Jonathan Shafi analyses the shifts in the global economic order and their impact on the question of Scottish independence

The misnamed ‘rules-based order’, which has structured global relations for 80 years, is being dismantled, giving way to a multipolar system composed of vying regional spheres of influence. That the East Wing is undergoing its first major structural change since the Second World War – razing the old in preparation for the new – is a visual metaphor almost too perfect to ignore. Because this is the essential purpose of the Trump Administration. It is not to resist multipolarity, but to manage it, and in many cases to accelerate the process. The twilight of the United States as unrivalled superpower is twinned with a state and corporate-led realignment in which the global system is being redefined.

The sprawling American apparatus has proven increasingly unsustainable. The wars undertaken in pursuit of empire dominance have constituted strategic failures in military overreach. In parallel, the centres of the world economy are shifting southwards and eastwards, and the United States is no longer the default safe haven for capital. The authors of a report produced by the Boston Consulting Group are in no doubt about the direction of travel: ‘the Global South is where the future is being built. These economies will account for the lion’s share of global growth well into the future, defining the next wave of economic opportunity. They also hold what the world needs: critical resources to secure global supply chains, young and expanding workforces, and growing consumer markets’. It is not outlandish to hypothesise an economic and geopolitical volte-face between parts of the existing core and parts of the erstwhile periphery.

Among the many repercussions, commodity markets are becoming less fixed around the dollar. ‘Today, a large and growing proportion of energy is being priced in non-dollar-denominated contracts,’ says Natasha Kaneva, head of Global Commodities Strategy at J.P. Morgan. There are indications of de-dollarisation in the bond markets. A recent report published by the London Stock Exchange Group is clear about the consequences: ‘If globalisation and multilateralism do reverse, and trade becomes more focused in regional trade-blocs, with less dollar denomination of international trade flows, the dollar’s role as a global trade invoicing and reserve currency may be diminished’. These alterations are tectonic in nature. In this way, the policy of the Trump Administration is not merely an eccentric aberration. It is epiphenomenal: an effect of the inescapable underlying tendencies organic to global capitalism in the 21st century.

Western Hemisphere

The once unrivalled global empire is retrenching in favour of ‘transactional and zero-sum’ relations as it stakes out hegemony in the Western hemisphere. Now, Europe is in the crosshairs for political and economic subjugation to the United States. The increasingly abrasive nature of direct political interference in this regard is proportional to the obsequiousness of the European and British political leadership. The latter has very little to do with placating Trump’s latest personal gripe in the soap-opera version of diplomacy broadcast by the major news outlets. That is merely the theatre for a dawning geopolitical reality. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said of American headquartered interventions into the country’s election in May: ‘I can’t remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the western democracies’.

Key institutions are being reorganised against this backdrop, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The White House sought a buyout of the whole organisation, offering employees a voluntary redundancy package, with the aim of bringing the agency into line with Trump Administration priorities. According to the aide of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, this meant ‘a greater focus on the western hemisphere, targeting countries not traditionally considered adversaries of the US’. It is within this lexicon that the threats against Denmark and Greenland exist. In the same vein, this is also how the apparently outlandish comments about Canada becoming a 51st state should be appraised: that the US is seeking hemispheric vassalisation.

No more so can we see this than with Europe. The continent has become a regional hub for retooling the American arms economy. At Trump’s insistence, military spending is being drastically increased, with the purpose of delivering a flow of contracts to US manufacturers. Meanwhile, EU exports to the United States have cratered by 22% in 2025. In other words, this represents a one-way extraction and provides a glimpse into the future role of Europe as an American protectorate.

As economist and former Scotsman editor George Kerevan wrote in 2024: ‘Europe no longer poses an economic threat to US interests and no longer needs to be placated or defended.’ In a bout of apparent joviality in the Oval Office, Trump revealed he was seen as ‘the president of Europe’. One anonymous EU diplomat put it bluntly: ‘He may never be Europe’s president, but he can be its godfather. The appropriate analogy is more criminal. We’re dealing with a mafia boss exerting extortionate influence over the businesses he purports to protect’. In the same way as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte referred to the President as ‘Daddy’, such squalid colloquialisms are reflective of something more concrete.

Tariffs and Rising Power Blocks

Trump has been a supporter of tariffs over the course of his career. Ostensibly, there are two primary factors offered to rationalise ‘Liberation Day.’ First, that Washington wants to reduce the US trade deficit. This lends itself to the well-worn rhetoric around American good grace being exploited by foreign freeloaders. Second, they reflect the ‘America First’ agenda to reshore manufacturing and aid in job creation.

