How Gaza broke the world-system

This lecture, delivered by Iyad El-Baghdadi at the University of Oslo on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, argues that the war on Gaza is not only a political rupture but a paradigm-breaking moment - one that exposes the deep structures of the current world-system and signals its collapse.

Drawing on frameworks from Ibn Khaldun to contemporary systems theory, Iyad explores how to read this moment, locate ourselves within a generational shift, and begin the work of building what comes next.

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening & Introduction
• 4:57 Time, History, and the Cycle of Systems
• 13:55 Where We Are Now, and What a System Is
• 19:01 Structural Inequality and Hierarchy
• 25:15 Milestones of the Current World System, and Why Israel Is Exceptional
• 33:03 Gaza as a Paradigmatic Event, and the Four Responses to Limbo
• 38:12 Building the Next System, and Working in Historical Time
• 42:23 Listening to Palestinians, a Note on Generations, and the Kulna Platform
• 48:05 Q&A — How Systems End, U.S. Power, Cryptocurrency, and Historical vs. Political Time

Transcript

1. Opening & Introduction

How is it that the nations that gave us colonialism, two world wars, a hundred million people dead, and a globalized racial hierarchy came out of the Second World War saying, "We are the good guys"? Well, you absolve yourself. You claim moral authority and avoid self-scrutiny by creating a space called Israel, where you say: "We are no longer racists. We're no longer fascists. We're no longer Nazis. Look — the people who suffered for a thousand years under European antisemitism now have their own state, and this state is fully integrated with us. It's part of our family of nations."

Palestinian identity itself is very radical, because there is nothing in this world system for us. There's nothing in this world system that offers us a home. Which is why, if you are genuinely Palestinian, you have to embrace that radicalness — the idea that we have to create a home not just for us, but for everyone. Maybe it's time for the refugees of the refugees, the victims of the victims, to offer everybody, all of us, salvation and a home.

If you go into any protest, you'll see that our flag, the Palestinian flag, has become the flag of change. It isn't only a national flag anymore. You see it when people want to express that this system isn't working and we need a replacement. So Palestine has become so much bigger than Palestine, and that is actually a challenge to us — both an opportunity and a challenge — because we, as Palestinians, have to decide who we want to be. Do we want to be another national project, or do we want to be a global project of collective liberation and systems change?

Before we start, I want to get a sense of the room. By a show of hands: how many of you are students at the university? How many are doing Middle Eastern studies or political science — almost everybody. How many are Palestinian, Arab, or of Arab background?

It's not very often that we get to hear Palestinians speak about the world system. A lot of the time we're either not platformed, or we're spoken about but not given the mic — or we're only presented to speak about our pain, our trauma, our victimization. This is a different kind of lecture, because we'll be talking about how Gaza is changing the world, and we're going to zoom out to very long historical arcs.

The news cycle moves fast — in a week you've already forgotten last week's news. That's disorienting; it makes it very easy not to see where you are in history.

The structure today is simple in principle: we want to talk about the world system and how it's changing. That's really two parts. But speaking about it in strict, dry terms felt wrong given how heavy this moment is — even for people who aren't Palestinian. So we'll pace differently, moving back and forth between system change and systems themselves.

This is the question on everyone's mind, certainly on mine and the minds of people around me: everything we've done in our lives for the past two years has happened against the backdrop of genocide. This is not normal — and sometimes you have to ask, what is "normal" even? Have we lost what that even means? It's been two years of relentless moral injury, two years of this feeling of betrayal. When does this end? Where is it taking us? This is a question I've had since right after October 7th, watching the explosion of dehumanization of Palestinians: where is this taking the world?

2. Time, History, and the Cycle of Systems

Living in a Western-dominated world order, we often don't notice the frames we've simply inherited. Other cultures see the world, and history, differently.

Let's start with time itself. We're used to living, in Western culture, with linear time — the idea that time always progresses, that the past is primitive and the future more evolved. That's not the only view of time. I'll offer three models.

Cyclical time. For a long period, most cultures thought of time in cycles, because we lived closer to nature — the moon has a monthly cycle, the sun a daily and yearly cycle, the seasons rotate. It was normal, in many cultures, to think of time in generational cycles. The ancient Greeks thought this way, and so did Islamic and Middle Eastern civilization more broadly. If you remember the movie 2012 — yes, I'm dating myself — it was about the Mayan calendar supposedly marking the end of the world in 2012. That's a Western misreading: it was the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar, not the end of time. Some cultures think in cycles not just of generations but of millennia — this is the view I adopt. It encodes a humble view of the human being.

