The World Ahead 2026: Part 1
The Behavioral Mechanics of a Fracturing Order
A Multi-Part Series on Geopolitics, Economics, and the End of American Reliability
By Johan
Professor of Behavioral Economics & Applied Cognitive Theory
Former Foreign Service Officer
A few weeks ago, I asked what humanity should be optimizing for now that we’ve escaped survival mode. Markets optimize brilliantly for wealth accumulation, but they have no answer for “okay, now what?” We built a machine that makes us richer and discovered it doesn’t know what wealth is for.
If you haven’t read it yet, start there. It sets up everything we’re exploring in this series.
Today, I’m launching a five-part series that synthesizes geopolitics, behavioral economics, and power structures to map where we are and what trajectories are already locked in versus what we might still influence. This isn’t speculation. It’s pattern recognition at civilizational scale.
What’s Coming: The Five Parts
Part 1 (This Post): The Behavioral Mechanics of a Fracturing Order
How incentive structures shape nations. Why American unreliability has become the central driver of global instability. What happens when the world’s most powerful nation walks away from the system it built; not because it’s weak, but because it wants to.
Part 2: Power Maps -- Where Major States Stand and Why
US withdrawal. Chinese expansion. Russian opportunism. European fragmentation. Middle Eastern realignment. Who’s positioned for what’s coming, and what their behavioral incentives tell us about their next moves.
Part 3: Economics Rewired -- De-dollarization, Supply Chains, and Fiscal Fragility
The end of the post-WWII consensus. Tariffs as political weapons. Bond market risk in over-leveraged democracies. What replaces “free trade” when it’s no longer ideology but transaction.
Part 4: Technology and Control -- AI, Surveillance, and the Information War
Why the next decade’s winner might not be the richest or strongest, but whoever controls the information space. Surveillance capitalism meets digital authoritarianism. The AI boom as both revolutionary technology and speculative bubble.
Part 5: Agency and Adaptation -- What Individuals, Cities, and Democracies Can Do
Positioning strategies when the global order is reorganizing and domestic institutions are captured. What works when the old rules no longer apply. How to maintain optionality when others are eliminating theirs.
Part 1: The Behavioral Mechanics of a Fracturing Order
The Question No One Wants to Answer
For twenty years, we’ve been warned about China’s rise and America’s decline. About the inevitable collision between superpowers. About a new Cold War dividing the world into competing blocs.
That is not what’s happening.
China’s influence continues to expand, true. America no longer commands the global stage the way it did after the Cold War, also true. But the bigger story, the one that changes everything, is this:
The United States, still the world’s most powerful nation, has chosen to walk away from the international system it built and led for three-quarters of a century.
Not because it’s weak.
Not because it has to.
Because it wants to.
There is no historical precedent for this. It has never happened before. And what comes next will define the rest of our lives.
From Unpredictable to Unreliable
Winston Churchill once said you can count on the Americans to always do the right thing after they’ve exhausted all other available options. The United States has always been unpredictable…elections, trade deals, even war and peace shifted with administrations. But it was rarely unreliable.
That distinction no longer holds.
Today, most leaders outside the United States see America as both unpredictable and unreliable. Governments sign trade deals, and Washington unilaterally changes the terms. The US suspends intelligence sharing, cuts foreign aid, intervenes in the domestic politics of friendly democracies. It threatens the territorial integrity of allies: Canada, Denmark; with a smile and a wink, as if sovereignty were negotiable.
At the global level, the pattern is unmistakable:
Obama forged an Iranian nuclear deal. Trump renounced it.
Hillary Clinton abandoned Democratic support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership despite years of diplomatic effort.
Obama brought the US into the Paris Climate Accord. Trump reversed it. Biden reaffirmed it. Trump renounced it again.
Washington has washed its hands of the WHO and UNESCO.
The list goes on.
