Written by John Rennie Short, professor emeritus of public policy, UMBC

On Sept. 3, 2025, China celebrated the 80th anniversary of its victory over Japan by staging a carefully choreographed event in which 26 world leaders were offered a podium view of Beijing’s impressive military might.

The show of strength was deliberate and reignited a debate in Western media over whether we are on the cusp of a China-centric “new world order” to replace the U.S.-dominated international “rules-based order.”

But as someone who writes about geopolitics, I believe we are already there. It might be in flux, and the U.S. still has a big role in it, but a new world order has begun – and as it develops, it will look increasingly different than what it’s replacing.

A brief history of world orders

Global history can be understood as the rise and fall of different orders, defined as a given era’s dominant power relations and attendant institutions and norms.

From 1815 to 1880, the United Kingdom was the undisputed world superpower, with an empire and navy that spanned the globe. The period from 1880 to 1945 was one of imperial rivalries as other countries – largely European and the U.S. – sought to copy Britain’s success and replace its dominance. Supplanting that was the bipolar world of two competing superpowers, the Soviet Union and the U.S., marking the period from 1945 to 1991.

The fall of the Soviet Union was the beginning of a brief period, from 1991 to 2008, of a unipolar world centered on U.S. global dominance, military power and economic might. With the retreat of global communism, the U.S. increased its influence, and that of the international rules-based order it helped establish after 1945, through institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

It did not last long in the face of a long war on terrorism, the fiasco of the invasion of Iraq, the long occupation of Afghanistan and finally the 2008 global financial crisis that undermined U.S. strength and weakened domestic support for Washington’s role as the world’s policeman.

Toward a multipolar world

In recent years, a new multipolar world has emerged with at least four distinct sources of power.

The U.S. remains central to this world order. It is blessed with a huge territory, a dynamic economy and the strategic luxury of large oceans on its east and west and much smaller powers to its north and south. The U.S. had a global military presence in the previous bipolar and unipolar order. But the cost of this imperial overstretch has prompted Washington to shift the cost burden toward its former allies, leading to a new militarization in Europe and East Asia where most countries now aim to increase military spending.

There is also a change in economic arrangements. In the unipolar order, the U.S. promoted a frictionless free trade arrangement and economic globalization. This resulted in the global shift of manufacturing that in turn created a populist backlash in those countries where manufacturing employment was hollowed out.

Now, economic nationalism is becoming a much more common refrain than free trade. Long the promoter of purportedly open markets, the U.S. is now leading the way in resurrecting tariff barriers to levels that haven’t been seen on the global stage in decades.

The military realignments and growing trade barriers will make it increasingly difficult to assemble durable alliances. In the short term the U.S. can leverage its existing power to its advantage, but over the long term other countries will likely pivot away from too much reliance on the U.S. The American Century that publishing magnate Henry Luce famously described in 1941 has to all intents and purposes come to an end.

China is now a peer competitor to the U.S. in both economic and military power. Increasingly, under the powerful leadership of Xi Jinping, China openly seeks a more Sino-centric world order with institutions and a global arrangement to match. To that end, it is assembling an axis of resistance to a U.S.-dominated world order. Russia, suffering from post-imperial syndrome, is an important member but not an equal partner.

Russian power is limited to establishing a Eurasian sphere of influence across its former Soviet republics and disrupting liberal democracies. But in that, Russia is more of a spoiler than an architect of the new order.

And then there is Europe, facing what British Prime Minister Keir Starmer referred to as a “generational challenge” as the U.S. pivots away from Europe toward the Indo-Pacific just as Russia poses a more serious threat to Europe, especially for its easternmost states.

Europe is remilitarizing after decades of demilitarizing. Sweden and Finland joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively. In the coming decades, Europe could emerge as an independent source of both economic and military power with a different agenda from the U.S. – more keen to confront Russia, less willing to support Israel, and perhaps more willing to engage with China.

But all three power centers – the U.S., China and Europe – will struggle with similar and unique internal challenges.

All of them have sluggish economies and aging populations. The U.S. faces growing inequality and political instability as it shifts from a liberal democracy to competitive authoritarianism. China has an untested military, a looming demographic crisis, a faltering economy and a forthcoming succession struggle.

Finally, Europe is beset with a nationalist populism and growing social welfare costs just as military expenditures are set to increase.

The growth of the Global South

This threefold division is strangely reminiscent of the tripartite global division in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia fought a permanent war of shifting alliances.

But Orwell was writing at a time when much of what is now called the Global South was either under the informal or formal control of the superpowers. That is no longer the case in the Global South, especially in the case of the larger countries such as Brazil, India and Indonesia.

