After that, things would slow down. The corpse’s tissues would be painstakingly scavenged; its gases, puff by puff, disgorged. Yet its teeth, if spared by scavengers, could outlast most species. A tooth in the abyssal plain attracts charged particles. Over millions of years, that ion-gathering tooth becomes a rock — and such rocks, today, are grenades beneath the palace of international law.

For a war is now underway: a war for the rocky riches of the deep. Those rocks are teeming with the kind of minerals whose unique physical properties make them essential to modern manufacturing. So far, they have been mined on land, with China coming to dominate their supply. But at the bottom of the world’s oceans lie the forbidden fruit of the mining sector: an estimated $20 trillion of deep-sea minerals. Since the Sixties, diplomats have fought over that unplucked fruit. Soon, the conflict will enter public view, bringing to a head many decades of diplomatic skirmishing.

The first fortifications were laid by a Maltese diplomat. With Uncle Sam soon to imprint the virgin lunar regolith with its first bootprint, Arvid Pardo urged the UN to declare another vast, unclaimed realm — the ocean floor — off-limits to colonists.

“The dark oceans,” Pardo told the General Assembly, “were the womb of life: from the protecting oceans life emerged.” It was to the depths of the seas, Pardo explained, that man was returning: laying cables, drilling for oil, dispatching submersibles, prospecting for minerals. “His penetration of the deep could mark the beginning of the end for man, and indeed for life as we know it on this earth: it could also be a unique opportunity to lay solid foundations for a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future for all peoples.”

Pardo’s principal worry was that the ocean floor, shrouded by the opacity of the sea, would become the natural home of missile silos. Such installations could be laid dangerously close to enemy shores. But he also feared that the ocean floor would be exploited, that richer, more rapacious countries would appropriate its buried treasure: not only the spoils of ancient shipwrecks, but the natural bounties of gold, silver, and the materials that we now know as critical minerals. Those valuable rocks, Pardo feared, those slowly-growing bundles of metals, would be plundered.

The high seas, Pardo concluded, referring to the parts of the oceans beyond the reach of the coast, were “the common heritage of all mankind”. This is a demarcation that stirs the blood of both Third World diplomats, to whom it signals that their countries might be handed a generous slice of profit, and their US counterparts, to whom it signals that the slice will be cut from an American cake.

Eventually, in 1982, the UN came up with a treaty to govern deep-sea mining. It was an extraordinary document, outlining a proposal that the UN itself, via an entity called “the Enterprise”, be permitted to mine; that signatories’ mining operations, should they outcompete conventional mines in developing countries, could be compelled by UN judges to pause their work; that profits be taxed by the UN and redistributed among member states; and that if a signatory were to develop particularly effective mining technology, such as equipment that could mine a seabed five kilometers below the surface, it would have to share that technology with the rest of the world — even if the innovator were the US and a beneficiary were the USSR. Perhaps predictably, the proposals were greeted with obloquy from Ronald Reagan. The US did not sign the treaty, nor did it sign the watered-down version that followed.

Even without the Americans involved, the would-be regulators have found it impossible to reach an agreement. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), which was set up by the UN in 1994, continues to deliberate. Of particular difficulty is the unresolved question of precisely how much harm undersea mining will cause to marine life. Europe lobbies for caution; the Third World for a cut of the profits; but those who are best-placed to profit are becoming impatient. The Pacific island state Nauru is leading the charge, but Japan, Russia and India, too, are tired of waiting.

Over the years, the ISA has issued a limited number of licenses for commercial operations, sponsored by individual governments, to explore the ocean floor, if not yet to mine it. To the relief of environmentalists, the deadlock has lasted decades; on rumbles maritime law’s equivalent of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

Given that the international attempts at regulation have been going on since the Moon landings, it’s remarkable that the US, for better or worse, has only very recently decided to defy a moratorium to which it was not a signatory. China’s dominance of the critical minerals market has been decades in the making and was never a secret. It was as early as 1992, when the ISA was but a twinkle in the UN’s eye, that Deng Xiaoping said that “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”.

Consider almost any critical mineral and the story is the same: China either mines it or has an ally mine it. Take lithium, a metal whose lightness of weight and generosity with electrons makes it a critical ingredient for batteries. Or tungsten, whose high melting point and diamond-surpassing hardness make it a potent ingredient to rocketry, aviation, munitions manufacturing and mining. The same is true of neodymium, which makes for the most powerful permanent magnets on the market; and dozens more. Be it an electric vehicle, a fighter jet or data center, if it’s 21st-century Western hardware, Xi Jinping has it in a headlock. 

Add the headlock, administered by China, to the deadlock, perpetuated by the ISA, and the result is a truculent America. Already, the US has set up a club of Western-aligned countries that, together, are attempting to lessen their dependence on China. So serious is America’s shortfall of critical minerals, in other words, that Donald Trump’s White House has had to make a rare foray into multilateralism — even as it shakes down Greenland and Ukraine for their own mineral resources. 

But these various efforts do not touch the seabed and its $20 trillion booty. It has not escaped Washington’s attention that the ISA’s long delays suit China, which happens to be the body’s biggest funder.

Last April, the White House lost patience. President Trump signed an executive order via which the US has given itself the power to award deep-sea mining permits, bypassing the ISA. America’s favored mining companies will target the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast stretch of the Pacific seabed where the local polymetallic nodules harbor metals — nickel, manganese, copper, cobalt — that are crucial for batteries.

Drums are now sounding in the deep. The US could issue its first mining permit this year or next, though large-scale activity will take several years more. The likely beneficiary is the Metals Company, whose two exploration licenses cover an area larger than Great Britain. These licenses, having been sponsored in part by Nauru and Tonga, are recognized by the ISA. Yet trouble looms. America is on the unilateral warpath, and already the old regime has suffered a defection. Japan, putatively a member of the ISA, has agreed to collaborate with the US, and in February, Tokyo announced that it had successfully extracted mineral-rich mud from elsewhere in the Pacific. Thought to be among the minerals in that mud is neodymium.

The CCP, still aiming to oversee regulation that suits Chinese interests, remains committed to the ISA, which is attempting to hurry things up. In July, the body will meet in Kingston, Jamaica, but whether Part II of its 31st International Session will be the one that does the trick, turning those exploration licenses into full-fledged mining permits, is unlikely. Those countries that desire a share of the subsea spoils must now decide whether to stick with the ISA, join the American breakaway — or start a piratical operation of their own.