A small example from Arabic: the word for "state" — as in Norway, a state — is dawla. The root dawla literally means "that which circulates, that which changes" — the exact opposite of the Western term "state," which implies something that doesn't change. Even our language encodes different paradigms.

Linear/progressive time. This is Western modernity, though it goes beyond that — the Roman Empire, for instance, lasted 2,200 years, so it was normal for people in that part of the world to think some things last forever.

Teleological/messianic time. The idea that the world is getting worse and we must suffer, because salvation is coming. We see this in communism — "the end of history" — and in liberalism as "the end of history" too. We see it in messianic Christianity, in messianic Zionism, and recently in AI discourse: the idea that we must suffer through everything AI is doing to our world because AGI is just around the corner — suffer now, salvation is coming.

The cycle. I want to dig into the cyclical view for a bit. Every system — not just the world system, but any paradigm — moves through a cycle:

It emerges out of the contradictions of the previous cycle, which will already have produced crises and stopped explaining the world adequately. Emergence is never just one system arriving; it's a competition between several.

Once a system answers the questions of its time — which doesn't mean it's the best system, only that it's fit for the times — it consolidates with astonishing speed. It's like selling water to a room full of people who just ran a marathon: there's a thirst for something to order the world, so it's adopted and institutionalized quickly, until it reaches its peak.

But the new system was born with its own contradictions — birth defects, in a sense. They don't go away with time; the body grows bigger, so the contradictions grow bigger too. They're never resolved — they expand and expand, the exceptional space grows larger and larger, until you pass the peak and enter decay. The contradictions become crises, and the crises compound until you reach the moment of breakage.

Breakage is when the system can no longer fulfill its own promises — it stops working even for people it used to work for. (For people who were always locked out or marginalized, it never worked; they were saying so from the start, but were ignored because they were marginalized and the system was still working for most people.) Breakage is when more and more people find themselves on the outside.

This is where we enter limbo — the old has broken, the new hasn't yet arrived — and I believe that's where we are now. This crisis phase can last a long time, even a generation. Things can make it last longer or shorter. But eventually a shift happens, a new system answers the unmet questions, and the cycle begins again.

Generations within the cycle. At any moment, three generations coexist: those just being born, those of us mid-career, and an older generation. By "generation" here I mean the effective span of a generation — 25 to 40 years — so three generations span roughly 75 to 90 years, which is how long a cycle tends to last.

Every generation is born into a different phase of the cycle. If you were born in the 1940s, '50s, even into the '60s, you were born into the consolidation phase of the current world system, which really began after the Second World War. I was born in the 1970s, around the time the system peaked or began to peak. This matters for what kind of work you end up doing: if you're born into consolidation, you're likely doing consolidation-type work — the system is explaining the world, doing visible good, and you enthusiastically adopt it. If you're born into crisis or limbo, your life looks very different.

3. Where We Are Now, and What a System Is

I believe we're in limbo. I've placed "you are here" slightly offset on the diagram, closer to the shift than to breakage, because I think the breakage has already happened.

Your positionality relative to the system — insider or marginalized — shapes your experience enormously. I was born a stateless Palestinian refugee. This system never worked for me. In fact, it was built on top of — the Nakba is roughly the same age as the system itself. So people like me noticed the breakage very early, and started working on it much earlier. Now, at a Palestine protest, most of the people you see are not Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim — they look like everyone else, like everybody in Norway. That tells me it's not only us feeling this. Everybody is.

We talk a lot about "changing the system" or "sticking it to the system" — but what is a system? A system is defined by complexity, function, and endurance — it's not a one-time event; it does something, continuously, through coordination. Every system needs six functions:

• Boundary — who's in, who's out; who does it work for
• Provisioning — how material needs are met
• Control — governance
• Cohesion — the shared story that holds it together (ideally people contribute to the system rather than being forced into it)
• Epistemics — how we know, how we sense
• Continuity/legacy — how the system perpetuates itself

This framework is fractal — it applies at different scales. A cell, a university, a nation-state all have analogues of these six functions. A cell has a membrane (boundary), metabolism (provisioning), gene regulation (control), a cytoskeleton (cohesion), receptors (epistemics), and DNA replication (legacy). This isn't a biology lecture, though — we're here for nation-states and the world system.

