In 2016, two elections shocked the globe, challenging the foundations of the open trading, liberal global economy and the diplomatic comity that had enabled it to flourish since the end of the Second World War. On 23 June, voters in the United Kingdom cast ballots by a 52/ 48 percent margin in a referendum to withdraw from the European Union, after 43 years of membership in the largest, most successful economic and political integration project in human history. Five months later, the rabidly protectionist and openly anti-diplomatic presidential campaign of Donald Trump in the United States resulted in Trump's accumulating enough votes in the 1789 Constitution's Electoral College to secure the presidency (despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes). As events of the next three years in these two countries that were cornerstones of the diplomatic promotion of liberal trade worldwide in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively would bear out, voters had taken a hatchet to a system of economic and diplomatic principles that had brought unprecedented economic fortune to their own forebears and to much of the world in the process.

But the votes of that annus horribilis 2016 were only the tip of the iceberg, or more precisely the tip of several interlocking icebergs, to use a soon-to-beanachronistic metaphor. A succession of crises afflicted the global economy, and international relations and the practice of diplomacy more broadly, in the second decade of the twenty-first century with particularly negative consequences for international trade. The global economy's recovery from the financial crisis of 2008 and the ‘Great Recession’ that followed was slower and more uneven than recoveries from other recent economic downturns. Emerging new technologies, extending from micro-targeting in advertising to robotics to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), have played a significant part in determining whose recovery has been strong and whose has been marginalized.

Taking a longer view, the evolution of both trade and diplomacy has always been driven by technological development: for trade, the invention of the wheel, the steam engine, the internet; for diplomacy, the telegraph, the telephone, email, and video conferencing.