The Year 2014 and the Origins of Our Time
Six threads born in 2014 have since converged into the world we now inhabit
Welcome to the 8th edition of the 2026 season of Drift Signal. I’m Nicolas, Head of Research at Vsquared Ventures. This is my personal newsletter, which examines macro and markets through the lens of late-cycle investment theory, and the views expressed are my own.
Here is some recently published content that could be of interest:
In Currency of Power, Marieke Flament and I speak with Izabella Kaminska on the eurodollar system, stablecoins, and the long arc of money moving beyond the reach of the state. From eurodollar markets and the LIBOR regime to the rise of Tether, Izabella shows how today’s stablecoins echo earlier offshore dollar structures rather than break from them. We also discuss her idea of stablecoins as a form of stabilisation — a way to manage global imbalances — and what this means for the future of dollar power and financial control. Watch, listen or read here: The Dollar’s Parallel Life.
Now on to today’s edition. The conventional story of our present moment begins in 2016. Brexit, Trump, the sense of rupture: two votes that seemed to announce a new era. The rupture of 2016 was real, but the ground had shifted two years earlier, reported as separate stories, and largely forgotten under later dates.
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and ended the post-Cold War settlement. China began building a parallel economic and financial order. American shale unwound the petrodollar system from the inside. Alibaba revealed a second digital civilisation. And in Gamergate and the US midterms, the infrastructure of populist politics was assembled before anyone knew what it would be used for. This edition traces the six threads that converged that year — and have not diverged since.
1/ 2014 sets the stage
Some time ago I listened to a Hidden Forces episode in which Demetri Kofinas speaks with Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine.
Jacob describes returning to America after a tour of duty and finding his country dramatically changed. The event he uses to illustrate this is the 2014 misogynistic harassment campaign known as Gamergate. He also mentioned ISIS founding its caliphate in the Middle East — a separate but equally striking 2014 marker, notable for the beheading videos and a new kind of information warfare that nobody had a ready answer to.
I fully understand Jacob’s point on ISIS. In fact, I remember that in 2015 I was studying a piece in the New York Review of Books, published anonymously, and thinking that these people were operating with a startup founder’s logic and that we had no playbook for it. ISIS felt like a turning point. But it then faded, and although it reshaped the Middle East in a major way, people rarely discuss it now.
What else was moving in 2014 that we have since forgotten filed under later dates?
The answer, on reflection, is quite a lot — enough to frame an entire newsletter edition! And that challenges the conventional story of our time, which tends to begin in 2016. Brexit in June, Trump in November: two votes that seemed to announce a new era. In an essay I wrote at the time, titled Brexit: Doom or Europe’s Polanyi Moment?, I framed the stakes this way:
One could say that 9/11 and the Iraq war were like World War I, having planted the seeds for the global political turmoil that’s led us to the faltering of the Syrian regime… and the migrant crisis that triggered Brexit. The equivalent of World War II may be looming in the form of ISIS and widespread terrorism: not battles waged by massive, professional armies powered by high technology, but destruction brought about by isolated groups of amateur individuals interconnected throughout a global cultural, financial and technological network.
If that is right, the rupture did not begin in 2016. Across geopolitics, energy, technology, and politics, the architecture of the present decade looks to have been largely in place by the end of 2014.
2/ Russia crosses a line
The post-Cold War order rested on the following assumption: as of 1989, territorial war in Europe was finished. Liberal democracy had won, markets would bind former adversaries together, and international norms would hold the peace. Francis Fukuyama’s famous (and widely misunderstood) concept of the “End of History” became the Western elite’s intellectual compass, grounded in the remarkable events of 1989.
The problem, notably from a European perspective, was a failure of historical reasoning. As historian Timothy Garton Ash argues, the West looked at nearly two decades of progress after 1989 and assumed the trend would continue. It took a contingent, fragile, hard-won outcome and read it as evidence that history moved inevitably toward freedom and liberal democracy. That left no room for reversals, for the agency of hostile powers, or for the possibility that the Soviet collapse was an event to be managed rather than a victory to be celebrated.
The warning signs were there early. As Garton Ash recalls in his book Homelands, he met Putin in St Petersburg in 1994 — then the city’s deputy mayor — who was already insisting on Russia’s need to protect Russian speakers abroad and recover territories that had “historically always belonged to Russia.” Crimea was mentioned by name. The West filed this away and moved on.
What followed was two decades of mistaking economic interdependence for hard security. Germany deepened its reliance on Russian gas even as it let its armed forces atrophy. NATO’s 2008 Bucharest summit produced the worst of both worlds: a communiqué promising Ukraine eventual membership without any concrete steps to guarantee its security, increasing Russia’s threat perception while offering Ukraine nothing real in return.
Then in late 2013, Ukraine’s pro-Russian government fell following the Maidan Revolution. The country pivoted decisively toward the West. Russia’s answer came in early 2014: the annexation of Crimea, the first forcible redrawing of a European border in decades. Western sanctions followed, and a long economic confrontation began to take shape.
My friend Moritz Müller-Freitag, reviewing Garton Ash’s book, puts it like this in his beautiful text Quo Vadis, Europa?:
In the decade that followed, Europe wilfully turned a blind eye to Russia, first in 2008 and then again in 2014. Garton Ash aptly calls the annexation of Crimea ‘the turning point at which the West failed to turn.
In 2014, the annexation of Crimea closed the post-1989 chapter. Great power rivalry was back on European soil. The rules that had governed the continent for twenty-five years no longer held.
3/ The West sanctions Russia, China takes note
In response to the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the US and its allies imposed sanctions on Russia. Their immediate target was Moscow, but their most important audience was Beijing.
What the sanctions demonstrated was that the US could use financial infrastructure as a precision geopolitical tool. SWIFT access, dollar clearing, treasury holdings were leverage, and any country sufficiently integrated into the dollar system was, in principle, exposed to the same pressure.
China’s exposure at the time was considerable. It held vast quantities of US treasuries, conducted the bulk of its trade in dollars, and had no parallel system to fall back on. The conclusion Beijing drew that year was the following: this integration was a strategic vulnerability, and reducing it was a matter of national security.
The response came on three fronts. First, China slowed its accumulation of US treasuries and began diversifying its reserves. Second, it launched the Belt and Road Initiative, deploying capital into infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Europe — seeking returns outside the dollar system and building relationships beyond Western financial architecture. As I wrote in 2017 in When China Rules the Global Digital World:
The Belt and Road Initiative is a process by which Chinese tech giants will become able to expand their operations throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. There are already ways through which popular Chinese applications such as WeChat and Alipay are adopted beyond the Chinese domestic market: mainly the diaspora and the growing number of Chinese tourists travelling abroad. But once the same applications are adopted in Central Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe, with the experience curve that comes from expanding to new countries and adapting to their particular customs, how long do you think it will take for Western Europeans to get interested in WeChat and Alipay, too?
Third, China began constructing alternative financial plumbing. The Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, launched in 2015, was designed to process renminbi settlements outside SWIFT.
The dollar’s power as a sanctions weapon rests on the absence of a credible alternative. Later events — US semiconductor controls on ZTE and Huawei in 2018 and 2019, the freezing of $300 billion in Russian sovereign reserves in 2022 — only confirmed the original calculation and accelerated the work. The decision, however, was taken by the CCP as early as in 2014.
4/ Xi Jinping runs a vulnerability audit
2014 produced two Chinese decisions that are rarely discussed together: