Power in the Age of Fracture

In the world that emerged after the Cold War, power moved with container ships and capital markets. Liberalism’s invisible hand was fortified by a visible navy, and its logic was one of frictionless flow: of goods, information, money, and governance standards. The sea was its main artery, and the U.S. Navy its steward.

Today, that world is cracking. Capital markets are fragmenting. Supply chains are shortening. Naval supremacy is increasingly contested not by peer fleets but by $10,000 drones and firmware updates. And, perhaps most significantly, ordinary people—the supposed beneficiaries of the globalized order—are turning against it.

What we are witnessing is not simply a redistribution of power, but a transformation in the very grammar of geopolitical influence. Economic integration no longer secures peace; in many cases, it foments resentment. Technological innovation no longer reinforces traditional hierarchies; it bypasses them. And military might no longer projects primarily from the sea—it radiates from code, chips, and algorithms.

This is a world no longer ruled by frictionless flows, but by points of friction—strategic chokeholds where denial is cheap and control is asymmetric.

The architecture of globalization was strategic, not merely economic. The United States underwrote an open trading system, because it extended American influence while suppressing the rise of challengers. Pax Americana was a naval enterprise. Aircraft carriers were not just tools of war; they were guarantees of commerce.

The post-Cold War world internalized this arrangement. Capital could move with near-total freedom, and so too could goods. Supply chains were built on the assumption of open seas, peaceful passage, and regulatory convergence. The frictionless world was a geostrategic design.

Yet that design also contained the seeds of its unmaking. As manufacturing shifted offshore, so too did political legitimacy. As capital markets globalized, they became more abstract—divorced from the human realities of labor, culture, and national community. The more efficient the system became, the more invisible its costs.

This is the backdrop against which populism has surged across the globe. The economic critique is familiar: deindustrialization, wage stagnation, and regional decline. But underlying this is something more profound—a sense that the global order strips people of their dignity, identity, and control.

Frictionless capital flows, far from being neutral, are experienced by many as a solvent—eroding not only jobs, but also the uniqueness of languages, traditions, and ways of life. What the populist revolt demands is not merely higher wages but re-embeddedness: an economy grounded once more in place, culture, and sovereignty.

This demand for rootedness is strategic. Many of the actors who now seek to undermine the global order through asymmetric means are themselves animated by these populist energies. The Houthis’ drone campaigns in the Red Sea, Iran’s maritime harassment, and Russia’s cyber proxies all represent a kind of anti-globalist warfare—where low-cost, high-leverage tools are used to strike at the arteries of a system seen as decadent, exploitative, and fragile.

The traditional architecture of global power was built at scale: the bigger the carrier, the deeper the supply chain, the broader the alliance network. But scale now generates vulnerability.

Airborne and undersea drones have inverted the cost matrix of conflict.

• Offense is now cheap, distributed, and often automated.
• Defense is expensive, centralized, and politically exposed.

An autonomous glider can loiter in shipping lanes for weeks, a drone boat can disable a billion-dollar destroyer, and a malware string can disrupt logistics flows across multiple continents. Control over the seas is no longer guaranteed by dominance of blue water. Presence is not power—it is a target.

And this extends beyond physical systems. Export controls on semiconductors, restrictions on firmware, and the weaponization of payments infrastructure (SWIFT access, CBDCs, capital sanctions) all show that economic war is the new total war—but it is being fought not with armies but with levers.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the transformation of supply chains into front lines. The liberal economic order imagined supply chains as apolitical—driven purely by cost and efficiency. Today, they are strategic terrain.

Taiwan’s TSMC is no longer just a chip manufacturer—it is a strategic asset, arguably more geopolitically significant than any oil reserve. The United States’s CHIPS Act, Europe’s industrial policy revival, and China’s push for self-sufficiency all mark the end of the laissez-faire model and the return of economic realism.

Control over production inputs, rare earths, and intellectual property is now as central to grand strategy as troop movements or naval bases once were.

This does not mean naval power is irrelevant. Sea control still matters—particularly in the Indo-Pacific, where territorial disputes and gray-zone operations persist. But the sea is no longer the uncontested medium of global commerce or power.

It is increasingly contested, cluttered, and constrained. Autonomous systems operate beneath and above the surface. Anti-ship missiles and hypersonic weapons make large platforms more vulnerable. And the proliferation of drone swarms introduces constant risk, even in peacetime patrols.

Naval power now operates in a world that no longer orbits around it. Power projection is not about presence—it’s about leverage. And leverage is shifting from tonnage to topology, from fleets to nodes.

We are living through a profound transformation in the logic of world order. The age of flow is giving way to the age of friction. The tools of power are becoming cheaper, faster, and more irregular. The actors wielding them are often motivated by a populist desire to dismantle the global order they see as corrosive.

And yet, in many ways, they are right. The old system, for all its prosperity, hollowed out meaning. It traded sovereignty for liquidity, culture for convergence, identity for efficiency.

The post-globalist world will not be orderly. It will be turbulent, contested, and fragmented. But it will also be more grounded. It will force a reckoning with the true costs of abstraction, and the geopolitical risks of assuming that human societies can be optimized like supply chains.

The question for policymakers is no longer how to preserve the old order—but how to build resilience, sovereignty, and strategic clarity within the new one.

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