The Unraveling Order

What might grow in the cracks of hegemony?

The “unified global order” never rested on unity. It rested on a set of payment rails, security guarantees, maritime chokepoints, legal regimes, and institutional norms that made Western preferences feel like neutral reality. For a while, that architecture produced a kind of planetary smoothness. Trade expanded, debt structured development, and the Global North maintained privileged access to the world’s energy, minerals, and labor at prices that rarely reflected ecological damage or political coercion.

What is breaking now is the presumption that global interdependence will remain organized around Western dominance. The fracture is visible in policy, in logistics, and increasingly in the open abandonment of the rituals that once disguised force as rules.

In the first week of January 2026, the United States carried out a military operation that captured Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, after which Washington announced it would control and sell large volumes of Venezuelan oil and manage the revenue stream for an indefinite period. At almost the same moment, the White House revived the Greenland obsession with sharper edges. Officials stated that Trump is actively discussing options to acquire Greenland and that the use of the U.S. military is “always an option,” prompting European pushback and explicit warnings about what such threats would mean for NATO credibility. If the attack on Venezuela is about oil and regime leverage, a potential annexation of Greenland is about Arctic geography, basing, and future resource corridors. Together, they point to a politics of extraction and emplacement that no longer bothers to speak softly.

Then comes the institutional retreat. On January 7, 2026, Trump moved to withdraw the U.S. from dozens of international and UN bodies, including withdrawal from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while further reducing participation and funding across multilateral forums. The White House itself framed this as a broad withdrawal from international organizations deemed contrary to U.S. interests. This is a stripping away of the thin membrane that once made hegemony look like governance.

Put these actions together, and the pattern clarifies. The old order depended on the North presenting itself as the steward of rules. The new posture is closer to letting the mask come all the way off through the nexus of states and corporations seizing what matters, threatening what cannot be seized, and exiting institutions that constrain discretionary power.

And yet, paradoxically, this hardening posture is also evidence of weakening. When dominance is effortless, it can afford manners. When it feels contested, it reaches for blunt instruments. That is the beginning of what “the fall of the Global North” looks like in practice. It is not an overnight collapse, but a loss of automatic compliance, rising costs of enforcement, and accelerating counter-coordination elsewhere.

The South’s Opening: Resource Flows as Bargaining Power

For the Global South, the core question is whether fracture creates room to regain control over resource flows.

Venezuela is a brutal case study. The U.S. move signals that resource sovereignty can still be overridden by force. But it also teaches an opposing lesson to everyone watching: dependence on Western shipping lanes, Western finance, and Western legal regimes is a strategic liability.

China’s response to the Venezuelan crisis shows how quickly this can translate into material rerouting: Chinese refiners are expected to replace Venezuelan crude with heavier barrels from Iran and Russia after U.S. actions disrupted Venezuelan flows to China. This is a demonstration that when hegemony cracks, the opening raises the possibility that resource flows can be rerouted. And this is a lesson that must be learned by the Global South.

That kind of rerouting has two important consequences.

First, it reduces the North’s ability to use sanctions and interdiction as a universal lever. Sanctions still bite, but their bite becomes uneven when alternative suppliers and payment arrangements expand. A world that can route around a chokepoint is a world where the chokepoint owner has to spend more to keep it closed.

Second, it increases the relative leverage of resource states and resource blocs. If buyers have to compete harder for secure barrels, secure ores, secure fertilizer, and secure shipping, then the South can demand more local processing, stricter terms, technology transfer, or simply higher rents. This is the material substrate of post-hegemonic bargaining.

This is where the degrowth opening begins to appear, not as a voluntary conversion but as a structural consequence.

East Asia: Chips, Alignment Games, and the Erosion of “Silicon Immunity”

We should not limit our assessment of what I call “Chokepoint Geopolitics” to the actions of the United States. Doing so would omit key players in the global hegemony of state and capital.

The same dynamic we pointed to with the Venezuela crisis is also playing out in the tech stack, where semiconductors have become the nervous system of economic security. Semiconductors are the key materials that balance conductivity and insulation, and this technology is what makes microchips feasible and functional. If you control semiconductor production, you control the global electronic space.

Japan is investing heavily in rebuilding domestic chip manufacturing, including substantial state support for Rapidus and major subsidies to expand TSMC-linked production in Japan. This matters because Taiwan’s strategic posture has long been entangled with the idea that its centrality to advanced chip production raises the cost of any coercive move against it. Put plainly, if China annexes Taiwan, the West loses its microchip supplier, and the global economy collapses overnight. Thus, the U.S. has long provided assurances that China will be kept at bay.

