The lazy consensus of the foreign policy establishment is built on a convenient fiction. Every time a border shifts or a supply chain fractures, analysts reach for the standard script. They point to Moscow, dust off the phrase about a rules-based international order, and declare that one man is single-handedly steering the globe toward chaos.
It is a tidy narrative. It is also dangerously wrong. Read more on a related issue: this related article.
Blaming a single leader for the disintegration of global stability is not just intellectually lazy; it is an analytical cop-out that absolves every other superpower of its systemic failures. When Washington, Brussels, and Beijing look at the map and see a world unraveling, they prefer to view the problem as a localized infection rather than a symptom of systemic organ failure.
I have watched diplomats nod solemnly at security conferences while drafting communiques that paper over their own policy miscalculations. They treat global stability like a pristine glass vase that was intact until someone swung a hammer. More journalism by NPR delves into similar perspectives on the subject.
The vase was cracked long before the hammer ever left the workbench.
To understand why the world feels more volatile today, you have to abandon the comforting myth of the lone villain. The architecture of global security was obsolete by the turn of the century. It was built for a bipolar world of rigid blocs, then retrofitted for a unipolar moment of unchecked American hegemony. When that hegemony frayed under the weight of foreign policy overreach and domestic polarization, the architecture did not just bend—it shattered.
What we are witnessing is not a sudden descent into lawlessness driven by one actor's malice. It is the messy, violent contraction of a unipolar era giving way to a fractured multipolar reality. Every major power is testing the boundaries of a system that no longer possesses an enforcer capable of maintaining the old rules.
Consider how the economic tools of statecraft have been weaponized over the past decade. Financial sanctions, asset freezes, and export controls were once treated as surgical instruments of last resort. Instead, policymakers turned them into blunt instruments of routine coercion. When you weaponize the global financial plumbing, every nation outside your alliance network immediately begins building alternative pipes.
That is not a consequence of foreign aggression. That is a predictable reaction to structural hegemony.
When you make the dollar a geopolitical weapon, you incentivize every rival capital to decouple from your currency. When you write trade rules that benefit domestic interest groups while hollowing out industrial capacity elsewhere, you create the very economic nationalism that fuels modern populism.
Pretending that global instability stems from a vacuum of evil ignores the physics of power distribution. Power does not tolerate vacuums, nor does it sit quietly when challengers gain economic and military mass. The unipolar moment was an anomaly in modern history, a brief blip between the Cold War and the messy multipolarity we occupy right now.
Refusing to acknowledge this reality ensures policy failure. If your diagnostic framework is flawed, your prescription will be toxic.
When leaders frame every international crisis as an existential battle between absolute good and absolute evil, they box themselves into diplomatic corners. There is no room for compromise with pure evil. There is no space for strategic realism or recognition of legitimate security concerns. There is only escalation, deterrence signaling, and the slow, grinding march toward wider conflict.
The hard truth is that major powers always operate according to perceived security imperatives and spheres of influence. Pretending that the rules of geopolitics magically changed after the Cold War was a historic blunder. It allowed Western policymakers to ignore the warnings of classical realists who predicted that pushing military alliances to the borders of a nuclear-armed rival would eventually provoke a violent reaction.
None of this excuses the invasion of sovereign territory or the human cost of modern warfare. Explaining a structural mechanism is not the same as endorsing the outcome. But if you want to fix a broken car, you cannot simply curse the driver who crashed it while ignoring the fact that the brakes were cut at the factory.
The next time you hear a commentator declare that international norms are under siege, look closer at who wrote those norms and who benefited from them. The global order was never universal; it was an arrangement that favored the victors of previous conflicts until those arrangements stopped working for everyone else.
Until Western capitals wake up to the reality of a multipolar world where other players possess both the capacity and the will to rewrite the rules of engagement, the descent into friction will accelerate.
Stop treating structural evolution as a moral failing. Start dealing with the world as it is, not as you wish it were.
