Trump, the rise of China, and AI—what stories from the last 25 years will stand the test of time?

The COVID-19 pandemic initially seemed destined for historical centrality. Governments shut down economies. Schools closed. Borders hardened. Commentators predicted permanent transformations in work, geopolitics, and social life. And yet, remarkably, much of that proved wrong. With a few exceptions—including hybrid work arrangements and some institutional scarring—we largely reverted to pre-pandemic norms. Like 9/11, COVID may ultimately register less for what it changed than for how little it did. One possible exception is China. The pandemic accelerated already-existing doubts about the Chinese Communist Party’s intentions, transparency, and integration into the global order. But even here, the collision course predated COVID. China’s rise itself is likely to be one of the defining stories of the age. It’s especially significant because it confounded a once-dominant belief: that market reforms and integration into the global trading system would moderate Beijing’s behaviour and perhaps even usher in liberal democracy. Instead, we end the first quarter of the century with China more authoritarian, aggressive, and expansionary than ever. The West’s evolving response to this reality—strategically, economically, and morally—will almost certainly be a central narrative of the next 25 years. Another sleeper issue is demographic decline. The early decades of the 2000s appear to be the period when much of the developed world quietly gave up on having children. Fertility rates collapsed across Europe, East Asia, and North America. The cultural, economic, and geopolitical consequences are still unfolding. But it is hard to imagine future historians not lingering on this moment as a civilizational turning point—when advanced societies stopped reproducing themselves. Related to this is global migration. For years, large-scale immigration was treated as the obvious technocratic solution to demographic decline. But growing doubts about this model are no longer fringe. In high-trust societies like Canada, mass immigration from low-trust contexts has raised difficult questions about social cohesion, institutional capacity, and the limits of pluralism. The idea that borders could be broadly open without serious trade-offs is increasingly contested. It’s far from clear that this debate resolves in favour of maximalist immigration over the long run. Overlaying all of this is a broader intellectual shift. We’re living in an era of heterodoxy—not just policy disagreement, but metaphysical contestation. Liberalism, once assumed to be on an inevitable upward trajectory, is now challenged from both Left and Right. Economic dislocation, cultural fragmentation, demographic anxiety, and geopolitical rivalry have all contributed to this moment. Some of the resulting thinking is serious and constructive. Much of it is not. But either way, questions that once felt settled are no longer so. Liberalism is being forced to make the case for itself again. Connected to this is an unexpected turn in the story of secularization. Even committed atheists are beginning to ask whether the wholesale abandonment of religious tradition has produced negative outcomes—not just spiritually, but socially and psychologically. Thinkers like Ross Douthat and Niall Ferguson have openly wondered whether the West may be in a nascent stage of a religious revival. Whether such a revival materializes is an open question. That it’s being discussed at all is historically notable. These debates intersect with even more fundamental questions about gender, biotechnology, transhumanism, and the boundaries between nature and choice. In some cases, advances in science have outpaced society’s ethical consensus; in others, rapidly evolving social ideas have come into tension with scientific realities. The past decade alone has seen norms shift with breathtaking speed. These issues will only loom larger as technology advances and long-standing assumptions about the human person come under increasing strain. Which brings us back to artificial intelligence. Of all the developments of the past 25 years, AI may be the most plausibly history-shaping. Early progress has been nothing short of remarkable. Its implications extend across education, literature, science, politics, work, and warfare. We’re still in the infancy of understanding what this technology means for human agency and social organization. But it’s difficult to imagine future history books not treating AI as a structural transformation on par with electrification or the printing press. There are undoubtedly important developments missing from this list. Any attempt at historical triage is necessarily incomplete—especially when it involves speculating about an unknown future. History has a habit of elevating the quiet and demoting the loud. Still, as someone whose formative transition—from young adulthood to professional life to parenthood—has unfolded entirely within these past 25 years, this exercise feels more than academic. The world I entered as a student in 2001 assumed a degree of stability, convergence, and confidence that now feels almost quaint. The world my children are growing into seems far less settled—more technologically powerful, more intellectually fragmented, and more uncertain about its own foundations. Perhaps that, more than any single event, will define how this quarter century is remembered: not for a particular shock or scandal, but for the moment when the assumptions of the late 20th century quietly expired—and we began, haltingly, to grope toward whatever comes next.