The Age of Global Un-Order by Mark Leonard - Project Syndicate
The Age of Global Un-Order
Apr 24, 2026
Mark Leonard
As crises become more complex, less
predictable, and increasingly intertwined, the global system is no longer
anchored by shared rules and norms. In a world where the very idea of order has
collapsed, governments must learn to navigate radical uncertainty rather than
chasing lost anchors of stability.
BERLIN—The US-Israeli strike that killed Iran’s
supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and launched the United States’ most
consequential Middle Eastern adventure since the Iraq War caught many in Europe
off guard. Confronted with a series of cascading crises—from a 1970s-style oil
shock to a transatlantic rupture threatening Europe’s security
architecture—many analysts have reached the same conclusion: the conflict
represents a breakdown of the multilateral system and heralds an era of global
disorder.
US President Donald Trump gesturing while
speaking about the conflict in Iran during a press briefing in the James S.
Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 6,
2026.
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Yet this interpretation misses something more
profound. The Iran war shows what geopolitics looks like when the very idea of
order has collapsed, a state of affairs I call “Un-Order.”
The distinction matters. Disorder is what
happens when established rules are deliberately broken. To describe a situation
as disordered is, paradoxically, to affirm that shared norms still exist, even
as they are violated. Un-order, by contrast, emerges when those norms are
overtaken by events and there is no longer a shared understanding of right and
wrong, or even of the truth itself. In their place remains a deeper,
irreducible uncertainty.
Rather than being governed by shared rules, the
international system is now beset by episodic bursts of coercion and
retaliation. The Iran war is a case in point: the February 28 strike that
killed Khamenei and triggered the current round of regional escalation took
place while negotiations were still underway, evoking the surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when Japanese negotiators were still in
Washington for talks with the US.
Worse still, international law and institutions
have proven largely ineffective in preventing the US, Israel, and Iran from
openly flouting core norms against the assassination or kidnapping of political
leaders, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and even the long-standing taboo
against wars of aggression.
Crucially, the war’s principal actors do not
seem to be aware that they are breaking rules at all. When Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin produced reams
of legal justifications for the invasion—an implicit acknowledgment that a
crime was being committed. By contrast, when US President Donald Trump
threatened to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, or when Secretary of “War”
(Defense) Pete Hegseth declared that the military would show “no quarter, no
mercy,” there was little indication that either man knew or cared that they
were advocating the commission of war crimes.
No institutional architecture can function when
major actors stop playing by the rules. That is the essence of the distinction
between disorder and un-order: one involves breaking rules; the other means
that no agreed-upon rules exist.
Polycrisis Is
the New Normal
The new age of un-order cannot be attributed to
Trump alone, even though his theatricality has come to embody it. He is better
understood as a symptom, rather than its primary cause, of a world that has
lost its organizing principles. The deeper forces driving this transformation
are structural: economic disruptions, climate change, technological advances,
and demographic shifts, all converging on the foundations of the existing
global order.
As a result, crises are becoming more complex,
less predictable, and potentially catastrophic. Rather than simply spreading,
they often bleed into one another. In a hyperconnected world, contagion,
tipping points, and extreme volatility become the norm. The Oxford economist
Ian Goldin has termed this dynamic the “butterfly defect,” using the familiar
image of a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world and setting
off a tornado on the other to illustrate the destructive potential of global interdependence.
A milder version of this dynamic played out
during the COVID-19 pandemic, which rapidly triggered a global economic crisis
as supply chains seized up and vaccine nationalism deepened geopolitical
tensions. Dramatic change often comes from the cumulative impact of smaller
disruptions.
The Iran war exemplifies the kind of permanent
polycrisis that is likely to define the decades ahead. Rather than a single
crisis, it is five: an energy-supply shock, a nuclear-proliferation threat, a
regional security breakdown, a global economic disruption, and a transatlantic
rupture, all unfolding in rapid succession.
In response to US and Israeli strikes, Iran
closed the Strait of Hormuz, driving up global energy, fertilizer, and food
prices. Even if the Strait eventually reopens and Trump lifts his own blockade
on Iranian ports, the shock will have damaging long-term effects on Asian
budgets, European interest rates, and strategic energy reserves worldwide.
Should the fragile ceasefire collapse and prices continue to surge, the
resulting cost-of-living pressures could boost populist movements across Europe
ahead of critical state elections in Germany and next year’s presidential
election in France.
To understand why Western responses keep
failing, it helps to distinguish between two competing ways of thinking about
order. The first could be called the Architect’s Approach. After the fall of
the Berlin Wall, leaders in Europe and the US believed they had discovered the
ultimate model for organizing the world, placing their faith in a set of rules
and institutions designed to maintain global stability.
The fate of that system now hangs in the
balance. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the preservation of the
“rules-based order” has become the leitmotif of Western foreign policy, echoed
in strategy documents, leaders’ speeches, and the communiqués of G7 and NATO
summits. European leaders, in particular, tend to be wary of change, assuming
it will undermine rather than strengthen the system. Having benefited most from
the existing order, they expect others to embrace it or construct an
alternative. In this sense, they think like architects, focusing on the world’s
institutional structure.
The Rise of
Artisan States
The second way of thinking about international
order could be called the Artisan’s Approach. It holds that, in an age of
un-order, governments’ primary task is to survive while positioning themselves
to benefit from disruption. China is the leading exponent of this view, but the
same logic appears to drive many rising powers, from India and Turkey to Saudi
Arabia and South Africa.
