The first Monday in a higher-viscosity world

Posted on: 12 January 2026

Whoever returns to the office today, whoever reopens their books after the holidays, whoever restarts supply chains paused for the Christmas break, does so in a system that has fundamentally changed its physical properties over the past two weeks. This is not a metaphor: it is fluid mechanics applied to the global economy. The system we operate in has increased its viscosity, and every movement now costs more.

The signals are three, apparently unconnected. The American raid on Venezuela that captured Maduro on 3 January. The US tariff book for 2026 now exceeding 4,500 pages, a hundred more than last year. The electricity demand from data centres that has reached 4% of US national consumption and is set to double by 2030. Three facts that news coverage treats as separate stories. But anyone who designs systems immediately recognises them as manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon: the shift from the era of efficiency to the era of security.

For forty years, the organising principle of the global economy was friction minimisation. Supply chains stretching ten thousand kilometres because containers cost less than warehouses. Offshoring to wherever labour was cheapest. Just-in-time everywhere. The system rewarded those who reduced friction, who made flow smoother. It was a low-viscosity world, where capital, goods, and information moved with minimal resistance.

That world is over. Not because of an ideological decision, but because of an empirical realisation that has worked its way through chancelleries and boardrooms: maximum efficiency produces maximum fragility. We saw it with Covid when a ship stuck in the Suez Canal paralysed half the planet. We saw it with Russian gas when Europe discovered that the lowest price concealed a lethal strategic dependency. We saw it with Taiwanese semiconductors when we realised that 90% of the world's advanced chips pass through an island that China considers a rebel province.

The systemic response to this fragility was not to rethink the architecture. It was to add friction. Tariffs, reshoring, friendshoring, foreign investment controls, export restrictions on critical technologies. Every intervention increases the system's viscosity, makes every transaction a bit more expensive, a bit slower, a bit more complicated. It is not a bug, it is a feature. The system is deliberately sacrificing efficiency in exchange for perceived resilience.

The problem is that nobody knows where the equilibrium point lies. And in the meantime, friction accumulates.

Take American tariffs. The average rate on all imports has risen to 17%, and if all announced policies come into effect it will reach 21%. But the aggregate number conceals the real transformation. The tariff book, the reference document for importers, has grown from 3,700 pages in 2017 to over 4,500 today. Eight additional pages of bureaucratic complexity for every single month of the Trump administration. Chapter 99, covering "temporary modifications", starts on page 3,320 and contains thousands of entries: ignition coils, hydraulic excavators, auto parts, each with its statistical code, its specific rate, its geographical exceptions. Navigating this labyrinth requires specialist consultants, dedicated software, time. All friction. All cost that someone must pay.

And someone is starting to pay. In 2025, companies absorbed around 80% of tariff costs without passing them to consumers. In 2026, according to JPMorgan, that percentage could fall to 20%. The difference will end up in prices. Not from malice or greed: simply because accumulated friction exceeds available margins. A large American food supplier spent months trying to work out how to handle tariffs that vary enormously by product and country of origin and change frequently. In the end, they opted to apply the average tariff rate across their entire catalogue. A crude solution, but the alternative was paralysis.

Britain has navigated this partially. The US-UK trade deal caps auto tariffs at 10% for up to 100,000 vehicles, and furniture tariffs at 10% where others face 25-30%. Small mercies in a fragmenting system. But the broader pattern holds: every bilateral deal is another negotiation, another exception, another layer of complexity. Post-Brexit Britain knows this friction intimately. The question is whether that hard-won expertise in navigating trade complexity becomes competitive advantage or merely survival skill.

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court is evaluating the legality of much of these tariffs. If it rules against the administration, companies that paid could seek refunds totalling $130 billion. But trade experts are unanimous: the administration would respond by doubling down, using other legal bases to impose similar tariffs. Uncertainty does not resolve, it shifts. More friction.

Then there is Venezuela. The raid on 3 January was not an isolated operation but the concrete manifestation of a doctrine made explicit in the national security strategy document published in December. Trump called it the "Donroe Doctrine", a pun merging his name with that of James Monroe, the president who in 1823 declared the Western Hemisphere an exclusive American sphere of influence. The 2026 version is more ambitious: "We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere."