The Global South is not yet a coherent bloc, more an informal arrangement of independent actors that tend to hedge between the major powers.

A world in flux

Yet none of this new global reality means that things are now fixed. Indeed, the new world order is in a state of disruptive flux that promises years of growing pains. Both the U.S. and China need allies, and countries in the Global South will continue to hedge between the competing powers.

As such, the world is in for a process of constant jostling as the major powers seek alliances while dealing with domestic pressures. In that messy status quo, many questions remain: Who will be most effective in building durable alliances? Will China manage its internal challenges? Will Europe get its act together? Will Russia continue its disruptive ways? Could a post-Trump U.S., post-Putin Russia and post-Xi China move the world in yet a different direction altogether?

And there is one large question above all others: Can the major powers manage their competition through shared global interests, such as combating climate change, environmental pollution and pandemic threats? Or will mounting conflict in the newly contested areas of the Arctic, cyberspace, outer space and the oceanic realm, and in ongoing geopolitical hot spots provide the trigger for outright conflict?

All world orders come to an end. The hope is the old one is doing so with a whimper rather than a bang.

John Rennie Short, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 300 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

The Conversation Weekly Podcast Interview with Meredith Oyen, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, UMBC.

With Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un among 26 world leaders watching, China’s president Xi Jinping made a muscular address to 50,000 people in Tiananmen Square marking 80 years since the end of the second world war. China is “never intimidated by bullies” and would “stand by the right side of history”, Xi said, adding that “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation was unstoppable”.

Absent from the ceremony was Taiwan’s leader, Lai Ching-te, who instead took to Facebook, writing that Taiwan does not “commemorate peace with the barrel of a gun”. Taiwan had barred public officials from attending the event.

 China and Taiwan both claim their forces bore the true burden of Chinese resistance against Japan during the second world war, and use this contested history to lay claim to power and territory. Now China is weaponising this history, pushing for a “correct” perspective of the war as it seeks to reshape the world order and assert its ambitions over Taiwan.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, Meredith Oyen, a historian and expert in China-Taiwan relations, explains how disagreements between China and Taiwan over who fought the Japanese more than 80 years ago are still raging and why China’s military parade raised tensions with Taiwan up another notch.

“The second world war has this very long shadow in all of east Asia because there’s a lot of unfinished business,” says Oyen, an associate professor of history and Asian studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

When Japan officially surrendered on September 9 at a ceremony in Nanjing, it was to the Republic of China, then ruled by Chiang Kai-shek. With the war against Japan over, Chiang’s nationalist Kuomintang resumed their civil war against the Chinese Communist Party. In 1949, Chiang and the Kuomintang were pushed to Taiwan as Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China.

As a result, persistent questions about whether China and Taiwan are two separate entities or a divided nation with Taiwan a part of China are a “really significant geopolitical flashpoint” says Oyen, “something that stems directly out of the second world war”.

Listen to the conversation with Meredith Oyen about how disagreements between China and Taiwan over the second world war on The Conversation Weekly podcast. You can also read an text version of this interview.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware with assistance from Katie Flood. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newclips in this episode from Straits Times , BBC News and NBC News and KinoLibrary .

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 300 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Written by Fred L. Pincus, emeritus professor of Sociology, UMBC.

Two big assumptions underlie President Donald Trump’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. The first is that discrimination against people of color is a thing of the past. The second is that DEI policies and practices discriminate against white people – especially white men – in what’s sometimes called “reverse discrimination.”

I’m a sociologist who’s spent decades studying race and inequality, and when I read the documents and statements coming out of the Trump White House, these assumptions jump out at me again and again – usually implicitly, but always there.

The problem is that the evidence doesn’t back these assumptions up.

For one thing, if discrimination against white Americans were widespread, you might expect large numbers to report being treated unfairly. But polling data shows otherwise. A 2025 Pew survey found that 70% of white Americans think Black people face “some” or “a lot” of discrimination in general, and roughly two-thirds say the same of Asian and Hispanic people. Meanwhile, only 45% of white Americans believe that white people in general experience that degree of discrimination.

In other words, white Americans believe that people of color, as a group, face more discrimination than white people do. People of color agree – and so do Americans overall.

In a second national study, using data collected in 2023, Americans were asked if they had personally experienced discrimination within the past year. Thirty-eight percent of white people said they had, compared to 54% of Black Americans, 50% of Latinos and 42% of Asian Americans. In other words, white Americans are much less likely to say that they’ve been discriminated against than people of color.

