Are we living in a new world order?

The term “new world order” (not the conspiracy version) generally refers to a major shift in world politics, in which the old economic, political and social structures are reshaped to fit the demands of a new era. 2025 is shaping up to produce precisely this—a more violent, authoritarian, hierarchical alternative.
The United States under Donald Trump’s regime is the prime case in point. Trump has unleashed ICE agents pumped up on unbridled power, deployed National Guard troops to the streets of major cities, weaponised the Department of Justice against his personal enemies, enacted the largest cuts to health care in US history, attempted to scrub trans people from public life, imposed steep tariffs on dozens of countries, rebranded the Department of Defense the Department of War and much more. It is possibly the most rapid political transformation the world has ever seen outside of a major war.
But it’s not just the United States. The far right is in power in Italy, Hungary and Finland, is the main opposition party in France, Germany, Portugal, Austria and Belgium, and is an established part of the political furniture everywhere else. In the United Kingdom, polls indicate that Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK would win a general election if it was held today.
The situation is admittedly less severe in Australia, although there is clearly a coterie of wannabe führers waiting in the wings, from the ragtag group of March for Australia organisers to One Nation’s Pauline Hanson (who is rising in the polls) and Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Politics is happening at a much faster rate than normal. A major new policy or directive is announced almost every day in the United States alone. Trump’s fascist former chief strategist Steve Bannon calls it “flooding the zone”: a deliberate strategy of overwhelming the media and public with a constant barrage of announcements and controversies, making it difficult to focus on any single issue or broader strategy. It’s like being punched repeatedly in the face so badly that it’s impossible to string together a coherent thought or exit strategy.
But there is a method amongst the madness. Conservatism is driven by a reverence for capitalism and its foundational inequalities between the rich and the poor. They rule over us on a macro level by wielding state power, and on a micro level in every workplace. Conservative ideologies are derived as a defence of this status quo. That is why they so strongly venerate hierarchies in all social spaces—bosses rule over workers in the economy, powerful countries rule over the weak geopolitically and men rule over women in the home. One of the best ways of naturalising a historically specific social phenomenon is by reproducing it in all walks of life, thus making it feel eternal.
Capitalism is also an extraordinarily violent society, from the everyday violence of poverty through to the violence of the police and imperialist war. Conservatives, again, venerate this state of being—there’s the stereotypical tough guy protecting his weak, fragile woman; the ICE agent bashing down doors and pelting with rubber bullets anyone who tries to get in his (occasionally her) way; and the warped world of the UFC.
You might have noticed I’m talking about conservatives, rather than singling out the far right. The latter exist in the world of the former, and the lines between traditional conservatives and the new far right are murky. There’s a tendency to look at the conservatives of yesterday (pre-Trump) as though they were more palatable (pretty outrageous if you’re old enough to remember George Bush, the butcher of the Middle East).
While it’s the case that some modern far-right parties and leaders were previously fascists on the margins, there’s also a general shift within conservatism further to the right—like the Republicans of old who have fallen in behind Trump. There’s also a through line between the generations, brilliantly depicted in Ali Abbasi and Gabriel Sherman’s 2024 film The Apprentice, which chronicled how Donald Trump was mentored and moulded by conservative lawyer Roy Cohn, who famously prosecuted the Rosenbergs during the height of McCarthyism.
Conservatism is shifting in this direction because of a series of political, social and economic ruptures that have engulfed the globe over the last fifteen years. Every period of capitalist crisis has produced a new political form as the system tries to stabilise itself and adapt to new conditions. Out of the Great Depression and Second World War came an era of greater state intervention into the economy and increased social spending—all based on the new riches flowing from the postwar boom. The economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s produced the neoliberal era, as states and bosses privatised public assets, cut social welfare, intensified the exploitation of workers and opened the global South to even greater plunder.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 heralded a new, prolonged period of instability. The state bailed out the wealthy and paid for it through waves of austerity that slashed workers’ living standards. Consequently, the traditional parties of the political centre were discredited across much of Europe and took a beating in the US (hence Hillary Clinton’s failure and Trump’s ease in sweeping away the mainstream Republicans). Out of the ensuing polarisation emerged the far-right politics that dominate today, and waves of progressive social movements and new left-wing parties.
A series of further crises compounded all this. The COVID years produced a new anti-lockdown, anti-vax conspiratorial audience for the right and the radicalisation of billionaires like Elon Musk, and was followed by years of steep inflation. Catastrophic climate change is no longer a concern for the distant future, but a reality bearing down on the world right now. As temperatures keep rising, a new series of crises will emerge as millions—and then billions—are forced to relocate, supply chains break down and crops fail. Even as our rulers fail to act on any of this, they are no doubt anxious about what it will mean for their system in the future.