Where does that leave Britain? Last November, the Government published a new critical minerals strategy. It classifies 34 minerals as critical, noting that the vast majority of them are 100% imported. We should meet at least 10% of our needs domestically, the report said; to that end, the Government is keen that we get better at recycling those minerals we have already used. It is less keen to use natural gas to make our industrial energy, which is the most expensive in Europe, any cheaper. Instead, the Government will give metal refiners, who turn mined ores into high-purity product, relief on their high energy bills. Taxing Peter, in other words, to give a tax break to Paul.

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Other parts of the strategy dig a little closer to the root of the problem. Through various financial vehicles, the Government is seeking to spur new mining endeavors, for Britain’s geology, already so many times our benefactor, has more to yield. This spring, I visited a new tungsten mine in Cornwall, one that has been the beneficiary of Government support. Walled off by bales of straw, the drill rig sits unobtrusively in a field of grass. Beneath that field is Europe’s highest-grade undeveloped tungsten resource. As Dennis Rowland, the project’s managing director, told me, Cornwall might seem over-mined, speckled as it is with the ruins of 19th-century tin mines. But by the standards of modern mining, it is under-explored, and the country’s needs have changed. “Our project, historically, wouldn’t have been mined,” he said, “because tungsten wasn’t exactly what they were looking for.” But it is tungsten we need today, as well as lithium — another specialty of the Cornish bedrock.

For all the governmental talk of Britain and the West moving to “warfighting readiness”, then, Britain’s critical minerals strategy still leaves many sacrifices unmade. We won’t rip up the countryside for the sake of mining: in Omagh, Northern Ireland, a mining company has been waiting for eight years for permission to begin a gold-mining operation worth tens of billions of pounds. Nor will we rip up our commitments, legislated and otherwise, to reduce our emissions and to protect places like the Clarion-Clipperton Zone.

Yet a more deeply imperiled Britain would inevitably become more creative in its sourcing of critical minerals. Antarctica, another of those unearthly realms, offers a continent’s-worth of forbidden resources, of which an exposed slice of north-reaching peninsula is claimed by Britain. “Should Antarctica,” a New York Times report asked in February, “be added to the treasure hunters’ list?”

The overseas territories, then, might one day help address Britain’s shortfall of critical minerals. We are unlikely to achieve critical-mineral autarky, but we can at least build some leverage. The same is true for what we might call the underseas territories; and in this case, the deposits often need simply to be scooped from the seafloor rather than blasted out of bedrock.

Through Trump’s caprice, Britain retains the Chagos Islands. The importance of the US-UK base on Diego Garcia is by now well-known; a more underrated providential gift of the archipelago, however, is its proximity to the mineral riches of the Indian Ocean. There are polymetallic nodules in this ocean, too, and polymetallic sulfides: hydrothermal vents that look like spires from the Sagrada Familia and are rich in copper, zinc, gold and silver. On this particular battlefield in the war for critical minerals, it is India, now in possession of three regional exploration licenses from the ISA, that has been the most muscular.

Britain, committed to a moratorium on deep-sea mining, and perhaps unwilling to irritate India and China, did not compete for those licenses. Discreetly, though, and despite itself, the country has a claim on two slices of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. These claims descend from the Seventies, when the American defense and aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin had an interest in deep-sea mining. Because the US was not part of the ISA, Lockheed turned to the British government instead. With London’s help, Lockheed acquired two exploration licenses, which together cover an area the size of England. When Lockheed pulled out of the region, it passed the licenses, with Britain’s approval, to a second company; when that company folded, the licenses were transferred to a startup, Glomar Minerals. It is as if Britain owns a magic ring that keeps finding its way back into our pocket. 

In April I spoke to Walter Sognnes, who leads Glomar. “The UK is in a better position than, for example, Germany,” he told me, “because you are an offshore nation. But you are missing the window, I think, because everything is stepping up, and you are not taking the lead. You are moving too slowly.”

Glomar, naturally, is held in deep suspicion by Greenpeace. But Sognnes argues it is better for the West to mine the ocean floor, with governments maintaining scrutiny of the companies concerned, than to pay for those same metals to be extracted near-lawlessly from third-world rainforests.

In time, the world might not need either, for the vast majority of the universe’s resources exist either above the deposits we know about or below them. Buoyed by Nasa’s retrieval of regolith from an asteroid, an American aerospace company, AstroForge, aims to mine richly-endowed asteroids, and has already put two experimental craft into space. Hades Mining, a German startup, hopes to one day use lasers to penetrate many miles into the Earth’s crust, multiplying the amount of deposits we are able to extract. Both ventures must contend with exceptionally hostile frontiers: the abyss of space, with its vast distances and lethal radiation, and the molten hell that is miles-deep bedrock.

But neither frontier will be conquered imminently. And Britain, like the liberal-order firmament as a whole, does not have time to wait for difficult tradeoffs to evaporate. To forgo our primary form of energy, in our case oil and gas, is a luxury that would hardly have been conceivable before the modern era. To outsource to adversaries our supply of critical minerals, the resources that make an energy transition possible, is complacency. The US will mine the Clarion-Clipperton Zone; American and Chinese astronauts will seek to use the natural resources of the Moon, too, just as their countries industrialize and militarize lower-Earth orbit. Where such endeavors differ from traditional colonialism, crucially, is that these new realms have no indigenous populations. But their purpose, one that is common to any colonial expedition, is to turn the resources of a frontier into wealth for a homeland; and if there is collateral damage, then so be it.

The world’s civically-minded middleweights will not relish this dynamic, but they cannot ignore it. Britain, one of those middleweights, must return to the frontier.

Even before the tariff tiff, Europeans were at risk of a geopolitical squeeze between the US and China. In trade, this is now happening. Despite Trump’s U-turn last week, we are still in a worst-case economic scenario. American tariffs on Chinese imports are now 145% — a level at which nations stop trading, even if Trump has since made an exemption for electronic goods and components. In all this, Europe emerges as the loser: it is far more exposed to trade shocks than America because it relies more on foreign trade.

How, then, can Europeans protect their interests? My advice is first and foremost not to get distracted by military matters. What is the greater threat to Europe — the US abandoning multilateral free trade, or a Russian invasion of Northern Europe in the mid-2030s? In the short term, it’s the former. While Russia has strong defense capabilities, it will not have the resources to fight another big war for at least 10 years. Europe will need to get its military in shape before then, but this is a medium-to-long-term job. By contrast, the split in the transatlantic alliance and the assault on the international trading system is taking place right now. It’s the threat we should be most focused on today.

