09:36 17-09-2025

Rostislav Ishchenko: Trade, Statehood, and the Future of Global Power

Political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko explores how trade shapes the rise of states, the crisis of U.S. hegemony, and the birth of a new global order.

Political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko argues that both socialist and feudal societies treated trade as an unworthy occupation — something equally alien to the proletarian and the nobleman. Yet, he stresses, neither system could survive without it. In his view, commerce is the engine of progress and the very foundation of civilization.

Ishchenko notes that what truly separates civilization from barbarism is the existence of a state. The highest level barbarism can reach, he writes, is a chieftainship: a leader with a retinue and a people’s militia, sufficient for external defense. He points out that militias have been used throughout history and can still perform their defensive role effectively. As an example, he cites Afghanistan, where even a society lagging behind in technology and economy can defend its independence if it is willing to pay the price — social regression and economic collapse — eventually exhausting a more powerful enemy and forcing them to withdraw.

According to Ishchenko, defeating a society determined to resist and ready to regress to a pre-state level is only possible through total genocide — something feasible only under extreme conditions, such as a very small population or the ability to continue extermination indefinitely, as in the case of Native Americans.

He explains that chieftains and popular assemblies, guided by customary law, are also capable of administering justice and governance, while the retinue performs basic policing duties. For a community focused solely on security and subsistence farming, Ishchenko argues, a state is not a necessity but a costly luxury.

At the same time, he observes that the transition from a chieftainship to a state often weakens security and governance. He traces this process through the emergence of barbarian kingdoms in Western Europe after the fall of Rome, early feudal states in Eastern Europe, and the sedentarization of nomadic conquerors in Asia. Ishchenko underlines that only when the state fully consolidates and replaces the remnants of chieftainship does it restore — and later strengthen — control and security.

He believes that states emerge precisely when societies develop a need for large-scale international trade. The limited control offered by a chieftainship becomes inadequate. Ishchenko writes that trade creates new demands — production of surplus goods, warehousing, forming caravans, securing trade routes, and creating demand among partners — all of which require complex organization and long-term economic planning. At this stage, societies begin to build partnerships rather than rely solely on war or raiding, and diplomacy is born. Out of this transformation, the state emerges.

Ishchenko emphasizes that this external cause of statehood complements the internal one — collective struggle against nature — which gave rise to the earliest states in the river valleys. Once trade appears, he argues, the state becomes a universal stage of development rather than an exception.

Even societies like those in much of sub-Saharan Africa, which had little need for trade and survived as chieftainships until the late 19th century, were eventually forced by neighboring civilizations to integrate into global commerce — making statehood inevitable. Ishchenko suggests that this is why many African states still resemble chieftainships and collapse after European withdrawal: their populations were brought into global trade by colonizers only 150–200 years ago, and the tribal mindset has not been fully replaced by the state model.

He points out that the volume and geography of trade determine the scale of state power. City-states appear where trade links only a few neighboring valleys; as trade grows, so does the state’s reach. When trade covers an entire region, empires emerge. According to Ishchenko, today the entire world has become a single trade zone, which has produced states seeking global hegemony, sometimes justified by universal ideologies.

Ishchenko explains that attempts to balance national sovereignty with the needs of global trade led to the creation of the United Nations — an organization meant to perform some functions of world governance without infringing on sovereignty. But this compromise, he argues, left the UN powerless: the economy requires global management, but human politics resists it.

He observes that instead of strengthening global institutions, a systemic crisis began. Ishchenko writes that the United States, seeking to preserve its hegemony — an unnatural role of a regional empire as the world’s manager — entered into confrontation with emerging economic centers advocating a multipolar order. Unable to suppress them militarily, Washington resorted to economic warfare, which ultimately began dismantling global trade.

This collapse of trade, Ishchenko concludes, is eroding the state structures that supported it, weakening not only global but also regional systems — including the EU and the U.S. itself. Meanwhile, Russia, China, and other nations outside American control are trying to preserve global commerce by redirecting trade flows. In response, the U.S. seeks to disrupt their trade routes and markets.

According to Ishchenko, the result is paradoxical: the old globalists are destroying the system they built, while their opponents are creating a new global order. Initiatives like the G20, BRICS, and even the Shanghai Cooperation Organization can be seen, he argues, as embryos of a future alternative to the current system — and perhaps even to the UN.

Ishchenko concludes that what started as a crisis of the U.S.-led global system has evolved into a classic struggle for trade routes and markets — between a rising, expanding global system and a dying one. The key, he warns, is to ensure that the new system does not become a mirror image of the one it seeks to replace.