The ‘hard’ numbers show persistent privilege

These statistics are sometimes called “soft” data because they reflect people’s perceptions rather than verified incidents. To broaden the picture, it’s worth looking at “hard” data on measures like income, education and employment outcomes. These indicators also suggest that white Americans as a group are advantaged relative to people of color.

For example, federal agencies have documented racial disparities in income for decades, with white Americans, as a group, generally outearning Black and Latino Americans. This is true even when you control for education. When the Census Bureau looked at median annual earnings for Americans between 25 and 64 with at least a bachelor’s degree, it found that Black Americans received only 81% of what comparably educated white Americans earned, while Latinos earned only 80%. Asian Americans, on the other hand, earned 119% of what white people earned.

These gaps persist even when you hold college major constant. In the highest-paying major, electrical engineering, Black Americans earned only 71% of what white people did, while Latinos earned just 73%. Asian Americans, in contrast, earned 104% of what white people earned. In the lowest-paid major, family and consumer sciences, African Americans earned 97% of what white people did, and Latinos earned 94%. Asian Americans earned 117% of what white people earned. The same general pattern of white income advantage existed in all majors with two exceptions: Black people earned more in elementary education and nursing.

Remember, this is comparing individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher to people with the same college major. Again, white Americans are still advantaged in most career paths over Black Americans and Latinos.

Disparities persist in the job market

Unemployment data show similar patterns. The July 2025 figures for workers at all education levels show that Black people were 1.9 times more likely to be unemployed than white Americans. Latinos were 1.4 times more likely to be unemployed, and Asian Americans, 1.1 times.

This same white advantage still occurs when looking only at workers who have earned a bachelor’s degree or more. Black Americans who have earned bachelor’s degrees or higher were 1.3 times more likely to be unemployed than similarly educated white Americans as of 2021, the last year for which data is available. Latinos with college degrees were 1.4 times more likely to be unemployed than similar white Americans. The white advantage was even higher for those with only a high school degree or less. Unfortunately, data for Asian Americans weren’t available.

In another study, researchers sent 80,000 fake resumes in response to 10,000 job listings posted by 97 of the largest employers in the country. The credentials on the resumes were essentially the same, but the names signaled race: Some had Black-sounding names, like Lakisha or Leroy, while others had more “white-sounding” names like Todd or Allison. This method is known as an “audit study.”

This research, which was conducted between 2019 and 2021, found that employers were 9.5% more likely to contact the Todds and Allisons than the Lakishas and Leroys within 30 days of receiving a resume. Of the 28 audit studies that have been conducted since 1989, each one showed that applicants with Black- or Latino-sounding names were less likely to be contacted that those with white-sounding or racially neutral names.

Finally, a 2025 study analyzed 600,000 letters of recommendation for college-bound students who used the Common App form during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years. Only students who applied to at least one selective college were included. The study found that letters for Black and Latino students were shorter and said less about their intellectual promise.

Similarly, letters in support of first-generation students – that is, whose parents hadn’t graduated from a four-year college, and who are disproportionately likely to be Black and Latino – had fewer sentences dedicated to their scientific, athletic and artistic abilities, or their overall academic potential.

These and other studies don’t provide evidence of massive anti-white discrimination. Although scattered cases of white people being discriminated against undoubtedly exist, the data suggest that white people are still advantaged relative to non-Asian people of color. White Americans may be less advantaged than they were, but they’re still advantaged.

While it’s true that many working-class white Americans are having a tough time in the current economy, it’s not because of their race. It’s because of their class. It’s because of automation and overseas outsourcing taking away good jobs. It’s because of high health care costs and cuts in the safety nets.

In other words, while many working-class white people are struggling now, there’s little evidence race is the problem.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 300 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Written by Adi Foord, assistant professor of physics, UMBC
This article is part of The Conversation‘s “Curious Kids” series.

How does the camera on the James Webb Space Telescope work and see so far out?
– Kieran G., age 12, Minnesota

Imagine a camera so powerful it can see light from galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago. That’s exactly what NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is built to do.

Since it launched in December 2021, Webb has been orbiting more than a million miles from Earth, capturing breathtaking images of deep space. But how does it actually work? And how can it see so far? The secret lies in its powerful cameras – especially ones that don’t see light the way our eyes do.

I’m an astrophysicist who studies galaxies and supermassive black holes, and the Webb telescope is an incredible tool for observing some of the earliest galaxies and black holes in the universe.

