Another turn of the wheel
“The old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born, now it is the time of monsters.”
This quote, quite descriptive and popular in the world of 2025 has usually been attributed to Antonio Gramsci. Irrespective of who is its original author, it is clear how it conveys the state of the world between the two World Wars, the scene from a Fascist prison.
That cataclysmic era, one human lifetime ago, really was the limbo of two very different worlds.
The first was marked by true multipolarity, a dog-eat-dog system of imperialism. After the collapse of the first colonial empires of Portugal and Spain, it was Great Britain and France who led the free-trade unions (albeit, quite unequal) of that period, each finding their own, quite differing, paths to democracy. This was also the era of the first period of true American imperialism, seeing the addition of the Mexican territories, Hawaii, Philippines and Cuba to the US sphere.
Of their opponents it was the Prussian-united Germany which proved to be the most persistent, along with the most significant non-European colonial empire, Meiji Japan. After the final battle between the allies and the most distilled form of revanchist imperialism, fascism, a new world was forged by the allies, now dubbed the United Nations, trying to assure the world we can move past zero-sum games for the sake of common humanity.
For many years we have, quite frankly, waited for a new, similar battle to yet again emerge, underlining the precariousness of liberal peace. The liberal world order succeeded in integrating Germany and Japan, but a new “Axis” has been forming between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China, all with revisionist ambitions to change the world to a less western-dominated (or more autocratic) one, with sympathies gained from several former colonies of European states.
After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine began, this reincarnated division between the free world and the Axis, or perhaps a new Cold War or the factions of a Third World War, between democracies and autocracies, would become crystal clear. Perhaps it would still be so, had we seen Kamala Harris be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States.
Still, it cannot be forgotten that an increasingly larger part of our side wouldn’t have subscribed to this worldview either. The revisionist states were not the only ones waiting for the old world to die.
The perfect storm of the 2020s
In the 2020s, we definitely battle crises like no other. The stagflation and inflation crises, built by the long period of close-to-zero interest rates that built a demand bubble that burst in the supply shock caused by the double tail risk come true – Covid restrictions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, eroded trust in governments across the political spectrum, which lost power in 2024 around the world.
In many countries traditional economic policies failed to address inequality and stagnation, creating space for radical alternatives. Even though the US left the Biden era in a “goldilocks economy”, the rise of costs was enough for the voters to capitalize on the nostalgia of the pre-inflation Trump era (which raises the question of there being any way of politically surviving inflation unless invoking economically fatal deflation).
2024 was, thus, the year of incumbent governments losing historically many elections to any alternatives they had. Libertarianism would break through as a new choice, first in Argentina and mayber in Bolsonaro’s Brasil, and then gaining a foothold in many far-right parties from the Republicans, as described, to the Alternative for Germany. But more importantly, COVID-19 normalized conspiracy thinking on a massive scale. The pandemic accelerated the rise of mass disinformation networks, reinforcing the idea that mainstream media, scientific institutions, and global organizations were inherently untrustworthy. Once someone had been convinced that the entire pandemic was a lie or a plot, it was a short step to believing that elections were rigged, that climate change was a hoax, or that the “deep state” was engaged in a plot to destroy civilization – all of this possible to put also in the far-right Christian narrative of a final battle.
Trump’s second administration has fully embraced this worldview. His government is not merely hostile to factual reality—it thrives on its destruction for unreality. Truth is no longer an inconvenience to be ignored; it is an enemy to be eradicated.
Elon Musk’s global ambitions
With the techno-libertarians and techno-authoritarians gaining rapid power over Silicon Valley and social media, this is an emergency of the most severe understanding. The first examples have been shown by Elon Musk, who has turned Twitter, now X, as his personal loudspeaker. Being bought for the sake of restoring free speech (see the four freedoms of the first part of this series), it has now devolved into a turbocharged echo chamber of far-right thought.
Musk, who himself visited Alternative for Germany’s election rally, has also called for UK’s Starmer and Germany’s Scholz to step down, boosted the neo-Nazi Tommy Robinson’s fake news -based attacks on UK asylum seekers, calling the highest US Ukraine-supporters traitors and sharing far-right memes about the European Union, making clear, that his ambitions wouldn’t end with that side of the Atlantic.
It might also be a personal vendetta, but the recent South Africa – United States breakdown of bilateral relations raises questions about the Musk foreign policy, alongside the end of USAID’s HIV/AIDS programs, which have, enhanced by the effects of a medicinal treatment stopped too early, been speculated to cause hundreds of thousands of excess, mostly Black, deaths in the apartheid-benefiter Musk family’s original country.
Aside from these talking points, Musk has been very vocal on European regulation, especially when picking public fights with former European Commissioner Thierry Breton. X is currently under investigation by the European Commission for violating Digital Services Act (DSA), for example for deceiving users with purchasable “verified accounts”, and refusing to comply with transparency on advertising, public data for researchers and recommender algorithm, its history and functions.
Protection versus control
Even with the flaws and inefficiencies, EU regulations, especially the DSA and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have forced major global technology companies to adjust their operations, or at least to pay significant fines. Musk and other ultra-rich technology influencers in the US, such as Meta’s controlling owner Mark Zuckerberg seem to view the Trump presidency as an opportunity of a lifetime for them to use the full power of the US government to pressure the EU to give up on the enforcement of its democratically adopted legislation, or not to fine US companies for breaking competition laws and other violations.
