This article was originally published in Vol. 5 No. 3 of our print edition.

The Return of Strategic Transactionalism, Nationalism, and Statecraft

The global resurgence of the nation state as the central organizing principle of international relations, together with the revival of its corollary, nationalism,¹ is perhaps the most obvious consequence of the discredited worldview championed by the autopilot Atlanticists and their much-vaunted ‘rules-based liberal international order’.² This now-defunct order’s intellectual underpinnings were conceived in the final months of the Berlin Wall’s horrid existence, and it emerged as a political force soon thereafter. Its first executors were so-called ‘Third Way’ politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, drunk on the vainglorious belief that they were leading the world into a transformation to end all future transformations.³

Almost two decades later, that ideological framework came crashing down in the span of just forty days in the summer of 2008.⁴ That was when the liberal, cosmopolitan West’s claim to global primacy cracked on two critical fronts: great power politics and international economics. In a fundamental way, this called into question its leadership of the world, which rested on hegemony, predictability, and a ‘monopoly on patronage’.⁵ First came the August 2008 Russia–Georgia conflict and the correct judgement made by the Kremlin that the West could not make a credible attempt to prevent or reverse its outcome, as doing so would have meant going directly to war with Russia, a nuclear power.⁶ Then, less than two months later, it was still more drastically challenged as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. This rapidly cascaded into a collapse of Western stock markets and the onset of a global financial recession.

At least two facts illustrate the fundamental geopolitical significance of the 2008 turning point. First, remedial efforts to overcome the effects of the economic crash could not have succeeded without significant non-Western participation—an unprecedented turn of events. Second, the criteria for membership in the new institutional arrangements that were hastily set up in response to the West’s financial troubles—most notably the establishment of the G20—did not involve having ‘liberal democracy’ as a form of government. What mattered most was having cash in one’s state coffers and the willingness to spend it beyond one’s borders.

It so happens that there is a not insignificant correlation—insurmountable evidence of which goes back to Thucydidean times, if not earlier—between a state having cash in its pocket and the ambitions of its leaders to play an active and influential role in international relations. After the events of 2008, the field was left wide open due to the lessening of the aforementioned constraints. From this, much of the rest of the world derived the following strategic lesson: the West could not solve international problems by itself anymore—even problems primarily of its own making.

‘Almost two decades later, that ideological framework came crashing down in the span of just forty days in the summer of 2008’

At the time, most Western politicians did not grasp the scope of this paradigm shift, though almost everyone else did. More than anything else before or since, the consequences derived from these two events opened the door for China to start capitalizing geopolitically on its skyrocketing economic success—the scale and rapidity of which is without precedent in human history.⁷ The 2013 launch of the Belt and Road Initiative by Xi Jinping, followed by the 2015 establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and, later, Beijing’s response to successive unilateral Western impositions of restrictions and tariffs on that country’s exports, together mark three additional milestones in China’s self-emancipation from the West’s claim to primacy.

The manner in which China seized nearly every opportunity to improve its standing in the world gave courage to much of the rest of the global majority—major and non-major non-Western powers alike—to contemplate, at the very least, a world without Western hegemony. Russia, Türkiye, and some of the more active GCC states, followed by India and many other non-Western powers, including all the world’s ‘keystone states’,⁸ took as full advantage of this opportunity as they could. A few Western countries did likewise, with Hungary being the obvious example.⁹

The cumulative effect of all this is that barely anyone in the non-Western world even pays lip service to the ‘rules-based liberal international order’ anymore, including most small and medium-sized countries. Since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the United States has also stepped away from defending this ‘order’. This has left the European Union as the only major power willing to protect it. As historian Michael Kimmage recently put it, ‘Trump’s dislike of universalistic internationalism aligns him with Putin, Xi, Modi, and Erdogan. These five leaders share an appreciation of foreign-policy limits and a nervous inability to stand still. They are all pressing for change while operating within certain self-imposed parameters. Putin is not trying to Russify the Middle East. Xi is not trying to remake Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East in China’s image. Modi is not attempting to construct ersatz Indias abroad. And Erdogan is not pushing Iran or the Arab world to be more Turkish. Trump is likewise uninterested in Americanization as a foreign-policy agenda. His sense of American exceptionalism separates the United States from an intrinsically un-American outside world.’¹⁰

