The Great Specialization of Civilizations
A meditation on geopolitics.
There are times in world history when the whole international order seems to undergo a rearrangement of its furniture—when nations, like actors in a poorly rehearsed play, suddenly discover that they have been cast in roles they did not audition for, and yet must perform with enthusiasm lest the entire stage collapse beneath them.
We are living in such a time.
The Americans, once the arrogant high priests of a “rules-based order,” now find themselves muttering incantations over the world’s weapons systems like exiled alchemists—the arms dealer of the planet by default if not by design. What was once a republic is rapidly becoming Lockheed Martin with a national anthem. The Pentagon hums, the factories roar, and one can practically hear the patriotic jingles already being composed for the next “multi-domain dominance platform.” A society that once promised freedom to the world now exports guided munitions and motivational despair in equal measure.
The Chinese, for their part, have discovered a genius for producing everything except freedom, originality, or an unbugged video call. They market consumer wares the way a river delta produces silt—effortlessly, endlessly, and often with the faint smell of toxic runoff. They are the merchant-state par excellence: half-Venice, half-Walmart, and all surveillance. Theirs is the empire whose authoritarianism is made palatable by two-day shipping.
The Russians—God help us—have modernized their ancient vocation: pillage with a bureaucratic face. No longer content merely to nurse grievances and produce vodka, they have become the mercenaries of a shattered world, pushing borders gently westward the way a drunk leans on a door he hopes might open. Theirs is not a strategy so much as an improvisation of brutality. If medieval war bands had Twitter accounts and thermobarics, they would look very much like the Russian state in 2025.
The Indians, meanwhile, play all sides with the serene confidence of a civilization that survived the Mughals, the British, and Nehru. They are the diplomatic equivalent of quantum superposition: both aligned and non-aligned, Western and Eastern, democratic and illiberal, plutocratic and populist. They smile at Washington, nod at Moscow, trade with Beijing, and lecture the rest of us about moral civilization while building a surveillance state.
And then there is the Middle East—our new global clerks of liquidity—quietly transforming from a region of oil sheikdoms into something like the Swiss National Bank wearing a keffiyeh. Doha mediates, Riyadh stabilizes, Abu Dhabi arbitrages. When the world fractures into feuding blocs, somebody must make finance function across enemy lines. The Gulf states, bored with being caricatures, now handle escrow for civilization.
Finally, Europe. Dear, precious, geriatric Europe. A continent once aflame with revolution has become the world’s retirement community, complete with nostalgia for its imperial past and a steady diet of wine, healthcare, and self-referential conferences about “the future.” Europe is the well-appointed villa by the sea, filled with opinionated retirees who complain bitterly about the noise made by nations that still have living histories.
If this sounds cynical, it is because cynicism is often the only coherent description available when the world insists on misbehavior.
But beneath this arrangement lies a deeper rot:
the disappearance of a center of moral gravity.
The Americans sell weapons because they no longer know what else they represent.
The Chinese sell consumerism because they dare not sell ideas.
The Russians sell violence because they have nothing left to export.
The Indians sell ambiguity because it is profitable.
The Gulf states sell stability because everyone else is selling chaos.
The Europeans sell nostalgia because that is their last remaining natural resource.
This is not a world with an ideology.
It is a world with roles—assigned by inertia, necessity, and the terminal weakness of nations that have forgotten how to justify themselves morally.
It is specialization without civilization.
Functionalism without meaning.
A global order reduced to a supply chain of geopolitical vices.
And the worst part—the most indicting part—is how natural this all feels.
How easily we have accepted the arrangement.
How quickly we have normalized the grotesque.
Hitchens would say—indeed, he said many times—that the measure of a civilization is how it behaves under stress. What we see now is how it behaves when exhausted: it retreats into caricature, adopts the path of least moral resistance, and calls it realism.
So here is the reality, stripped of euphemism:
We are not drifting into a multipolar world.
We are congealing into an amoral one.
A world where power is not justified, only exercised.
Where no one even remotely claims to speak for humanity.
Where all the grand traditions of political philosophy are drowned under a global exchange of weapons, goods, mercenaries, liquidity, and memories.
This is the great rearrangement.
This is the specialization of civilizations.
And unless we rediscover some sense of coherence—some wire to walk, some center to hold—we will wake up to find that the world has become a marketplace of functions without a single meaningful purpose.
Humanity, in other words, will have subcontracted itself out of existence.
You address the surface actors who wield power and how they do it. I would love to get your take on information highways as the new Royal roads or silk roads or trade choke points or Roman roads or Incan roads or railroads or highways. Power is now in who controls information flows and the energy sources that must sustain information systems. Techno feudalism. What are your thoughts? BTW your portrayal of Europe sounds more like Florida. Have you been to Brussels lately? There's a frantic energy of "oh s*** we need to do this on our own."
Today, more than 23 years, eight trillion dollars, and a million dead since 9/11, America has never been more insecure at home and had less power, credibility and moral authority abroad. “The U.S. is no longer the world’s policeman who will enforce the international rules based order,” one dispirited U.S. government official wrote me in 2023 after the Biden administration abandoned the 100 million dollar Airbase 201 in Niger. “We’ve instead turned into the fat middle aged crossing guard, standing there in a neon vest, flapping our arms and yelling at the side of the road for cars to slow down.”