever since the Meiji era, when Japan opened itself to the West roughly 150 years ago, we have had a tendency to treat Western institutions, ideas, and discourse as absolute truths instead of thinking things through for ourselves. It is time to abandon that habit.
We need to identify our own interests and decide for ourselves what freedom, democracy, and the individual should mean. Then we must ask how those principles and interests can be reconciled with those of the people around us and with those of other nations.
That is where we should begin.
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