The world is no longer governed by principles. It is once again governed by constraints. That is the naked truth, the unbeautiful truth, the truth that the moralists of international commentary push aside like a piece of furniture too heavy for too small a room. As of now, geopolitics no longer resembles a debate about values, but an inventory of vulnerabilities, stockpiles, maritime routes, air bases, missiles, undersea cables, and thresholds of tolerance. States no longer really ask what is right; they calculate what they can still afford. We have entered a historical sequence in which power returns at a gallop, and in which law, as always when empires grow restless, is politely put back in the trunk.
The most convenient error, and therefore the most widespread, is to believe that the current disorder is some sort of anomaly. The opposite is true. Disorder is the normal condition of the international system; order is merely its costly parenthesis, sustained only so long as the hegemonic power agrees to subsidize it. And that parenthesis is closing. The war in Ukraine is entering its fifth year without any decisive Russian collapse, despite the fantasies entertained for months in Western strategic salons. Recent assessments instead emphasize that Moscow still has the human, industrial, and budgetary resources to continue the war throughout 2026. This is not a Russian victory in the romantic sense of the term; it is colder than that. It is the demonstration that an authoritarian, militarized, and resilient state can absorb costs that commentary-driven democracies had chosen to underestimate.
Meanwhile, the Middle East has ceased to be merely a powder keg: it has once again become the convulsive heart of the global system. Since February 28, 2026, the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has crossed a threshold that many pretended to believe was impossible. Joint American-Israeli strikes killed Ali Khamenei and triggered a massive Iranian regional retaliation. Since then, attacks, counterattacks, aerial disruptions, threats against oil infrastructure, and maritime insecurity have turned the region into an accelerator of planetary crisis. What is unfolding there is not merely an armed neighborhood quarrel or yet another confessional flare-up; it is a struggle for control over energy nodes, transit corridors, and the very credibility of American deterrence. When the Gulf wavers, the rest of the world pays the bill, sometimes before it has even understood the menu.
This is where China enters the picture, not as a majestic spectator, but as a power imprisoned by its own needs. Much has been said, often with the smugness of subsidized academics, about China’s rise as though it were an irresistible phenomenon. Far less has been said about its energy bill. A great industrial power still heavily dependent on external supplies is not invincible; it is exposed. If its flows are compressed, delayed, made more expensive, or cut off, its manufacturing miracle ceases to be a miracle and becomes once again a factory dependent on the sea. Your original intuition lies precisely there: China is threatened not only by some foreign armada, but by the gradual strangulation of what keeps it running. That is far more serious, because it is less spectacular. Modern empires do not always die under bombs; they also seize up for lack of fuel.
To this is added the other great stage of the decade: Taiwan. China encircled the island during large-scale military exercises at the end of December 2025, notably in response to a major American arms delivery announcement. That move was not some theatrical whim; it was a message. Beijing wants to accustom the region, the markets, and public opinion to the normalization of coercion around Taiwan. Washington, for its part, is reinforcing its deterrence architecture, notably through AUKUS and the consolidation of its Indo-Pacific partnerships. The problem is that the more each side prepares peace through force, the more each side creates the material conditions for a major accident. Stability is no longer a state; it is a contained tension. And in history, contained tensions have an unfortunate tendency to want to find out how far they can go.
The Sahel, meanwhile, reminds us of another law of realism: when the state recedes, other powers advance, and rarely with brochures on human rights in hand. The expansion of jihadist groups, the weakening of regional structures, the repositioning of Sahelian juntas, and the intrusion of outside actors such as Russia together form a landscape of advanced fragmentation. This theater is often treated as a humanitarian periphery; that is a small-bourgeois geopolitical error. The Sahel is a laboratory for the world to come: perforated sovereignties, privatized violence, competitions for influence, the circulation of weapons, and populations caught between rival propagandas. There too, morality trails far behind, out of breath, while the entrepreneurs of chaos seize the crossroads. An international order that no longer knows how to stabilize its margins always ends up importing their disorder into the center.
On the economic front, the grand illusion of happy globalization now looks like an old advertisement left too long in the sun. As soon as energy routes are threatened, as soon as maritime risk premiums rise, as soon as the Strait of Hormuz becomes something more than a name on a map, inflation returns like a physical truth. Oil makes transport more expensive, transport makes inputs more expensive, inputs make food more expensive, and food eventually makes political stability itself more expensive. That is the circle. Technocrats like to talk about supply chains; they forget that a chain is only as strong as long as its links are not being used as targets. The global system is not de-globalizing out of doctrinal conviction; it is being reconfigured under the pressure of risk, potential blockades, and the militarization of interdependence.
The state of the world, to borrow almost the title of the podcast by my friend Jean-François Caron and his collaborator Jocelyn Coulon, is less that of an apocalypse than of a revelation. The mask is falling. The great powers no longer believe in universalism; they sometimes pretend to for the gallery, but they are returning to what they have always been: actors obsessed with their security, their material autonomy, their corridors, their room for maneuver, and their rank. Neo-realism is nothing like an intellectual affectation here; it is simply the least dishonest description of the moment. We are entering an era in which peace will be rarer, more expensive, and more precarious, because it will no longer rest on the illusion of general convergence, but on balances of fear. And when a world begins to function that way again, one must stop speaking as though in a seminar. One must speak as though history has become dangerous again. Because it has.