Why You Should Never Write About the "Postwar Rules-Based Order"

It’s not just that readers will flee. It just misses the point.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Two lynchpins of the “postwar rules-based order” have convened here this week to mourn its loss, comfort its aging veterans and flail around in endless seminars about how to bring it back. These are the 2025 Annual Meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund, which draw finance ministers, central bankers and investment hangers-on from around the globe.

Inevitably, the Old Ones grow misty-eyed, reminiscing about the “Washington Consensus,” that formula for economic reforms that is now reviled as Corporate America’s tool to extract profits from the world’s poor, even if it was mostly just common sense.

Some will talk about the need for the current populist fever to pass, so that sound notions like balanced budgets, independent monetary policy and free markets might thrive again. They will hope to revive transatlantic cooperation and dream up meaningful agendas for the G-7 and the G-20.

Still others will call for a fresh approach to policy communications (maybe on Instagram! Or TikTok!) so that “ordinary people” can fully grasp the importance of global rules and order.

I am doing plenty of flailing along with everyone else, but I can’t help feeling that we’re mostly ignoring far more important questions that will upend the world’s economy regardless of what anyone here decides. When this wave of populism does recede —which it always does —the order we all remember will have been dramatically refashioned in a typhoon of technological disruption.

First, naturally, are the forces of artificial intelligence that progress daily to refashion almost every job in the world. This will have profound implications for inequality, government finances and innovation. It will also reshuffle which countries will shape the world’s economy and how other economies will align within new global value chains.

Next will come all the promising ways to transmit money, shares, and other forms of ownership on distributed ledgers. Soon enough, the memecoins will fade as novelties, while the flows of stablecoins, tokenized securities, and even central bank digital currencies expand. They will change the way central banks fight inflation and manage financial flows. They will transform how banks’ lending drives growth. They will create vast new flows of money and assets that the world’s governments will struggle to track and manage.

Finally, the next decade will bring inevitable changes to energy markets as renewables continue their slow march to domination. The Trump Administration’s proud embrace of fossil fuels feels like a rearguard action as the rest of the world builds out electric vehicle networks, wind farms and solar grids. Oil producers may still be important in the new order taking shape, but they will never dominate as they did under the old one.

The Blogger’s Handbook is clear that no reader worth having will stay with you past any sentence that includes the words “postwar rules-based order,” so I’m glad you’re still with me.

Just remember that we all have to think much bigger thoughts about the challenges ahead. Anyone who doesn’t regret the loss of the crumbling economic consensus doesn’t have a heart. Anyone who ignores the technological disruption at hand doesn’t have artificial intelligence. Or digital currency. Or solar panels.