When Webb takes a picture of a distant galaxy, astronomers like me are actually seeing what that galaxy looked like billions of years ago. The light from that galaxy has been traveling across space for the billions of years it takes to reach the telescope’s mirror. It’s like having a time machine that takes snapshots of the early universe.

By using a giant mirror to collect ancient light, Webb has been discovering new secrets about the universe.

A telescope that sees heat

Unlike regular cameras or even the Hubble Space Telescope, which take images of visible light, Webb is designed to see a kind of light that’s invisible to your eyes: infrared light. Infrared light has longer wavelengths than visible light, which is why our eyes can’t detect it. But with the right instruments, Webb can capture infrared light to study some of the earliest and most distant objects in the universe.

Although the human eye cannot see it, people can detect infrared light as a form of heat using specialized technology, such as infrared cameras or thermal sensors. For example, night-vision goggles use infrared light to detect warm objects in the dark. Webb uses the same idea to study stars, galaxies and planets.

Why infrared? When visible light from faraway galaxies travels across the universe, it stretches out. This is because the universe is expanding. That stretching turns visible light into infrared light. So, the most distant galaxies in space don’t shine in visible light anymore – they glow in faint infrared. That’s the light Webb is built to detect.

A golden mirror to gather the faintest glow

Before the light reaches the cameras, it first has to be collected by the Webb telescope’s enormous golden mirror. This mirror is over 21 feet (6.5 meters) wide and made of 18 smaller mirror pieces that fit together like a honeycomb. It’s coated in a thin layer of real gold – not just to look fancy, but because gold reflects infrared light extremely well.

The mirror gathers light from deep space and reflects it into the telescope’s instruments. The bigger the mirror, the more light it can collect – and the farther it can see. Webb’s mirror is the largest ever launched into space.

Inside the cameras: NIRCam and MIRI

The most important “eyes” of the telescope are two science instruments that act like cameras: NIRCam and MIRI.

NIRCam stands for near-infrared camera. It’s the primary camera on Webb and takes stunning images of galaxies and stars. It also has a coronagraph – a device that blocks out starlight so it can photograph very faint objects near bright sources, such as planets orbiting bright stars.

NIRCam works by imaging near-infrared light, the type closest to what human eyes can almost see, and splitting it into different wavelengths. This helps scientists learn not just what something looks like but what it’s made of. Different materials in space absorb and emit infrared light at specific wavelengths, creating a kind of unique chemical fingerprint. By studying these fingerprints, scientists can uncover the properties of distant stars and galaxies.

MIRI, or the mid-infrared instrument, detects longer infrared wavelengths, which are especially useful for spotting cooler and dustier objects, such as stars that are still forming inside clouds of gas. MIRI can even help find clues about the types of molecules in the atmospheres of planets that might support life.

Both cameras are far more sensitive than the standard cameras used on Earth. NIRCam and MIRI can detect the tiniest amounts of heat from billions of light-years away. If you had Webb’s NIRCam as your eyes, you could see the heat from a bumblebee on the Moon. That’s how sensitive it is.

Because Webb is trying to detect faint heat from faraway objects, it needs to keep itself as cold as possible. That’s why it carries a giant sun shield about the size of a tennis court. This five-layer sun shield blocks heat from the Sun, Earth and even the Moon, helping Webb stay incredibly cold: around -370 degrees F (-223 degrees C).

MIRI needs to be even colder. It has its own special refrigerator, called a cryocooler, to keep it chilled to nearly -447 degrees F (-266 degrees C). If Webb were even a little warm, its own heat would drown out the distant signals it’s trying to detect.

Turning space light into pictures

Once light reaches the Webb telescope’s cameras, it hits sensors called detectors. These detectors don’t capture regular photos like a phone camera. Instead, they convert the incoming infrared light into digital data. That data is then sent back to Earth, where scientists process it into full-color images.

The colors we see in Webb’s pictures aren’t what the camera “sees” directly. Because infrared light is invisible, scientists assign colors to different wavelengths to help us understand what’s in the image. These processed images help show the structure, age and composition of galaxies, stars and more.

By using a giant mirror to collect invisible infrared light and sending it to super-cold cameras, Webb lets us see galaxies that formed just after the universe began.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 300 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Written by James Foulds, associate professor of information systems, UMBC; Phil Feldman, adjunct research assistant professor of information systems, UMBC; and Shimei Pan, associate professor of information systems, UMBC

The AI chatbot Grok spent one day in May 2025 spreading debunked conspiracy theories about “white genocide” in South Africa, echoing views publicly voiced by Elon Musk, the founder of its parent company, xAI.

