"The old world is dying, Antonio Gramsci once wrote. And the new world struggles to be born. In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight. In 2025, western leaders appeared convinced they and we were living through one such transitional period, as the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt."
"No one can say they were not warned about the wrecking ball that was about to be inflicted on the global order by Donald Trump. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spelled out with admirable clarity in his Senate confirmation hearing in February how Trump disowned the world his predecessors had made. The postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us, he said."
"The rules-based international order had to be jettisoned, Rubio said, because it had been built on a false assumption that a foreign policy serving core national interests could be replaced by one that served the liberal world order, that all the nations of earth would become members of the democratic western-led community, with humankind now destined to abandon national identity and become one human family and citizens of the world. This was not just a fantasy. We now know it was a dangerous delusion."
An old world is dying and a new world struggles to be born, creating a transitional period in which small acts can have decisive weight. Western leaders in 2025 perceived the post-1945 international order as halted and suffering a crisis of legitimacy. A recent repudiation of the postwar rules-based system by US leadership has treated the order as a strategic weapon and prompted claims that the liberal project of universal democratic integration was a false assumption. That repudiation is presented as the single greatest proximate risk of wide geopolitical instability and a generational global crisis.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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