But the major global development is the rising imperialist conflict between China and the US and its Western allies. To put it simply, all things being equal, China is on track to overtake the United States economically, including in the most innovative high-tech industries. Economic might creates military might, and together they create global domination. That’s how the US rose to the top of the imperialist pecking order. This is a serious long-term crisis for the US ruling class, and every other country still betting on and benefiting from the Western alliance.
The old order is no longer working for those who created it. Hence, a new world order is necessary. It’s impossible to understand anything about the political chaos of today without this context.
Take Trump’s tariffs, which have been imposed on friends and foes alike, and decried by many as economic irrationalism. It’s an attempt to force companies to bring production back on shore. Why is this necessary? Here’s one pertinent example: shipbuilding has all but disappeared from the US, but naval power will be crucial in any future conflict in the Asia Pacific. There’s a method to the madness.
Then there’s the crackdown on undocumented migrants, who compose a key part of many low-wage US workforces. To prepare a civilian population for war is to imbue them with a vicious nationalism and hatred towards perceived foreign enemies. Endless headlines and speeches about “a war on US borders” and “illegal aliens invading the US” are part of that ideological conditioning.
There’s also the broader “war on woke”, which is a major offensive against the rights of the oppressed. Basic notions of fairness, equality, diversity and acceptance might be tolerated when the ruling class is trying to convince us that the entire world is fair and equal. But it’s antithetical to the conservative belief that “might is right”.
It’s been obvious for years that the chaos of modern capitalism would produce a new (if partially reheated) form of politics. But 2025 has made that form a whole lot clearer. It includes rising militarism, the fortification of borders, state authoritarianism and the junking of progressive liberal values. To caveat this a little—it’s still early days, and we don’t have a crystal ball. But it would be wrong to ignore the reality unfolding around us. To change the world effectively, we must understand what is happening.
One counter to the notion that we’re living in a new world order is that it is purely a product of the Trumpified Republican Party and its international allies: if Trump is booted in three years, then this will all be over. There are a few things that suggest the situation is not so simple.
First is that when Joe Biden was president, he attempted to chart a different course. He used subsidies to entice industry to reshore, proposed a major spending package to rebuild America’s decaying infrastructure (both of which, it was argued, would create well-paying jobs to alleviate trashed living standards and social chaos), and imposed targeted tariffs on China and other adversaries, while putting serious effort into strengthening economic and political bonds with US allies. It too was a plan to strengthen US imperialism, but with more carrots and fewer sticks. It bombed. Much of the spending was blocked by Congress (including some Democrats) and the US capitalists made no serious attempt to discipline the detractors into supporting it. The “other way” failed.
Second, aspects of the new approach are being adopted by parties not of the right, most notably UK Labour, which has imposed a harsh new border policy, cut social spending, designated Palestine Action as a proscribed terrorist organisation (which has led to the arrest of thousands of supporters) and continued the Tories’ fight against trans people.
Third, the wheels Trump has set in motion will not necessarily just stop spinning when he leaves the White House. Some aspects of his program will probably be dropped, such as the open hostility to traditional allies. But some things can be so utterly transformed, or destroyed, that they are not easily reinstated. Take USAID: it could take years to rebuild the structures and networks of international aid distribution that have been obliterated by Trump, and there’s no certainty that any future administration would see this as a priority. Not to mention that we have no idea what will happen at the next election; Trump might seek an unconstitutional third term or successfully pass the crown to J.D. Vance.
Finally, moments in which liberal centrism has stabilised in the past fifteen years have done nothing to stave off the radicalisation of conservatives and their quest for power. Joe Biden, after all, was followed by Trump 2.0 and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is warming the seat for Nigel Farage.
More importantly, we should not desire to return to the old order. That one sucked too. It was an order in which Wall Street was bailed out while the poor were evicted, the US enforced its supremacy by dropping bombs on the Middle East, historic numbers of immigrants were deported and billionaires bought super yachts while millions went hungry.
There is, however, another way, one that does not rely on bankrupt politicians and parties. We can instead look to the power of workers and the oppressed to fight the right, overthrow the billionaires and build a genuinely new world order based on equality and human liberation.
There has been no shortage of mass struggles in recent years. More people protested in the 2010s than any other decade in human history. In just the last month, Gen Z protesters have overthrown governments in Nepal and Madagascar, and mobilised in Indonesia, Morocco, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and Peru.
And in the last few weeks, mass workers’ struggle has returned to the streets and workplaces of Europe, with the Italian general strike in solidarity with Palestine, a similar general strike scheduled for Spain and general strikes against austerity in France.
The people are furious, and rightly so. What we need is a politics that can draw together all these struggles, direct them against the rich and powerful and fight for a socialist society that replaces hierarchy with equality and violence with peace.