‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’, Vladimir Lenin is supposed to have said. But the globalised world order collapsing within the space of weeks would be momentous even by the Bolshevik leader’s standards. This is certainly what many international politics watchers think is happening.

Bronwen Maddox, director of the Chatham House think-tank, has said that the concept of the West as an alliance of liberal democracies is ‘probably’ over. Michael Clarke, a former director general of the Royal United Services Institute, has been more forthright. ‘The West is dead’, he said. Meanwhile Marc Chandler, chief strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex, has said that Trump’s policies will ‘end globalisation’.

The problem with these obituaries to the West, these valedictions to the world order and to globalisation, is that they assume that a decisive transition has taken place in recent weeks. But this is not what is happening. Rather these declarations express the dawning, and deepening, recognition by the west’s elites of the existing instability of global politics and economics, even though this has been so for some time.

In truth, the geopolitical and economic shifts and fractures that Trump has brought to the fore over the past few weeks have been taking place for years.

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