This isn’t partisan dysfunction. This is structural breakdown. The behavioral incentive that sustained American leadership: credibility with allies, predictability in commitments, adherence to international law; has been replaced by transactional opportunism.
The Behavioral Economics of American Withdrawal
American willingness to lead is buckling under a politics of grievance. Voters increasingly feel that US institutions and elected leaders no longer represent them. As a result, the United States is no longer committed to international rule of law, global institutions, or its own allies.
This is partly deep political conflict inside the United States. Trump is a symptom and beneficiary of this conflict, not the initial cause. He is also an accelerant, making the process faster and more visible.
But here’s what makes this different from normal political turbulence: the incentive structures have fundamentally changed.
For decades, US presidents and legislators maintained a commitment to American leadership in a troubled world. In service of that goal, they bolstered allies to make them stronger, more competitive, more secure. Japan, coming out of World War II, experienced this as no other nation did.
But that commitment depended on a belief that leadership served American interests…economically, strategically, morally. That belief has collapsed.
And there’s a behavioral feedback loop here worth examining.
From the American perspective: European allies, Japan, Canada have underinvested in their own defense for decades while free-riding on US security guarantees. They’ve lagged in productivity growth, technological innovation, and competitive dynamism. Their prosperity became more dependent on American protection precisely as American voters grew tired of paying for it.
This creates a classic principal-agent problem. Allies optimized for welfare spending because someone else was covering security costs. America subsidized this arrangement as long as voters believed it served US interests…economically, strategically, morally; it did and was to our benefit.
That belief has collapsed.
The incentive structure that sustained American leadership—-credibility, predictability, rules-based order, delivered fewer tangible benefits to American workers while imposing costs they could see.
When incentive structures change, behavior changes. The behavior we’re seeing is American disengagement as deliberate withdrawal.
Whether this perception is accurate matters less than the fact that it’s now driving policy. Allies can argue they contributed in other ways, that the postwar order benefited America enormously, that deterrence prevented conflicts that would have cost far more.
All true. Also irrelevant.
Because the political coalition that sustained American leadership no longer exists. And allies who assumed that arrangement was permanent now face a new reality: their security architecture was built on American commitments that are no longer reliable.
Unreliability as Weapon
American unreliability has become the central driver of geopolitical uncertainty and instability in today’s world.
But there’s a twist. Unreliability doesn’t mean absence of American power. The changing incentive structure has forced European defense spending increases, brokered trade concessions, and destabilized adversaries through unpredictability itself.
The problem is that unreliability as a tactic undermines the foundation of alliance systems. It signals to every government on earth: American commitments are conditional, revocable, and subject to change without notice.
What does that mean in practice?
Ukraine loses American support. Not militarily, at first, but politically. The signal this sends to every autocrat: democratic allies are unreliable, territorial aggression pays if you can outlast American attention spans.
China reads the map. Taiwan’s window is narrowing. Not in 2026, but the strategic calculus is shifting. When America signals it won’t defend Ukraine, why would it defend an island China considers its own? Xi is patient. He’s watching Trump gut alliances, watching Europe fracture, watching American institutions hollow out from within.
The Middle East realigns. Abraham Accords were always transactional, not transformative. Now the transactions get cruder. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt are reading American withdrawal and Chinese advance. Israel is increasingly playing Trump’s rhetorical “support,” which proves to be spectacle without strategy.
Kleptocracy goes mainstream. The model isn’t just Trump. It’s Orban, Erdogan, Modi, Milei. Elected autocrats who dismantle institutions, capture state resources, redirect them to loyalists. America is now validating this model at scale. Every semi-authoritarian regime on earth just got permission to accelerate.
The Chinese Exception: Strategic Patience Pays
There is one silver lining in this dark cloud, and it’s important.
The United States and China continue to lurch from mini-crisis to mini-crisis on trade and export controls. But the big picture is that they are moving toward a more stable place.
Why?