An adequate response to this threat would require deeper cooperation between the EU and the UK. But this means not getting sidetracked by another Brexit debate. When the European Commission announced it would open talks with the UK on defense cooperation, France immediately suggested that this would be a good moment to re-open the EU-UK talks about fish. Never underestimate the level of pettiness in European politics.

The most immediate joint action I would recommend is a coordinated macroeconomic policy response in the form of a fiscal stimulus for consumption and investment. Perhaps Canada could be roped in, or even China. Now is a great moment to do this because it would protect Europe and the UK from a sharp recession — plus, it wouldn’t cost very much. The infamous bond vigilantes are currently busy fighting Trump — and they can’t fight on two fronts at once. Last week, the US bond market came close to seizing up as people lost confidence in the future role of the dollar as a global reserve currency. If you move your money out of the US, you have to move it somewhere. This is why the euro is rising against the dollar.

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Economic stimulus would not only mitigate the economic downturn in Europe, it would also help to rebalance the global economy. The problem of global imbalances is not really about trade, as Trump erroneously insists. It’s about the US saving too little, and the rest of the world, especially China and the EU, saving too much. The difference between what a country saves and what it invests is approximately the same as the difference between what it exports and what it imports. It is the financial side of this equation that drives the product side, and not the other way round.

If the EU, the UK, Canada, and perhaps even China came together to agree on a joint stimulus, it would be a win-win for everyone. If the Trump administration is genuinely keen to solve the problem of global imbalances, as members of Trump’s team suggest, then they should welcome such an antidote.

My next suggestion will probably go down less well with the Americans. The EU and UK should begin to replace a traditional diplomacy centered around relationships with a diplomacy that prioritizes the national, or European, interest. After all, Trump’s tariffs do not benefit Europe: not a single European country can align with Trump on this issue and emerge victorious.

If the US and China decide to fight it out, Europe would be wise not to take sides. Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, has so far refrained from doing so: “We shouldn’t jump in with both feet to retaliate”, he told the Liaison Committee of the House of Commons. This is exactly the right thing to do. And Europe should follow his lead by staying neutral. After all, Trump is not our friend. He could not care less who wins the Russia-Ukraine war, in which he casts himself as a neutral arbiter. He does not play on our team.

Europe should see the US and China as strategic competitors, not as enemies. For the EU, now would be a prime moment to revisit the EU-China investment agreement. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron negotiated the deal with President Xi in 2020, but the European Parliament shelved it a year later, after China banned a few MEPs from visiting. The relationship became frosty, though it has been thawing lately. When Rachel Reeves, the UK chancellor, visited China recently, she came out in favor of greater cooperation. It would be easier to cooperate, however, if the EU, the UK, and Canada acted together. If only we weren’t so afraid of provoking Trump’s fury.

Of course, any cooperation with China must respect national security interests. It would be wrong for Europe or the UK to rely on China for critical infrastructure — we should not revert to the bad old days when we did not care about security. But cooperation is not the same as dependency. The goal is to make sure that the global trading system can continue to function, with or without America.

The alternative to this would be dire. The US and China could someday stop trading with one another altogether. In such a scenario, China would start selling its unsold goods to Europe at knock-down prices, driving European competitors out of business. The EU and the UK might then respond by imposing tariffs on China. As we saw last week, China would retaliate immediately. The world trading system would suffer a cardiac arrest.

Yet while greater cooperation makes perfect sense for the EU, the UK might be wary of it. The island nation is still holding out for a trade deal with Trump, and hoping that the President will drop the 10% tariff. If this were to happen, the UK would find itself in a very small group of privileged American trading partners. China will clearly not be part of that group. And I doubt the EU will be either, especially if Trump imposes a 20% tariff on the bloc, and it retaliates. Perhaps South Korea, Vietnam, or Japan will make the cut.

But this would mean the world splitting into competing tariff zones, with the EU and the UK on opposite sides of a new global tariff border. And if Trump and Starmer were to agree to a trade deal, Trump would almost certainly insist that the UK mirror US tariff policy. He could not otherwise impose different tariffs on different countries.

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Would this make sense for the UK? In 2023, the UK imported £115 billion of goods and services from the US and exported £187 billion. That same year, it imported £466 billion from the EU and exported £356 billion. So the UK imports roughly four times as much from the EU as it does from the US. And it exports twice as much to the EU than it does to the US. The trade numbers with China are smaller, but it all adds up. With this in mind, it would not make sense for the UK to break with the EU and Canada to join Team America.

Naturally, trade numbers are not cast in stone. They would change if the UK were to align with the US. In a world where many services are delivered digitally, and where container shipping is cheap, geography matters less than it used to. And there is at least one scenario in which it would benefit the UK to align with America: if the EU were to retaliate against American tariffs, the UK would be foolish to join in. Post-Brexit Britain cannot afford a tariff war.

The UK and the EU have three options now: align with the US, become more independent, or do nothing and let others decide their fate. My own preference would be the second course of independence. My hunch is that the UK will try to stick with its traditional alliance with the US for as long as possible. I see the EU splintering: Italy, under Meloni, will align with the US. So will Hungary. And so may some eastern European countries that prioritize security over trade. Meanwhile, France will seek greater independence, and Spain will favor a closer alliance with China.

What about Germany? Friedrich Merz, the presumptive next German chancellor, would be more inclined than any of his predecessors to seek a closer alliance with the US. He did not agree with the EU’s negotiating position on Brexit. What the Germans and the British have in common is that they are instinctive free traders. If there is any hope for Europe to lead a world of free-trading nations, Germany and Britain would need to be at the forefront.

This is, after all, a time for action. Either we rise to the occasion now, or else we allow the era of global free trade to slip from our fingers — and with it, all our prosperity.

On Wednesday, Trump put a 90-day pause on tariffs above 10%. There was one major exception: China, with whom the president has started a perilous game of chicken. After his administration imposed a further 34% surcharge to the earlier set of tariffs it had slapped on China, the Chinese leadership reciprocated, applying the same 34% right back. Even as he paused tariffs for the rest of the world, Trump announced he would put China’s tariff up to 125%.

The markets rallied in response to the 90-day pause. But in the four days that followed Liberation Day, Americans saw more than $6 trillion of their wealth evaporate in the stock market, and they’re still sitting on losses. Their interest rates spiked as investors dumped US Treasuries they no longer regarded as safe, and the purchasing power of their dollars fell as foreigners pulled up stakes and retreated back home. If this is the outcome of the so-called Thucydides Trap, the idea that a declining empire ends up at war with a rising one, the early betting by investors seems to be against an American victory. Trump, reluctantly, may have been forced to confront that reality.

