Socialist Register 2024: A New Global Geometry

In October 2022 President Joe Biden launched the new National Security Strategy, which warned that the world was at an “inflection point” in which the “post-Cold War era is definitively over, and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next”. US leadership would be needed more than ever, the document declared, to define “the future of the international order” by marshalling its unparalleled economic, military and diplomatic resources to confront America’s geopolitical rivals. While it is clearly premature to speak of the end of the liberal economic order, let alone the development of a multipolar international system, it is not too early to take stock of how these momentous changes, even if not spelling the end of globalization, might alter its historical trajectory, or point toward a new global geometry. And, from there to assess potential vulnerabilities and resistances from socialist movements with their historical demands for a democratic and egalitarian world order.