Not pleasant to write.
I do it anyway.
We are living through a period in history where it no longer makes sense to discuss 'what we think', but where we must instead relate to 'what is'.
We have reached that point in the story where the veils fall, and where what we for decades have called order reveals itself to have been far more fragile, temporary and historically contingent than we wished to admit while it still stood.
In such periods, not only the mechanisms of power are exposed, but also the illusions that generations have leaned against in order to live in the fantasy of stability.
They did not arise because people were stupid - or evil - but because illusions often arise where 'the desire for order' is greater than 'the will to face reality'. And it has been easy to live in this fantasy, as long as it could be maintained - not least because it has stretched over longer than most of us have been part of history ourselves.
In our time, this recognition gathers especially around the fantasy of a world order governed by what we have called "international law".
It was an idea that grew out of the ruins of the Second World War, and for some decades it was so strong that it actually gave the impression that humanity had moved into a new and more civilised stage. That we fundamentally, as a species, had evolved and become something new. Something better. It was pleasant, morally uplifting and well-suited to conferences, declarations and solemn resolutions...
...but it never rested on the foundation that alone makes laws something other than well-meaning statements of intent. For a law always presupposes a superior authority that can both demand obedience and enforce consequences when it is not respected.
Within functioning nation-states, this authority exists, supported by institutions, power and ultimately coercion and violence. This is where law gains its weight.
But on the international plane, nothing equivalent exists. The world community is not one political body, but a collection of sovereign states with widely different interests, strengths, cultures, faiths and ambitions, and there exists no instance above them with real ability to enforce rules against the strongest actors.
Therefore it is not an expression of cynicism, but of sober recognition, when the world once again - as so many times before - moves according to the logic of great power politics.
Think about that before you rush to the keyboard.
When the US invaded Iraq, international protests remained precisely that - protests. When Russia went into Ukraine, the same structures proved equally powerless. And if China one day chooses to take Taiwan by force, the world's reaction will again consist of words, sanctions and moral posturing, but not of any superior enforcement of a universal law.
And it is not like this because people lack the will for - or have no need for - justice. It is because the system was never built to bear the weight we, in our longing for order, placed upon it.
So deeply do we wish this order to be real that we came to speak of it as if it could already be enforced. But it could not - and it cannot.
To insist that it can be enforced is to cling to a world order that is already slipping from our grasp.
In such a world, our way of understanding conflicts MUST AND SHALL also change.
The question is no longer merely whether a rule has been broken, but which interests, boundaries and power relations are at play, and what consequences follow if they are ignored.
Seen in that light, support for Ukraine, for example, is not about punishing a breach of norms, but about relating to what happens to Europe's and the West's stability if aggressive great powers can expand their influence through violence and intimidation without consequence.
Venezuela shows the same mechanism in a different form - a country rich in resources, drained from within, maintained through force and supported from without by actors driven not by justice, but by strategic interest.
In both cases, it is not the absence of moral declarations that is the problem, but the absence of real power to enforce them. A world where strength can be converted into influence without decisive resistance inevitably becomes more dangerous for those who do not themselves possess it.
When the narratives that have carried a world order lose their force, language is the first thing to be exposed. Words that once created direction begin to circulate emptily, repeated out of habit rather than conviction, while reality moves on without regard for them. In such times, the difference between speech and action becomes not merely visible, but decisive.
There exists therefore a more honest and responsible way to speak about geopolitics than to hide behind juridical fictions.
The good leader in this new order therefore becomes not "the one who repeats the right words" but - "the one who sees and articulates reality as it is, and acts in accordance with his country's long-term interests".
For civilisations are not maintained by declarations alone, but by clarity, strength and the will to protect what one has inherited against those who wish to take it.
The world order we are saying goodbye to was unusual, historically brief and made possible by quite particular power relations.
The world we are now entering is older, more brutal and far less forgiving.
The question is therefore not whether we prefer the old narrative, but whether we understand the new one in time - before it once again writes itself into history without regard for our illusions.
It is time to wake up.
❤️🔥🪽
