Why the new world order will be worse than you think

0:00 The president of the United States recently shared this photoshopped image

0:03 on social media showing NATO leaders a map where the U.S.

0:07 has taken control of not only Venezuela, but, more shockingly,

0:11 territory from loyal NATO allies that helped

0:14 the US fight several wars in the past decades.

0:17 Specifically, Denmark and Canada.

0:19 To many, this seems like something only a madman would do.

0:23 But according to a viral speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney,

0:27 this is all part of a bigger trend.

0:30 This is a return to an era of great

0:34 power rivalry that the rules based order is fading,

0:39 that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

0:45 And while Carney has a completely different vision

0:47 on how to behave in such a new world order.

0:50 The overall idea that we are moving back to an era of great power

0:55 competition is actually in line with what

0:58 one of the architects of Trump's foreign policy,

1:01 Stephen Miller, recently told CNN's Jake Tapper.

1:05 But we live in a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength,

1:13 that is governed by force, that is governed by power.

1:16 Therefore, it makes sense that Trump's new national security strategy

1:20 literally says they are returning to the so-called Monroe Doctrine,

1:25 under which the US has historically sought to keep

1:28 other great powers out of the Western Hemisphere.

1:32 This means that, according to Miller, the US will now be using its military

1:37 to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere.

1:41 And that's exactly what we've seen in the last few weeks.

1:43 Isn't it?

1:44 Therefore, some, like Doctor Wes Mitchell,

1:46 have said that Trump's actions are in fact rooted in a clear

1:51 and compelling logic grounded in the discipline of grand strategy.

1:56 So what is this logic?

1:57 Well, one word consolidation.

2:00 Venezuela.

2:01 Greenland.

2:01 Canada.

2:02 The US is acting like a great power that is consolidating

2:05 its power in its own hemisphere to recover its strength first,

2:09 which will allow it to ultimately compete with other great powers

2:12 like Russia and China in a new era of great power competition.

2:17 However, according to the authors

2:18 of a recent viral international relations paper,

2:21 Professor Stacy Goddard and Abraham Newman,

2:24 this explanation does not make much sense because actually,

2:28 upon closer inspection, Russia's and China's activities in Venezuela

2:32 and around Greenland are extremely limited.

2:35 On top of that, their resources are way too expensive to truly benefit the US.

2:40 Therefore, they argue that to truly

2:42 understand Trump's attacks on neighbors and allies,

2:44 we need to view the new international order through the lens

2:48 of what came before the era of great power competition.

2:52 The era of competing royal houses

2:54 that cared about personal wealth and personal status.

2:58 To see how that works other than human.

3:01 You know, I think Sisi and I always give the example of, Game of Thrones.

3:05 You know, it's like every almost everybody on earth relates to this show about

3:11 a small group of elites who really don't care about their societies in general.

3:16 They just care about redistributing resources amongst these houses.

3:20 And that is a system that for most of, of human history,

3:24 dominated international relations.

3:26 So could it be that if we view Trump as a neo royalist

3:30 and the refinery and mineral mining owning billionaires around him as his court,

3:35 Venezuela, Greenland,

3:36 and also strangely high tariffs against China's biggest rival,

3:40 India, it will all fall into place.

3:44 So who is right is the new world order we are seeing

3:46 right now a Trump versus Ghani style return to great power politics,

3:50 or rather, the return of the corrupt politics of royal dynasties.

3:54 To find out, I did, on the one hand,

3:57 a massive deep dive into the fundamentals and the history of great power

4:01 politics and how it compares to Trump's

4:03 new national security strategy versus Ghani's speech.

4:06 And, on the other hand, an in-depth interview with Professors Godard and Newman.

4:12 But before we get into which story can explain the New World order best,

4:16 we need to understand what we are leaving behind.

4:20 That is the rise and fall of the rules based liberal international order.

4:25 Newfoundland, Canada, 1941.

4:27 Churchill, arguably still the leader of the most

4:30 powerful empire the world has ever seen.

4:32 Meets his counterpart from the richest nation on Earth, Franklin D Roosevelt.

4:38 Together, they sit down to discuss what

4:40 they see as the ideal international order,

4:43 an order that would never again produce another devastating world war.

4:47 And here they've just agreed on the first

4:50 pillar of the rules based international order,

4:52 which means that nations have borders that should be kept as they are.

4:56 They have a right to self-governance.

4:59 They have a right to trade freely, and they can decide with whom they trade.