Musk has continuously claimed DSA, a law that addresses the systemic risks of social media platforms and their algorithms, to censor free speech, prompting JD Vance to threaten, already before his Vice Presidency, that the US could withdraw its military presence from Europe unless (Musk’s view of) free speech is restored. Ironic as ever, Musk is the only one who has actually censored speech on X, solely based on opinions that have been critical of him, embarrassing for him or anyone else he just plain doesn’t like.
Thus, there is a possibility of a nightmare available already with today’s capabilities: the fusion of state power with Big Tech’s vast predictive analytics capabilities—now controlled by Musk, Thiel, and their allies—where large language models would help to create a system where resistance can be found and be neutralized in real time, where mass psychographics dictate policy, and where democratic agency itself becomes a relic of the past. The great irony of the techno-libertarian elite would be not abolishing authoritarianism—but perfecting it through data extraction, neural networks, and AI-driven social control.
The transatlantic breakdown
Jumping back to the news, delivering his promise, the visit of Vice President Vance in Munich in February can mostly be remembered by his claim that the greatest threats to European democracy come not from foreign adversaries like Russia or China, but from within—specifically from European leaders themselves. Vance, taking the stage at the Munich Security Conference, lambasted European migration policies, denounced the EU’s regulatory state, and openly criticized what he called the “muzzling of the people” through laws like the DSA.
But the real warning was in his threat. Standing before an audience of diplomats and security officials, Vance implied that unless Europe aligned itself with the Trump administration’s vision—one that prioritized deregulation, corporate autonomy, and an unrestrained digital free-for-all—the United States could reconsider its military commitments to the continent. The message was clear: abandon your regulatory state, or risk facing the consequences alone.
This marked an unprecedented moment in transatlantic relations, a mafia-style ultimatum. Historically, U.S. security guarantees—whether through NATO or bilateral agreements—had been conditional on strategic necessity, shared defense commitments, or broader geopolitical alignments. But never before had an American vice president tied military protection to an ultimatum about corporate interests. Vance was, in effect, using security policy as a bargaining chip for the dismantling of European oversight over Big Tech.
At the same time, to shake traditional alliances and ignore international law even more, Trump has set his sights onto Greenland, the military significance of which might be overshadowed by all the strategic resources (needed for a possible confrontation with China) a thawed glacier might reveal.
The speculations of their real aims are even more unnerving.
A new global system for what?
After the catastrophic visit of Ukrainian president Zelenskyy to Washington and the cutdown of American aid to Ukraine for a peace deal – now sent to Russia – with the goal of a fast end to the war in Ukraine, most have questioned the US commitment to European security. It can be seen as US rapprochement with Russia, but knowing the techno-oligarch influence in Washington, an ultra-cautious interpretation of avoiding existentially fatal World War III at all costs cannot be brushed out – underlining their focus on survival of humanity as a species.
Sarcastically it would be not as much defending Europeans and their values, but to minimize as much as possible the possibility of a nuclear war ruining their plans, whether it gave autocrats a full expansive licence.
The theory of a “Reverse Nixon” to isolate China – the most urgent possible competitor for US global hegemony – and Iran, the main enemy of the already feudal and pro-technocrat Saudi Arabia – from Russia surely is intriguing, but also so is a new “Metternich”. It would focus on the goal of the American conservatives, perhaps also the techno-libertarians, to support anti-liberal autocracies, including Hungary, Russia and maybe even China, to crush pushes for democracy, inclusion and equality everywhere in the world, like the founders of the pre- World War system did in the Vienna Congress.
These all hypotheses seem to have one thing in common: that the new ruling class of the United States really has something against democracy, if not even viewing it as an existential danger, endangering the survival of the whole of humanity if not put under “stabler” techno-autocrat control.
This dark, ultra-pessimistic view of humanism really is something one could call anti-enlightenment, and if it really is the power behind the throne in the US, it places us in Europe even more in a special place as final defenders of democracy. No wonder JD Vance seems to hate the EU so much.
What a pity for them and their beliefs of excellence that usually it is the one-man led systems that are the most prone to collapse. They are nothing new.
Finally using the leverage
Neil Strauss and Howe formulated a theory, that in social historical spheres could be viewed as anything from an interesting take on long cycles to pseudoscience, but in far-right spheres it became a prophecy. It claims that every generation is affected by the environment it is raised in, and builds its own world based on the “archetype” it has gained from it.
One, quite simplistic, not to say, chauvinist, take of it says: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” This is the justification many of the techno-authoritarian supporters now use in not only bracing for but actively bringing forth a once-in-a-lifetime crisis to see a new world come true.
A more justified takeaway for us would be that after a lifetime we seem to forget why we created the world as it stands now. The question we now face is how swiftly and effectively Europe—and the world—can brace for a very different new era, where so few remember why the European Union was established.
The only problem is, we have never been this alone defending our democracy, from a prospect that has long been unthinkable: an American Empire, with goals of expanding an ideology at heart very at odds with what the European Union aims to stand for. I just hope we still have time.
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