Not that anyone stands to gain from a trade war. If the initial, aggressive global tariff program is resumed, the whole world economy will suffer, with estimates of the cumulative reduction in global economic growth in coming years having rising above 2%. In the short term, smaller economies that depend heavily on trade with the US — Mexico, Canada, Vietnam, and let’s not forget poor little Lesotho — would be hit the hardest, but everyone will come off worse. As the old African proverb has it, when two elephants fight, only the grass suffers.

But once the dust has settled, it may well be that the winner, in relative terms, is China. The country may bounce back harder than its rival because Trump appears to have succumbed to the fatal flaw of many an empire in decline: hubris. He has overestimated his strength and underestimated his foe’s.

In this cavalier frame of mind, Trump launched his trade war with no clear strategy, probably assuming everyone would quickly surrender. His end-game is little more than a vaguely operationalized goal of stopping the world from ripping off or plundering the States, however one measures that. This has left America ill-prepared for a possibly drawn-out trade conflict with China, in which it could be at a disadvantage. By opening up a couple of hundred trade-war fronts at once, Trump endangered just over a tenth of the American economy. And in doing so, he has made enemies everywhere. China, by contrast, has focused its new trade barriers only on the United States, which accounts for about 2.5% of its GDP — or closer to 4%, if one includes “connector” countries like Vietnam.

In other words, having declared it will “fight to the end if the US side is bent on going down the wrong path”, Beijing is prepared to take the hit, no doubt secure in the knowledge that it is taking a far smaller economic risk than the United States.

China’s deftness results from what is, in contrast to the US, a clear strategy. Its aim is to maintain an open world trading order that has served it well, and use this as a market to develop the high-value export industries it believes will define the future, like renewable energy, EVs, robotics and artificial intelligence. It will happily exploit the United States’ newly fraught relations with other countries: positioning itself as the new guarantor of the world trading order the US has renounced, China is securing growing markets in the developing world while managing relations with Europe.

In addition, China enjoys an advantage over the US in political and economic firepower. That might seem a strange thing to say, given that the US economy is bigger than China’s, with a much higher per capita income, and is much less exposed to trade with China than China is to the US. But that simple arithmetic is misleading. The question is not just how much punishment each country can apply, but how much pain it can absorb.

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Whereas the Chinese leadership can justify its action to its people by saying it didn’t pick this war, it seems unlikely the average American whose cost of living shoots up will celebrate simply because he or she hears someone in China has it worse. Politically, the US administration has not prepared the nation for anything more than a brief skirmish, with Trump bragging that trade wars are easy to win. The President came to office on a pledge to bring down inflation and boost the economy — now, financial meltdown has driven a precipitous drop in his approval rating.

Nor does insisting that this is short-term pain for long-term gain help Trump’s cause much. It may keep his base on board for now, but swing voters have been abandoning Republicans, as recent special elections have shown. The longer this conflict drags out, the worse that will get. Peter Navarro said this week that the stock market is now bottoming and the Dow Jones Industrial Average will soon go to 50,000, but if instead it keeps plummeting, or if inflation spins out of control, the administration’s soft treatment by Right-wing cheerleaders may soon wear out. One study estimated that a wider tariff war would knock nearly 2% off America’s economic growth and raise prices by as much as 7%. Unlike the Chinese leadership, the US faces mid-term elections next year, and if the price of eggs keeps on rising, Trump could lose his foot soldiers.

Meanwhile, China has a lot of what can be called economic strategic depth. The basic tension in the US/China trade relationship is that the US has been living beyond its means, whereas China has been living well beneath them, repressing wages to keep export prices competitive. Faced with the loss of external markets, the Chinese leadership is now re-orienting the economy towards domestic consumption to pick up the slack, which will lessen the impact of the trade war on ordinary citizens. It thereby has a lot of capacity to absorb lost American sales.

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Unlike the US, China has kept a lot of its powder dry. It could, for instance, still restrict exports of critical minerals to the US or target US multinationals with operations in China. And with its very high domestic savings rate, Beijing has a lot of fiscal space to cushion the blow of a prolonged war. The US, in contrast, depends for its deficit-financing on creditors who, to judge from the plunge in US bond prices this week, are already losing patience with Trump.

Taking all that into account, Beijing’s defiant and resolute tone shouldn’t surprise us. Before Trump’s announcement of the 125% tariff, it responded to Trump’s previous upping of the ante by again reciprocating, leaving US exports to China facing an 84% tariff. Whereas the US leadership is at war with itself, with Elon Musk openly calling Navarro, the suspected architect of the tariff schedule, a “moron”, “dumber than a sack of bricks”, and “Peter Retarrdo”, and with various members of the administration publicly telling audiences they’re not responsible for the policy, the Chinese leadership remains unified.

That’s to be expected, given the country’s authoritarian model, but what’s more noteworthy is the relative unity, so far, across China’s corporate elite as well. Unlike in the United States, where CEOs and fund managers have been screaming for a change in direction, China’s major companies are telling their clients they should be able to manage the challenge. Whereas US grocery bills are expected to leap, Chinese food producers are saying they should be able to keep price increases limited. The confidence index among chief economists remains positive, the government is bolstering stock prices and improving liquidity in the banking system, and the rapidly-rising new energy sector expects to be largely immune from the impact of the American salvo. This isn’t surprising, given since so much of China’s export market for this sector’s products lies in the developing world. While Tesla’s share price has fallen by half, its Chinese rival BYD’s is up 20% this year.

No doubt there is an element of bravado in the tough talk from China. But all the signs are that the country is up for this fight. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s 90-day suspension is a ceasefire or a surrender. But either way, it doesn’t look like an early show of strength.

Whether or not US trade policy is now being designed by White House interns who left their assignment to the last minute, Britain’s comparatively lenient treatment — if that’s what you can call a blanket 10% tariff — probably owes little to Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s “calm-headed” approach. It’s really thanks to Britain’s trade deficit in goods with the US that it got off relatively lightly.

That’s little reason to celebrate. For one thing, sooner or later someone will explain service trade to Trump, whereupon Britain will get that furrowed-brow look, given the large surplus it runs with the US. But until then, Britain might persist in the hope that Starmer and Trump will reach a trade deal that will protect it from the President’s caprices.

