3 experts: Lessons from history on how to understand America in 2025

“It’s a remarkable, maybe unique, combination of fragility and resilience.”

That’s the take on what the world gets wrong about the United States from Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, a British journalist who has spent decades covering the country, first for the Financial Times and now as CEO Editor for news platform Semafor.

Speaking to Radio Davos at the World Economic Forum's 2025 Annual Meeting, Edgecliffe-Johnson, academic and Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mead, and business leader and broadcaster David Rubinstein outlined how we may better understand this 20th and 21st-century superpower after the re-election of Donald Trump as the 47th US President.

Here’s what the three had to say.

When Edgecliffe-Johnson moved to the US a quarter of century ago, it was “unified by a story” and held together by its founding ideals but the country is more divided now, he says:

“I think when you look at divisions in the country now, you have to think there is something quite fragile about the American project and about the institutions of government. They’ve been very heavily tested in recent years, and there’s very little confidence in them, increasingly among the population. It’s a very split population.”

Since the journalist's arrival in the country, it has lived through 9/11, the global financial crisis and COVID-19. “And every time you come across one of those, you think, is this it? You know, can America come back from this? And America has an extraordinary record of coming back from that,” says Edgecliffe-Johnson.

As for what happens next under the new Trump administration, “I think we’re in for a new test of those fragilities. I think the new president is feeling very emboldened. I think he’s feeling quite unleashed and certainly not bound by previous conventions that have played a big part in the country’s resilience.”

Responding to whether the American dream is leaving people behind, Walter Mead, a Global View Columnist at the Wall Street Journal and Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida, and Fellow at think-tank the Hudson Institute, says there is 'much more anxiety'.

"We have a more dynamic society, but that's a more insecure society. And between automation eating at the demand for blue collar labour on the one side, and outsourcing, where factories move to countries where there are lower regulations and cheaper labour on the other, people do feel that a lot of things that they used to be able to count on just aren't there."

What many misunderstand about the populist and MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement in the US is that it is not purely reactionary, says Mead, “American populism has always had this kind of odd pro-enterprise, pro-capitalist streak."

"It’s very important to try to understand that and to realize that these are people who are looking for more opportunity, rather than people who are simply trying to freeze the status quo in place.”

Contrary to popular belief, American conservatism is actually "radically innovative" at its core, says Mead.

“The qualities that make America great, the qualities that made it the industrial leader in all of these technologies that enabled American society to leave sort of feudalism and other things behind. Their nostalgia is also future-centred.”

David Rubenstein, Co-founder and Co-chairman of private equity firm The Carlyle Group says: “Right now, the United States seems to be in a fairly dominant position, and certainly in the Western world”.

Much of this dominance relies on having the world’s only reserve currency, but also a technological edge. The US was not a dominant country until after World War Two, he says, and its investment in technology has been a key driver of this shift.

But we should not assume the US’s position as the world’s dominant superpower will last forever, he says.

"The only thing we know for certain from world history is that things change in ways that people don't anticipate. So I can't tell you for certain that technology will be as dominant in the global economic sphere as it is today. But clearly technology's on the march. And I think companies and countries that don't recognize how technology is changing everything I think are going to be left behind."

A lesson American leaders should take from the past is "to listen to what other countries are thinking about, and listen to them intelligently", as “nothing continues forever. And if something can’t keep going on, eventually it won’t.”

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