These states were not among the architects of
the current order and have become accustomed to adapting and revising
frameworks devised by others. Despite their size and influence, they display
the pragmatism and flexibility of artisans—repairing, repurposing, and
recombining existing elements to create something new, rather than designing
systems from scratch.
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Of course, these two analytical models do not
always correspond to real-world policymaking. Still, they capture the growing
divide between those who make grand plans and those who embrace change and
adapt to it. While architects pursue bold visions and are often paralyzed by
the gap between design and reality, artisans seek to understand where the world
is heading and to make the most of emerging contingencies.
Architects tend to do well in a predictable
world. In a complex, constantly shifting geopolitical landscape, however,
artisans have an advantage. For decades, international politics has been shaped
by Western architects whose expansive visions drove the creation of a global
order based on universal institutions and a linear notion of progress. Artisans
are better equipped to navigate the radical uncertainty of a world in which no
one seems to recognize rules.
Iran’s conduct in its war against the US and
Israel is a prime example of an artisan state in action. Stripped of air
superiority, conventional military parity, or reliable allies, the Islamic
Republic did not attempt to fight the war on America’s terms. Instead, it
identified the single point of asymmetric leverage, the Strait of Hormuz, and
then relied on its decentralized command structure to adapt to changing
conditions.
By closing the Strait instead of pursuing a
conventional confrontation it could not win, Iran has transformed the conflict
from a military contest into one of economic endurance, in which it clearly has
the upper hand. Consequently, backchannel negotiations have come to focus on
the Strait itself rather than the issues that drew the US into the war: regime
change, Iran’s uranium stockpiles, its missile program, and its support for
regional proxies.
At the same time, the US is increasingly
constrained by its own architectural assumptions. Paradoxically, while Trump is
an instinctive disruptor—an agent of chaos with little patience for
institutional frameworks—the military and diplomatic machinery he commands
continues to operate according to an architectural logic.
The US entered the Iran war with a set of
maximalist objectives that bore little relation to what American military power
could realistically deliver. Armed with state-of-the-art AI targeting systems
and futuristic tools like the so-called “Ghost Murmur”—a long-range quantum
magnetometer that reportedly can trace the electromagnetic signal of a human
heartbeat and isolate it from background noise—the US achieved impressive
tactical feats. But while cutting-edge technology may have enabled the initial
strike that eliminated much of Iran’s senior leadership and the recent rescue
of its stranded pilot, when Iran closed the Strait, the Trump administration
found itself unable to reconcile its grand ambitions with the reality of Iran’s
improvisational defense.
Europe’s
Outdated Playbook
One could be forgiven for assuming that
Europeans, as architects par excellence, are ill-suited to an age of un-order.
They have certainly suffered disproportionately from America’s war in Iran,
given their exposure to energy-market volatility. Moreover, European
policymaking has also become synonymous with overregulation, endless meetings
about meetings, and arguments over the ideal curvature of bananas, rather than
decisive action.
But Europe is better equipped for this world
than it realizes, as its history, institutions, and political culture reflect
deep traditions of adaptation and resilience. The European Union itself was not
the product of grand architectural design, nor are the bloc’s prosperity and
security the result of a single, carefully executed plan.
Contrary to how it may appear, the European
project evolved through continuous trial and error. What began as the Coal and
Steel Community grew into a customs union, then a single market, and eventually
a monetary union with its own currency. Membership expanded incrementally, from
six states to nine, then 12, 15, 25, and finally 27. Some promising
initiatives, such as the European Defense Community, failed outright. Others
emerged in response to crises: European governments strengthened security
cooperation after the Balkan wars, pursued fiscal consolidation in the
aftermath of the eurozone debt crisis, expanded public-health collaboration in
response to COVID-19, and, most recently, accelerated defense integration
following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The challenge facing Europe today is to tap
into that experience and develop an artisan’s code that can guide it through
the current crisis in the Middle East and the coming age of un-order. To this
end, policymakers should focus on three key priorities.
First, European leaders must accept the reality
of un-order rather than chasing a semblance of stability. The sooner they stop
reaching for grand frameworks and focus on concrete goals, such as maintaining
nuclear nonproliferation and preventing regional crises from triggering
systemic economic shocks, the sooner they can develop strategies that actually
work. Above all, they must recognize that crises like the war in Iran are no
longer problems to be solved, but conditions to be managed.
Second, European policymakers must rethink
their approach to interdependence. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, like
the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, has underscored the risks of overreliance
on a single supplier or chokepoint. European countries now understand they need
to diversify their supply chains, but with migration and technology emerging as
arenas of competition, they must also become less squeamish about exercising
pressure on others, whether Russia, China, or even the US.
Above all, European countries must take
responsibility for their own security. For too long, they have outsourced core
functions to external structures—NATO, the World Health Organization, the
United Nations—rather than developing their capabilities. The result has been
strategic passivity and dependence on American leadership. To survive the age
of un-order, Europe will need to boost defense spending and expand its domestic
arms industry, strengthen societal resilience, and prepare to act without the US
when necessary.
The greatest danger, however, lies in Europe’s
outdated playbook. While rules, meetings, and blueprints have served it well
for decades, clinging to these tools now risks blinding leaders to the harsh
realities of global un-order. The war in Iran is not an aberration; it is the
first of many tests.
Mark Leonard
Writing for PS since 2004
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FollowMark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, is the author, most recently, of Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail (Pol