They’d be unwise to bank on it, though. It’s true that Trump loves striking a deal. After some impressive diplomacy by the Mexican president, as well as some assiduous ring-kissing by a couple of Canadian provincial premiers, both Mexico and Canada were granted a slight reprieve from their assigned tariffs. In a moment of generosity, Trump decided to impose only the earlier tariffs he had put on them, rather than raising their rates further.

But that itself is reason to worry. As both the Mexicans and Canadians will tell you, Trump is perfectly capable of negotiating an agreement only to tear it up shortly after. So if he wakes up in a bad mood tomorrow, who’s to say what he’ll do. Plus he has indicated that if any country retaliates with tariffs of their own, he will ratchet up their rate, depending on how irritated he is feeling.

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You’d be hard-pressed to find an economist anywhere who can discern any logic or strategy behind this approach. Using a tariff as a bargaining chip, or to exert pressure, is arbitrary and fickle, and doesn’t serve any obvious vision for building the country’s export capacity. Thanks to Trump’s tariffs, US coffee-drinkers will have to shell out more for their morning java. So too will chocoholics. And of course, it won’t lead to coffee or cocoa production coming to America, because America can’t grow tropical crops. The same goes for bananas and a host of other products whose Stateside prices will now shoot up. There was a time when Latin American tourists would fly to America with empty suitcases just to stock up on all the cheap clothes and groceries there. Now the direction of travel will reverse.

But while analysts scramble to find method in this apparent madness, they are probably missing the point. Madness may itself be the method. By constantly keeping his negotiating partners on the backfoot, Trump appears to believe he maximizes his leverage in negotiations. It’s not clear whether this is true. After all, trade negotiations aren’t real-estate deals: they are vastly complicated, and tend to take place over many years and involve a fine-grained understanding of the sectors that will most benefit. In the trade negotiations Trump has carried out so far, the US has generally come off the worse, which is no doubt why he often renounces his own deals.

Worse, this keep-’em-guessing method is terrible for business. Thanks to his cryptic policy by tweet, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is now at levels only ever seen once before in the US: during the early-pandemic panic when stocks were crashing and the economy was collapsing. When the index reaches such levels, investment and spending tends to fall, which slows the economy. Given that the US economy is already decelerating, the double whammy of higher prices from tariffs and slower growth is going to create a vicious cycle in which those who can will put their money aside for a rainy day. It’s no surprise, then, that US stock markets tanked yesterday. Moreover, given how heavily invested ordinary Americans are in the stock market, this will further worsen the gloom.

What is equally significant, though, is that the Uncertainty Indices for major Asian economies — China, India, and Japan — aren’t showing similar levels of panic. Unlike the supplicants lining up outside the White House to beg clemency, the response of some Asian countries to the Trump tariffs appears to be neither to fight nor beg, but to ignore. China seems set to use its immense reserves of savings to stimulate local consumption while Malaysia says it will seek to diversify its trade away from the US. Growth in China, India, and the dynamo southeast Asian countries will take a hit, but it will continue.

Instead, the losers will be America’s erstwhile friends, in Europe and North America. The East will inevitably beckon, as Western countries look to reduce their dependence on the United States. Assuming China does engage in a program of fiscal stimulus to boost domestic consumption, its trading partners will be keen to strike new deals to replace lost sales to America.

The bonds with America that are weakened today may never recover their intensity. The faith that neoliberal internationalists had after 2020 that Trump might only be an unpleasant interlude before a return to normality was this week proven wrong. If current polling trends continue, he may well leave office a reviled president. But he came to power off the back of the popular vote, and there will likely be future presidents who will uphold his legacy. For Trump speaks for a new America — one that appears to be here to stay.

No longer willing to play the part of the global policeman, the US is turning its back on the world and the world is reciprocating. Nations which fail to do so will live at Washington’s mercy. This mass pivot risks harming America’s economy long-term, while weakening its global heft. Already, we see the dollar plunging in value, as global investors realize the US is no longer the safe haven it once was. And if foreign investors no longer underwrite America’s debt, the damage to its economy will be deep and permanent.

In the end, then, the biggest victim of Trump’s attack on free trade will probably be America itself. This year, and possibly for several years to come, its economy will underperform compared to its recent rate, and the country will gradually lose influence over others as they diversify away from it. Meanwhile, the “exorbitant privilege” of the dollar’s status as a reserve currency may in time be lost, which will hurt the living standards of ordinary Americans. Unable to live off the world’s credit, they’ll need to cut their spending and pay higher prices.

All told, this will probably accelerate the transition to a post-American age, particularly as other countries are already starting to regard China as a more predictable partner. The tragic irony is that although Trump pledged to make America great again, he may end up making China great instead. As for Britain, it would probably be best not to hope for salvation in some kind of trade deal. The Atlantic Age died on Wednesday, and whatever “special relationship” might have existed will, to paraphrase a former vice president, be worth a bucket of warm spit.

It is hard to exaggerate the role of the dollar in the global economy. It is the currency that holds the financial world together “in its inmost folds”, as Goethe put it in Faust. Since the Forties, the US has been the anchor of the global financial and monetary system. It’s a set-up that made sense at the time. It did so all the way up until the collapse of communism. But this millennium, it has become more like a Faustian bargain. It has allowed Europe and Asia to specialize in industrial production and dump their trade surpluses onto the US, and to a lesser extent the UK and Australia. America, meanwhile, has been only too happy to play along, running large trade deficits against the rest of the world. But this came at the cost of de-industrialization — arguably the very reason Trump was first elected.

Economists mostly do not care about such imbalances. David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage suggests that everybody is better off when they specialize and open the borders to trade, and let the deficits and surpluses fall wherever they may. This Faustian bargain works until it hits big political obstacles. Obstacles like Trump.

The irony, then, is that even as it created the conditions for his election, the continued success of the global free trade system depended critically on Trump not getting elected. It depended on him not imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum, for example, or on threatening retaliatory tariffs over 200% on French wine and champagne. Now that part of the bargain is crumbling.

Trump is clearly not worried about global imbalances, or the sustainability of the global economic order. He thinks of trade balances like business deals. The country with the surplus is the winner. This is without a doubt the wrong way to think about, but Trump’s crude trade policies may be the only thing that spurs change. There is no way that China or Germany would ever voluntarily refrain from running export surpluses. They, like Trump, define their economic models in terms of trade balances. It will take a political sledgehammer to force them to change, which is what is happening right now.