Because Beijing forced Trump to climb down from threats of a full trade war by using its own dominance of the global market and supply chain for critical minerals and rare earths. They combined market leverage with strategic patience, and they persuaded Trump that China has real bargaining power.
In response, Trump made clear to trade hawks in his own administration that until Washington has developed a hedging strategy for these critical minerals, which will take longer than he imagines, Americans should avoid direct conflict with China.
Earlier this year, Washington approved an easing of export controls on certain semiconductor chips in exchange for Chinese easing of new critical minerals licensing. Until recently, this was an absolute no-go area for both Trump and Biden.
Xi’s willingness to meet Trump without a clear path to a deal signals that China sees Trump as someone they want to do business with. The bargaining will stay transactional and tense, but China has read the incentive structure correctly: Trump responds to leverage, not morality.
This is a preview of how the world will adapt to American unreliability. Not through confrontation, but through forcing the US to acknowledge others’ bargaining power.
The Revolution Question
Is what’s happening inside the United States a political revolution?
It’s early to say. But increasingly, I believe the answer is yes.
Over the past multiple decades, we’ve seen two state revolutions with global impact:
Gorbachev’s Socialist Revolution attempted to save the Soviet Union through radical internal reform…political openness, economic restructuring, devolving power from Moscow. These reforms undermined the foundations of the Soviet system. They let citizens, oligarchs, and nationalists question the regime’s legitimacy. The result: the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Bloc collapse, Soviet disintegration. The revolution failed and took the USSR with it.
Deng Xiaoping’s Capitalist Revolution transformed China from central planning to state capitalism…open to private enterprise, foreign investment, trade. Western governments embraced these reforms, leading to China’s admission to the WTO in 2001. Tiananmen Square and Soviet collapse persuaded Chinese leaders that political reform was too dangerous. The party’s monopoly on power was non-negotiable. But the economic revolution succeeded. China lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, sustained 10% average growth for nearly two generations, became a middle-income economy of 1.4 billion leading the world in cutting-edge technologies.
Now we turn to Washington.
The president of the United States says the greatest threat to his country is not Beijing or Moscow or terrorists. The true enemies are members of the opposite political party. Their supporters. Their funders. Their voters.
President Trump believes his return to power allows, even demands, the end of political checks and balances on his executive authority.
This isn’t economic revolution. There’s no strategic restructuring of capital, no transformation of how markets operate. Corruption and self-dealing are not revolution, they’re just business as usual in America’s increasingly broken capitalist system. They’re just more permitted now.
But a political revolution is another matter.
There is consolidation of executive power by pushing the boundaries of law. Usurping powers traditionally left to Congress, the courts, the states. Undermining political opposition to ensure they no longer represent a challenge.
This is partly Trump’s transactional approach to power. But it’s also political retribution: revenge on those he believes weaponized the Department of Justice against him, promoted cancel culture against right-wing dissent, demonized Trump and his allies as fascists.
Inside the United States, the president has won total loyalty of the Republican Party and consistent support of Republican lawmakers for legislative and executive agendas to undo checks and balances. He’s begun a sweeping purge of America’s professional bureaucracy, the administrative state, replacing career civil servants with political appointees personally loyal to him. He’s weaponized the power ministries he says were weaponized against him: FBI, Justice Department, IRS, regulatory agencies.
He’s secured executive impunity from a judiciary that’s independent but no longer co-equal.
And in foreign policy, the United States remains committed to existing norms, treaties, and agreements only insofar as they serve the interests of President Trump and his political allies.
As the saying goes, he is replacing rule of law with rule of the jungle, where the powerful do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
Will the Revolution Succeed?
This is the most essential political question in the world today.
Partially, it’s a matter of degree. The United States already has a structural bias favoring Republicans because of the electoral college.
Uncompetitive elections that look more like a single-party system than a competitive representative democracy. It is not a full democracy.
The broader checks on presidential power are now in question.
America’s judiciary is still roughly independent, but its power pales compared to the executive.