Translated: the United States claims the right to military intervention anywhere in the Americas when it perceives a threat to its interests. This is not rhetoric. It happened. A sitting president was extracted from his residence and taken to New York to face prosecution. That Maduro was a corrupt dictator with pending drug trafficking charges does not change the mechanics of the event: the United States has demonstrated willingness to use force to reshape the hemisphere according to its strategic interests.

The message has been received. Mexico knows that in October the USMCA comes up for renegotiation and that Trump has already said the country is "controlled by cartels". Colombia has received explicit warnings. Cuba has been described as "ready to fall". China, which had designated Venezuela as a strategic partner at the highest level, finds itself facing a fait accompli: its investments in Latin America are not protected by international law, but only by American willingness not to intervene. A willingness that is now explicitly conditional.

This is geopolitical friction. Every company operating in the Western Hemisphere must now incorporate into its calculations the possibility that rules could change drastically and rapidly by unilateral decision from Washington. It is not a matter of approving or disapproving: it is a matter of correctly modelling risk.

For Britain, watching from across the Atlantic, the implications cut several ways. The Special Relationship provides some shelter. But the underlying message is clear: in the new order, sovereignty is negotiable, and negotiating power correlates with economic and military weight. Middle powers navigate; they do not set terms.

And then there is energy. Or rather, the collision between two eras playing out in electrical grids. American data centres consumed 183 terawatt-hours in 2024, more than the whole of Pakistan. By 2030, consumption is forecast to grow by 133%, driven primarily by artificial intelligence. A single training cluster for generative models consumes as much as 100,000 homes. The largest data centres under construction will consume twenty times that.

The problem is that 70% of the American electrical grid was built between the 1950s and 1970s and is reaching the end of its lifecycle. An estimated $720 billion investment is needed in transmission infrastructure alone by 2030. But permits for new lines take years. Construction takes more years still. Meanwhile, in Virginia data centres already consume 26% of the state's electricity. In Ireland, 21%, with projections reaching 32% by year end.

The result is that bills are rising. In the PJM region, stretching from Illinois to North Carolina, data centres contributed to a $9.3 billion increase in the electrical capacity market for 2025-26. A family in western Maryland pays $18 more per month. A family in Ohio, $16. A Carnegie Mellon study estimates that by 2030 the average increase in American electricity bills due to data centres will be 8%, with peaks of 25% in high-concentration zones.

It is the paradox of the era: the most advanced industry on the planet is literally competing for electricity with ordinary families' refrigerators and air conditioners. And it is winning, because it can pay more. But that victory has a political cost that will eventually manifest.

Britain faces its own version of this collision. The AI gold rush demands power. The grid was not built for it. Every new data centre approval is a calculation: jobs and investment against infrastructure strain and residential costs. The friction is different in form but identical in nature.

Three phenomena, one common dynamic. The global system is shifting from a low-viscosity regime optimised for efficiency to a high-viscosity regime where security, control, and resilience take priority. Every transaction requires more energy, more time, more attention, more capital. Not because anyone has become stupid or evil, but because the rules of the game have changed.

For those returning to work today, this means one precise thing: do not expect the same performance from the same effort. The system has changed density. What used to flow now encounters resistance. What was automatic now requires verification. What was predictable now oscillates.

This is not catastrophism. Global economic growth for 2026 is forecast at 2.7%, world trade will grow by 2.2%. The world is not ending, it is slowing. But the difference between those who navigate well and those who founder in a denser fluid is not strength, it is precision. Abrupt movements do not work. Speed for its own sake dissipates energy. What is needed is calibration: knowing exactly how much thrust to apply, in which direction, for how long.

Whoever this morning reopens their business expecting 2026 to be a linear continuation of 2025, or worse a return to 2019, is using the wrong map. The territory changed while we slept. Not dramatically, not apocalyptically. But structurally.

Viscosity has increased. Every movement costs more. Whoever understands this first, wins.