The tariffs, though, are only one part of the story — the visible part of the bargain and the one that is receiving most of the media attention. But there is another, more important side to it, the financial side, in which the dollar underwrites the entire global economy. The current system means that when, say, Porsche exports a car to the US, two things are happening. The car moves from Germany to the US; the dollars move in the opposite direction. You could think of the transaction in a different way: Porsche is buying US dollars, and pays for the dollars by delivering cars. So when countries dump their exports on the US, they are buying US dollars. Accordingly, when a lot of foreign companies do this, the value of the dollar goes up. The dollar accounts for almost 60% of central bank reserves, but the US only accounts for 14% of the world’s economic output, if measured in purchasing power. But the dollar is not only the biggest currency. It is also one of the most overvalued. The two concepts, the global role of the dollar, and its relative value, are not the same, but they are linked. And this is where Team Trump sees an opportunity.

If the dollar is devalued, Porsche, in our example, would still get the same amount of dollars, but these dollars would be worth less. And Porsche would be powerless to do anything about it. This makes devaluation far more effective than tariffs from the US perspective. Tariffs are legally and procedurally complicated. Countries can, and do, retaliate. It is much harder to retaliate against a devaluation.

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When I first heard that Trump’s finance team, led by Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, was trying to devalue the dollar, it seemed that they had not thought this through. I thought this was the Achilles heel of Trump’s economic agenda because it seemed to have conflicting goals — to keep the dollar’s global predominance and reduce its value at the same time. How on earth could they do both? I put this down as an unresolved contradiction in Trump’s head. Like the English cake aphorism, you could describe it as having your dollar and selling it — something only Trump would do.

The reason Trump cares about having his dollars is not to support the global economy, but because of its geopolitical power. There is no other currency that could take its role. The second largest currency in the world is the euro. It accounts for some 20% of global reserves. But the Europeans are not equipped to play the role the US is now leaving vacant.

I hear a lot of nonsense about the EU as the new leader of the Western world. But Europe has aging populations, and its economy is much less innovative than those of the US and China. The EU depends on other countries to buy its exports. It does not suck in foreign capital as the US has done. Unlike the US, the EU does not have the equivalent of US treasury securities, government bonds with a reputation of being the safest assets on earth. The EU has a monetary union, but it lacks a political union. Nor does it have a large capital market. It lacks the infrastructure of a global economic power.

Given Europe’s weakness, Trump’s goal to devalue the dollar and to maintain the dollar’s global role might not be as contradictory as at first seems. It does beg the question though, if the world diversifies away from the dollar, and if the euro cannot absorb this, who else will?

Enter crypto-currencies. Is this perhaps why Trump has just signed an executive order to create a strategic crypto reserve, very much like the strategic petroleum reserve which the US set up in the Seventies after the oil crisis? Crypto is purely ethereal, not backed by any assets. Fiat money, like the US dollar, is also not backed by assets. Our currencies are issued by governments. Money, whether fiat or crypto, relies on trust. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau talked about money as a social contract. I always thought of this as a more useful definition than the much narrower point of view of economics, which defines money as providing three services: to act as a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. This does not capture the bigger picture: if we lose trust in our own money, we use someone else’s. Given the central banks’ failings since the crash, it is perfectly reasonable for people to be skeptical about money. It is also rational for people to be skeptical about crypto currencies like Bitcoin. They are highly volatile, so they are not really a store of value. They are definitely not a unit of account. And you cannot go to most shops and pay in crypto.

But crypto currencies have one killer feature: their supply is fixed by algorithm. People still dig for gold and find some. They might even find some on Mars, if they started digging there. But they are not going to find any Bitcoin. There is no central bank in the crypto universe. There are no economists involved — perhaps one of the reasons economists hate crypto with such a passion.

Crypto, then, is well placed to play an important part in the global dollar detox story, as we move towards a different monetary system. Apart from setting up a strategic crypto reserve, the US administration and Congress are about to implement a regime of ultra-light crypto regulation. This may be the answer to how Team Trump is going to address the dollar-cakeism problem. If foreigners diversify away from the dollar and move towards crypto, then the US would stay in control: the dollar remains the number one fiat currency, and the global crypto market is also concentrated on the US. Either way, Trump wins.

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Such tactics are borne out by the emergence of what is sometimes referred to as the Mar-a-Lago accord, whereby the US will no longer play the anchor of the global monetary and financial system. Europeans will not only have to wean themselves off the US for defense, but also for finance and trade. It would be the biggest shift in the global economy since the 1944 Bretton Woods accord. That system went through various mutations, originally based on gold, but throughout this entire period, the dollar was the lynchpin. Before the Americans, the pound was the global reserve currency. But before that, there were no backstops. From the Greek empire all the way to Napoleon, European rulers issued coins made from precious metals, mostly gold and silver. With the US no longer willing to shoulder the responsibility of keeping the system going, we may well be returning to that world, except in today’s world, crypto is the new gold.

The brains behind this transition is Bessent. He is the guy who did the critical analytic work that allowed George Soros to carry out his infamous assault on the pound in 1992 — one of the most devastating acts of financial speculation of all time. Earlier this month, he stated clearly that “international economic relations that do not work for the American people must be re-examined”.

It’s a realignment that carries serious risks. It reminds me of that point in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer when a scientist asked whether a nuclear bomb could unleash an atmospheric chain reaction that could destroy the world. The answer he gave was: possibly, but unlikely. Similarly, here, nobody can rule out the possibility that the sudden withdrawal of the US as the global financial anchor could lead to a catastrophic financial meltdown. It might be possible. It might be unlikely. But what is significant is that for the first time in 80 years, someone is seriously trying to make it happen.

But the EU had a big trade surplus against the UK, and so had more to lose from a trade war. And this is how it played out. The single biggest victim of Brexit was not the UK economy, but German industry. Germany’s spectacular decline started in 2018, kicked off by Brexit and followed by a string of supply shocks including the pandemic and then Russia’s war in Ukraine. Trump’s tariffs will be next. The overarching lesson here is that if you are the surplus country, no matter how large you are, you should not engage in trade warfare.

But that’s exactly what’s happening. After Trump imposed a 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico, and a 10% tariff on China over the weekend, all three countries threatened retaliation. Justin Trudeau, the outgoing Canadian prime minister, has already announced a 25% counter tariff on $155 billion worth of US imports; Claudia Sheinbaum, the Mexican president, ordered her trade ministry to implement sanctions on US goods; China wants to bring a lawsuit in front of the World Trade Organization. They are all outraged by Trump’s assault on the multilateral trading system and are ready to come out all guns blazing.

