By Ephraim Agbo
The architecture of global stability, built after 1945, is crumbling. As great powers abandon restraint for transactionalism, we are entering a dangerous epoch defined not by shared principles, but by the relentless pursuit of advantage.
The international order that emerged from the ashes of World War II is quietly collapsing—not with a single dramatic rupture, but through steady, institutional erosion. The assumptions that governed global politics for nearly eight decades—that borders are inviolable, that strong states are constrained by law, and that collective security outweighs unilateral ambition—are no longer holding. We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the operating system of world affairs, from a framework of rules to a contest of raw power.
At the heart of this unraveling is a central, unresolved tension: is global stability best maintained through shared, enforceable rules, or is it ultimately a product of deterrence, dominance, and spheres of influence? The answer, once widely assumed, is now fiercely contested.
The Post-War Gamble: Order as a Project
The concept of a rules-based order was born from catastrophic failure. In the wake of mechanized slaughter and genocide, the victorious powers, led by the United States, embarked on a radical project. The goal was not merely to win the peace, but to architect a system that could prevent a third descent into global war. This system—comprising the United Nations Charter, Bretton Woods institutions, and a web of security alliances—was a conscious effort to sublimate power politics into legal and institutional channels.
Its logic was strategic as much as it was idealistic. Stabilizing Europe, opening markets, and containing rival ideologies required predictable frameworks. Landmark achievements like the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions sought to place boundaries around the conduct of war itself. This order was never neutral or perfectly just; it reflected and perpetuated Western hegemony. Yet, for all its flaws, it established a common grammar of state behavior and a platform, however uneven, for accountability.
Case Study in Restraint: The 1991 Gulf War
The system’s potential was demonstrated in 1990–91 following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. The response was a textbook application of the post-war playbook: deliberate coalition-building, explicit UN Security Council authorization, and military action tightly scoped to the defined legal objective of reversing aggression. The campaign concluded once Kuwait’s sovereignty was restored.
This restraint was not incidental; it was mandated by the very rules-based framework within which the operation was conceived. For a moment, it appeared the model could function as designed: punishing transgressors while containing conflict.
The Fracture: Iraq 2003 and the Unraveling
The 2003 invasion of Iraq shattered that precedent. Unable to secure a second UN resolution, the leading coalition members proceeded unilaterally, invoking contested legal justifications. The consequences—state collapse, regional destabilization, humanitarian catastrophe—were profound.
But the deeper damage was to the system itself. When the most powerful states circumvent the very rules they are tasked to uphold, they render those rules optional. The 2003 war did not just break a country; it broke a fundamental trust in the consistency and legitimacy of international law.
The Crisis of Credibility: Selective Enforcement
This crisis of credibility has only deepened. The persistent double standard—where international law is rigorously applied to adversaries and weakly, if at all, to allies—has moved from a peripheral critique to a central destabilizing force. Contemporary conflicts lay bare the gap between judicial pronouncements and geopolitical realities. Courts issue rulings, investigations are launched, but enforcement is paralyzed by power politics.
The message sent is corrosive: the framework exists, but compliance is a function of strength, not obligation. This perceived hypocrisy fuels global cynicism and erodes the moral authority necessary for any rules-based system to function.
The New Transactionalism: An Era Without Pretense
What defines our current moment is not merely episodic rule-breaking, but the shedding of even rhetorical commitment to a shared order. The language of collective security, human rights, and multilateralism is being displaced by a blunt, unapologetic transactionalism. The emerging doctrine is “interests first,” with rules serving as mere instruments, to be leveraged or ignored as convenience dictates.
This represents a philosophical break: a rejection of the idea that lasting stability requires mutual constraint, in favor of a belief that balance—or dominance—alone is sufficient.
The Imperial Nostalgia Trap
Some observers, witnessing this shift, predict a return to 19th-century-style great power politics, with neatly divided spheres of influence. This is a fundamental misreading of the 21st century. The world is now populated by educated, economically dynamic, and fiercely sovereign post-colonial states. Nations like India, Brazil, and Indonesia do not seek patrons; they seek agency and strategic autonomy. The non-aligned space is growing, not shrinking.
The world is too interconnected, too digitally informed, and too multipolar for simple imperial models to hold.
Europe’s Strategic Awakening
Nowhere is the anxiety of this transition more acute than in Europe. For generations, European security and prosperity were underwritten by American power and embedded within a dense rules-based transatlantic framework. That assumption is now untenable.
As American focus pivots and strategic guarantees are questioned, Europe faces a stark choice: mobilize unprecedented collective political will and resources to ensure its own security and sovereignty, or risk becoming an object rather than a subject in the new power dynamics.
The Peril of the Interregnum
History warns that periods between decaying orders and emergent ones are exceptionally perilous. In such an interregnum, predictability evaporates. Localized conflicts can spiral without diplomatic circuit-breakers. Miscalculations proliferate in the absence of clear red lines understood by all.
The greatest threat is not a planned major war, but uncontrolled escalation—a crisis where ad-hoc restraint fails because the shared rulebook has been discarded.
Conclusion: The Indispensable Fiction
For all its imperfections and hypocrisies, the rules-based order provided an indispensable fiction: a common narrative of how the world should work, against which actions could be measured and offenders shamed. It offered mechanisms, however flawed, for conflict resolution and a language for restraint.
Its progressive dismantling leaves a vacuum. The alternative—a world where power is its own justification—rarely yields lasting peace, only periods of domination awaiting challenge. The question is no longer whether the post-1945 system was perfect; it was not. The question is whether what comes next will be merely anarchic, or whether, from the contest of raw power, new and more equitable rules can someday be forged.
What is certain is that the age shaped by World War II is conclusively over. The defining struggle of the coming decades will be between the impulse for dominance and the imperative for order. And as history relentlessly teaches, when rules collapse, the price is paid not by the architects of power, but by the vulnerable multitudes.
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