The way in which the perception of the conflict over Ukraine has played itself out—the indifference of the global majority to what they see as an internecine matter juxtaposed against the rigid public posture of most Western powers (i.e. an insistence upon the defeat of Russia, defined as the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders at the very least) also speaks to this point. This should not have come as a surprise, for the global majority understands full well that the rough and tumble of geopolitics is eternally coeval with political life,¹¹ as is the Thucydidean antithesis between any political community’s dreams and the reality of its power.¹²

The antithesis between ambition and capability calls to mind another Thucydidean dictum regarding the burdens and responsibilities of statecraft and the necessary acknowledgement of even an accomplished statesman’s powerlessness in the face of grave disadvantage.¹³ The foregoing is, of course, even more applicable in cases involving political communities led by run-of-the-mill politicians, for statecraft is far more than the mere sum of one’s intentions and aspirations.¹⁴ Rather, statecraft is the contingent application of state power to enhance that state’s security and promote its national interests. Thucydides defined the goal of statecraft as the maintenance of a nation’s happiness and its moderation in prosperity while ‘taking care that the state grows as much in security as it does in renown’.¹⁵ This, in turn, suggests that what genuine statecraft requires most—everywhere and always—is a clinical examination of what cannot be achieved (here by ‘clinical’ I mean not misled by passion, prejudice, or ideological rigidity). Only then may the achievable be fruitfully contemplated and prudentially executed, because history never ends, geography matters, the future is uncertain, one’s friends are always imperfect, power politics never go away, no political cause is ever truly just, and the ‘skull is always just below the skin’.¹⁶

Statecraft is not a morality play, an exercise in telling others how to avoid perdition, a leisurely walk down a manicured garden path that leads to total victory over the jungle, or an altruistic drive to provide relief of man’s estate or to advance the common good. As Socrates argues in Plato’s Republic, achieving and maintaining the right balance between logos (reason or deliberation), thymos (spiritedness), and epithumia (appetitive craving or desiring) is the key to attaining a condition of justice in both the individual and the political community or regime (politeia). Justice, in other words, is what results when each of the three aforementioned parts fulfils its respective function without attempting to interfere in the function of the other two. This state of perfect justice is exceedingly rare in individuals and effectually impossible in political communities. In the latter case, postulates Socrates, a philosopher king would need to rule in order to keep everything in balance, and the conditions for that to take place are presented in such a way as to make it clear that it can never actually be realized. The greater the disbalance between logos, thymos, and epithumia, the greater the likelihood that a given regime will move away from anything resembling even the quest for justice, properly understood. In far too many contemporary Western contexts, this has produced regimes whose politicians espouse a belief in the ‘increasing power of reason over man—a wrong conclusion contradicted by more and more evidence, yet suggested by wishful thinking’,¹⁷ whilst practising what Tocqueville called ‘mild despotism’, defined by him as ‘regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude’ that ‘reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd’.¹⁸

Most politicians in most Western states continue to conduct their foreign relations through the repetition of emotive clichés uttered in obstinate fealty to the ‘rules-based liberal international order’ their predecessors constructed as the Cold War was coming to an end. Even today, nearly two decades after that fateful summer when control of the globe began inexorably to slip out of Western hands, most of our politicians still seem unable to genuinely think through the consequences of the fact that such a world has come and gone, never to return. As Wolfgang Munchau puts it, ‘They are the Norma Desmond of geopolitics—convinced that they are still the stars.’¹⁹

‘The West could not solve international problems by itself anymore—even problems primarily of its own making’

