The imminent return of Donald Trump has unleashed a tsunami of analysis. But one aspect of his thought and the thinking of those around him, has not been noticed and yet could be consequential for the world.
Trump is happy to take risks and do apparently crazy things because he assumes the world can take it. The mental model he shares with many of his entourage is one in which the world is remarkably resilient.
Their confidence draws on experience. The last 70 years have seen no world wars and no global depressions. Climate change may be fuelling the occasional droughts, hurricanes and floods, but they are sceptical about its impacts.
The pandemic was, paradoxically, another cause for complacency. The world faced a huge challenge but bounced back easily.
So they believe that you can take risks, disrupt, play – confident the world will sort itself out. The extent to which Musk, Trump and others take this for granted is under-appreciated – and it is literally embedded in the models used by investment titans like Ken Griffin, Steve Schwarzman and Bill Ackman, who are some of Trump’s key funders. Their models are trained on data from recent decades – and so portray a world of relative resilience and stability.
Others take a very different view. China's President Xi was scarred by the Cultural Revolution. His father had been a senior figure in the government (in charge of propaganda) but was purged, imprisoned and humiliated. Not surprisingly, he sees a world that is precarious, always just a step away from chaos.
In the West, a previous generation of leaders, brought up around the Depression and WW2 also saw the world as fragile; that mistakes, recklessness and carelessness could lead to millions of deaths, not just a fall in the share price.
Their perspective is echoed for the many who see just how easily the 21st century could bring systems collapse, as climate, food, economics and then politics pass tipping points that remorselessly take the world out of sync. 2 degrees of warming let alone 3 could unleash chaos on an appalling scale.
But some of the most powerful in the world really do believe that it’s OK to ‘move fast and break things’ (to use one of Silicon Valley’s favourite sayings) since their own experience is that there’s always someone else to pick up the pieces, and that the battles of life are really much more games than anything existential.
So in their view it is worth turning up the heat in international affairs. Assassinating foes, threatening dire retribution against enemies.
And sometimes they have a point. Their opponents often became too nervous, always worried about anything that might lead to escalation (like giving Ukraine missiles) or acting tough in trade.
Here in the UK both sides in the Brexit debate greatly exaggerated its potential impacts. Similarly in domestic policy governments often become too timid about the law – rather than calibrating risks, just as bureaucracies tend to be better at seeing why things can’t be done than how they could be.
But we have now swung to an opposite extreme which will test the world to its limits. My hunch is that the world will prove a lot less resilient than the new masters assume. And one reason is that that resilience was based in large part on the strength of institutions – institutions that coordinated responses to financial crisis; institutions that help nations avoid slipping into unintended wars; institutions that arbitrate on trade battles. Underpinning this resilience, too, were the armies of professions that help to keep a complex world working: doctors and nurses, engineers, civil servants, teachers, logistics managers. Their often dull, invisible world, helps the world cope with shocks, but they are rarely noticed by the swashbuckling risk-takers, and some are even portrayed as the enemy within.
The main hope for the world is that the new masters will be content with performance and play. DOGE for example is more likely to be a lot of sound and fury signifying little, more like many past attempts at driving up efficiency in government than anything new. RFK may strut and shout – but may be too lazy to truly transform the system he nominally runs.
In this respect they may echo Trump’s record with the wall on the Mexican border that he promised so often before his last election. So there will be lots of bluster, a few show trials and personal retribution but perhaps not too much systemic change.
And yet. With fewer restraints their profligacy and playfulness may get out of control. And its possible the world really is less resilient than it was, as successive crises slowly erode the buffers. And then we may find that it is a lot easier to dismantle than it is to build back up. For the very rich this may not matter – they can afford to make big mistakes. But for the vast majority this is a pretty massive gamble.