Liberal order is out of control. We live in a time of exceptions to the rule

Donald Trump is seen in Europe as a chaos seeder, a man endowed with the other of the midas touch: everything he takes, he leaves in worse condition than he found. But despite his anachronistic views on most things, Trump is the perfect personification of our era.

In 2021 I published a book The Age of UnpeaceIn which I argued that we should rethink the rules governing global relations in a time of hyperconnection. All the institutions and systems that would unite us – I wrote then – began to be utilized as weapons.

Global politics are like a failed matrimony today. In a bad marriage, any common substance specified as a lot, a dog or a kid can be utilized by 1 of the partners to harm another. Similarly, trade, the Internet, energy sources, supply chains, migration flows, strategical natural materials and state-of-the-art technologies can be utilized to exert geopolitical influence and inflict pain.

In this fresh world, the boundaries between war and peace have blurred. It was incorrect for us to think that at the end of the Cold War we had secured a golden age of peace. In fact, force was inactive ubiquitous, and it was utilized in the form of sanctions, export control, power cutting, interference in elections and provoked migration. The only thing that wasn't done was to declare an open war.

A fewer months after the release of my book Vladimir Putin began a full-size Russian attack on Ukraine. Since then, the attention of the planet has mostly focused on conventional ways of conducting war and the request to defend against Russian tanks, aircraft and missiles. Analysts and decision-makers learn from the past alternatively than focus on what is fresh in this situation. And yet the war in Ukraine from the beginning is something unique: a unusual hybrid of nineteen- and twenty-first-century phenomena, specified as trenches full of soldiers, but besides sanctions, drones, artificial intelligence and competition for influence in social media.

U.S. president Joe Biden, French president Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reacted to Russian aggression trying to renew the old order. However, especially since Trump's re-election, it has become clear that we request a fresh way of looking at the world. Trump's administration threw all the old certaintys into the blender and turned them into mush. Any clear discrimination has disappeared for war and peace, allies and enemies, national and private interests, or left and right. Since Trump is at war with the remainder of the world, he tries to extort minerals from Ukraine and makes threats to the territorial integrity of Greenland or Panama, the erstwhile rules of global order no longer apply.

Unfortunately, it is not just a “disorder” that indicates that there is simply a fundamental agreement on what “order” looks like. There is no specified agreement. The events preceded any reasoning about global order.

For years, countries have gone through crises related to hyperconnectivity and interdependence – from the collapse of the stock exchange in 2008, the exile crisis in Syria, to the pandemic – which has prevented decision-makers from gaining the assurance of citizens. Many resorted to emergency measures and exceptional states. But now so many exceptions have been made that the textbook of global rules has been holed up like Swiss cheese. Order present is based on exceptions, not rules.

Trump understood. He's hooked up. The universal impatience of the behaviour of the elitewho pretended to eat all their minds, but inactive neglect to fulfill their promises. The Americans are yet grasping at what many another people around the planet have always noticed: that liberal global order is fraud – something like the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither Roman nor imperial. After the atrocities committed in the prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the liberal global order lost its right to be called liberal. He lost his right to call himself international, since many parts of the planet remained in civilian wars. And due to these failures, he besides lost his right to call himself order.

If Europeans are re-arming themselves to face Russia's aggression, they must besides figure out how to last this age of "un-peace" that Trump, Putin, Chinese president Xi Jinping and another hard-arm leaders have inaugurated. 1 of the biggest challenges will be to make yourself safe again with interdependence.

Support for Ukraine and rethinking economical models to deal with trade wars – this may be necessary, but not enough. We besides request to think powerfully about migration, social safety and wellness policy and how politicians communicate with voters. In another words, Europeans request a fresh way of doing politics – 1 that will reconstruct people's sense of control.

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Mark Leonard manager of the European abroad Affairs Council and author of the book Age of non-peace. Interdependence as a origin of conflict (tow. Andrzej Wojtasik, Political Criticism 2022).

Copyright: task Syndicate, 2025. www.project-syncicate.org. In English she translated Aleksandra Paszkowska.