But here, there are real and understated complications. Such an agenda requires addressing labour shortages, exacerbated by deportations, and training programmes to reskill millions of workers. Supply chains would need to be domesticated, entailing high levels of state planning and infrastructure investment. To scale up, this would require time and deep cultural change. All the while, JP Morgan’s chief global strategist, David Kelly, warns that the US is ‘going broke slowly’. US household debt hit a record $18.59 trillion in the third quarter of this year, up by $197 billion from the second quarter. Last month, layoff figures surged to 150,000. ‘This is the highest total for October in over 20 years, and the highest total for a single month in the fourth quarter since 2008’, according to Challenger, Gray and Christmas research.

While there is an attempt to negotiate multipolarity, that does not mean rivalry between states and blocs of states is any less relevant. Quite the opposite. This is an erratic process, in which great power conflict will permeate through proxy battles for resources and political leverage. Trump likes to take full credit for preventing the Pakistan-India drone and missile conflict in May of this year from escalating into a protracted military standoff. But Chinese economic entanglement was likely influential to the outcome, owing to the strategic value placed on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. This project represents the most significant investment in China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, ‘a massive China-led infrastructure project that aims to stretch around the globe’. It includes financing for infrastructure such as highways, ports, and power plants. Despite intermittent security and diplomatic setbacks, complicated by warming relations between the US and Pakistani leadership, this project is building vital anchors in regional trade. This is partly to provide ease of access for Chinese energy imports from the Middle East, a region to which we will turn in future editions.

Meanwhile, the United States is refocusing on its own sphere, which aims to include South America. Expect, therefore, more military and non-military operations around Venezuela. Concurrently, the result of Milei’s libertarian economic doctrine has effectively handed Argentine sovereignty over to the United States through the debt colonialism conferred by Washington’s $40 billion bailout. And as the US now accepts China as a peer rival, it is scaling down forces in eastern Europe, in a pivot towards its own borders and the Indo-Pacific.

The Home Front: Collapse And Reconstitution

These events are a preamble to the many ways in which the process will reflect back into Western societies. The end of liberal globalisation will necessarily impact existing institutions and norms. As alternative poles of attraction in the international order emerge, so too will flows of migration diversify, resulting in attempts to discipline labour and rebuild the domestic workforce. The democratic elements in Europe and the United States are likely to recede in the name of pragmatism. Talk of a ‘global village,’ once in vogue in the World Trade Organisation, with its semi-porous borders and universal Westernising culture, as promoted at the high point of globalisation, is a thing of the past. The President of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen, admitspreviously held orthodoxies are no longer: ‘The first quarter of the century has come to an end. And it has brought about a sea-change in global affairs. The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality’.

Right-wing nationalism and increasingly forms of ethnonationalism nest within this context. These questions are not rooted solely in the rhetoric or political magnetism of populist leaders, or reducible to a cultural backlash against ‘woke capitalism’, but in the material changes produced by the global transition and the inability of Western economies to deliver sustainable and redistributed economic growth. Ironically, far from bolstering the West in the multipolar world, national chauvinism further erodes its once dominant position, while unravelling the social fabric internally. A narrower set of interests may benefit from the disarray, in the form of billionaire disruptors looking to exploit matters. In similar vein, prominent figures like Reform’s Richard Tice, the multi-millionaire CEO of the Mayfair-based asset management company Quidnet Capital Partners LLP, can present as ‘British patriots’ before jetting back to the United Arab Emirates. Talk of rebellion against ‘globalism’ is cheap when it comes to this burgeoning phalanx of the transnational elite

Scottish Nationalism in the Multipolar Age

As a small and embryonic state, Scotland could be subject to further asset stripping at the mercy of larger powers. These trends are already in place, given the extent to which Scotland’s national wealth is being extracted through Foreign Direct Investment deals. The First Minister has also been seeking investment from Ming Yang, a Chinese energy firm. Whereas in the past this may have attracted controversy, today it is viewed in more realist terms.

But Scotland is very much on the periphery, and a site of profit extraction. Its natural endowments are sold off to global capital with minimal oversight. The so-called green transition has been a process of expropriation: vast offshore wind reserves are leased to multinationals. Revenues flow out, while local economies remain stagnant. Freeports, marketed as tools of regional regeneration, function as subnational enclaves for capital, not strategic engines of development. The Scottish Government operates as an interface for corporate lobbying and outsourcing, constrained by fiscal dependency and ideological conformity.

Without an industrial strategy and without monetary control in the form of an independent currency, multipolarity may further expose Scotland’s vulnerability to predatory capital. And as the Western hemisphere comes under totalising American control, Scotland too will be compelled to make its contribution to rearmament. That includes keeping Trident, which is a US, not a British, maintained and operated system.

Notions of Scottish exceptionalism are also being tested like never before, as the rise of Reform and concern around immigration grows. In the same breath, the political crisis in the UK is not going away. Instead, it is going to intensify as the post-war world order ruptures around it.

This article is an abridged version of Jonathon Shafi’s substack article, posted on Independence Captured. Please read the full article here.