I just started reading Geopolitical Economy by Radhika Desai, and even just reading the intro it’s apparent she could see the writing in the wall. This was written in 2013. She could see that the sustainability of the global US project was coming to an end. I’m definitely going to follow through with this book as it seems incredibly relevant.

Any effort by a state to become dominant will therefore trigger great power conflicts as it compels other powers to collectively balance the aspiring hegemon.

This is very interesting, Desai describes this as Trotsky’s “Uneven and Combined Development” theory of Dialectical state relations:

states’ international interaction is seen in terms of the dialectic that the Bolsheviks termed uneven and combined development (UCD). On the one hand, dominant states seek to preserve existing uneven configurations of capitalist development which favour them, including through formal and informal imperialism. On the other, contender states (a term gratefully borrowed from Kees van der Pijl, 2006b) accelerate capitalist, and in some cases such as the USSR, communist, development to contest imperial projects of dominant states. Such hot-house development is called combined development because it combines or compresses many stages into shorter and more intense bursts. Despite the economic, geopolitical, military and ideological power marshalled by dominant states, so far the latter tendency has dominated in UCD – sometimes against great odds and with apparently interminable delays. This politico-economic dialectic, and not the market or capitalism conceived in exclusively economic terms, is responsible for productive capacity spreading ever more widely around the world. By the early twenty-first century it had created the multipolar world in which there were now too many economies that were too substantial for any one of them to even hope to dominate the rest.