A man rides past a poster of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and an anti-tank barricade in Caracas on Oct. 28, 2025. Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. military buildup along South America’s northern rim is, Washington insists, aimed at “narco-terrorists.” A growing chorus of analysts aren’t convinced; they suspect what the Trump administration is really after is regime change in Venezuela.
Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader since 2013, is taking no chances. In recent weeks he responded to the Trump administration’s moves as if invasion were imminent. After a September emergency decree and martial rhetoric about a “republic in arms,” the Venezuelan president says militias and reservists are now mobilized nationwide.
The leftist leader has ordered armed forces, police and militia to deploy across 284 battlefronts – a national defense posture that surges troops on sensitive borders. He has also massed 25,000 soldiers near Colombia, a likely vector for infiltration.
In addition, roughly 4.5 million members of the National Bolivarian Militia, an auxiliary force created in 2005 and made up of civilian volunteers and reservists, have reportedly mobilized. Civilians are being trained by the armed forces in weapons handling and tactics sessions to knit local “people’s defense” committees into the defense architecture.
Armed civilians participate in a military deployment in support of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro on Sept. 23, 2025. Federico Parra/AFP via Getty Images
This placing of Venezuela on a war footing follows months of U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean. And there is no doubt that should it come to it, the U.S. boasts a far larger and more sophisticated military than Venezuela.
But as an expert on Latin American politics, I suspect that might not be enough to remove Maduro from power – or encourage opposition figures in Venezuela on Washington’s behalf. In fact, any direct attempt to do so might only lead to a slow process that risks entrenching Maduro’s position.
Powerful friends overseas
Alongside nationwide domestic mobilization, the Venezuelan leader still has some pretty powerful international friends. Maduro boasts some 5,000 Russian Igla-S, man-portable anti-aircraft missiles positioned at key air-defense points. While unverified, these reports are indicative of the short-range air defense and anti-ship capabilities being supplied by nations friendly to the Maduro regime.
On Oct. 28, a Russian Il-76 heavy cargo plane, operated by a sanctioned carrier tied to Russian military logistics, landed in Caracas after a multistop route through the Caucasus and West Africa. If not an outright sign of solidarity, this is a signal that Russia can airlift advisers, parts and munitions at will.
Iran’s long, quiet hand is visible in Venezuela’s drone program. It was reportedly seeded with Mohajer-2 kits and expanded over the years into armed and surveillance platforms assembled at state plants by Tehran-trained technicians.
Cuba, for its part, has for more than a decade embedded intelligence and internal security advisers across Venezuela’s military services, an underdiscussed force multiplier that helps the regime police dissent and maintain loyalty.
Although Russia, Cuba and Iran may help Maduro survive, they are unlikely to save him from any determined American campaign.
Cautious opposition
If Washington is hoping that its military squeeze may encourage Venezuelans to take matters into their own hands, the domestic scene is less favorable. The opposition to Maduro is fragmented and vulnerable after being deprived, fraudulently by most accounts, victory in a 2024 vote and a subsequent year of repression.
The Democratic Unitary Platform remains split between a pressure wing and a participation wing after the disputed vote. The jolt of morale handed to the opposition on Oct. 10, when the de facto 2024 opposition candidate María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize, has yet to move the needle.
There is a low probability, in my opinion, that the opposition can forcibly remove Maduro without a trigger, such as a major split within the security services, sustained mass mobilization with elite defections, or a massive U.S. intervention.
The regime’s domestic security architecture and control of courts, prosecutors and the electoral council make a sudden elite split unlikely. Electoral displacement is also unpromising given that the official opposition is split on tactics, faces daily repression, and Maduro has repeatedly signaled he will not accept a loss – even if he loses.
Diaspora politics are febrile. South Florida’s large Venezuelan exile community reads the naval buildup as a potential turning point and lobbies accordingly, even as U.S. immigration and travel policies cut against their interests. The opposition’s mainstream leaders still mouth the catechism that change should come by Venezuelan hands, but more are openly courting external pressure to tilt the balance.
The Trump administration has certainly shown willingness to mount pressure on Maduro and encourage his opponents. Since August, the Pentagon has surged forces, destroyers and amphibious ships into the U.S. Southern Command’s patch. Then, on Oct. 24, Washington redirected the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, attacks against suspected drug vessels will likely continue.
The campaign has already resulted in at least 13 strikes and 57 killed in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. And President Donald Trump has been consistent in linking the targeted cartels to Venezuela’s government and Maduro directly. Should the U.S. wish to escalate further, precision strikes on Venezuelan territory are not out of the question. With an aircraft carrier nearby and F-35s staged in Puerto Rico, the Pentagon has options.
Meanwhile, covert actions will accompany any overt military posturing. The White House has openly declared that the CIA has authority to operate inside Venezuela. A U.S. Homeland Security agent reportedly tried to recruit Maduro’s chief pilot to fly the president into U.S. custody, a plot that fizzled but hints at the psychological ops now in play. Venezuela, meanwhile, has condemned “military provocation” by the CIA and others.
It is worth recalling past attempts to unseat Maduro, including a 2018 drone attack at a Caracas parade and a failed freelance operation in 2020 that ended with deaths and dozens captured, including two former U.S. soldiers. The U.S. has denied any connection to both incidents.
In any event, such operations seldom topple strongmen – but they do seed paranoia and crackdowns as regimes chase ghosts.
Possible endgames
If Washington’s real objective is regime change, the plausible outcomes are sobering. To be sure, a quick collapse of Maduro’s government is unlikely. A short, sharp campaign that dismantles the regime’s coercive tools could trigger elite defection. Yet Cuba-hardened internal security, patronage over the generals and years of sanctions-induced siege mentality make a palace coup improbable on a timetable that suits Washington.
In my view, a slow squeeze is likelier.
A hybrid strategy involving maritime and air pressure, covert agitation and inducements, targeted strikes to degrade regime capacity, and political, legal and cyber warfare to isolate Caracas and split the officer corps is realistic. But that path risks entrenching the regime’s hard-liners and worsening a humanitarian crisis even as it degrades Maduro’s capacity.
A boomerang is always possible. Military action will very likely rally nationalist sentiment in Venezuela, fracture hemispheric consensus and drag the U.S. into a longer confrontation with messy spillovers, from uncontrolled migration to maritime security threats.
A Venezuelan militiawoman holds a banner with a photo of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro during a military parade on April 13, 2019. Marco Bello/Getty Images
It is worth recalling that approximately 7.9 million migrants and refugees have already left Venezuela, with over 6.7 million residing in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Even the successful decapitation of Maduro’s regime would not guarantee a successor able to govern the country.
At least three signposts matter in determining what happens next.
The first is airlift cadence: More Russian cargo flights into Caracas point to accelerated military and technical aid. A second is the expansion of U.S. targets – a strike on a military installation or a presidential bunker would cross a political Rubicon, even if framed as a counter-narcotics operation. The third is opposition mobilization. If there are credible signs of Venezuelan demonstrations, protests and action, this will shape Washington’s appetite for escalation.
But even if the White House clings to its current counter-drugs and counterterrorism narrative, all evidence points to the trajectory as an incremental regime change push with less than certain outcomes.
Robert Muggah is the co-founder of the Igarape Institute, a think and do tank in Brazil and a principal and co-founder of SecDev, a geopolitical and digital advisory group. Dr. Muggah is an affiliated scholar at Princeton University, a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosh Academy, and received a DPhil from the University of Oxford.
His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew.
Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor […] These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.
Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.
The statement also noted Andrew will have to leave his current home, Royal Lodge, and move to alternative private accommodation.
These moves follows allegations, which Andrew continues to “vigorously deny”, surrounding his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But how can a prince – who is, after all, the son of a queen – be stripped of the title “prince”?
Here’s how it works – and what it might mean for succession.
How do you actually strip a prince of his titles?
This is within the remit of the monarch, Charles III. The monarch issues an official document called a letters patent.
They are typically used to grant a title or a right, but this is doing the opposite: withdrawing it from Andrew.
There are precedents for monarchs removing titles in this way. When Diana and Charles divorced, she lost the use of “Her Royal Highness”, as did Sarah Ferguson, the former wife of Andrew. So a royal losing their title doesn’t always have to be scandalous or unusual.
