History doesn’t follow a calendar but defining ideas. The “long 19th century” began with the French Revolution (1789) and ended with World War I (1914). Similarly, the “long 20th century” began in 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I and emerged as a global power. Symbolically, the 21st century started on 20 January 2025 with two defining events—Donald Trump’s divisive return to power and the seismic release of DeepSeek, a Chinese open-source AI. Here’s why. Trump’s return to power represented not merely a political recalibration but the conclusion of an era anchored in American global leadership. Since 1917, the United States has served as the principal architect of international institutions, alliances, and the advancement of democratic ideals. The “America First” agenda—prioritizing national sovereignty over global entanglements and domestic economic interests over multilateral frameworks—signalled a deliberate retreat from the traditional US diplomatic approach highlighted by State Secretary Marco Rubio: So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. Yet Trump’s shift transcended politics. It revealed a growing scepticism toward a defining assumption of modernity: that societies function within a universally shared framework of rational thought, a concept forged during the ‘long 20th century’. This period saw sustained efforts to impose scientific rigour—rooted in observation, experimentation, and predictability—in understanding human conditions and our society. Politics, the realm of arts, intuition, and statecraft, was recast as “political science,” while social dynamics started being treated as phenomena reducible to formulaic analysis. Resistance to this ‘scientification’ of society, however, predated Trump. Postmodern scholars warned against conflating human behaviour with laboratory experiments. Over time, scepticism spread beyond academia. Public trust in scientific consensus—once viewed as an objective foundation of society—eroded, exacerbated by social media’s amplification of competing narratives and partisan media’s weaponisation of discourse. This erosion of shared truths has precipitated an epistemic crisis, challenging the Enlightenment’s core proposition: that reason alone can order society. As we enter this nascent era, the imperative is to give rationality a new purpose. The Enlightenment project can endure only by revitalizing critical thinking and tempering empirical rigour by acknowledging human complexity—cultural heritage, communal bonds, and societal complexities. The path forward should avoid risks of reactionary tribalism and technocratic overreach. Instead, it demands a renewed modernity: one that harmonizes reason with humility, recognizing that enduring institutions must account for both human imperfection and the irreducible diversity of society. This article is part of our ongoing series on the far-reaching consequences of Trump’s leadership. On Trump’s inauguration day, DeepSeek launched a groundbreaking open-source AI model, challenging Big Tech’s dominance by offering free access to its code—unlike proprietary systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. DeepSeek’s moment transcends a mere tech breakthrough, heralding the dawn of a ‘new century’: First, it marks a shift from industrial capitalism-driven mainly by money and machines- to a cognitive economy- fueled by knowledge and creativity. Second, wealth and economic power will diminish as determinants of success. DeepSeek developed its model with 20 times less investment than tech giants, attracting top talent by prioritising, among other motivations, the centrality of open-source collaboration. Third, once tech imitators, Chinese companies and labs now lead a new competition: not for control of data and technology, but for defining how innovation unfolds in the AI era. Don’t miss the DeepSeek Moment. As the ‘long 20th century’ collapsed under its own flaws—globalization’s inequities, institutional decay, and the weaponisation of facts and truth, we enter in highly uncertain era of volatility and possibility for reinvention. Three main questions will resonate in the coming years:
1. Trump Moment: The end of the Pax Americana and the Enlightenment era?
Crisis of Enlightenment
To see more articles on this subject, visit our Trump Moment blog collection page.2. DeepSeek Moment: The rise of the cognitive economy
Stay updated on the latest developments and in-depth analysis of DeepSeek’s transformative impact on AI, security, geopolitics, and more.The new century starts