5:05 And finally, the seas should be

5:07 kept open to facilitate this international trade.

5:10 Now, the second pillar of the liberal

5:12 rules based international order was economic.

5:15 And for that, we have to go back to Bretton Woods, the United States,

5:20 1944, 44 nations come together to put an end to economic chaos.

5:24 The economic case of the 1930s and 40s.

5:27 This conference sets the stage for the following

5:30 international institutions that will create order.

5:33 Where before there was chaos, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

5:37 that would later turn into the World Trade Organization.

5:40 This meant that tariff should be the same for everyone.

5:44 Then there's the world Bank.

5:45 All poor countries should get loans to develop

5:48 independent of their political allegiance to certain great powers.

5:52 Then there's the IMF.

5:53 Getting loans to save your currency from collapsing

5:56 will now depend on your economic program,

5:58 rather than your political allegiance to certain great powers.

6:03 Finally, the third pillar of the rules based order was the UN,

6:06 a community of states, both strong and weak,

6:09 that all pledged to follow even more rules.

6:12 1944 Dumbarton Oaks, the United States 1945 Yalta,

6:17 the Soviet Union, and finally 1945 San Francisco, the United States.

6:22 These conferences led to the creation of the United Nations.

6:26 Countries that signed the UN charter agreed

6:29 that they would respect number one, human rights.

6:32 Number two, international law.

6:34 Number three, they signed that armed force shall

6:37 not be used safe in the common interest.

6:40 And then finally, that the goal of this new international order

6:44 was to promote the economic and social advancement of all people.

6:48 Very lofty goals.

6:50 And just as with Bretton Woods, this led to the creation of some

6:53 international institutions which theoretically made it

6:56 more difficult for states to act on their own in key areas like war,

7:02 which was only allowed if the UN authorized it and justice

7:07 states were held accountable by the International Court of Justice.

7:11 On top of that, some states went even

7:14 further by signing up to the International Criminal Court,

7:17 which could and did sue leaders from weaker states like Sudan and the Congo.

7:23 But crucially, as Kony admitted,

7:25 we knew the story of the international rules based order

7:29 was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,

7:34 that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically.

7:39 And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor

7:42 depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

7:45 For example, the International Criminal Court has

7:48 issued arrest warrants against Putin and Netanyahu,

7:50 but they are practically untouchable.

7:53 The IMF was far stricter,

7:55 enforcing painful economic reforms on small powers like Egypt,

7:58 Greece and Argentina than against strong countries like the UK.

8:04 Also, the UN sanctioned small powers like

8:06 Zimbabwe and North Korea for human rights abuses,

8:08 but never strong countries like China, the Soviet Union and the US.

8:12 For similar offenses.

8:13 And despite countries signing up not

8:15 to invade one another except for self-defense,

8:18 both Western and Eastern powers invaded several

8:21 countries during this so-called liberal rules based order.

8:24 Still, we cannot be 100% sure that this was

8:27 because of the rules based order and international institutions.

8:30 And in hindsight, I think we can say

8:33 that the liberal international order looked like a big success.

8:37 There were no new world wars, and even without taking those into account,

8:40 the years from 45 to 2011 had relatively

8:43 fewer conflicts between states than the decades before them.

8:47 We can also see that in the liberal order,

8:49 relations between countries on average got much friendlier.

8:52 We even saw several countries joining a security community in NATO.

8:56 And on the flip side,

8:58 we saw far less countries being in severe or lesser rivalry like France,

9:02 Germany, in the UK, which used to always be at each other's throats.

9:07 Finally, on the economic side, after a massive reduction in global terms,

9:11 we saw an explosion in global trade and more importantly,

9:14 we saw a massive reduction in global poverty.

9:17 And yet, while free trade under the rules based international

9:21 order arguably helped drag millions out of poverty, especially in Asia,

9:26 the bottom 50% of Americans saw their share of income drop remarkably,

9:30 in the second half of the liberal rules based order.

9:33 So it is perhaps no wonder that Americans elected a candidate

9:37 twice that talked openly about blowing up this liberal order.

9:42 But we have to be honest, it was not just Trump that started this process.

9:45 The three great powers actually seem to have been in on it together.

9:50 First, in 2014, member of the UN Permanent

9:53 Security Council Russia annexed Crimea and then in 2022,

9:57 several other provinces from Ukraine.