But what’s not happened yet – because it’s not within the remit of the king – is the removal of Andrew’s position as eighth in line to the throne.
That requires parliamentary legislation to do – and not just the Westminster parliament, either.
To do that, the Westminster parliament would have to introduce a bill and pass it. However, the move would also require virtually identical legislation in all of the Commonwealth parliaments (such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and so on).
That’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
A bit over a decade ago, with what came to be known as the Perth agreements, the Commonwealth parliaments agreed to change the rules around succession and gender. No longer would older princesses be leapfrogged by younger brothers to get a spot on the throne.
It happened very smoothly, so it is certainly possible for all Commonwealth parliaments to agree to coordinate on something. However, the Westminster parliament cannot instruct other parliaments to pass such legislation.
So, could all the Commonwealth parliaments coordinate to remove Andrew from the line of succession? I have not seen any mention of this in media reports so far, but I would be highly surprised if this didn’t happen in future.
It seems incompatible that Andrew would lose his title and still be in line for succession.
But is the son of the queen not always a prince?
By custom, yes, the son of a queen is known as a prince. But as we have seen, that title can be removed.
The best example is in 1936, when King Edward VIII abdicated so as to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson, and he lost the title of king.
He was thereafter no longer entitled to the title “His Royal Highness” and he got a new title: Duke of Windsor. He had some prestige, but was no longer entitled to use his royal title.
Edward VIII (who was also Andrew’s great uncle) did not have any children. But if he had, they wouldn’t have been entitled to inherit the throne.
And that was an actual reigning king, not just a prince.
Acting in a moment of crisis
Andrew has reportedly accepted the latest decision but it was made by his brother, the king.
This is a signal from Charles not just to the public but also to his heir, William, that he’s doing everything he can to smooth the path for William’s succession and to respond to public anger over the allegations against Andrew.
As an historian, this is a moment to reflect on how this is another example of the British monarch taking decisive action in a moment of crisis, to save the reputation of and public support for the monarchy.
Another example would be King George V, who acted decisively in the first world war not only to strip titles from family members who had supported Germany in the war, but to also change the name of his family.
They were known as Saxe-Coburg Gotha (a German name), but they became the house of Windsor.
Content warning: this article includes graphic details about sexual assault some readers may find distressing.
Prince Andrew will be stripped of his royal titles, including prince, and will move out of his home, Royal Lodge, to a private residence. Buckingham Palace issued a statement today that King Charles has initiated a formal process to remove the “style, titles and honours of Prince Andrew”, who “will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor”.
The decision comes in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl, published this fortnight. The memoir includes an inside account of the two years Giuffre spent as a “sex slave” working for Jeffrey Epstein and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre died by suicide in April this year, aged 41, on her farm in Western Australia.
Three weeks before she died, she emailed her co-author, journalist Amy Wallace, and longtime publicist Dini von Mueffling: “In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released.”
“Today,” Giuffre’s family said, “she declares a victory. She has brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage”.
British historian and author Andrew Lownie (author of a book about Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, called Entitled), told Sky News earlier this month, “the only way the story will go away is if [Andrew] leaves Royal Lodge, goes into exile abroad with his ex-wife, and is basically stripped of all his honours, including Prince Andrew”. Sarah Ferguson will also move out of Royal Lodge.
As a trauma memoir, Nobody’s Girl forces us to bear witness to an uncomfortable truth: Giuffre’s abuse was hidden in plain sight.
“Don’t be fooled by those in Epstein’s circle who say they didn’t know what Epstein was doing,” she writes. “Anyone who spent any significant amount of time with Epstein saw him touching girls.” She continues: “They can say they didn’t know he was raping children. But they were not blind.”
Review: Nobody’s Girl: A memoir of surviving abuse and fighting for justice – Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Doubleday)
Four days before the memoir was published, Prince Andrew announced he would no longer use the titles conferred upon him, including Duke of York. Three days later, leaked emails from 2011 suggested he gave Giuffre’s date of birth and social security number to one of his protection officers, hours before the infamous photograph of him with her was published.
Maxwell’s brother, Ian Maxwell, published an article in the Spectator today, headlined “Don’t take Virginia Giuffre’s memoir at face value”. The memoir keeps his sister, who was convicted of charges including sex trafficking of a minor, in world headlines – at a time Donald Trump has said he will “take a look” at pardoning her. Earlier this year, Maxwell was moved to a lower security prison to continue her 20-year sentence.
Allegations of parental abuse
Giuffre writes that her father began molesting her at the age of seven. He “strenuously” denies this. While the memoir makes this public for the first time, Giuffre’s older brother Danny Wilson told ABC’s 7.30 he first heard the allegations years before the memoir was published – and confronted his father about it.
Giuffre regularly wet her pants at school – earning her the cruel nickname “Pee Girl”. She recalls: “I began to get painful urinary tract infections. My infections were so severe, I couldn’t hold my urine.”
After one (of several) medical examinations, a doctor told her mother her primary school aged daughter’s hymen was broken. Giuffre writes of this moment:
My mother didn’t hesitate. ‘Oh, she rides horses bareback,’ she explained. That was the end of that. I didn’t even know what a hymen was.
Later, she recalls her mother raising suspicions about her involvement with Epstein and “apex predator” Maxwell, questioning “what this older couple wanted with a teenage girl who had no credentials”.
Giuffre writes: “I guess I was glad she cared enough to have suspicions, but at the same time, wasn’t it a little late for that? I knew she couldn’t save me; she’d never saved me before.”
Around the time of her doctor’s visit, the memoir alleges, Giuffre’s father began “trading” his daughter to a friend – a tall, muscular man with “a military bearing” who was also abusing his own stepdaughter. In 2000, the man was convicted of molesting another girl in North Carolina. He spent 14 months in prison and a decade as a registered sex offender.
Giuffre writes that she was abused by these men for five years, from ages seven to eleven; it only stopped when she began menstruating.
Heartbreakingly, Giuffre discloses that at one point she imagined Maxwell (or “G-Max” as she wanted to be known) as her mother: “While I was hardly equipped to judge, it often seemed to me that Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents.” Among other things, the pair gave Giuffre her first cell phone, whitened her teeth, and taught her how to hold a knife and fork “just so”.
‘The younger, the better’
Giuffre’s memoir is a courageous and clear-eyed account of what trauma takes – and what recovery demands.
Told in four chronological parts – “Daughter”, “Prisoner”, “Survivor” and “Warrior” – the memoir meticulously records the “sexual assaulting, battering, exploiting, and abusing” Giuffre endured throughout her life, most notably at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.
The result is a devastating exposé of the fetishisation and abuse of girls – “the younger, the better”, Epstein said – and society’s failure to protect the most vulnerable.
Giuffre was 16 and working as a locker-room attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort when Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her to “service Epstein”, under the pretence of training as a masseuse. (In October 2007, Trump – who is portrayed favourably in the memoir – reportedly banned Epstein from his resort after Epstein hit on the teenage daughter of another member.)
Over the next two years, and roughly 350 pages, Giuffre tells how she was trafficked to “a multitude of powerful men”, including Prince Andrew, French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a prominent psychology professor and a respected United States senator.
Giuffre’s original memoir manuscript was titled “The Billionaire’s Playboy Club”.
In one of the most distressing scenes, Giuffre describes how she was trafficked to “a former minister”, who raped her so “savagely” she was left “bleeding from [her] mouth, vagina, and anus”. When Virginia told Epstein about the brutal attack, which made it hurt to breathe and swallow, he said, “You’ll get that sometimes.”
Eight weeks later, he returned Giuffre to the politician, who this time abused her on one of Epstein’s private jets. In the US version of the memoir, the politician is described not as a “former minister”, but as “a former Prime Minister”.
“I know this is a lot to take in,” Giuffre writes. “The violence. The neglect. The bad decisions. The self-harm. But please don’t stop reading.”
One of the most devastating revelations comes toward the end of the memoir. Giuffre – now in her forties – receives a phone call from a confidant claiming to have evidence that Epstein paid off her father when she was a girl. In 2000, when Epstein and Maxwell started abusing the teenager at El Brillo Way, it is alleged that her father accepted “a sum of money” from the paedophile.