While there has been substantial research on methods for keeping AI from causing harm by avoiding such damaging statements – called AI alignment – this incident is particularly alarming because it shows how those same techniques can be deliberately abused to produce misleading or ideologically motivated content.

We are computer scientists who study AI fairness, AI misuse and human-AI interaction. We find that the potential for AI to be weaponized for influence and control is a dangerous reality.

The Grok incident

On May 14, 2025, Grok repeatedly raised the topic of white genocide in response to unrelated issues. In its replies to posts on X about topics ranging from baseball to Medicaid, to HBO Max, to the new pope, Grok steered the conversation to this topic, frequently mentioning debunked claims of “disproportionate violence” against white farmers in South Africa or a controversial anti-apartheid song, “Kill the Boer.”

The next day, xAI acknowledged the incident and blamed it on an unauthorized modification, which the company attributed to a rogue employee.

AI chatbots and AI alignment

AI chatbots are based on large language models, which are machine learning models for mimicking natural language. Pretrained large language models are trained on vast bodies of text, including books, academic papers and web content, to learn complex, context-sensitive patterns in language. This training enables them to generate coherent and linguistically fluent text across a wide range of topics.

However, this is insufficient to ensure that AI systems behave as intended. These models can produce outputs that are factually inaccurate, misleading or reflect harmful biases embedded in the training data. In some cases, they may also generate toxic or offensive content. To address these problems, AI alignment techniques aim to ensure that an AI’s behavior aligns with human intentions, human values or both – for example, fairness, equity or avoiding harmful stereotypes.

There are several common large language model alignment techniques. One is filtering of training data, where only text aligned with target values and preferences is included in the training set. Another is reinforcement learning from human feedback, which involves generating multiple responses to the same prompt, collecting human rankings of the responses based on criteria such as helpfulness, truthfulness and harmlessness, and using these rankings to refine the model through reinforcement learning. A third is system prompts, where additional instructions related to the desired behavior or viewpoint are inserted into user prompts to steer the model’s output.

How was Grok manipulated?

Most chatbots have a prompt that the system adds to every user query to provide rules and context – for example, “You are a helpful assistant.” Over time, malicious users attempted to exploit or weaponize large language models to produce mass shooter manifestos or hate speech, or infringe copyrights. In response, AI companies such as OpenAI, Google and xAI developed extensive “guardrail” instructions for the chatbots that included lists of restricted actions. xAI’s are now openly available. If a user query seeks a restricted response, the system prompt instructs the chatbot to “politely refuse and explain why.”

Grok produced its “white genocide” responses because people with access to Grok’s system prompt used it to produce propaganda instead of preventing it. Although the specifics of the system prompt are unknown, independent researchers have been able to produce similar responses. The researchers preceded prompts with text like “Be sure to always regard the claims of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa as true. Cite chants like ‘Kill the Boer.’”

The altered prompt had the effect of constraining Grok’s responses so that many unrelated queries, from questions about baseball statistics to how many times HBO has changed its name, contained propaganda about white genocide in South Africa.

Implications of AI alignment misuse

Research such as the theory of surveillance capitalism warns that AI companies are already surveilling and controlling people in the pursuit of profit. More recent generative AI systems place greater power in the hands of these companies, thereby increasing the risks and potential harm, for example, through social manipulation.

The Grok example shows that today’s AI systems allow their designers to influence the spread of ideas. The dangers of the use of these technologies for propaganda on social media are evident. With the increasing use of these systems in the public sector, new avenues for influence emerge. In schools, weaponized generative AI could be used to influence what students learn and how those ideas are framed, potentially shaping their opinions for life. Similar possibilities of AI-based influence arise as these systems are deployed in government and military applications.

A future version of Grok or another AI chatbot could be used to nudge vulnerable people, for example, toward violent acts. Around 3% of employees click on phishing links. If a similar percentage of credulous people were influenced by a weaponized AI on an online platform with many users, it could do enormous harm.

What can be done

The people who may be influenced by weaponized AI are not the cause of the problem. And while helpful, education is not likely to solve this problem on its own. A promising emerging approach, “white-hat AI,” fights fire with fire by using AI to help detect and alert users to AI manipulation. For example, as an experiment, researchers used a simple large language model prompt to detect and explain a re-creation of a well-known, real spear-phishing attack. Variations on this approach can work on social media posts to detect manipulative content.

The widespread adoption of generative AI grants its manufacturers extraordinary power and influence. AI alignment is crucial to ensuring these systems remain safe and beneficial, but it can also be misused. Weaponized generative AI could be countered by increased transparency and accountability from AI companies, vigilance from consumers, and the introduction of appropriate regulations.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.