10:00 Next, when it comes to the economic pillar,

10:02 Trump's 2018 tariff barrage already completely undermined the principle

10:06 of low tariffs that should be equal against all nations.

10:10 Meanwhile, China actively undermined the IMF and world Bank when it

10:14 became one of the biggest lenders to poor and crisis stricken countries.

10:18 Finally, both China and Russia already had a terrible human rights record,

10:23 and honestly, the US lost a lot of credibility in 2003.

10:26 And the Bush and Cheney, when they essentially authorized the use of torture

10:30 in CIA black sites and in Guantanamo Bay.

10:34 Still, Trump now almost announcing new tariffs against a new nation

10:38 every month and threatening to annex territories from its most loyal allies.

10:42 That genuinely looks like the final nail

10:45 in the coffin of the rules based international order.

10:48 So no wonder that Carney said that we are

10:52 in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

10:55 The liberal, rules based international order is dead about that.

10:58 Almost everyone agrees.

11:00 The real question is what's next?

11:02 Are we heading back to an era of great power

11:04 competition like Carney and the Trump administration seem to believe?

11:07 Or should we think back further, that Trump's chaotic actions are better

11:11 understood through the lens of the emergence

11:14 of new kings and cohorts of billionaire backers such as the Trump dynasty,

11:19 the House of Putin and the House of Modi?

11:22 Chapter two.

11:22 What will the new global order actually look like?

11:28 The first view is that we are now heading

11:30 back to a new era of great power competition,

11:33 where great power leaders like Trump and Putin have

11:36 a very different vision than middle power leaders like Ghani.

11:41 This means that the world will look a lot more like it did in the 18th,

11:44 19th, and early 20th centuries.

11:47 International relations.

11:48 Scholars tend to refer to this order as the Westphalian Global Order.

11:52 After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648,

11:55 which greatly reduced the power of royal houses

11:58 in favor of nation states and their bureaucracies.

12:01 In this new Westphalian order,

12:03 you may say international institutions like the UN,

12:06 IMF and World Trade Organization lose what's left of their waning power.

12:11 Instead, the world will once again be completely determined

12:13 by the actions of great powers like the US,

12:16 China, Russia, and perhaps India and Europe.

12:19 According to international relations professor John Mearsheimer,

12:22 who famously belongs to the school of thought known

12:26 as realism in such a world order that states can

12:30 never be certain that they won't end up living next

12:34 door to a really powerful state that has malign intentions.

12:40 All of that causes states to do everything

12:44 they can to be as powerful as possible,

12:48 and depending on how powerful they end up being,

12:51 States are then classified as great powers, middle powers, or small powers,

12:55 and they will all play a different variation of the power game.

13:00 First, small powers will either try to survive by claiming neutrality,

13:04 like Sweden and Belgium did in the Second World War,

13:07 or by aligning themselves with a great

13:09 power for protection like Finland and Hungary did.

13:12 Meanwhile, middle powers will either try to play great

13:15 powers off against one another like India has historically done,

13:19 or they will do the same that Ghani suggested in his speech,

13:23 which is value based realism,

13:26 meaning that liberal countries like Canada and Finland, for example,

13:30 for every geopolitical situation they will weigh their liberal values,

13:34 such as the importance of human rights, respecting boundaries and democracy.

13:39 And they will weigh that with geopolitical reality, especially for Canada.

13:43 This is a break with the past concretely,

13:46 whereas Canada's previous Prime minister,

13:48 Justin Trudeau, frequently challenged great powers

13:50 like China on their human rights records.

13:53 Ghani is subtly indicating that Canada may no longer do this.

13:57 If the geopolitical reality is that this would

13:59 get Canada into trouble with a great power simultaneously.

14:03 Currently, in the case of the way forward,

14:05 maybe for a liberal value based mill powers to form coalitions with countries

14:09 with similar values that may help them

14:11 stand up to great powers with different values, such as Trump's America.

14:17 You see, while the Trump team also rides

14:19 in their national security strategy that they believe in realism,

14:23 now they give a version of it a different name flexible realism,

14:28 which so far seems to mean might is right.

14:32 A strong country like the U.S.

14:33 can take Greenland from Denmark,

14:35 because Denmark is a tiny country with a tiny economy and a tiny military,

14:42 they cannot defend Greenland.

14:44 And this is what international scholars mean when they say might is right.

14:48 The US should get Greenland because it is strong enough

14:51 to defend Greenland from other great powers, and Denmark is not.

14:55 But why does a great power like the US need to do this in the first place?