According to Giuffre, when she confronted her father, there was “a brief silence” before “he started yelling at [her] for being an ungrateful daughter”.
Of all the betrayals she endured, this one stands alone: “I will never get over it”.
Girls no one cared about
“When a molester shows his face,” Giuffre writes, “many people tend to look the other way.”
In chapter 11, Giuffre describes how Epstein’s personal chef, the celebrity cook Adam Perry Lang, made her her favourite food – pizza. This, apparently, became something of a tradition – Lang feeding Giuffre, but never “ogl[ing]”, “even if I was standing naked in front of him, which was not unusual”. She wrote: “When I’d finished attending to Epstein or one of the other guests, Lang would have a cheesy hot pie waiting.”
In 2019, Lang issued a statement about working for Epstein: “My role was limited to meal preparation. I was unaware of the depraved behavior and have great sympathy and admiration for the brave women who have come forward.”
In another scene, Giuffre reveals that Epstein “never wore a condom”. After falling pregnant at the age of 17, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy.
On this day, Giuffre recalls how Epstein and Maxwell (“two halves of a wicked whole”) – with the help of Epstein’s New York butler – drove her to hospital after she woke in “a pool of blood”. Epstein lied to the doctor about her age, Giuffre alleges, and the two men seemed to enter “a gentlemen’s agreement” in which “whatever was going on between this middle-aged man and his teenage acquaintance […] would be kept quiet”.
“We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care,” Giuffre writes. “At times I think he even believed he cared.” She describes how Epstein “threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better.” As a self-described “pleaser” who “survived by acquiescing”, Giuffre writes that Epstein and Maxwell “knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein” her childhood abusers had: abuse cloaked in “a fake mantle of ‘love’.”
Sex as birthright
In March 2001, at Maxwell’s upscale townhouse in London’s Belgravia – where Prince Andrew was famously pictured with his arm around the teenager – Giuffre recalls how Maxwell invited Andrew to guess her age. When the prince correctly guessed 17, he reportedly told her, “My daughters are just a little younger than you.”
Later that night, she writes, Prince Andrew bought the teenager cocktails at Tramp – an exclusive London nightclub – where she and the prince danced awkwardly and the prince “sweated profusely”. In the car, on the way home, Maxwell instructed Giuffre “to do for [Andy] what you do for Jeffrey”.
In November 2019, in his calamitous interview with BBC’s Newsnight, Prince Andrew denied any wrongdoing, claiming he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”. He told presenter Emily Maitlis he could not have danced sweatily at Tramp because he had “a peculiar medical condition” that prevented perspiration, caused by what he described as “an overdose of adrenaline” in the Falklands War.
In that interview, Andrew admitted his decision to stay at Epstein’s New York home in December 2010 – months after Epstein was released from jail for soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution – was “the wrong thing to do”. However, the prince claimed his decision was “probably coloured by [his] tendency to be too honourable”.
In her memoir, Giuffre describes Andrew as “friendly enough but entitled” – “as if he believed having sex with [her] was his birthright.” She alleges she had sex with the prince on two more occasions.
The last word
Publishing a book posthumously can be an ethical minefield. Critics often question whether posthumous publication is what the author would have wanted. They point to the author’s right to protect their work and their literary reputation – a right that cannot survive them.
However, Giuffre left no space for speculation. In the email she sent her co-author and publicist before her death, she made her wishes clear:
It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time. The content of this book is crucial, as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals.
As the memoir progresses, Giuffre’s health spirals. The physical, emotional and mental toll of trauma closes in on her. Epstein is dead. Maxwell is in prison. But Giuffre is still “trapped in an invisible cage”.
“From the start,” she says, “I was groomed to be complicit in my own devastation. Of all the terrible wounds they inflicted, that forced complicity was the most destructive.”
Before she died, Giuffre made a promise to her husband and children that she would try with “all her might” to believe her life mattered. Her final goal was to prevent “the emotional time-bomb” inside her from detonating.
While Giuffre may at last be beyond harm, the truth remains. She – like the hundreds of girls abused by Epstein and his associates – was wronged.
Her fight, like theirs, transcends death: release the Epstein files; hold abusers and their enablers accountable; expose the systems that protect predators; abolish statutes of limitations for the sexual abuse of minors. Ensure no other child suffers. This is what Giuffre wanted.
By publishing her memoir, she ensured the fight would survive her. She made certain her voice would outlast her pain.
In this way, she got the last word.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.
Kate Cantrell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The documentary, 1,000 Men & Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, has made Tia Billinger – stage name Bonnie Blue – a household name.
Famous for her sexual stunts, including one in which she has sex with more than 1,000 men in 12 hours, Bonnie Blue fascinates us because we do not understand her.
Billinger claims to be an embodiment of feminism. She points out she is rich and independent, and says she has taken control of her sexualisation. Yet it is difficult to imagine how sleeping with 1,000 men in a day could lead someone to feel empowered rather than degraded.
Some have offered personality-based explanations for Billinger’s choices, saying she may simply be an opportunistic sociopath.
But explanations like these relegate her to the status of a social oddity, or a monster. And this discounts the social conditions that produce someone like Billinger – the same social conditions all women face.
The contradiction Bonnie Blue embodies reveals just how fraught a woman’s relationship to power and influence is. Women who seek power often encounter a double bind that leads them to use their power in a way that also curtails it.
Power through subservience
Power requires two ingredients. It involves autonomy and self-determination. It also requires being embedded in society so as to exert influence within it.
These two aspects of power work in tandem for men, and especially white men. But for women, and people with other marginalised identities, they often pull in opposite directions.
US feminist writer Andrea Dworkin described this situation in her 1978 book Right-wing Women: for women, power comes through subservience to male values.
For a woman, to be embedded in society is, by definition, to have her autonomy and self-determination restricted. As a result she is forced to choose: do what you want or have influence.
The reward for protecting men’s access to women
Billinger’s business model is striking. She makes enormous amounts of money by offering sex for free. The fact the sex itself is free enables her to turn around and sell a desirable commodity through subscription-based platforms such as Fansly – namely, the fantasy of female availability.
I loved […] seeing how many men had wedding rings on. I just loved knowing I was doing something their wives should’ve done.
She tells men not to “feel guilty for doing something you deserved and you was, well, you was owed”. Despite appearances, then, Billinger is not autonomous at all. Her power is the result of subservience to male entitlement.
There have always been women who gain power by protecting men’s access to women. Consider, for example, US conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016). While Billinger is famous for her extreme sexual stunts, Schlafly could be considered the original tradwife.
Initially an expert in foreign policy, Schlafly was unable to gain political traction through her expertise, so she built a career opposing women’s liberation on behalf of housewives. She got the political power she wanted, but not in the field she really cared about.
Conservative activist Phyllis Schafly wearing a Stop ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) badge in front of the White House, Washington DC, in February 1977. Library of Congress
Womanliness as a masquerade
Both Schlafly’s and Billinger’s personas map squarely onto one side or the other of what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called the Madonna-whore complex, in which a misogynistic society categorises women according to the kind of service they offer men – either as a saintly mother figure or as a sexual object.
Each of these roles also deflects attention by attacking the opposite side of the dichotomy.
Billinger positions herself as a rival to men’s wives, claiming her critics simply want to turn her into a housewife. Schlafly positioned herself as a housewife opposing equal rights because she considered such rights to be bound up with sexual promiscuity.
In reality, each stance relies on the other. And we’re beginning to see this manifest in the emergence of tradwife Onlyfans content.
In 1929, psychoanalyst Joan Riviere wrote about a tendency in her female patients she called “womanliness as a masquerade”.
Riviere notes how women who exhibited traits socially coded as “masculine”, or who occupied positions historically reserved for men, attempted to hide this masculinity through a performance of femininity. She wrote:
women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.
To undertake a “masculine” pursuit of power, both Schlafly and Billinger uphold a particular ideal of femininity. And both women’s careers are logical – if misguided – responses to the messages women receive about where their value lies.
A never-ending tradeoff
Our systems punish women for wanting things such as power, money, or visibility, requiring them to turn against other women, give up their expertise, or make themselves infinitely available to men.