Most American voters who said they cared about democracy in 2024 voted for Trump, not against him, because they were convinced the political system was already broken and only Trump would create the disruption they wanted. That’s the issue, reality is flipped.
A constitutional crisis before the next elections seems probable. Possible outcomes range from a break within the Republican Party toward sustained single-party rule. We cannot rule out enormous political chaos and realignment.
The Longer-Term Question: Structural Erosion
What about the longer-term US outlook?
Historically, America’s structural advantages over other advanced industrial democracies were based on a few fundamentals:
Better post-war infrastructure (public and private institutions)
Strong demographics supported by hardworking immigrants
Greater public tolerance of unequal distribution of economic gains
Greater tolerance for deficit spending
All four of these advantages are now eroding.
What This Means for Everyone Else
Faced with a United States that has become so unreliable, one that can’t be counted on to safeguard allies who have under-invested in their own security and competitiveness, the right strategy is defense first, hedge second.
America’s traditional allies must regain their competitive position. That demands:
Focus on growth
Robust industrial policy
Streamlined regulatory authorities
Expansive investment in new technologies
Extracting and investing in entrepreneurship
Asserting diplomatic leadership internationally
Accepting responsibility for building multilateral architecture
New models are coming into existence.
The near-term politics of making these transformations is daunting. The EU is far from a state and needs consensus. Europe faces pushback from weak governments. But if allies succeed in building their own capacity, America’s unreliability in the years beyond Trump will matter less.
Defense and hedging strategies are already underway. They’re likely to succeed in varying degrees over time, even as I remain skeptical about short-term turnarounds.
We’re Living in a Post-American Order
And no one is willing or able to fill the vacuum.
China has its own problems and is not prepared to bite off more than it can chew. All of this means a deeper fractured world…more conflict, more impunity, causing more damage that lasts longer.
This geopolitical trajectory is not sustainable.
During the Cold War, it took the Cuban Missile Crisis to convince leaders that armed confrontation would be catastrophic and that new communication channels and agreements were essential. We don’t know what crisis will finally force the necessary reckoning.
But we know that crisis is coming.
Until then, all of us: governments, businesses, individuals; have to brace for growing turbulence. The old rules no longer apply.
But history isn’t deterministic. Trajectories can shift. They shift because people keep the possibility of something better alive long enough for an opportunity to appear.
We need more empathy. More leadership. More cooperation and trust.
Not just from world leaders…too many refuse to see the danger or hope to profit from it. I’m talking about us. We can’t wait for politicians to act. We can’t rely on markets. We can’t count on Washington to lead or Beijing to step up or multilateral institutions to fill the gap.
We have to invent new communities grounded in truth, not spin. Bolstered by action, not just talk. Built on cooperation, not division.
That’s hard. I understand that. But there’s no secret lever to pull, no hidden strategy that makes this easier.
I just know we must.
What’s Next
Over the next four weeks, I’ll break it down:
Part 2: Where the major powers are positioned and what their behavioral incentives reveal
Part 3: How economic reorganization is already reshaping trade, currency, and fiscal stability
Part 4: Why technology, especially AI and surveillance, will determine who wins the next decade
Part 5: What individuals, cities, and democracies can actually do when the global order is reorganizing
This isn’t cynical. It’s pattern recognition. The trajectories are visible.
The question is whether enough people see them clearly enough to adapt, resist, or build alternatives.
Do not obey in advance. Stay strong. Refuse to be a bystander.
More next week.
Why the Snail
It carries its home.
It moves with intention.
It leaves a trail.
So do I.
Johan is a behavioral scientist and former Foreign Service Officer. He writes about power, belief systems, and how humans make sense of collapse. Subscribe for essays on what happens when the maps no longer match the territory.
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Great article. Looking forward to the next chapter.
My biggest takeaway (as a Us citizen) is that we are on our own in this turmoil and no one is going to save us. Community building seems to be the key to our survival.
Excellent analysis, thank you.