Zoomed out to the world system: it's organized around nation-states. Boundary is citizenship, visa hierarchies, border regimes. Provisioning is financialized capitalism. Control is U.S.-dominated — no longer strictly unipolar, moving toward multipolarity, but the U.S. is still dominant. Cohesion is the "liberal world order" narrative. Epistemics runs through academia, universities, think tanks, establishment media, and tech platforms. Continuity runs through the centrist political establishment and its connected elites and communities.

Keep in mind: this world system is designed. It doesn't just happen. When a system peaks, it normalizes itself — it makes itself feel natural and permanent. What I'm doing here is stripping away that clothing so you can see the structure.

4. Structural Inequality and Hierarchy

I want to introduce structural thinking, because we're used to talking about things in interpersonal terms. "Inequality" — I don't have as much as you — becomes something else once mapped onto a society: hierarchy. Bigotry ("I hate you," privately) becomes racism when the system itself is designed to include and exclude. Individual sexism becomes patriarchy when systematized. And so on with violence, inequality, hierarchy. To be clear, I'm not talking about administrative or functional hierarchy — a family or a team needing different roles for practical reasons, not about human worth. I'm talking about structural inequality.

There's a well-known metaphor — blind men and an elephant, which I think actually comes from India. Several blind people feel different parts of an elephant and each describes something different: a spear (the tusk), a wall (the leg), a snake (the trunk) — but it's all one elephant, and they're all right.

Looking at the world system this way: capitalism encodes hierarchy — it can't function otherwise. If everybody owned assets and nobody had to work, capitalism would be over; it needs some people to own assets and others to subsist by working. Colonialism requires a metropole and a colony — if both were independent, colonialism wouldn't work. Neocolonialism needs a "developed," creditor world and an indebted "global majority"/global south that is also a source of migrants and refugees. Racialized patriarchy — I'd argue patriarchy has fused with racism into a single racialized hierarchy, a ladder of human worth. What we have is a kind of global caste system, designed with just enough mobility to disguise itself — to make us believe we live in a fair world — but not enough mobility to threaten or expose the underlying structure.

What enables structural hierarchy in the first place? You need pre-existing inequality, and you need a story to justify it — because equality is actually the default. There's a famous experiment with capuchin monkeys (around 2003–2004): two monkeys are given different foods — one gets grapes (higher value), the other cucumbers. The one getting cucumbers reacts with visible outrage — even throwing the cucumber back at the experimenter. This is well documented; there's a whole field called "inequity aversion," and it isn't unique to humans — crows, dogs, and other animals show it too. The point: equality is built into us. Hierarchy requires convincing people to live within it, which requires a story that justifies why some are on top and others on the bottom. It also requires structural violence — meaning harm, a broader concept than physical violence — and it requires shame, which is the psychological enforcement mechanism of hierarchy: you need to be shamed in order to comply.

5. Milestones of the Current World System, and Why Israel Is Exceptional

Briefly, the key dates: 1945, the end of the Second World War. 1974, the petrodollar system, establishing the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency and binding it to the Gulf states. 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the "end of history" narrative — the system's peak. 2008, the financial crisis we still haven't recovered from — things have arguably gotten worse since. 2011, the Arab Spring, when people like me arrived on the world stage. 2023, Gaza — the genocide, which I read as a paradigmatic signal that the system is ending.

Every one of the six functions is now in crisis. Boundary: I was stateless until two years ago; we have a migrant crisis, a refugee crisis — Gaza itself is a refugee crisis, since many Gazans are refugees or children of refugees, and they can't leave (that would be ethnic cleansing) or stay (that is genocide). Provisioning: extreme wealth inequality, the top 1% capturing more and more, people working longer for less. Control: democracy itself is in crisis. Cohesion: a widespread feeling of living in an unfair world. Epistemics: truth is no longer protected, whether on social media or through AI. Continuity: a worldwide collapse of the political center, which used to guarantee that people in power were part of, or connected to, the elite — hence the global rise of the far right, and to a lesser extent the far left.