If women were allowed to pursue power without these sacrifices, it might curtail the harms other women face as a result of the masked pursuit of power.
Women should not have to choose between power, money and visibility on one hand, and community and liberation on the other. They should not have to choose between Madonna and the whore.
Yet as political gains continue to shrink around the world, many women are starting to feel this double-bind more forcefully. There may be more Bonnie Blues and Phyllis Schlaflys on the horizon.
Lexi Eikelboom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
It has remained a staple, with over 390,000 copies sold in Australia to date.
Its transformation from an economic critique to a capitalist icon highlights its historical evolution and adaptability.
A game with a message
Monopoly’s roots trace back to The Landlord’s Game (1903), created by Elizabeth Magie to critique monopolistic land ownership.
It featured two sets of rules – one emphasising wealth accumulation, the other wealth distribution. The aim was to demonstrate how different policy levers, taxing income versus taxing land, affect economic outcomes of players.
It was based on economist Henry George’s proposition for a “land value tax” or “single tax”. Under this regime, people would keep all they earned, with public funds raised from land ownership instead.
The two sets of rules in the Landlord’s Game demonstrate how wealth is either concentrated in the hands of landlords (taxing income) or is more fairly distributed across society (taxing land).
In 1935, a man named Charles Darrow removed the game’s socialist critique (the version that taxed land), renamed it Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers. The game was now focused on the accumulation of real estate until one player remained, having bankrupted their fellows.
The game thrived during the Great Depression, offering an escapist fantasy of financial success.
In 1935, Parker Brothers paid Magie US$500 (US$11,800 today) for the rights to her game, ensuring their ownership of Monopoly was unchallenged. As part of the deal, they released her original game, but it failed to gain traction with players.
Not everyone welcomed its capitalist themes – Fidel Castro famously ordered all Monopoly sets in Cuba destroyed in 1959
Playability and house rules
Philip Orbanes, former vice president of research at Parker Brothers, argued a good board game must have clear rules, social interaction and an element of luck. Monopoly ticks all three boxes.
Despite this, Monopoly is notorious for causing arguments. Hasbro (who bought out Parker Brothers in 1991, acquiring Monopoly in the process) found that nearly half of Monopoly games end in disputes, often over rule interpretations. Monopoly is the game most likely to be banned, or see a particular player banned, on game nights.
A group of sunbathers having a smoke and playing a game of monopoly at an open air pool, 1939. Fox Photos/Getty Images
Monopoly’s rules have been adjusted and manipulated as players have sought to overcome the inequities in the game. Another of Hasbro’s surveys found 68% of players admitting to not having read the rules in their entirety, and 49% said they had made up their own rules.
These “house rules” include things like cash bonuses on Free Parking or modifying auctions to make the game more engaging.
Identity and nostalgia
Monopoly’s use of real-world locations makes it adaptable to local markets.
The original version reflected Atlantic City’s socio-economic hierarchy. When Waddingtons released the English version in 1936 under license (the same version which would go on to be released in Australia in 1937), Atlantic City’s wealthy Boardwalk and working class Mediterranean Avenue became London’s Mayfair and Old Kent Road, respectively.
The game can also serve as a bridge to former geographies. The 1980s Yugoslav edition remains a link to the past for those who lived through that era, recording changing political geographies and cultural shifts.
More than 240 players compete for the British Monopoly title at Fenchurch street station, London, in 1975. WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images
Monopoly is a flagship brand for Hasbro, worth an estimated US$272m in 2018. Part of Monopoly’s success lies in its licensing strategy. The board layout is extremely flexible, allowing for localised adaptations to be made to suit different markets, without any substantial change to the game play.
There are believed to be over 3,400 different versions of Monopoly issued, from classic city street layouts to popular culture imaginings.
It is this aspect that attracts collectors; world record holder Neil Scanlon owns 4,379 sets of Monopoly (he is still searching for the Cronulla Sharks set).
Monopoly reflects the world’s economic systems, embodying both the dream of wealth and the realities of financial inequality.
It has been studied by economists and educators as a tool for understanding capitalism, wealth accumulation and market control.
The game originally meant to critique monopolistic practices became a celebration of them. Each player has the opportunity to accumulate vast wealth, reflecting the promise of capitalism: where anyone can enjoy riches as long as they work hard enough.
Magie’s message was leveraged by Federal MP Andrew Leigh in his 2023 critique of the growing concentration of business monopolies in Australia. Leigh noted how monopolies affected Australian families and how the Albanese government had “increased penalties for anti-competitive conduct, and banned unfair contract terms” with the aim of creating a fairer society.
The game continues to be a favourite, ranking as the top childhood game among Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials – and fourth for Gen Z. The sense of nostalgia was strong among all groups, not surprising as board games were found to be an integral part of family bonding.
Monopoly has evolved from an anti-capitalist critique into a commercial juggernaut. While it has faced criticism for erasing its socialist origins and its reliance on luck, its ability to reinvent itself has ensured its lasting appeal.
As both a cultural artefact and a competitive game, Monopoly remains firmly embedded in board game culture.
Lisa J. Hackett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
US President Donald Trump has instructed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing immediately, “on an equal basis” with other countries’ testing programs.
If Trump is referring to the resumption of explosive nuclear testing, this would be an extremely unfortunate, regrettable step by the United States.
It would almost inevitably be followed by tit-for-tat reciprocal announcements by other nuclear-armed states, particularly Russia and China, and cement an accelerating arms race that puts us all in great jeopardy.
It would also create profound risks of radioactive fallout globally. Even if such nuclear tests are conducted underground, this poses a risk in terms of the possible release and venting of radioactive materials, as well as the potential leakage into groundwater.
The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has been signed by 187 states – it’s one of the most widely supported disarmament treaties in the world.
The US signed the treaty decades ago, but has yet to ratify it. Nonetheless, it is actually legally bound not to violate the spirit and purpose of the treaty while it’s a signatory.
What testing is used for, and why it stopped
In earlier years, the purpose of testing was to understand the effects of nuclear weapons – for example, the blast damage at different distances, which provides confidence around destroying a given military target.
Understanding the consequences of nuclear weapons helps militaries plan their use, and to some extent, protect their own military equipment and people from the possible use of nuclear weapons by adversaries.
But since the end of the second world war, states have mostly used testing as part of the development of new weapons designs. There have been a very large number of tests, more than 2,000, mostly seeking to understand how these new weapons work.
The huge environmental and health problems caused by nuclear testing prompted nations to agree a moratorium on atmospheric testing for a couple of years in the early 1960s. In 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in all environments except underground.
Since then, nuclear-armed states have stopped explosively testing at different times. The US stopped in 1992, while France stopped in 1996. China and Russia also aren’t known to have conducted any tests since the 1990s. North Korea is the only state to have openly tested a nuclear weapon this century, most recently in 2017.
These stoppages came in the 1990s for a reason: by that time, it became possible to test new nuclear weapon designs reliably through technical and computer developments, without having to actually explode them.
So, essentially, the nuclear states, particularly the more advanced ones, stopped when they no longer needed to explosively test new weapon designs to keep modernising their stocks, as they’re still doing.
With the exception of this significant development, however, everything else has been going badly.
All nine nuclear-armed states (the US, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel) are investing unprecedented sums in developing more accurate, stealthier, longer-range, faster, more concealable nuclear weapons.
This potentially lowers the threshold for their use. And it certainly gives no indication these powers are serious about fulfilling their legally binding obligations to disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Moreover, multiple nuclear-armed states have been involved in recent conflicts in which nuclear threats have been made, most notably Russia and Israel.
This includes those in military stockpiles, those that have been deployed (linked to delivery systems such as missiles), and those on high alert, which are the ones most prone to accidental use because they can be launched within minutes of a decision to do so. All of these categories are on the increase.
Nearly all of the hard-won treaties that constrained nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War have been abrogated.
There’s now just one remaining treaty constraining 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, which are in the hands of the US and Russia. This is the New START Treaty, which is set to expire in February next year.
Putin offered to extend that treaty informally for another year, and Trump has said this is a good idea. But its official end is just four months away, and no actual negotiations on a successor treaty have begun.