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Europe, meanwhile, stands ready. Trump has not yet imposed any tariffs here. Not yet. But he has already said, ominously: “The European Union has treated us so terribly.” And there are bound to be repercussions. Given the temperament of the President, there is no point in trying to predict what he will do. But the tariffs will surely come. In the coming weeks, if not days.

Economically, his tariff war will act like a tax on US consumers. The increased costs are inevitably borne by the consumers. But, as a form of rebalancing, it will raise a lot of revenue for the US treasury and together with the shrinking of the federal government, may well end up lowering the budget deficit and strengthening the US current account balance. Of course, there will be repercussions that could push in the other direction: the dollar might rise; the world might plunge into recession. But the truth is we have no experience of what happens when the largest economy on earth, with the dominating global reserve currency, imposes massive tariffs on its trading partners. Many economists reckon the tariffs will increase inflation and slow growth. “They will almost surely be inflationary,” said Joseph Stiglitz, the renowned economics professor.

But I would be cautious about such predictions. Macroeconomists lost their credibility as forecasters over Brexit and the first Trump presidency with their wild predictions. They are now simply expressing political views dressed up as empirical science.

In my eyes, Trump is too much focused on bilateral trade balances, rather than on the underlying dynamics of what causes them. And the underlying global economic imbalances are massive. In 2023, the EU ran a surplus against the US in the trade of merchandise goods of $209 billion. For 2024, the total will be in the order of $230 billion. China’s trade surplus with the US was $279bn and will probably have surpassed $300bn for the year as a whole. Canada’s surplus with the US was $64.3 billion [note: the data are from census.gov. there are lots of different statistics out there, measuring different things]. The world has been fretting about these imbalances for more than two decades now and yet nothing much has changed. Germany and China, the world’s biggest export surplus countries, will never voluntarily cut down on their surpluses unless threatened at gunpoint.

This is partly because they frame their surpluses as a sign of economic success. The Germans like to believe that this has something to do with the quality of their goods, lauding themselves as “Export Weltmeister” — a meaningless category that comes without prizes. This is merely a celebration of dependency. Having relied on Russia for gas, and China for its exports, Germany has now also become dependent on the US. But, then, running trade surpluses against other countries is the only economic strategy the current generation of Germans has ever known.

The problem here, then, is that a country’s current account, which consists mostly of trade, has an exact mirror image in the financial account, which measures the difference between savings and investment. And it is better to think about the strength of German and Chinese economies in these terms, not trade. This tells what is going on underneath the hood, which is that they don’t know how to spend their savings. This is where their imbalance lies.

The better response to Trump’s trade tariffs, then, would not be to fight back, but to fix that underlying problem — the lack of domestic investment and consumption. Why not make it more attractive for companies to invest their surpluses at home? Why not deregulate the economy, especially the tech sector, support new businesses, reduce corporate taxes; attract the best talent from abroad; and get people off the welfare and sickness payrolls? The powerful response to Trump would be to focus on solving these twin problems — the imbalance and the dependency.

The worst response would be to stick with the same old model, and the same dependencies, and to embark on a trade war it cannot win. Canada, more dependent on the US than anyone else, will be crushed if it follows through with Trudeau’s policies. His response plays well with fellow liberals, but it achieves nothing economically — and Trump will no doubt double down if Canada retaliates.

The fear here is that the obtuse EU does the same. In anticipation of a Trump presidency, the European Commission has already prepared a sanctions hit list. During Trump’s first term, it put a tariff on Harley Davidson motorbikes. The EU already imposes a 10% protectionist tariff on all car imports. The irony here is that in this trans-Atlantic relationship, we Europeans are fuming at Trump for doing what we have been doing all along.

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Europe is still in massive denial at what is about to hit. It likes to think it can change Trump’s mind. Friedrich Merz, Germany’s opposition leader, and the man predicted to be the next chancellor, thinks he can negotiate a trade deal with Trump. The Irish hope that they can stay below Trump’s radar since he could destroy the Irish economic model at the flick of a switch by removing a simple tax loophole on intellectual property rights for US companies that manufacture in Ireland. Meanwhile, Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, hopes to appease the President with a promise to buy more gas from the US. This is not how it will work. Trump will impose the tariffs. And that will be that.

Trump has learned from his past mistakes when dealing with the Europeans. They lied to him during his first term, and made promises they did not honor, including assurances that they would meet the NATO defense spending target of 2% of economic output. Back then, the Europeans had convinced themselves that Trump was just a phase, a fluke caused by a lopsided electoral system. Emboldened by their successful defiance of Trump back then, the Europeans concluded they could do it again.

I think they are wrong. Once they realize this, they will move to the second stage of grief — anger — where they will be stuck for a long time. They will try to retaliate, lose, and get even angrier.

There are parallels with the European approach to the war in Ukraine. Even as they support Ukraine, they don’t have an agreed war goal, let alone a strategy. They treat the conflict as a morality play. Underestimating Vladimir Putin and the resilience of the Russian economy, they overestimated the power of sanctions.

This complacency has, over the past years, become the defining character trait of the centrist European liberal, matched only by an unshakeable belief in their own virtue. And today, they are similarly underestimating Trump. They remind me of the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forget nothing.

Historians generally regard America as having won the trade war with China but in almost all other respects one-term President Trump represented the last hurrah of US global power. President Elizabeth Warren pulled the US out of Nato and the WTO. But life went on surprisingly normally, apart from one ugly dispute in Estonia in which two dozen British troops died in a border clash with the Russians.

It turned out that bilateral agreements between the great powers sufficed to keep trade ticking over and for keeping the peace. The Taiwanese, with no one to protect them, were not happy, initially, about being absorbed into the rest of China; but it turned out that the influence of Taiwanese assumptions about freedom, combined with the enormous power of the Christian underground, slowly ate into the power of the Communist party.

The events of 2016 did not come out of the blue; the rumblings had been audible for some time before. And yet on what slender threads did the new era hang! A few thousand votes in a few different places, plus some more plausible defenders of the status quo, and neither Brexit nor Trump would have happened, at least not at that time.

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When they did, the world turned on its axis in many surprising ways, slowly at first but more markedly in the 2020s and 2030s. Historians came to call it the great pivot year, from the centrifugal era to the centripetal one.

Western society had been dominated since the 1980s by dispersing centrifugal forces that extended individual freedom but weakened collective bonds and the power of tradition, and in the process allowed smart people to claim undue economic and political rewards. The affluent and cognitively blessed, and the two were invariably combined, became ever more powerful, while many others felt they had lost status and meaning. One journalist, writing in 2016, called them ‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’.

