Adnkronos (Adnkronos) – The globalization of "flat" markets is over. The United States and China now wield their economic levers as weapons, and competition between the great powers has become, above all, a technological competition. But the result won't necessarily be the emergence of new empires capable of dividing up the world. Rather, it will be a long period of "non-order": a fragmented multipolarism, in which shared rules lose weight and power is distributed among states, middle powers, and new private players, starting with big tech.
This is the framework Marta Dassù paints when speaking to Adnkronos about The Age of Arrogance. Why New Empires Are Destined to Fail, the new book she co-wrote with Edoardo Campanella for Mondadori and presented at the Center for American Studies in Rome, in a packed room, with the front row occupied by the most important Italian ambassadors, both current and former. It's impossible to name names without offending someone.
“In our first book, some trends that had been visible since the 2008 financial crisis were already visible.
Today, those trends have consolidated,” Dassù explains to Adnkronos. “The major powers, particularly China and the United States, no longer look to horizontal globalization, the illusion of flat markets, but are using their respective economic levers as weapons, in a competition centered on technological competition.”
The book's thesis, however, is not that this challenge will simply create a new balance between empires. On the contrary. "There will actually be neither a collision nor an imperial collusion," says Dassù. The authors' chosen concept is un-order, the absence of order: something more radical than simple disorder, because it doesn't indicate a temporary crisis in the system but "a questioning of the idea that a rules-based international order is necessary."
The risk is therefore “a period of chaotic fragmentation, a chaotic multipolarism”.
Dassù recalls Henry Kissinger's definition of international order: a relatively stable balance of power and a set of at least partially shared standards and rules are needed. Today, in his interpretation, both are lacking. Power is more diffused not only among states but also among private entities, from large technology platforms to big tech, while consensus on rules is weakening.
This is where Europe comes in, the most difficult entity to place in the new geography described by Dassù and Campanella. It is not an empire, and it has built much of its international identity precisely on its ability to produce rules. But, Dassù warns, this is no longer enough.
European rules "should be smarter than they actually are," and the Union must understand that regulatory capacity must be complemented by "strategic levers" to leverage its existing strengths. The goal, he summarizes, is to allow Europe to secure a place in the new world: "not just on the menu but also at the table."
It is around this question—how to survive and count in the “age of arrogance”—that the discussion at the American Studies Center developed, moderated by La7 journalist Alessandra Sardoni, with Giampiero Massolo, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, Carolina De Stefano and Michele Valensise.
Sardoni summarized one of the book's starting points as the end of the Pax Americana and the progressive erosion of two ideas that had accompanied the West for decades: the United States as the ultimate insurer of international order and economic interdependence as a force capable, at least potentially, of reducing conflict.
For Giampiero Massolo, the distinction between "disorder" and "non-order" is the essential step. In disorder, he observed, rules continue to exist even when they are violated. In the world described in the book, however, "the very concept of rule" is called into question.
The dominant logic then becomes the assertion of national interests through force or its display. But precisely here the paradox of "bullying" emerges: being stronger does not automatically mean achieving the desired result. The United States, China, and Russia possess incomparably superior tools to most other actors, but they are forced to confront asymmetries, dependencies, and interdiction capabilities that reduce the effectiveness of traditional force.
It's a world, in Massolo's interpretation, where it's becoming increasingly difficult to clearly distinguish between a center and a periphery. Even far less powerful actors can block, slow down, or make the strategies of the great powers more costly. And the same states that theoretically have the capacity to transform a crisis into a global conflict are simultaneously trying to avoid direct conflict among themselves.
This creates a system in which mutual blackmail and shifting geometries proliferate. For middle powers, the response increasingly becomes multi-alignment: not choosing a side once and for all, but cooperating with different interlocutors depending on their interests and dossiers. The result is a multipolarism without truly fixed poles, in which stable alliances tend to be replaced by temporary convergences.
If Massolo read the book through the distribution of power, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, formerly of the ECB, did so starting from the economic costs of the empire.
His thesis is that an empire can generate advantages for its political and economic center, but has increasing costs to maintain its position. The more competition between powers increases, the more difficult those costs become to sustain. And for Bini Smaghi, the current confrontation between Washington and Beijing already illustrates this problem.