14:58 Aren't they already powerful enough?

15:01 No.

15:01 Say scholars like wertheimer,

15:03 without international commitments to respect borders.

15:06 Even great powers like the US, Russia or China will always fear that another

15:11 great power will become much stronger than them, upsetting the balance of power.

15:16 Therefore, they may even want to dominate your region of the world.

15:21 Is because in that situation,

15:24 there is no other state that is capable of hurting you.

15:29 And this logic leads to so-called spheres of influence,

15:32 where great powers try to deny other great powers the ability

15:36 to threaten them by keeping them as far away as possible.

15:40 In the 19th and 20th centuries, the US tried to keep other great powers out

15:44 of the Americas under the so-called Monroe Doctrine and using similar logic.

15:49 Hitler at some point actually proposed a sphere of influence in Europe,

15:52 which he called the German Monroe Doctrine,

15:55 and people like Professor Mearsheimer have used

15:57 this logic of the Monroe Doctrine to make

16:00 the case that the West provoked Russia into invading

16:03 Ukraine by meddling in its sphere of influence.

16:06 The Trump team has written in the national security

16:09 strategy that they are essentially returning to the Monroe Doctrine.

16:14 Some call it the donno doctrine now, and some, like Doctor West Mitchell,

16:18 have used this type of logic to argue that term strategic

16:22 actions are in fact rooted in a clear and compelling logic,

16:24 firmly grounded in the discipline of grand strategy.

16:28 He says that Russia and China are the US natural great power competitors,

16:32 but that the US no longer has the strength to fight them all over the world,

16:36 and therefore the US is now

16:38 essentially retreating to its own Western Hemisphere.

16:41 Just this is done historically, many times before.

16:44 Venezuela and Greenland are both about

16:46 securing access to vital resources and, crucially,

16:49 about denying them to competitors.

16:52 So what we've seen so far is simply a return to great power competition.

16:56 Everything the US has done so far is just in the national interest.

17:01 Flexible realism is a cynical but not illogical take on America First.

17:06 However, to me there were at least three details about

17:08 recent events that I could not explain with this theory.

17:12 First, capturing Maduro does not seem to have been in US national interest,

17:16 given that the oil there is too expensive to get out of the ground,

17:20 and China did not get that much anyway.

17:23 Second, annexing Greenland and in the process completely

17:26 alienating European allies does not make much sense either,

17:29 given that the US already had almost unlimited military access

17:33 to the island and easy economic access to its minerals.

17:37 Finally, if Trump was truly following a great power style strategy,

17:40 why did he recently tear of the hell out of India,

17:43 which is China's natural rival in Asia?

17:46 This is where Godard and Newman's neo

17:48 royalist theory starts making a lot more sense.

17:51 They claim that what we are seeing today is,

17:54 rather than a system of territorial nation states,

17:57 rather than a system of rule governed institutions.

18:01 What we see is a system of international

18:04 politics that structured around the interest of ruling clicks,

18:08 which include a personalized,

18:10 absolute sovereign, and basically his network of whether or not his family,

18:15 whether or not its financial interests, ideologues that legitimate his rule.

18:19 They call this neorealism because rather than a return

18:22 to great power politics of the Westphalian order,

18:25 it would potentially be more like a return

18:27 to the world order before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

18:32 You see, the Peace of Westphalia came about to put

18:34 an end to various devastating wars that plagued the Holy Roman Empire,

18:39 Wars that often came about because of royal succession,

18:43 not the national interest.

18:45 For example, the Dutch War of Independence against

18:48 Spain arguably came about after that suddenly found

18:51 themselves with a new Spanish king that had

18:54 essentially inherited the Netherlands through a series of marriages.

18:59 So in the royalist system, the main actors were not states,

19:03 but rather ruling monarchs and their clicks.

19:06 Therefore, most wars in those days were not about the national interest at all.

19:10 They were about increasing royal wealth and status.

19:15 Similarly, Godard and Newman argue that in the case of Maduro's capture,

19:19 Greenland and the tariffs against India, it's not about national interest.

19:24 It's about this small group of hyper elites,

19:27 these this clique actor kind of clusters interest.

19:30 And so that really drives a very

19:32 different logic of how international politics functions.

19:35 So while Venezuela's oil is too expensive

19:37 to benefit the American oil industry as a whole,

19:40 the specific American refineries that did benefit just

19:43 so happened to be controlled by Trump Mega-Donors,

19:46 such as John Edison from Vidor.