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, and the emergence of post-industrial societies had opened up western societies to an unprecedented degree, and thereby weakened collective national and class identities; meanwhile, diversity of many kinds reduced trust and traditional social norms, while social media created conditions of ‘connected isolation’, promoting narrow tribal identities and individualistic identity politics. And all the while, depression, loneliness and cultish political movements marched on.

The centrifugal era turned out not to be compatible with democracy, and in 2016, the two great English-speaking lands decided that democracy came first and ushered in today’s more centripetal era. The nation state stopped retreating, and economic and cultural openness were both a little more constrained. Immigration fell in most rich countries, partly because of stricter rules, but also, with the exception of Africa, because of sharply rising standards of living in poorer countries.

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Today’s centripetal era, which may itself be drawing to a close as 2050 approaches, helped to revive democracy and civic life in part through greater awareness of the psychological roots of what was then called populism — the humiliations and mass resentment built into modern, achievement societies.

As Boris Johnson, the long-serving Prime Minister (and later President) of the UK, put it: “Our beautiful democratic society must level up and find a useful place for everyone, not create a competition in which some succeed and the others fail.” Johnson, who successfully led the UK out of the EU by co-opting and channelling the country’s populist forces, became a model for other centrist and centre-right politicians.

The European Union, a product of the post-national, centrifugal era, was initially shaken by the centripetal one and almost came apart — especially after the election of Marine Le Pen as President of France in 2022 propelled on a nationalist wave after the Royal Navy had sunk several French fishing vessels and English home-owners in the Dordogne were expelled in retaliation.

Johnson and Le Pen more than patched things up in the 2024 Treaty of Calais and Johnson went on to marry Le Pen’s daughter Mathilde. The new Anglo-French Entente paved the way for the UK (minus Northern Ireland which had recently merged with the Republic) to re-enter a much looser EU that looked something like the one it had joined in 1973. The Eurozone had shrunk to Germany and the Benelux countries, and German influence had diminished after the wave of green terror paralysed the country’s energy system in the mid-2020s.

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Looking back, one of the remarkable things about 2016, is how unexpected both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were. How ignorant we then were about our own societies! Such ignorance would be impossible today following the digital citizen project which has truly connected us both to each other and to the local and national state.

After various data scandals, and the failed dirty tricks campaign against Elizabeth Warren in 2020 on the part of the digital giants, the socialisation of the core digital space swept through most western societies, rather as the welfare state had been nationalised after the Second World War. Not only did our digital citizen identities make the provision of state services, especially to the elderly, much more efficient but the constant monitoring of public preferences meant that no more surprises like those of 2016, or the watershed general election of 2019, were possible. (Those of uswho can just about remember surprising elections sometimes regret this.)

Perhaps the most unexpected post-2016 development was the spiritual revival in the UK and elsewhere. The left-behind places and people had been put on the map by Brexit, Trump and European populism. Governments tilted to the new centre, a bit to the Left economically and to the Right socially (in the now quaintly anachronistic political language of the 20^th century). In the 10 years or so after 2016, this helped to bring new life and prosperity to some of the poorest regions but it was really the spiritual revival that took off in the mid-2020s that improved the quality of life in the most depressed places.

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The post-2016 anxiety about dealing with the polarisation was partly based on the reasonable belief that the negotiation of value differences was going to be harder than dealing with the interest clashes of the old socio-economic politics that dominated the post-Second World War world. It is surely harder, people thought, to split the difference on immigration or family policy than on, say, the desired level of public spending or taxation

This fear turned out to be partly misplaced. The sharply declining hegemony of western countries after 2016— symbolised by the collapse in student numbers from China and India after 2020 — created unifying threats and risks, which pulled people together far more than any nationalist rhetoric ever could.

The new “mass elite” of the expanded higher education sectors of the early 21^st century found that the high-status cognitive employment that they thought they had been promised was in sharp decline, thanks mainly to AI. After some flirtation with the hard Left (in the now long-forgotten Corbyn movement in the UK) this group found itself drawn into alliance with the so-called left-behinds under a broadly small-c conservative banner.

The culture wars flared briefly for a few years after 2020, but a new consensus of a kind, finding common ground between liberals and conservatives, emerged under the great reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, Giles Fraser. It was best represented by the adoption, in the UK and across much of Europe, of Hungary’s successful natalist policies. Larger families were encouraged by public policy and became common again, ending what came to be seen as the narcissistic era of one or two-child families.

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But this did not, as radicals had feared, mean a reversal of gender equality. Quite the opposite, it brought with it a much greater respect for domesticity and the work of child-rearing and care for the elderly, inside the home as much as in the public economy. So-called Fifth wave feminism was associated with the feminisation of society. Many women still enjoyed success in the public realm and, by 2035, half of all MPs were women. After the monarchy was abolished, following the disastrous reign of Charles III, and Boris Johnson was elected first UK president, he was replaced as PM by Munira Mirza, the third Conservative party female PM (and first PM of Muslim heritage).

The spiritual revival was pioneered by a new form of secular Christianity stripped of much of the traditional theology, though not the ritual. The churches filled again as much as centres of community and neighbourhood as places of deity worship. This went hand in hand with a kind of remoralisation of human relations. More families stayed together for longer and child-care mainly took place within the family, and was increasingly undertaken by fathers (30% of main carers were men by 2035).

The co-option of populism represented by Boris-ism did not succeed everywhere and authoritarian governments did emerge in Austria and Sweden — in the latter after a horrific terrorist incident that killed thousands of people. The Sweden Democrat government imposed a curfew on all Muslims after the attack and many innocent Muslims died in random attacks.

Vegan terrorism was also a problem in parts of Europe, including the UK, even as meat-eating dwindled to being an exotic minority taste.

The dog that didn’t bark, looking at the big concerns of 2016, is climate change. Technological advances, including a final breakthrough in nuclear fusion and in the technology of de-salination, meant a largely carbon-free global economy by 2040 and security of drinking water in poorer parts of the world. Moreover, I am writing on the eve of 2050 in the middle of a mini-ice age, and sea levels have fallen so low that the Boris bridge connecting the UK and France now runs over dry land for several miles at both ends.

It is a wonderful symbol of how the fears of those people once called “Remainers”, who believed that leaving the EU in 2020 would cut off an independent UK from the continent, have proved so wrong.