The US has also said China needs to be involved in the successor treaty, which would make it enormously more complicated. China has not expressed a willingness to be part of the process.
Whether anything will be negotiated to maintain these restraints beyond February is unclear. None of the nuclear-armed states are negotiating any other new treaties, either.
All of this means the Doomsday Clock – one of the most authoritative and best-known assessments of the existential threats facing the world – has moved forward this year further than it has ever done before.
It’s really an extraordinarily dangerous time in history.
Tilman Ruff is affiliated with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the Medical Association for Prevention of War.
A new, old specter is haunting the world: the bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons.
Well, that is what the Kremlin wants the world to believe.
Take the new Russian state-backed film “Tolerance.” Released in September 2025 to a less than enthusiastic public response, the dystopian tale of moral decay in the West opens with a warning of an “omnipresent Anglo-Saxon liberalism” that will “cause the ultimate degradation and extinction of once-prosperous countries and peoples.”
Scary stuff. But the film isn’t the first time that Anglo-Saxons have been cited as a threat to the Russian way of life.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian officials and their colleagues in the Kremlin-controlled media have taken to referring to their Western adversaries as “Anglo-Saxons.” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov even stated that the “Anglo-Saxons” in question are bent on defeating Russia “with the hands of the Kyiv regime.”
Indeed, analysis one of us conducted with Adrian Rogstad at the University of Groningen looking at statements posted on the Russian foreign ministry website found a marked increase in “Anglo-Saxon” references after the invasion of Ukraine – 86 of them in the course of 2022, compared to just 27 in the previous 20 years. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova’s March 2022 comment that the “Anglo-Saxon world will never stop … It’s like an insatiable monster,” is typical of the way “Anglo-Saxon” is used. The term even made it into the official Russian foreign policy concept published a year later, where in the section titled “The U.S. and other Anglo-Saxon states,” the United States is referred to as “the main inspirer, organizer and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian policy of the collective West”.
The term is a particular favorite of Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. In February 2024, Peskov explained that Putin agreed to be interviewed by the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson because he “stands in clear contrast to the position of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media.”
This creeping use of “Anglo-Saxon” as a slur hasn’t gone unnoticed in the West. Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Lynne Tracy said in 2023 that the use of the term was “very strange” given the multiethnic character of American society.
Reports suggest that with the election of a more Russia-friendly president in Donald Trump, the word from the Kremlin was not to use the term for Americans, specifically. But it appears not everyone got the memo – pro-Putin State Duma Deputy Viktor Vodolatsky recently warned against “Anglo-Saxons” creating a “point of tension” in the South Caucasus through the U.S.-led peace efforts between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
As experts in Russian discourse and post-Soviet nations, we see the increased use of “Anglo-Saxons” as reflecting deeper trends that tap into Putin’s use of history to justify the invasion of Ukraine and smear his perceived enemies, while exploiting political divisions in Europe and America.
Who were the Anglo-Saxons?
The original Anglo-Saxons comprised the waves of conquerors from Germanic tribes in Europe that flooded into England – Jutes as well as Angles and Saxons – in the fifth and sixth centuries. Alfred the Great united the warring fiefdoms of southern England in the ninth century and declared himself king of the Anglo-Saxon realm.
But the term did not enter wider usage until long after the “Anglo-Saxon period” ended with the invasion of England by French-speaking Normans in 1066.
In fact, it wasn’t until the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th century that scholars started to refer to the Anglo-Saxon origins of the English, in a bid to differentiate the country from Catholic Europe – another use of history for political aims.
But the term really took off in the 19th century, when it was folded into pseudoscientific racist justification for the British Empire. That came to an end in World War I, when Britain and America found themselves fighting against Germany – the location of Saxony. In 1917, the British royal family changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Even U.S. President Woodrow Wilson – an acknowledged racist – insisted that Americans were not Anglo-Saxons.
There things stood until 1964, when American professor E. Digby Baltzell published “The Protestant Establishment,” which popularized the term “White Anglo Saxon Protestant,” or WASP, to refer to middle-class Americans of European descent.
By the 2000s, it was mostly white supremacists who were using the term Anglo-Saxon as a synonym for a modern-day demographic. Academic journals and groups dedicated to studying the Middle Ages dropped references to “Anglo-Saxons” due to the racist connotations.
Make Moscow medieval again!
It is against this background of Anglo-Saxon as a term appropriated by white supremacists that modern Russian usage should be seen.
Russian propaganda has long sought to talk up the far right in Europe and America, with whom Putin’s “national conservatism” has a close affinity. It does so to sow division in Western democracies and fracture the liberal international order. The aim is to portray the U.S. and U.K. as warmongering Anglo-Saxon nations, thereby encouraging the French, Germans and other Europeans to avoid following their lead.
More broadly, the references to Anglo-Saxons reflects Russia’s view that global politics is driven by a “clash of civilizations,” in which Russia represents the values of traditional Europe, and it taps into a centuries-old fear of perfidious Western encroachment on the Russian state.
Putin has tried to justify the invasion of Ukraine by claiming that modern Russia is the direct descendant of ninth-century Kyivan Rus, and that Ukrainians are therefore really Russians.
The Russian government has invested heavily in trying to persuade its citizens that they can trace their identity all the way back to a distant past in medieval times – at a time when Anglo-Saxons ruled England.
But in leaning on outdated terminology popular with white supremacist groups in a bid to sow division and antagonism in the West, Putin seems to be retreating into an imaginary world of the medieval past.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
China recently announced that it was putting new controls on the export of rare earth elements, sparking a new round in the country’s ongoing trade war with the US.
Donald Trump responded by threatening to ramp up tariffs on Chinese goods by a further 100%. This was under discussion when China’s president Xi Jinping and Trump met on October 30 at the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in South Korea.
Trump and Xi now say they have come an agreement over access to China’s valuable rare earths, but details of what this entails are not yet clear. But it was clear it was important for the US president to walk away with some agreement on this vital component of green tech.
China mines 70% and refines 92% of these increasingly important metals, and manufactures 98% of the world’s rare earth magnets used in EVs, electronics, medical devices and other clean tech. In recent years, these essential minerals have become a crucial part of China’s economic agenda as it tries to focus on “high quality development” in advanced and green technology
The recent announcement from Beijing has raised concerns about global access to these essential minerals. If the supply of rare earths available to the outside world diminishes, the cost of manufacturing green tech would rise and drive up prices worldwide. If there is anything that would stall the development of the green economy, this could be it.
In response to the earlier announcement, Trump initially suggested he might cancel the upcoming meeting with Chinese president Xi.
The battle to gain access to rare earth minerals is important to developing more green tech.
Trump had also announced that he was considering a ban on exports to China of all products made with US software such as laptops and jet engines, and industrial equipment. This might reduce Beijing’s ability to design essential components for AI chips, hampering its bid for dominance in clean tech.
Prior to the meeting, electric vehicles coming from China had already been hit by a 100% US tariff, while import duties for solar cells and lithium batteries stood at 50% and 25% respectively.
But the result might have surprised Trump. As US-made goods are exempt from tariffs from paying tariffs, Chinese firms have set up production sites in the US to circumvent Trump’s tariffs. Instead of helping domestic US companies, Trump’s policies have done the opposite.
For instance, the solar manufacturing capacity of Chinese firms based in the US has grown so large that it now accounts for 39% of all solar panel energy output in the country versus only 24% from US firms.
But even if Chinese clean tech sales in US were severely affected by the tariffs, most of China’s green tech is heading elsewhere.
Based on my estimations using data from the energy thinktank Ember, Chinese green tech exports globally in 2024 were valued at US$184.06 billion (£139 billion), while total exports to the US stood at US$20.66 billion. The US market accounted for only 11.2% of the total proportion of total Chinese green tech exports, while that number from January to September 2025 has dipped to 7.8%.
Compared to the EU (29.95%) and Asian market (27.97%) in 2024, the US market appears relatively small. So higher tariffs would harm China’s economy, but the damage may not be as substantial as Trump might imagine. However, the EU’s plans to meet climate targets is massively dependent on these Chinese exports.
Problems for Beijing?
