All the Dominant Models Are Collapsing
19th December 2025
A recent article lays out the collapse of the dominant geopolitical model of “rising powers generate conflict”: The Stagnant Order And the End of Rising Powers (Foreign Affairs, paywalled). The basic idea is that the foundations of “rising powers”–demographics and productivity gains–no longer support grandiose planetary dominance.
Rather, demographics is already baked in as a crushing liability to all existing powers, and despite endless claims that technology will jumpstart productivity, the reality is productivity gains have flatlined for decades. “Growth” is a function of expanding debt, not productivity gains.
This dynamic extends beyond geopolitical models: all the models being used to explain and control the world are all collapsing: economic, social, political, they’re all collapsing because they are all constructs assembled in eras that no longer map the present.
As I explained in The Entire Bubble Economy Is a Hallucination, models collapse because of two limitations that define all models: