For decades, the United Kingdom and the United States were treated (by themselves and by others) as gold standards of political stability, institutional competence, and global leadership. While based on histories featuring global take-overs and mass destruction of indigenous races, their development success has been breath-takingly economic – even cultural and linguistic with their writers, movies, and music well known everywhere. English became a world default operating system. Westminster and Washington exported governance models, aid frameworks, and development orthodoxy with confidence.
Yet then, somewhere along the way, they have now lost their development ‘marbles’.
This is not a story of sudden collapse. It is a slow, ironic unravelling: how long-term development success can breed complacency, entitlement, and a dangerous belief in national invincibility. When that belief takes hold, countries begin to exempt themselves (psychologically and politically) from the rules of common decency, mutual respect, and collective responsibility that underpin sustainable development everywhere else.
Populism as a symptom of development saturation
Both the UK and the US offer textbook examples. Following electoral victories rooted in populist premises (often built on misinformation, selective history, and emotionally manipulative narratives) governments led by Boris Johnson and Donald Trump moved swiftly to cut international development assistance.
This has been widely documented by outlets such as The Guardian, Newsweek, Le Monde, and Stern. US and UK international aid budgets were framed not as strategic investments in global stability, but as indulgent expenses benefiting undeserving outsiders. Development cooperation, once a source of soft power and moral authority, became a domestic political liability.
For development practitioners, the lesson is not merely about populism. It is about what happens when societies that have “made it” forget why they made it in the first place. Success narrows perspective. Complexity becomes inconvenient. Solidarity is recast as weakness.
When nations start believing their own myths
We can all now see that advanced development creates fertile ground for myopic nationalism – the belief that prosperity is self-generated, self-sustaining, and best protected by withdrawal. This is a classic late-stage development trap. Institutions remain strong enough to function, but political narratives drift into a blender of nostalgia, grievance, and imagined sovereignty.
The irony is that the damage is largely self-inflicted. Disunited kingdoms and states weaken themselves economically, diplomatically, and culturally. They exhaust institutional capacity on internal conflict rather than future planning. While doing so, they create space and opportunity for others.
Our planet’s European Union remains the most visible counter-example. Keeping 27 sovereign states united and pointed in common directions is not easy and requires sophisticated actions. But the EU does this better every day. It demonstrates the enduring, unquestionable value of pooled sovereignty, coordinated regulation, and political friendship. The EU’s strength lies not in uniformity but in structured cooperation – a lesson increasingly ignored by its former transatlantic and continental cousins.
Language, visibility, and the global audience
There is a further irony worth underlining, and that is language. English’s rise as the world’s dominant language has made Anglo-American political dysfunction globally legible.
Unwise, unattractive, and insular, nationalism expressed in English is instantly understood, dissected, and judged from pole to pole. By contrast, equally misguided public rhetoric in less globally spoken languages often remains locally contained and unknown outside national borders.
In short, when well-known English-speaking societies lose their marbles, the whole world watches and the whole world understands exactly how much wisdom their people and politicians have lost.
This matters for reputation. It matters for influence. And it matters for development leadership. Mystique and credibility have evaporated.
Civil servants: The quiet counterweight
It would be unfair (and inaccurate) to attribute this decline to public institutions as a whole. In both the UK and the US, civil servants have consistently demonstrated professionalism, restraint, and commitment to public service. They are often the last line of defence against policy volatility, preserving functionality even as political leadership veers toward self-destructive disruption.
This too is a lesson in becoming a victim of success. Effective civil services, built over generations, can mask political damage for a long time – long enough for extremist electorates and leaders to underestimate the consequences of their actions, and to resent the competence that exposes their own limitations.
So while scale differs, dynamics do not, and the world can slipstream away from delusional disunity. Our world is already reforming with new unified purpose and presence.
As highlighted recently by the Canadian Prime Minister at Davos, there is growing momentum for a more collective, middle-power-driven world order: one less dependent on disunited separatism and more anchored in friendly cooperation, collective competence, and shared interests in critical mass.
This emerging order also stretches from pole to pole. It is a pragmatic, networked, and increasingly confident evolution of human society. Its united weight can out-compete fractured development giants not through domination, but through coordination, credibility, kindness and wisdom.
The world can, quite simply, take back control of its destiny through new global partnerships – where wisdom still prevails, propsers and is welcomed.
Checklist: early warning signs for development practitioners
To conclude, a practical checklist for countries (and donors) keen to avoid losing their development marbles can look out for the following Calls To Action:
- Aid being framed as charity, not strategy. CTA: reaffirm development assistance within national security, economic resilience, and diplomatic strategy by explicitly linking aid outcomes to shared global stability and long-term mutual benefit.
- Populist narratives replacing evidence-based policy. CTA: Institutionalise independent policy review mechanisms and public impact assessments to ensure major development decisions remain grounded in data, evaluation, and lived experience rather than electoral rhetoric.
- Hostility toward expertise and civil service independence. CTA: Legally protect professional public services and advisory bodies, recognising expert continuity as a core national asset rather than a political inconvenience.
- Over-reliance on past reputation rather than current performance. CTA: Replace reputation-based assumptions with transparent performance dashboards that regularly demonstrate real-time effectiveness, accountability, and learning in development delivery.
- Language of sovereignty replacing language of cooperation. CTA: Reframe sovereignty as strengthened (not diminished) through alliances, partnerships, and shared rule-making in an interdependent global system.
- Fear of local-level success and bottom-up innovation. CTA: Reward and scale successful local initiatives through adaptive funding models that treat community-level effectiveness as a source of systemic strength rather than an institutional threat.
Mitigation lies in unity, humility, and institutional memory. Development success is not a permanent entitlement. It is a responsibility.
Those who forget this risk becoming development case studies – useful ones, certainly – but cautionary all the same.
