The World Has Changed

From Washington’s drift to Beijing’s assurance, the center of gravity is shifting. I preview a forthcoming essay.

The world has changed.

That line has been rattling around my head these past months, and not because I rewatched The Fellowship of the Ring on a recent flight, but because the sensation it captures — that the ground has shifted underfoot — has become inescapable. Every morning seems to bring fresh confirmation that we’re entering, or have already entered, a new epoch and that the mental models and interpretive tools we relied on even a few years ago no longer fit the contours of the present.

Two op-ed pieces I read over the weekend capture this change in the zeitgeist. Fareed Zakaria argues that the “China lost the plot” story Americans comforted themselves with is over. Beijing, he says, has corrected course and is now positioning itself as a constructive agenda-setter: rolling out a Global Governance Initiative, stepping away from developing-country carve-outs, extending zero-tariff preferences to poorer states, and pushing an AI strategy built around open, fast deployment and integration with hardware, infrastructure, and cities. Meanwhile, Washington is consumed by culture-war theatrics, academic score-settling, and protectionism that looks increasingly pointless and self-defeating. The result, he warns, is a widening contrast between a system focused on coordinated technological adoption and one that just can’t seem to get out of its own way.

The sociologist Andreas Reckwitz widens the frame. He describes a West that once lived by the Enlightenment’s secular creed of progress, now surrounded by loss: ecological, economic, demographic, infrastructural, geopolitical. The 20th-century confidence that the future would reliably outshine the present has given way to a pervasive sense of reversal. Reckwitz suggests responses — resilience, revaluation, redistribution — and then something perhaps even harder: that we somehow learn to weave loss “into individual life stories and collective narratives, making it bearable without trivializing it.”

It’s far from just these two. The Post’s international columnist, Ishaan Tharoor, wrote in the aftermath of the SCO meeting in Tianjin and the September 3 parade in Beijing about how Trump’s America First policy has effectively handed the mantle of the post-World War II order to Beijing, and about how China is leaning into the United Nations just as the U.S. under Trump takes a wrecking ball to it. And diplomat Jeff Prescott and Biden-era National Security Council Senior Director for China and Taiwan Julian Gewirtz co-authored a hard-hitting piece in Foreign Affairs that argues Beijing has shifted from caution to an offensive strategy: exploiting Washington’s retreat to present itself as defender and shaper of the UN-centered order, courting the Global South, and layering new security and economic partnerships to move the system’s center of gravity toward Beijing. Those changes, they warn, may be difficult to unwind even if U.S. policy later shifts.

Put together, that’s the feel of the zeitgeist shift. The ground truth is that we are living through a moment of profound reckoning, and it’s causing real psychological distress. It isn’t only America’s relative slippage or China’s newly assured posture. It’s a deeper recognition that the Enlightenment project — reason, science, individual liberty harnessed to steady social improvement — no longer reproduces itself automatically inside Western institutions. Indeed, reason and science, at least, seem to have made their way instead to China. We’re left here in America, and perhaps in the West more broadly, with free speech devoid of shared meaning, innovation without a shared purpose, and pluralism without a civic scaffold sturdy enough to hold it.

I’ve now been back to China five times since the COVID-19 pandemic ended. Each visit has sharpened the contrast. I see a country that, whatever its missteps, whatever its authoritarian excesses or economic woes, still moves with a sense of direction. The integration that Zakaria points to is palpable on the ground: robotics, drones, renewables, city-scale platforms, all layered into daily life, with policy, capital, and industrial capacity aligned to execute.

Then I fly home and feel the undertow: a constitutional order straining under Trumpian assault, polarization hardened into partisan super-identities, public goods woefully neglected. America has lost the plot. I came home for a month this summer and found my X feed filled with raging controversy over a Sydney Sweeney jeans ad and a Cracker Barrel logo. Back in China in September, I watched from afar as the Charlie Kirk assassination touched off something far darker.

The longer piece I’m finishing, slated for publication elsewhere (I don’t want to jinx it), tries to name what this moment obliges us to rethink. It asks whether we’ve reached a civilizational inflection point in which performance and delivery — not just procedure — will be a (or perhaps the) primary currency of legitimacy. It looks hard at scale, at state capacity, at the end of America’s monopoly on “weaponized interdependence,” and at why denial and deflection have proven such tempting, and dangerous, American habits. And it looks at what this moment means in China, which has entered into a “New Era” of its own—something Xi Jinping may well be right about.

It is not meant as a sermon about China’s superiority, though it skips the usual litany of Chinese perfidy that’s become a coping crutch in American discussion on China. It is, instead, a plea for intellectual honesty: to measure ourselves against what has in fact been built, to separate our values from our vanities, and to strengthen the institutions we still believe in by facing evidence we would rather ignore.

None of this requires romanticizing China, imagining it as some technocratic utopia. Anyone who reads me or listens to my show knows, I trust, that I don’t see it that way. The point is different. If we are serious about liberal values, we must recover the ability to deliver the material goods, the infrastructure, the education, the basic prerequisites of a decent everyday life. Democracies renewed themselves in earlier crises by coupling procedural legitimacy to performance. We need that fusion again, and we need it yesterday.

Here’s the thing, though: I bristle at the hectoring tone that so often emanates from Western capitals on human rights. The scolding, the sanctimony, so often delivered without anything like moral standing — rife with hypocrisy that’s impossible to ignore — seems counterproductive, galvanizing defensiveness in Beijing while accomplishing little. I’ve long felt that way. Bristle though I may, I believe the pressure itself wasn’t always a bad thing. And here is one of the tragedies of our moment. If no state actor outside China can credibly model a moral example — no polity that inspires by what it builds at home and how it comports itself abroad — then meaningful pressure on Beijing and other illiberal states will fade.

That’s not what I wanted. Tolerance, compassion, freedom of conscience, cosmopolitanism — these are not Western property, and haven’t been for a long time. But Western stewardship, in those admittedly rare instances when ideals were actually lived, has helped them spread. If that stewardship fails, the world will not pause and wait for us to get our house in order.

Galadriel’s line¹ is not a lament. It is a statement of fact. The world has changed. Can the U.S. and other (once) liberal democracies still summon the seriousness to adapt our systems to reality, and conjure up the moral imagination to make the Enlightenment new again — lived, and not lectured? Perhaps. But it will take time, and meanwhile, there’s a new reality we’ll have to live with. The question before us then is how best to move through the interregnum without breaking what still holds.

The full essay, which I’ve worked on these past few weeks and which I’m tentatively titling “The Great Reckoning,” is coming soon. So is the reckoning itself.

1. Yes, Tolkien purists, I know it was actually Treebeard, the Ent, who spoke those lines or something close to them in The Lord of the Rings, but I think Peter Jackson putting it into Cate Blanchett’s mouth was far from a terrible idea.