Why Israel is exceptional. Israel is a European project, founded by European Jews fleeing European persecution. Its founders were European Jews — not representative of Jews worldwide, including the many Jews of the Arab world, who were at the time part of the Arab national and anticolonial project. Israel effectively hijacked Jewish agency worldwide and reframed it as a European consciousness.

Every system, when created, needs an exceptional space — a space where the normal rules don't apply, because that's part of sovereignty: only the sovereign can break its own rules. This world system needed such a space.

The previous world order, roughly from the mid-19th century (around 1848), combined colonialism and nationalism. The late 19th century saw the "Scramble for Africa" (Africa was almost entirely colonized between roughly 1880 and 1914) alongside the rise of nationalism — Germany and Italy, for instance, weren't unified states until then. Before the Second World War, European nations consolidated into ethnic nation-states and then colonized the world (colonialism itself predates this, but this era made it the global regime).

So: how did the nations responsible for colonialism, two world wars, a hundred million dead, and globalized racial hierarchy emerge from the Second World War calling themselves the good guys? By absolving themselves — claiming moral authority and avoiding self-scrutiny through the creation of Israel: "We're no longer racists, fascists, Nazis — look, the people who suffered under a thousand years of European antisemitism now have their own state, fully integrated into our family of nations, our Western order."

A note on tools: I might sound anxious about AI, but it is genuinely useful. I'd encourage you to take any of what I'm presenting and put it into ChatGPT — ask it interesting questions, such as: in what ways is Israel exceptional in history? Has anything in history resembled it — ethnic nationalism established on someone else's land, or a state so dependent on constant Western aid while being entirely hegemonic in its own region? Or a state created by genocide survivors — though this narrative ("Israel was created by Holocaust survivors/refugees") isn't entirely accurate, since the Zionist project predates the Second World War, and the relationship between the state of Israel and actual Holocaust survivors is complicated. Netanyahu, for instance, has referenced how Israel, after October 7th, "fought back" and was "not driven to the slaughter" — a reference to internal Israeli shame that so many Jews were "driven to the slaughter" without resisting during the Holocaust. There is something — and I tread carefully here — about the hundred years of Palestinian resistance that is deeply frustrating, not just to the world order, but specifically to Israelis.

6. Gaza as a Paradigmatic Event, and the Four Responses to Limbo

Israel is an exceptional project, but the Gaza genocide is also extremely exceptional — and living through it, we don't always recognize just how exceptional it is. This is not only Israel's crime. Looking again at the six functions, the Western order is deeply implicated in every part of this genocide. This is the West's genocide. And the Western system cannot stop it without indicting itself, and cannot ignore it without exposing itself.

Nothing is going back to "normal" after this. You can see nations doubling down on the two-state solution and recognizing Palestine — not really for Palestinians' benefit, but to keep their own policies coherent: if they actually acknowledged what's happening — genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism — they'd have to change policy radically, and they can't. Chanting "two-state solution" is a way of preserving policy coherence without confronting the underlying reality. But the Gaza genocide is a border, a paradigmatic signal — nothing goes back to normal after this.

Four responses to limbo. In a period of limbo, when a system's promises are visibly broken and there's demand for something new, four kinds of responses emerge:

• Reactionaries — "let's go back." The problem: there's no back to go to; the world and its structures have already changed, so past solutions don't work. Reactionaries are usually people the system was built for, whose coverage under the system has been shrinking as its contradictions grow. You can see the global rise of the far right here. Reactionaries can never actually offer a real solution — in power, they intensify the crisis rather than resolve it. Their true role in the cycle is as accelerators.
• Nihilists — people the system never covered, who conclude: this is unsalvageable, burn it down. I think of ISIS, but also of many non-religious people who reach the same conclusion.
• Centrists — still inside the system, denying anything is wrong. As time passes they look increasingly absurd to everyone but themselves — not because they can't see it, but because they can't afford to: acknowledging it would mean having to offer a solution they don't have.
• Visionaries — say: this isn't working, we need to replace it. There's a crucial difference between "tear it down" (nihilism) and "replace it" (architecture) — the latter requires systems thinking. Visionaries are often, though not exclusively, marginalized people, since marginalized people were never covered by the previous cycle. That's why, as a stateless Palestinian refugee, it makes sense for me to work on the next system — this one was never my home, and building a new system is a way of building a home.