The US had already put restrictions on which technologies China can buy from the US. China can still manufacture electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines without US software. But without the most advanced technologies from the US, Chinese firms will have fewer options.
While there are indications that the tech gap between Washington and Beijing may be shrinking, the US still possesses some of the most advanced technologies that are crucial for green tech development. These include advanced semiconductors, which are needed to make AI chips.
Such components and machinery are essential to China’s claim to green leadership since they allow users to automate EVs, solar panels and wind turbines, while ensuring their efficiency and optimising energy use. Simply put, without the best semiconductors and the AI chips, China won’t be able to create world-leading clean tech.
China may have metals but without US chips and software, it’s green economic momentum might stall – at least until China’s semiconductor and AI tech catches up with the US. Chinese economic progress and its green leadership may be dependent on gaining better trade deals, even if it does still have a massive advantage.
This story was updated on October 30 to include details of the meeting between presidents Trump and Xi.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Chee Meng Tan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This is the first in a two-part series. Read part two here.
For nearly four centuries, the world economy has been on a path of ever-greater integration that even two world wars could not totally derail. This long march of globalisation was powered by rapidly increasing levels of international trade and investment, coupled with vast movements of people across national borders and dramatic changes in transportation and communication technology.
According to economic historian J. Bradford DeLong, the value of the world economy (measured at fixed 1990 prices) rose from US$81.7 billion (£61.5 billion) in 1650, when this story begins, to US$70.3 trillion (£53 trillion) in 2020 – an 860-fold increase. The most intensive periods of growth corresponded to the two periods when global trade was rising fastest: first during the “long 19th century” between the end of the French revolution and start of the first world war, and then as trade liberalisation expanded after the second world war, from the 1950s up to the 2008 global financial crisis.
Now, however, this grand project is on the retreat. Globalisation is not dead yet, but it is dying.
Is this a cause for celebration, or concern? And will the picture change again when Donald Trump and his tariffs of mass disruption leave the White House? As a longtime BBC economics correspondent who was based in Washington during the global financial crisis, I believe there are sound historical reasons to worry about our deglobalised future – even once Trump has left the building.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
Trump’s tariffs have amplified the world’s economic problems, but he is not the root cause of them. Indeed, his approach reflects a truth that has been emerging for many decades but which previous US administrations – and other governments around the world – have been reluctant to admit: namely, the decline of the US as the world’s no.1 economic power and engine of world growth.
In each era of globalisation since the mid-17th century, a single country has sought to be the clear world leader – shaping the rules of the global economy for all. In each case, this hegemonic power had the military, political and financial power to enforce these rules – and to convince other countries that there was no preferable path to wealth and power.
But now, as the US under Trump slips into isolationism, there is no other power ready to take its place and carry the torch for the foreseeable future. Many people’s pick, China, faces too many economic challenges, including its lack of a truly international currency – and as a one-party state, nor does it possess the democratic mandate needed to gain acceptance as the world’s new dominant power.
While globalisation has always produced many losers as well as winners – from the slave trade of the 18th century to displaced factory workers in the American Midwest in the 20th century – history shows that a deglobalised world can be an even more dangerous and unstable place. The most recent example came during the interwar years, when the US refused to take up the mantle left by the decline of Britain as the 19th century’s hegemonic global power.
In the two decades from 1919, the world descended into economic and political chaos. Stock market crashes and global banking failures led to widespread unemployment and increasing political instability, creating the conditions for the rise of fascism. Global trade declined sharply as countries put up trade barriers and started self-defeating currency wars in the vain hope of giving their countries’ exports a boost. On the contrary, global growth ground to a halt.
A century on, our deglobalising world is vulnerable again. But to chart whether this means we are destined for a similarly chaotic and unstable future, we first need to explore the birth, growth and reasons behind the imminent demise of this extraordinary global project.
French model: mercantilism, money and war
By the mid-1600s, France had emerged as the strongest power in Europe – and it was the French who developed the first overarching theory of how the global economy could work in their favour. Nearly four centuries later, many aspects of “mercantilism” have been revived by Trump’s US playbook, which could be entitled How To Dominate the World Economy by Weakening Your Rivals.
France’s version of mercantilism was based on the idea that a country should put up trade barriers to limit how much other countries could sell to it, while boosting its own industries to ensure that more money (in the form of gold) came into the country than left it.
England and the Dutch Republic had already adopted some of these mercantilist policies, establishing colonies around the globe run by powerful monopolistic trading companies that aimed to challenge and weaken the Spanish empire, which had prospered on the gold and silver it seized in the Americas. In contrast to these “seaborne empires”, the much larger empires in the east such as China and India had the internal resources to generate their own revenue, meaning international trade – although widespread – was not critical to their prosperity.
But it was France which first systematically applied mercantilism across the whole of government policy – led by the powerful finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1661-1683), who had been granted unprecedented powers to strengthen the financial might of the French state by King Louis XIV. Colbert believed trade would boost the coffers of the state and strengthen France’s economy while weakening its rivals, stating:
It is simply, and solely, the absence or abundance of money within a state [which] makes the difference in its grandeur and power.
In Colbert’s view, trade was a zero-sum game. The more France could run a trade surplus with other countries, the more gold bullion it could accumulate for the government and the weaker its rivals would become if deprived of gold. Under Colbert, France pioneered protectionism, tripling its import tariffs to make foreign goods prohibitively expensive.
At the same time, he strengthened France’s domestic industries by providing subsidies and granting them monopolies. Colonies and government trading companies were established to ensure France could benefit from the highly lucrative trade in goods such as spices, sugar – and slaves.
Colbert oversaw the expansion of French industries into areas like lace and glass-making, importing skilled craftsmen from Italy and granting these new companies state monopolies. He invested heavily in infrastructure such as the Canal du Midi, and dramatically increased the size of France’s navy and merchant marine to challenge its British and Dutch rivals.
Global trade at this time was highly exploitative, involving the forced seizure of gold and other raw materials from newly discovered lands (as Spain had been doing with its conquests in the New World from the late 15th century). It also meant benefiting from the trade in humans, with huge profits as slaves were seized and sent to the Caribbean and other colonies to produce sugar and other crops.
In this era of mercantilism, trade wars often led to real wars, fought across the globe to control trade routes and seize colonies. Following Colbert’s reforms, France began a long struggle to challenge the overseas empires of its maritime rivals, while also engaging in wars of conquest in continental Europe.
France initially enjoyed success in the 17th century both on land and sea against the Dutch. But ultimately, its state-run French Indies company was no rival to the ruthless, commercially driven activities of the Dutch and British East India companies, which delivered enormous profits to their shareholders and revenues for their governments.
Indeed, the huge profits made by the Dutch from the Far Eastern spice trade explains why they had no hesitation in handing over their small North American colony of New Amsterdam, in return for expelling the British from a small toehold of one of their spice islands in what is now Indonesia. In 1664, that Dutch outpost was renamed New York.
After a century of conflict, Britain gradually gained ascendancy over France, conquering India and forcing its great rival to cede Canada in 1763 after the Seven Years war. France never succeeded in fully countering Britain’s naval strength. Resounding defeats by fleets led by Horatio Nelson in the early 19th century, coupled with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo by a coalition of European powers, marked the end of France’s time as Europe’s hegemonic power.
The battle of Trafalgar, off southwestern Spain in October 1805, was decisive in ending France’s era of dominance. Yale Center for British Art/Wikimedia
But while the French model of globalisation ultimately failed in its attempt to dominate the world economy, that has not prevented other countries – and now President Trump – from embracing its principles.
France found that tariffs alone could not sufficiently fund its wars nor boost its industries. Its broad version of mercantilism led to endless wars that spread around the globe, as countries retaliated both economically and militarily and tried to seize territories.
More than two centuries later, there is an uncomfortable parallel with what the results of Trump’s endless tariff wars might bring, both in terms of ongoing conflict and the organisation of rival trade blocs. It also shows that more protectionism, as proposed by Trump, will not be enough to revive the US’s domestic industries.
British model: free trade and empire
The ideology of free trade was first spelled out by British economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the founding fathers of classical economics. They argued trade was not a zero-sum game, as Colbert had suggested, but that all countries could mutually benefit from it. According to Smith’s classic text, The Wealth of Nations (1776):
If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make, better buy it off them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in such a way that we have some advantages.
As the world’s first industrial nation, by the 1840s Britain had created an economic powerhouse based on the new technologies of steam power, the factory system, and railroads.
Smith and Ricardo argued against the creation of state monopolies to control trade, proposing minimal state intervention in industry. Ever since, Britain’s belief in the benefits of free trade has proved stronger and more long-lasting than any other major industrial power – more deeply embedded in both its politics and popular imagination.
This ironclad commitment was born out of a bitter political struggle in the 1840s between manufacturers and landowners over the protectionist Corn Laws. The landowners who had traditionally dominated British politics backed high tariffs, which benefited them but resulted in higher prices for staples like bread. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 upended British politics, signalling a shift of power to the manufacturing classes – and ultimately to their working-class allies once they gained the right to vote.
An Anti-Corn Law League meeting held in London’s Exeter Hall in 1846. Wikimedia
In time, Britain’s advocacy of free trade unleashed the power of its manufacturing to dominate global markets. Free trade was framed as the way to raise living standards for the poor (the exact opposite of President Trump’s claim that it harms workers) and had strong working-class support. When the Conservatives floated the idea of abandoning free trade in the 1906 general election, they suffered a devastating defeat – the party’s worst until 2024.
As well as trade, a central element in Britain’s role as the new global hegemonic power was the rise of the City of London as the world’s leading financial centre. The key was Britain’s embrace of the gold standard which put its currency, the pound, at the heart of the new global economic order by linking its value to a fixed amount of gold, ensuring its value would not fluctuate. Thus the pound became the worldwide medium of exchange.
This encouraged the development of a strong banking sector, underpinned by the Bank of England as a credible and trustworthy “lender of last resort” in a financial crisis. The result was a huge boom in international investment, opening access to overseas markets for British companies and individual investors.
In the late 19th century, the City of London dominated global finance, investing in everything from Argentinian railways and Malaysian rubber plantations to South African gold mines. The gold standard became a talisman of Britain’s power to dominate the world economy.
The pillars of Britain’s global economic dominance were a highly efficient manufacturing sector, a commitment to free trade to ensure its industry had access to global markets, and a highly developed financial sector which invested capital around the world and reaped the benefits of global economic development. But Britain also did not hesitate to use force to open up foreign markets – for example, during the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when China was compelled to open its markets to the lucrative trade in opium from British-owned India.
By the end of the 19th century, the British empire incorporated one quarter of the world’s population, providing a source of cheap labour and secure raw materials as well as a large market for Britain’s manufactured goods. But that was still not enough for its avaricious leaders: Britain also made sure that local industries did not threaten its interests – by undermining the Indian textile industry, for example, and manipulating the Indian currency.
In reality, globalisation in this era was about domination of the world economy by a few rich European powers, meaning that much global economic development was curtailed to protect their interests. Under British rule between 1750 and 1900, India’s share of world industrial output declined from 25% to 2%.
But for those at the centre of Britain’s global formal and informal empire, such as the middle-class residents of London, this was a halcyon time – as economist John Maynard Keynes would later recall:
For middle and upper classes … life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.
US model: protectionism to neoliberalism
While Britain enjoyed its century of global dominance, the United States embraced protectionism for longer after its foundation in 1776 than all other major western economies.
The introduction of tariffs to protect and subsidise emerging US industries had first been articulated in 1791 by the fledgling nation’s first treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton – Caribbean immigrant, founding father and future subject of a record-breaking musical. The Whig party under Henry Clay and its successor, the Republican Party, were both strong supporters of this policy for most of the 19th century. Even as US industry grew to overshadow all others, its government maintained some of the highest tariff barriers in the world.
Founding father Alexander Hamilton on the front of a US$10 note from 1934. Wikimedia
Tariff rates rose to 50% in the 1890s with the backing of future president William McKinley, both to help industrialists and pay for generous pensions for 2 million civil war veterans and their dependants – a key part of the Republican electorate. It is no accident that President Trump has festooned the White House with pictures of Hamilton, Clay and McKinley – all supporters of protectionism and high tariffs.
In part, the US’s enduring resistance to free trade was because it had access to an internal supply of seemingly limitless raw materials, while its rapidly growing population, fuelled by immigration, provided internal markets that fuelled its growth while keeping out foreign competition.
By the late 19th century, the US was the world’s biggest steel producer with the largest railroad system in the world and was moving rapidly to exploit the new technologies of the second industrial revolution – based on electricity, petrol engines and chemicals. Yet it was only after the second world war that the US assumed the role of global superpower – in part because it was the only country on either side of the war that had not suffered severe damage to its economy and infrastructure.
In the wake of global destruction in Europe and Asia, the US’s dominance was political, military and cultural, as well as financial – but the US vision of a globalised world had some important differences from its British predecessor.
The US took a much more universalist and rules-based approach, focusing on the creation of global organisations that would establish binding regulations – and open up global markets to unfettered American trade and investment. It also aimed to dominate the international economic order by replacing the pound sterling with the US dollar as the global medium of exchange.
Within a week of its entry in the second world war, plans were laid to establish US global financial hegemony. The US treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, began work on establishing an “inter-allied stabilisation fund” – a playbook for post-war monetary arrangements which would enshrine the US dollar at its heart.
This led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank at the Bretton Woods conference in New Hampshire in 1944 – institutions dominated by the US, which encouraged other countries to adopt the same economic model both in terms of free trade and free enterprise. The Allied nations who were simultaneously meeting to establish the United Nations to try to ensure future world peace, having suffered the devastating effects of the Great Depression and war, welcomed the US’s commitment to shape a new, more stable economic order.
How the 1944 Bretton Woods deal ensured the US dollar would be the world’s dominant currrency. Video: Bloomberg TV.
As the world’s biggest and strongest economy, there was (initially) little resistance to this US plan for a new international economic order in its own image. The motive was as much political as economic: the US wanted to provide economic benefits to ensure the loyalty of its key allies and counter the perceived threat of a communist takeover – in complete contrast to Trump’s mercantilist view today that all other countries are out to “rip off” the US, and that its own military might means it has no real need for allies.
After the war finally ended, the US dollar, now linked to gold at a fixed rate of $35 per ounce to guarantee its stability, assumed the role as the free world’s principal currency. It was both used for global trade transactions and held by foreign central banks as their currency reserves – giving the US economy an “exorbitant privilege”. The stable value of the dollar also made it easier for the US government to sell Treasury bonds to foreign investors, enabling it to more easily borrow money and run up trade deficits with other countries.
The conditions were set for an era of US political, financial and cultural dominance, which saw the rise of globally admired brands such as McDonald’s and Coca Cola, as well as a powerful US marketing arm in the form of Hollywood. Perhaps even more significantly, the relaxed, well-funded campuses of California would prove a perfect petri dish for the development of new computer technologies – backed initially by cold war military investment – which, decades later, would lead to the birth of the big-tech companies that dominate the tech landscape today.
The US view of globalisation was broader and more interventionist than the British model of free trade and empire. Rather than having a formal empire, it wanted to open up access to the entire world economy, which would provide global markets for American products and services.
The US believed you needed global economic institutions to police these rules. But as in the British case, the benefits of globalisation were still unevenly shared. While countries that embraced export-led growth such as Japan, Korea and Germany prospered, other resource-rich but capital-poor countries such as Nigeria only fell further behind.
From dream to despair
Though the legend of the American dream grew and grew, by the 1970s the US economy was coming under increasing pressure – in particular from German and Japanese rivals, who by then had recovered from the war and modernised their industries.
Troubled by these perceived threats and a growing trade deficit, in 1971 President Richard Nixon stunned the world by announcing that the US was going off the gold standard – forcing other countries to bear the cost of adjustment for the US balance of payments crisis by making them revalue their currencies. This had a profound effect on the global financial system: within a decade, most major currencies had abandoned fixed exchange rates for a new system of floating rates, effectively ending the 1944 Bretton Woods settlement.
US president Richard Nixon announces the US is leaving the gold standard on August 15 1971.
