What Does an Imperial Hegemon Mean for Research Ethics?

When I began to write a book about bioethics and the rules-based international order, the idea that the world was facing the greatest geopolitical change since World War II was uncontroversial for those who were paying attention to such esoterica. For pretty much everyone else this claim was interesting when identified but paled in comparison to an ongoing global pandemic. During my first few presentations early in 2024 in places like Krakow, Singapore, and Vienna, audiences of academics acknowledged that this was a thing but maybe not an immediate thing. 

It turned out to be a pretty immediate thing.

I think it’s fair to say that neither the experts nor the more casual observers (nor this writer), appreciated the Formula One-level acceleration that the still-young year 2026 has already witnessed. If Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks at the World Economic Forum weren’t quite at the historic scale of Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech, they at least set down a marker that the Trump administration had turned U.S. foreign policy in the direction of an “imperial hegemon,” political science jargon...