7. Building the Next System, and Working in Historical Time

If we're building a new world system, the six functions above are exactly the questions we have to answer — this is your menu of work. If you're young, living through limbo, you may live long enough to see the next system arise, and even help consolidate it. This is your work, and this is how we think about our work at Kawaakibi Foundation — though we know this isn't a job for one organization or one team; it's a job for a generation, really for the whole world.

What does it take to disconnect from the churn of the present and think in longer terms? I want to offer another model. The cycle we discussed runs in generations — that's "historical time," where actual system change and paradigm shifts happen. But there's a much larger cycle: "cosmological time" — the rise and fall of conceptions of the human being, worldviews, cultures, religions, spiritual movements, running in millennia. Europe, for instance, is still in its own unfinished cosmological transition — from a Roman-Christian fusion to Enlightenment secular humanism in the 18th century. Cosmological time is such a long arc that it recedes into the background of our thinking, even though it occasionally surfaces.

Then there's "political time" — crisis time, the week's news, getting faster and faster. Political time is structurally conservative: it favors whoever already holds power, platform, or media infrastructure — they'll simply be louder. As long as you're stuck in political time, you can't really build power; it favors the already powerful.

Most activism today is trapped in political time — stuck in the news cycle, chasing visibility, views, and algorithms that reward exactly that. I'm not saying everyone should exit political time — some people need to be at protests, doing interviews, going viral. But if all of us are only in political time and nobody is in historical time, we're not actually changing anything — we're deepening the system's crisis. My team and I work primarily in historical time, but there's also a skill in working the border between the two: writing something highly relevant to today's news that still pulls people toward systems thinking. That's the kind of work I want us to do at Kawaakibi.

8. Listening to Palestinians, a Note on Generations, and the Kulna Platform

A note on listening to Palestinians: a lot of independent media covers Palestine extensively, but what's often missing is Palestinians themselves — rarely given the platform to speak about the world, not just about who died last week or how we feel about our pain, but about how we think about history and change.

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American author and academic, coined the phrase "the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees." I'm reminded of a news segment I saw two or three years before the Gaza genocide, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine — about Jewish Ukrainian refugees displaced by the war who ended up in Israel and were given housing in a West Bank settlement, on someone else's land. Palestinians sit at the bottom of the oppression food chain — the victims of the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees of the refugees.

Palestinian identity is radical because there's nothing in this world system for us. That's why, if you are genuinely Palestinian, you have to embrace that radicalness — the idea that we must build a home not only for ourselves, but for everyone. Maybe it's time for the refugees of the refugees, the victims of the victims, to offer everyone salvation and a home. At protests, our flag has become the flag of change — not just a national flag, but a symbol that the system isn't working and needs replacing. Palestine has become bigger than Palestine, which is both an opportunity and a challenge to us: do we want to be another national project, or a global project of collective liberation and systems change?

A note on generations. This didn't start on October 7th. In a way it started in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration — issued even before the British occupied Palestine — though in certain ways it precedes even that. Rashid Khalidi, in The Hundred Years' War on Palestine, frames it explicitly in generational waves of attack on Palestinian identity. In a hundred years, Palestinians never won, but we were never defeated. In that same century, the USSR rose and fell, regimes came and went, technologies came and went. One constant for over a hundred years: Palestinians have kept resisting. Just as Israel is exceptional, and the Gaza genocide is exceptional, I believe the Palestinian people are exceptional — and we are offered both an opportunity and an obligation to help build a system that can include all of us.

Kulna. Which brings me to the platform we're launching, called Kulna — "all of us." Kawaakibi Foundation was born out of the Arab Spring; I'm an Arab Spring refugee myself, as are the other co-founders, from across the Arab world. Since coming to Norway, our team has expanded to include people who aren't from that background at all, but bring a different perspective — Kulna reflects that. It literally means "all of us," and that's exactly what we mean: collective liberation.

The platform hasn't launched yet — it will launch next year. You can follow updates via the QR code and on Instagram. Thank you very much — we have about half an hour for questions.

