Sometimes history changes with a bang. Other times, it just slips quietly out the side door.
When we last looked around in January, the second inauguration of Donald Trump already seemed like a significant geopolitical tremor. Just weeks later, the landscape feels unrecognizable.
On the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a Security Council resolution passed — with the U.S., China, and Russia in rare alignment — omitting any reference to the aggressor. Not even a footnote. Not even a euphemism. Just… silence.
Elsewhere, pressure is building in strange new ways. Reports suggest that strategic resources — lithium, rare earths — are being negotiated under duress, with the moral calculus of power starting to resemble something more transactional than principled.
In Europe, democratic erosion manifests differently. A far-right party, once marginal, is now a dominant force in one of the EU’s founding states. Some of its rhetoric is so extreme that even its ideological cousins on the continent recoil from open cooperation.
And while foreign observers stare at Washington with incredulous fascination, many Americans speak of their own country with quiet disbelief. The surprise is not just what is happening — but how quickly it has become normalized.
I don’t yet have a coherent framework for what we’re living through. Perhaps no one does. But if we’re building a new world, it seems no one paused to read the blueprints.
– Christopher Angel