Well that was fun. Another year in the books and for once it was a year that probably won’t be soon forgotten in that it was a very historical year. The word ‘historical’ often gets thrown around too loosely, because many people (i.e. members of the media) don’t really have a historical perspective. They get caught up in the stories of the day and declare this or that to be of great historical significance because of how they feel about it. But for something to be of truly history book significance, it has to be an event (or series of events) that is either the culmination of some underlying heretofore unnoticed trends, or something that sends history down a completely different path. For example, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 that led to World War 1 was such an event, because without WWI, the world today looks completely different as to be unimaginable. The attacks on 9/11/2001 were also such an event. The collapse of the Iron Curtin in Eastern Europe in 1989 was the culmination of certain trends that had not been widely noticed before. The point is that as 1914, 1989, and 2001 came to a close, we knew at the time that we had experience an ‘historical’ year.

And so it is with 2016. The Brexit vote, along with Donald Trump’s election win (as well as Bernie Sanders primary challenge to Hillary Clinton), revealed a deep-seated disenfranchisement of large segments of the population with the political class. While Donald Trump ran under the Republican banner, his victory was as much a slap at the established Republican Party as it was the Democrat Party. And Brexit was led by the head of a minor British political party, although with some major support with the established Tory Party. But what makes these elections different from prior elections/referendums is that in one case a country is fundamentally trying to change how it is governed (i.e from the E.U. in Brussels with an assist from London, or just from London), as opposed to just who is doing the governing. In the other case, this isn’t simply a change from the standard established politics of the Democrat Party for the standard established politics of the Republican Party. What we have is a person who is effectively creating a different governing coalition, even if he himself really isn’t actually aware that he is doing it. It is basically a non-violent (at this point) rebellion that instinctively trying to tear down an existing system that a large fraction of the population on both the center-left AND the center-right don’t feel is benefitting them and is being run to their detriment. The point is that the election of a political novice with no experience to the most powerful position on the planet is the ultimate vote of “no-confidence” in the existing system. And the fact that he is appointing people to head up agencies that they personally have opposed is a sign that he is actually serious about changing the game.

In short, many assumptions that have governed the U.S. (and by extension the international system) for last 25 years in some cases, and since WWII in other cases, are being upended. The year 2016 is likely to go down in history as one that was extraordinarily impactful.