9. Q&A

On predicting how the system ends

It's very difficult to predict how a system ends, mainly because it becomes fragile, and fragile systems can't fix themselves. My own view: Gaza alone isn't "enough" to end a system this size. The post-1945 system was the first truly global system — before it, systems were localized or regionalized. It's really only after 1945 (with roots in the earlier rise of colonialism) that the whole world started running on "Western time." Enormous systems, even broken ones, remain enormously violent and powerful. I've watched regimes fall, as in the Arab Spring — everything looks imposing until the last five minutes, and then the collapse is sudden and breathtaking. Typically, collapse happens only once the alternative has already arrived; many people cling to a broken system simply because it's the only thing available, but the moment an alternative exists, the old order is abandoned with astonishing speed.

I think this system probably survives into the mid-2030s — I don't think collapse is imminent. Beyond the Gaza genocide, watch the still-unfolding Epstein-related crisis, which is really asking who gets to rule us, by what right the global elite occupies that position. And I think we're in an AI bubble; the next financial crash will be worse than 2008, and that's where we'll need real answers about what comes after capitalism, since capitalism will have generated more crises than solutions by then. We have an ongoing project at Kawaakibi on post-capitalist economics — still in development.

Follow-up: how would you hope it ends, versus how you predict it will?

Not all cycles are equal — some are born with far fewer crises than others, even though all systems eventually decay as the world changes. There's a link between historical/intergenerational trauma and the next cycle: Israel, for instance, was an exceptionalized space created partly to contain the unprocessed trauma of the previous cycle. If we do a good job, at the end of this cycle, of actually integrating its traumas rather than carrying them into the next system, that requires transitional justice and a much better understanding of historical trauma — another project we're developing at Kawaakibi, on trauma historiography.

We also need a provisioning system genuinely capable of matching reality: we already, practically, live in a world of abundance — more than enough food (we throw away more than we eat), more than enough housing for everyone — and yet extreme poverty persists. We've effectively ended scarcity in many domains; we just haven't figured out distribution. Historically, that's remarkable. Some things will remain genuinely scarce — attention, time, quality. What I hope for is a better system for everyone: collective liberation. It's not guaranteed. That's precisely why the stakes are high, and why this is both a responsibility and an opportunity — and I believe Palestinians will play a significant role in it.

Is this the beginning of the end of the American superpower, given how every empire in history has eventually ended?

It's the end of the end, not the beginning of the end. After 1945, the United States was the only Allied power to emerge unscathed, with enormous industrial capacity and, after the war, most of Europe's gold. The U.S. was itself still a frontier country — active settler expansion continued domestically until the frontier formally closed around 1893, which is very recent, historically.

After the war, the U.S. built a global trade system — a genuinely well-designed, more inclusive system than what preceded it (though it never included us). It rebuilt even its defeated enemies, Germany and Japan, and its allies, through the Marshall Plan, framed as fighting communism — a justification that outlived communism itself, while the empire remained.

Key to this is the U.S. dollar. Until 1971, the international financial system ran on Bretton Woods, under which the dollar was convertible to gold — anyone could, in principle, redeem dollars for gold, and countries like France sometimes did. As the U.S. expanded into a full empire, there wasn't enough gold to back the dollars in circulation, so in 1971 the U.S. ended dollar-gold convertibility, making the dollar a purely fiat currency — faith in the dollar became faith in the U.S. government.

This produced a crisis, compounded by the 1973 Middle East war, when Arab oil producers refused to sell oil to the West in support of Egypt against Israel. In response, the U.S. struck a deal with Middle Eastern oil producers: oil would be sold only in dollars — even to a country like India or China offering its own currency. This created infinite structural demand for the dollar. U.S. superpower status is fundamentally tied to the dollar: any two countries trading with each other, regardless of their relationship to the U.S., needed dollars because everyone needs oil. The system also included U.S. military protection — so Gulf states didn't need huge militaries — and a mechanism for recycling that oil wealth: countries would buy U.S. Treasury bonds, parking their dollars in Western banks and creating both demand for, and a "sink" for, the dollar.

This explains a great deal about the world we live in. A very strong currency makes imports cheap and exports expensive for the country holding it — meaning, over time, fewer and fewer factories remain in America, since it becomes more efficient to manufacture in China, Vietnam, or elsewhere. The petrodollar system created the world we see: dollar hegemony, the U.S.'s "exorbitant privilege" to borrow cheaply, run enormous deficits, sustain artificially high living standards, and outcompete rivals who, like the USSR, had to physically extract oil while the U.S. could effectively print dollars for it. It also produced the underlying contradiction: American industrial capacity was exported abroad, China became the world's factory, and Europe settled into a role as system administrator.