The end of fixed exchange rates opened the door to the “financialisation” of the global economy, vastly expanding global investment and lending – much of it by US financial firms. This gave succour to the burgeoning neoliberal movement that sought to further rewrite the rules of the financial world order. In the 1980s and ’90s, these policy prescriptions became known as the Washington consensus: a set of rules – including opening markets to foreign investment, deregulation and privatisation – that was imposed on developing economies in crisis, in return for them receiving support from US-led organisations like the World Bank and IMF.
In the US, meanwhile, the increasing reliance on the finance and hi-tech sectors increased levels of inequality and fostered resentment in large parts of American society. Both Republicans and Democrats embraced this new world order, shaping US policy to favour their hi-tech and financial allies. Indeed, it was the Democrats who played a key role in deregulating the financial sector in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, the decline of US manufacturing industries accelerated, as did the gap between the incomes of those in the hinterland, where manufacturing was based, and residents of the large metropolitan cities.
By 2023, the lowest 50% of US citizens received just 13% of total personal income, while the top 10% received almost half (47%). The wealth gap was even greater, with the bottom 50% only having 6% of total wealth, while a third (36%) was held by just the top 1%. Since 1980, real incomes of the bottom 50% have barely grown for four decades.
The bottom half of the US population was suffering from a surge in “deaths of despair” – a term coined by the Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton to describe high mortality rates from drug abuse, suicide and murder among younger working-class Americans. Rising costs of housing, medical care and university education all contributed to widespread indebtedness and growing financial insecurity. By 2019, a study found that two-thirds of people who filed for bankruptcy cited medical issues as a key reason.
The decline in US manufacturing accelerated after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, increasing America’s soaring trade and budget deficit even more. Political and business elites hoped the move would open up the huge Chinese market to US goods and investment, but China’s rapid modernisation made its industry more competitive than its American rivals in many fields.
Ultimately, this era of intensive financialisation of the world economy created a series of regional and then global financial crises, damaging the economies of many Latin American and Asian economies. This culminated in the 2008 global financial crisis, precipitated by reckless lending by US financial institutions. The world economy took more than a decade to recover as countries wrestled with slower growth, lower productivity and less trade than before the crisis.
For those who chose to read it, the writing was on the wall for America’s era of global domination decades ago. But it would take Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election – a profound shock to many in the US “liberal establishment” – to make clear that the US was now on a very different course that would shake up the world.
Making a bad situation more dangerous
In my view, Trump is the first modern-day US president to fully understand the powerful alienation felt by many working-class American voters, who believed they were left out of the US’s immense post-war economic growth that so benefited the largely urban American middle classes. His strongest supporters have always been lower-middle-class voters from rural areas who are not college-educated.
Yet Trump’s key policies will ultimately do little for them. High tariffs to protect US jobs, expulsion of millions of illegal immigrants, dismantling protections for minorities by opposing DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) programmes, and drastically cutting back the size of government will have increasingly negative economic consequences in the future, and are very unlikely to restore the US economy to its previous dominant position.
US president Donald Trump unveils his global tariff ‘hit list’ on April 3 2025. BBC News.
Long before he first became president, Trump hated the eye-watering US trade deficit (he’s a businessman, after all) – and believed that tariffs would be a key weapon for ensuring US economic dominance could be maintained. Another key part of his “America First” ideology was to repudiate the international agreements that were at the heart of the US’s postwar approach to globalisation.
In his first term, however, Trump (having not expected to win) was ill-prepared for power. But second time around, conservative thinktanks had spent years outlining detailed policies and identifying key personnel who could implement the radical U-turn in US economic policy.
Under Trump 2.0, we have seen a return to the mercantilist point of view reminiscent of France in the 17th and 18th centuries. His assertion that countries which ran a trade surplus with the US “were ripping us off” echoed the mercantilist belief that trade was a zero-sum game – rather than the 20th-century view, pioneered by the US, that globalisation brings benefits to all, no matter the precise balance of that trade.
Trump’s tax-and-tariff plans, which extend the tax breaks to the very rich while reducing benefits for the poor through benefit cuts and tariff-driven inflation, will increase inequality in the US.
At the same time, the passing of the One Big Beautiful Bill is predicted to add some US$3.5 trillion to US government debt – even after the Elon Musk-led “Department of Government Efficiency” cuts imposed on many Washington departments. This adds pressure to the key US Treasury bond market at the centre of the world financial system, and raises the cost of financing the huge US deficit while weakening its credit rating. Continuing these policies could threaten a default by the US, which would have devastating consequences for the entire global financial system.
For all the macho grandstanding from Trump and his supporters, his economic policies are a demonstration of American weakness, not strength. While I believe his highlighting of some of the ills of the US economy were overdue, the president is rapidly squandering the economic credibility and good will that the US built up in the postwar years, as well as its cultural and political hegemony. For people living in America and elsewhere, he is making a bad situation more dangerous – including for many of his most ardent supporters.
That said, even without Trump’s economic and societal disruptions, the end of the US era of hegemonic dominance would still have happened. Globalisation is not dead, but it is dying. The troubling question we all face now, is what happens next.
This is the first of a two-part Insights long read on the rise and fall of globalisation. Read part two here: why the next global financial meltdown could be much worse with the US on the sidelines.
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Steve Schifferes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Silvia Mantovanini (ICRAR/Curtin) & the GLEAM-X Team
The Milky Way is a rich and complex environment. We see it as a luminous line stretching across the night sky, composed of innumerable stars.
But that’s just the visible light. Observing the sky in other ways, such as through radio waves, provides a much more nuanced scene – full of charged particles and magnetic fields.
For decades, astronomers have used radio telescopes to explore our galaxy. By studying the properties of the objects residing in the Milky Way, we can better understand its evolution and composition.
To reveal the radio sky, we used the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope in the Australian outback, composed of 4,096 antennas spread over several square kilometres. The array observes wide regions of the sky at a time, enabling it to rapidly map the galaxy.
A view of the Murchison Widefield Array antenna layout.
Between 2013 and 2015, the array was used to observe the entire southern hemisphere sky for the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (or GLEAM) survey. This survey covered a broad range of radio wave frequencies.
The wide frequency coverage of GLEAM gave astronomers the first “radio colour” map of the sky, including the galaxy itself. It revealed the diffuse glow of the galactic disk, as well as thousands of distant galaxies and regions where stars are born and die.
With the upgrade of the array in 2018, we observed the sky with higher resolution and sensitivity, resulting in the GLEAM-eXtended survey (GLEAM-X).
The big difference between the two surveys is that GLEAM could detect the big picture but not the detail, while GLEAM-X saw the detail but not the big picture.
A beautiful mosaic
To capture both, our team used a new imaging technique called image domain gridding. We combined thousands of GLEAM and GLEAM-X observations to form one huge mosaic of the galaxy.
Because the two surveys observed the sky at different times, it was important to correct for the ionosphere distortions – shifts in radio waves caused by irregularities in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Otherwise, these distortions would shift the position of the sources between observations.
The algorithm applies these corrections, aligning and stacking data from different nights smoothly. This took more than 1 million processing hours on supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Western Australia.
The result is a new mosaic covering 95% of the Milky Way visible from the southern hemisphere, spanning radio frequencies from 72 to 231 MHz. The big advantage of the broad frequency range is the ability to see different sources with their “radio colour” depending on whether the radio waves are produced by cosmic magnetic fields, or by hot gas.
The emission coming from the explosion of dead stars appears in orange. The lower the frequency, the brighter it is. Meanwhile, the regions where stars are born shine in blue.
These colours allow astronomers to pick out the different physical components of the galaxy at a glance.
The new radio portrait of the Milky Way is the most sensitive, widest-area map at these low frequencies to date. It will enable a plethora of galactic science, from discovering and studying faint and old remnants of star explosions to mapping the energetic cosmic rays and the dust and grains that dominate the medium within the stars.
The power of this image will not be surpassed until the new SKA-Low telescope is complete and operational, eventually being thousands of times more sensitive and with higher resolution than its predecessor, the Murchison Widefield Array.
This upgrade is still a few years away. For now, this new image stands as an inspiring preview of the wonders the full SKA-Low will one day reveal.
Natasha Hurley-Walker receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Silvia Mantovanini does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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