Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
In moments of across-the-board upheaval such as we are presently living through, the best guide to the future comes from looking at similarly portentous periods in the long past.
This is precisely what Hui Huang has done brilliantly in a Noema essay that analogizes today’s global disruption from AI and synthetic biology to geopolitics with the transition from the waning stability of the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China to the tumultuous period of the Warring States, which realigned that world according to new realities. It was a period of destruction, but also of unprecedented innovation and creation.
Writing from Shanghai, Huang starts with the systemic shock of President Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs, the first move of his “warring states mindset.”
“Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on America’s major trading partners. For critics, it was a reckless act of economic warfare. For Trump and his allies, it was a long-overdue rejection of a naïve world order.
“In a striking historical parallel, in the Spring and Autumn period of ancient China, Duke Xiang of Song famously refused to attack an enemy before they had properly arrayed their troops, adhering to the codes of ritualized warfare. Predictably, he lost. Today, a similar accusation is hurled at the United States: that it has restrained itself with outdated moral expectations, while rivals such as China and Russia maneuver freely, unburdened by idealism. Trumpism, and the worldview of figures like J.D. Vance, represent a sharp rejection of the so-called benevolence of Xiang. Their message is simple: America must adapt to a world where restraint is no longer a universal virtue.”
Huang continues: “This is not merely a moment of disruption. It marks a paradigmatic shift in global logic. The world is moving from a system of mediated stability toward one of open rivalry.
“To understand this moment, China’s own history offers a useful analogy. In the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 BCE), warfare was ritualized, legitimacy symbolically upheld by the Zhou king. But as the old order weakened, the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE) emerged, a time of intense competition, innovation and systemic transformation.
“Trumpism does not merely reject global liberalism; it reimagines the architecture of American power. Its core instinct is not isolationist or nihilistic, but fundamentally opposed to established diplomatic norms and rituals, a deliberate departure from the old ways of seeking consensus. In this worldview, legitimacy comes not from international approval but from output: industrial strength, cultural cohesion and strategic clarity. Rituals are not something to be respected, but to be bypassed.”
For Huang, this mindset did not emerge in a vacuum. “For much of the postwar era, the U.S.-led international order resembled China’s Spring and Autumn period — a fragile yet enduring balance, upheld by norms, rituals and symbolic legitimacy. Henry Kissinger, the era’s foremost architect, believed in ambiguity, restraint and equilibrium. Institutions like the United Nations played the role of a Zhou king, lacking hard power but commanding deference. Even amid Cold War tension, the world remained rule-bound. Red lines held, backchannels worked, deterrence was mutual.
“But the Zhou world is gone. Trumpism marks not an aberration but an inflection point, a recognition that fewer actors obey the old rites, and those who still do risk irrelevance. Like the Zhou order before it, today’s international system is fading not because of ideological rebellion but because its underlying conditions no longer hold. From Trump’s perspective, tariff wars were a response to these changing conditions. Institutions like the WTO, he argued, no longer ensured reciprocity, and growing trade imbalances reflected how the liberal economic order had failed to protect national interests.”
“Trumpism marks not an aberration but an inflection point, a recognition that fewer actors obey the old rites, and those who still do risk irrelevance.”
What is underway today, much like the transition from the Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States period, is about far more than a change in political climate. As Huang writes, that transition in China marked one of the most profound systemic shifts in its history, involving “a fundamental transformation that reshaped modes of production, social hierarchies and the very basis of legitimacy over centuries. It represented a deep pivot driven by new material and strategic realities that rendered the old Zhou rituals obsolete. This historical lens suggests that today’s global shift is not merely about changing alliances or rhetoric, but about a deeper, structural and potentially epochal turn.”
A Globally Synchronized Rethink
A wise student of the past, Huang does not regret the future. “What we are entering may not be a collapse, but a modeling epoch: a new Warring States world, chaotic and cruel, but also luminous. For those who think in systems and build in code, this is not the end of history. It is its recommencement.
“The Warring States era was not only an age of war. It was an age of brilliance. During the political upheaval of that period, Chinese civilization produced some of its greatest minds: Mencius, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, and Mozi, whose frameworks still shape political and moral reasoning today. Karl Jaspers called this broader phenomenon the Axial Age, when societies across China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece simultaneously reinvented what it meant to be human. Philosophy, justice and law did not arise from peace, but from rupture.
“More than two millennia after the Axial Age, we may be entering another globally synchronized rethink. With no shared ideology and dwindling trust in inherited institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles. What is justice? What deserves to endure? Questions of AI ethics, political legitimacy and governance are no longer academic. They are civilizational. The true contest ahead is between systems that adapt and systems that ossify.”
Huang concludes: “This is not a dark age. It is a time worthy of living.”
AI Helps Out
One note about Hui Huang’s essay “Welcome To The New Warring States” in Noema. Noema is transparent about the use of AI in any of its pieces. We publish original human-generated ideas but allow authorized, disclosed use of AI in certain cases. The initial submitted draft of this piece utilized ChatGPT as an editorial assistant and translator to help convey Chinese concepts more clearly in English, so as to express the author’s original, human-generated ideas more effectively.
Specifically, it was used to generate section headings, suggest transitions and reduce repetition, as well as for line edits to improve clarity and flow in the initial draft. It was not used to originate facts; all claims and examples are drawn from the author’s own notes and publicly available sources, and were reviewed and edited by the author himself first. This draft has since received multiple human edits. Noema verified the author’s identity and the piece’s conceptual originality using various scanners and review processes and conducted a detailed human fact-check. See our AI policy here.