But that “silicon shield” is not a permanent law of nature. It is a distribution of industrial capacity that can be altered. As leading-edge ecosystems diversify into Japan, the U.S., and elsewhere, Taiwan’s unique leverage can be diluted, even if it remains critical for years. This demonstrates that Taiwan’s relative bargaining position can shift as redundancy increases. If the U.S. reliance on Taiwan wanes, China may decide to mimic the U.S.’s soft coup in Venezuela.

China, meanwhile, is tightening the Taiwan pressure point while expanding its options for rerouting leverage across the region. Beijing recently hosted South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung amid deteriorating ties with Japan, with supply chain cooperation and critical minerals on the agenda. In parallel, China has started banning exports of certain dual use items to Japan in light of rising tensions linked to Japan’s statements about a Taiwan contingency. This is not a simple “China and South Korea versus Japan” bloc, but it is a clear attempt to court Seoul and isolate Tokyo by using trade tools that bite directly at advanced manufacturing inputs.

Taiwan itself reads this as part of a broader campaign. Taiwan’s security agency has said that China’s recent war games and hybrid operations were aimed at undermining global support for the island, including disinformation and cyber activity.

If the earlier era of globalization promised that interdependence would dampen conflict, the emerging era treats interdependence as a battlefield. Chips, rare earths, and oil are levers in the struggle over who gets to coordinate the future. The lesson for the Global South is that while resource rerouting is an option, it is a pathway fraught with complex politics at the points where coordination systems’ boundaries meet.

Degrowth Arrives Through Constraint

Degrowth in the North has often been framed as an ethical choice: consume less so others can live more, and so ecosystems can recover. That remains the cleanest argument. But fracture suggests another pathway: the North may be pushed into degrowth-like adaptations by the weakening of its access to cheap inputs.

If interventions like Venezuela raise geopolitical risk premia, if Europe must treat threats to Greenland as a real contingency, if multilateral climate and security cooperation is hollowed out, then supply chains become less predictable and more expensive. The North’s throughput economy depends on stable, low-friction movement of energy and materials. Friction changes the calculus.

Under those conditions, the “solutions” that actually work start to look like sufficiency: durability instead of planned obsolescence, repair instead of replacement, public provisioning instead of private excess, localized food resilience, and reduced dependency on long-distance just-in-time logistics. Degrowth becomes less a slogan and more a description of what happens when the old subsidy of cheap extraction weakens.

None of this is guaranteed to be humane. Constraint can produce cruelty as easily as care. A declining empire can turn inward, militarize borders, and impose scarcity downward while preserving luxury upward. But fracture does at least make visible what was hidden: the North’s living standards have been historically underwritten by asymmetric resource flows.

What the Fracture Makes Possible

The Global South’s opening is real but narrow, as the U.S. turns to overt extraction and threat, sheds institutional restraints, and accelerates the scramble over chokepoints through rerouted supply chains and shifting alignments.

The crucial insight is that fractures in global hegemony can force a reckoning with material reality. When Western hegemony weakens, it becomes harder to maintain a consumption regime built on distant extraction and invisible coercion. That is the dangerous part, because the North may respond with violence to preserve privilege. It is also the potentially liberating part, because it creates conditions where sufficiency, relocalization, and lower throughput stop being fringe ethics and start becoming survival strategies.

For the South, asserting control over resource flows can mean something more than higher royalties. It can mean refusing the role of the sacrificial zone. It can mean setting terms that keep more value onshore and reduce ecological devastation. It can also mean building regional compacts that prioritize food security, energy resilience, and ecological repair rather than export-maximization.

The unified order is not being replaced by a better one. It is being replaced by a struggle over coordination itself. Who sets the channels through which energy and resources move? Who owns the chokepoints? And who gets to say no? In that struggle, degrowth is not just a moral horizon. It is a clear path to self-actualization and autonomy for a Global South that has long been treated as little more than a treasure chest to be plundered. It is also one of the few coherent adaptive pathways for a North that can no longer assume the world will stay cheap.

Photo by Clark Wilson on Unsplash

• Note: This is the first article of our newest feature: The Longer Read. Published periodically, The Longer Read will explore important and timely topics in more depth than a typical S&W article.

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