Now to Trump: the system took a severe shock in 2008. What Trump is doing now — with tariffs and his broader approach to the world stage — is actively dismantling the very system the U.S. built to place itself at the center of the world, including the dollar system itself. My own view is that the current AI investment bubble is partly masking the deterioration of the world trading system and the dollar's position. If the U.S. loses reserve-currency status, U.S. power will collapse with astonishing speed, and American living standards will crash hard and fast. So: we're not at the beginning of the end of U.S. power — we're at the end of the end. These things look imposing right up until the final five minutes, and then they collapse very fast. Trump says he wants to make America great again, but he is functionally an accelerant of decline — much as Netanyahu, who talks about eternity, is actually accelerating Israel's decline. I expect the world to look very different by the late 2030s or into the 2040s — which is why I think the mid-2030s will be a genuinely pivotal period.

Will cryptocurrency accelerate this process?

Bitcoin emerged directly out of the 2008 financial crash, designed as an inflation-proof currency that can't be arbitrarily expanded. But there's a principle in economics — Gresham's Law — that bad money drives out good: people spend the less valuable currency and hoard the more valuable one. That's essentially what's happened with Bitcoin: it hasn't become a functioning currency, since people don't buy lunch with it — they hold it. Alongside it, plenty of crypto projects are not inflation-proof at all — they're speculative instruments, and the space is full of scams and people chasing quick money. We've recently seen two sitting presidents, Javier Milei in Argentina and Donald Trump in the U.S., launch their own coins, largely benefiting their own circles.

Bitcoin specifically — the idea of an inflation-proof currency — might be part of how we eventually fix the economic system, creating money that can't simply be inflated whenever elites choose to create more of it. Inflation is itself a mechanism of inequality: the people who receive new money first are typically those with direct access to government contracts, while the value of savings held by people without assets erodes. If you hold assets, inflation makes you richer; if you hold cash, you get poorer — which is one driver of extreme inequality. As for the broader field, most speculative coins — Dogecoin and similar projects — will likely trend toward zero over the long run. The two projects I have real confidence in are Bitcoin and Ethereum — Ethereum mainly because, unlike Bitcoin's still-mysterious, pseudonymous creator, Ethereum has a known, active, well-led community around it.

On whether accumulated, quiet change during "historical time" is really moving toward a break — and how do we know it isn't just heading toward another iteration of consolidation, especially since Israelis presumably see their own "accumulation" moving toward their own goals?

This question came from someone Lebanese, noting that Lebanon has lived in near-continuous crisis longer than the questioner has been alive — the Lebanese civil war began in 1975, and I was born in 1977. Every time you think you've hit bottom, it gets worse. So: how do we know this is really the end of a cycle, and not just another rock-bottom before more of the same?

Let me address the Israeli side of this first. Israel is exceptional but also operates in an exceptionalized information space — Hebrew is spoken almost nowhere else, so Hebrew-language discourse reaches almost exclusively Jewish Israelis. For a population of roughly seven and a half million — more Jewish Israelis than there are Norwegians — Israeli society also has a remarkably narrow menu of media options. I read a great deal of translated Hebrew media for my work, and I can tell you Israeli society has still not woken from the shock of October 7th — it remains, in many ways, sealed inside its own reality. I expect that only after a ceasefire will that reckoning begin — the realization of how badly Israel's standing has eroded internationally, including among the American right, let alone the left.

The Israeli psyche combines being both victimizer and victim simultaneously. When Israel strikes Iran or Syria, you see a mix of exuberant strength — "look how afraid of us everyone is" (visible even in official messaging; the foreign minister has posted videos of frightened Middle Easterners almost as a point of pride) — alongside genuine existential fear. Israelis feel simultaneously dominant and existentially threatened, and that combination produces a cycle that cannot break itself from within: the more afraid Israelis get, the more violent the response; the more violent, the more isolated; the more isolated, the more afraid. It will only break from the outside — and we are already seeing that happen.

As for the first question: not every apparent "emergence" is a true beginning — there are false starts constantly. It's entirely possible we're looking at another ten or twenty years of crisis rather than immediate transformation; this is a very large, very resilient global system, capable of absorbing a great deal of shock. But that doesn't change the underlying fact that systems churn, that this one will eventually break, and that whatever comes next depends on us actively building it.