In so many ways, 2024 feels like an inflection point — one of those years that carries within it a future yet unformed.
The U.S. election is of course the most prominent of these trends. If Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, as expected, it will kick off a series of domino effects that could reshape the United States’ relationship with itself, and with it, the whole world.
The FT columnist Edward Luce argued this week that the U.S. is stuck in a “cold civil war” — one in which the combination of social media and political entrepreneurialism has resulted in two distinct Americas, each armed with a reality-defining media machine.
The problem for the rest of the world is both that this is happening against the background of China’s rise as a global power, and that U.S.-China competition doesn’t neatly break down along partisan lines. If one party favored competitive isolationism and the other de-escalation, that would have clarified things. But, even as I write this, I’m reminded of the writer Jia Tolentino’s line that a defining characteristic of our era is that nothing de-escalates anymore.
https://sinica.substack.com/p/the-overwhelming-2024-ness-of-it