The United States, according to his analysis, has for decades been able to import more than it exported and finance a growing portion of its economy externally. Competition with China, however, has greatly increased America's financial needs. Beijing presents the opposite vulnerability: to maintain its centrality in value chains, it must support production and exports and relatively curb domestic consumption.
"The two great powers, China and the United States, have a planet of clay," Bini Smaghi summarized: the competition between the two systems is becoming, in his interpretation, "a debt race" that poses sustainability problems for both.
And it is precisely from here that the economist derives a less pessimistic reading of Europe. The European market and European savings are indeed resources needed by both the United States and China. The challenge is to transform this potential weight into the capacity for action.
Bini Smaghi's proposed solution hinges primarily on the creation of truly continental players: not just public intervention, therefore, but European private capital capable of financing European businesses. The model he evokes is Airbus: what is needed, he argues, is "many Airbuses" in technology, pharmaceuticals, finance, and other strategic sectors. Europe, in short, "is also built from the bottom up, not just from the top down."
This is the point on which Michele Valensise, president of the IAI, focused his intervention. While the United States, China, and Russia represent three different declinations of imperial logic in the book, Europe is something different: not simply an unfinished empire, but a project built on another idea of power.
Valensise urged against turning Europe's weaknesses into a sort of permanent lament. "Europe certainly exists," he observed, emphasizing that the book also contains elements of confidence in the possibility of a European response, provided that integration is strengthened and national policies are not relied upon alone.
The problem, according to Valensise, is not only that revisionist powers are challenging the existing order, but that its demolition is not matched by a credible plan for an alternative order. In place of a new shared system, the risk is that those with the power simply assert themselves, at least temporarily, by imposing their own agenda.
Hence the interest in middle powers and in a segment of what is called the Global South: countries that don't necessarily identify with either the Western agenda or that of its competitors and that can build variable forms of cooperation. Valensise also cited Mark Carney's Canada as possible references, along with the possibility of new convergences between middle powers interested in preserving cooperation and rules.
But the game, he added, is no longer fought solely with military and commercial tools. It also involves technology, and AI in particular. For Valensise, Europe cannot treat AI as a sectoral issue on the agenda: it will be one of the decisive areas of competition between the United States and China, and Brussels must find a balance between innovation and technological governance, without limiting itself to either deregulation or regulation that ends up stifling European industrial capacity.
Carolina De Stefano, a professor at Luiss University, brought the discussion back to Russia. Russia, she observed, appears both as a puzzle and as a country in which certain historical continuities are particularly visible. The central point of her analysis concerns the shift from post-Soviet ambiguity to a much more explicit imperial choice under Vladimir Putin.
In the 1990s, according to De Stefano, Russia had kept the question of its identity open: a nation state or the heir to an empire. This ambiguity allowed it to maintain relations with the Federation's many ethnic groups, relations with the former Soviet republics, and the claim to international continuity with the USSR.
Under Putin, in her analysis, that ambiguity has progressively diminished, and Moscow has much more clearly chosen an imperial dimension, based also on the protection of Russian-speaking populations beyond the border and on a more markedly Russian and Orthodox definition of national identity. A choice that, according to the scholar, could generate contradictions even within the Russian Federation itself.
The "failure" evoked in the book's subtitle, in De Stefano's interpretation, should therefore not be understood solely as a potential internal crisis of imperial systems. It also concerns their ability to propose a sufficiently credible and attractive model to others: a set of ideas, rules, institutions, and tools truly capable of replacing what is being contested.
Ultimately, this is the thread that runs through both the book and the Roman debate: force has returned to the center of international relations just as it has become more difficult to transform it into control.
The great powers possess unprecedented military, economic, and technological tools, but they must contend with rising costs, mutual dependencies, new private actors, middle powers less willing to align, and a technology that distributes capabilities once reserved for states.
For Dassù and Campanella, therefore, the "age of arrogance" doesn't necessarily herald the return of three great empires capable of dividing the planet between them in an orderly fashion. It can produce the exact opposite: a world in which no one can truly dictate the rules to everyone else.
And it is precisely in that space, according to Dassù, that Europe must decide what it wants to become. Continue to be primarily the power of rules, or learn to transform its market, technology, savings, and industrial capacity into strategic levers. To avoid, in the phrase used by the author in speaking to Adnkronos, finding itself "on the menu" and instead being able to sit "at the table."
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