19:49 Similarly, while Greenland's minerals are not worth

19:51 enough for the US to alienate allies over,

19:54 that price may well be worth it to billionaires

19:57 with extensive interest in Greenland like Ronald Lauder,

20:00 who reportedly put the idea into Trump's head in 2018.

20:04 Finally, there's Trump's mega tariffs against India.

20:07 Again, from a great Barr perspective,

20:09 it makes no sense to alienate China's biggest Asian rival.

20:13 But if you consider that Modi very publicly humiliated Trump by stating

20:17 that he had nothing to do with Pakistani Indian fees in the summer,

20:21 Indian tariffs immediately after that incident start making a lot more sense.

20:26 But while neorealism can fill in a lot of gaps in their article,

20:30 Goddard and Neumann do recognize that the Royals

20:33 dynamics have always been in the background.

20:36 After all, even during the height of great power politics,

20:38 the 19th century Belgian King Leopold,

20:40 for example, used the Belgian state to conquer

20:43 and dominate his own personal colony in the Congo.

20:47 And even today, Trump style personal rule is quite common.

20:51 However, the difference between MBS or Orban and Trump is that they

20:55 just don't have the material or status

20:58 capability to transform the international system.

21:02 And that's why Trump is so exceptional, because he has the U.S.

21:05 military and the U.S.

21:06 economy behind it.

21:07 In other words, just as Westphalian style,

21:09 great power politics were always still there in the background during,

21:13 for example, the Cold War.

21:14 Goddard and Neumann argue that royalist elements are and have

21:18 always been a part of the international order as well.

21:21 Therefore, my conclusion,

21:25 my conclusion is that to truly make sense of where the global order is going,

21:30 we need all three lenses.

21:32 If going, you can make international organizations become more powerful again.

21:35 The global order will again become more predictable.

21:39 But if they become weaker, we will either see more great power

21:42 games where small and medium powers like Ukraine,

21:45 Venezuela and perhaps even Canada become pawns

21:48 or battlefields for great powers that continuously

21:51 seek to become more and more powerful because they fear that if they won't,

21:56 they will not remain a great power for very long.

22:00 However, if great powers are governed by autocratic or illiberal rulers,

22:05 then we will increasingly see incidents like Trump's Board of Peace,

22:09 which he plans to stay on even if he is no longer U.S.

22:12 president, where great power influence will

22:14 not be used in the national interest,

22:16 but rather to enrich Personalis leaders and their clicks

22:20 or elevate their social standing amongst a new class of global

22:25 rulers and their courts that compete very much like

22:29 the royal houses of game of Thrones for power and status.

22:32 So, given that Trump will be in power for at least three more years,

22:36 and given that far right populist parties are still lurking

22:38 in the shadows in many other middle powers as well,

22:41 I think it's a safe bet that we will

22:44 be seeing a more volatile international order emerging, which,

22:47 whether it be for personal or national interest, tariffs,

22:50 sanctions and even military strikes and wars, will sadly become more common.

22:56 The economic evidence so far tells us that this will

22:58 make most of us poorer and less secure,

23:01 especially given that, unlike in the 19th century,

23:04 great powers now have weapons that could kill us all at the click of a button.

23:09 Still, it doesn't have to be that way.

23:11 For example, some have argued that at the Congress

23:14 of Vienna after the body was defeated, the return of realism looked inevitable.

23:18 Yet this never happened.

23:20 Similarly, who knows?

23:21 Perhaps Trump's successor will see the value of the liberal,

23:24 rules based international order again, and together with Geithner and others,

23:28 they may build yet another liberal international order from the ashes

23:32 of the one that we just said goodbye to.

23:35 So what do you think?

23:37 Let me know in the comments and if you want to know more,

23:40 I highly recommend you check out three follow

23:43 up analysis from our advertising sponsor, The Economist.

23:47 Specifically, I recommend you check out this detailed analysis about.

23:50 While Trump may have backed down about Greenland,

23:53 it's only the tip of the iceberg of Europe's geopolitical vulnerabilities.

23:57 Indeed, why is it that in the New World

23:59 order everybody seems to be picking on Europe specifically?

24:02 The economist answers that question as well.

24:05 Finally, check out The Economist's take on whether Mark Carney can

24:08 actually help Canada find its place in this new world order.

24:13 I think as these analysis show,

24:15 The Economist delivers insights that help you see the bigger picture.

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