Why the Great Unraveling Will Be So Hard to Stop

Global fragmentation appears to be well underway. The astonishing shift in US foreign and economic policy is a primary cause, but the picture is far from simple and implicates many other factors. How to make sense of this teeming disorder? Where will these shifting forces lead the world?

For a persuasively bleak assessment, read The Doom Loop by Eswar Prasad. The author, a professor at Cornell University and leading international economist, draws on years of scholarship and experience, including as a senior official at the International Monetary Fund. This background makes his carefully grounded pessimism all too authoritative. Prasad doesn’t say that the case is hopeless; he offers some prescriptions, which we’ll come to shortly. But it’s impossible to read his book and not be alarmed.