It is the quintessence of geopolitical malpractice that out-of-power Americans, meretricious Canadians, hapless Britons, and namby-pamby Europeans of various stripes still remain loyal to that defunct way of thinking. Liberal internationalists to the core, incapable of introspection, and lacking serious analytical aptitude, these chin-strokers share too many traits of what Robert Musil termed the ‘Man without Qualities’ and Friedrich Nietzsche called the ‘Last Man’. For in their heart of hearts, they still dream of the advent of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’²⁰ and the resulting inception of Alexandre Kojève’s quasi-Hegelian ‘universal and homogeneous state’—a consolidated global economic and social order operating within a common political space—in which ‘wars and revolutions are henceforth impossible’.²¹ To them, such a world still sounds like paradise on earth: no politics at home, no geopolitics abroad, no wars anywhere. Everyone becoming more like everyone else, ‘complete[ly] satisfy[ied] (Befriedigung) [in the] realiz[ation] of their own [unique] individuality’, with all this being concertedly recognized as being of equal worth or value by the state and through enforcement of its laws by the citizenry.²²

No wonder the contemporary champions of the ‘European construction’ have nothing but disdain for those ‘populist nationalists, stupid nationalists [who] are in love with their own countries’, as the then President of the EU Commission Jean-Claude Juncker put it in a farewell interview.²³ No wonder they persist in concerning themselves far too much with working out the details of ‘delineating…the programme of the essentially future perfect State’.²⁴ As one of my teachers, Pierre Manent, explains, this consists of ‘trying to transform a loose grouping of democratic nations into a coherent whole, into a new, unified body politic. Now the most important and most problematic point is that this proposed new political body is defined by the fact that it is purported to be a pure democracy. By this expression I mean that what the Europeans are trying to do is to separate the democratic regime completely, or rather the machinery of democratic politics (composed of ‘institutions’ and animated by ‘values’) from any underlying conception of what it means to be a people. However democratic its regime, a people is never simply defined by its democratic character: its members are attached to a circumscribed territory, accustomed to particular mores, moulded by a more or less ancient religion. But Europeans have embarked on the bold adventure of building a democracy without a people…Europeans are busy separating their democratic ‘governance’ from everything they were and have done in the past.’²⁵

No wonder such people wholeheartedly embrace those who, like Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, earnestly believe that the EU represents ‘the first ever attempt to build a liberal empire’.²⁶ No wonder they react hysterically when their dream is called out for turning into a nightmare, as US Vice President JD Vance did in Munich: ‘Contrary to what you might hear a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy.’²⁷ And no wonder almost none of them are capable of genuine statecraft, for they cannot substantively define the ‘positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important’ (to cite Vance again). The best they can do is to speak incessantly about what they need to defend themselves from.

But that is hardly enough in a world ‘in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage—or the will—to drive a truly international agenda’,²⁸ because the ‘rules-based liberal international order’ they so openly and lovingly serve is disappearing before their eyes. It does not help that now they are alone, effectually abandoned by a United States they no longer recognize. The multiplying paradigm shifts in international structures and balances of power we all now experience are all but guaranteed to produce political, economic, and social shockwaves of unprecedented scale, scope, and duration.

At precisely the moment when statecraft is most required in all corners of the West for this civilization and the institutions it controls to have a real chance to retain global standing, a great majority of its ‘higher men’ remain ‘hypnotized by simulacra of their own cleverness’, as another of my teachers, Stanley Rosen, put it in a not altogether different context.²⁹ While they blink and bleat, the rest of the world pays scant attention, opting instead to spring into action by putting their own countries first.

This dissociates the vast majority of non-Western states from what today’s ‘higher men’ call a ‘representative liberal democracy’—a phenomenon that is, generally speaking, allochthonous to their homegrown traditions of statecraft. As a statement of historical fact, most such states played no part in its original conception, initial construction, and subsequent development. If they ever did, their allegiance to—and classification as—‘representative liberal democracies’ in the fullest sense is far less likely, given contemporary geopolitical realities.

An unsurprising consequence of the foregoing is the increasing divergence between the values espoused by the non-Western world in conducting the affairs of state and the ones championed by those I have identified above as engaging in geopolitical malpractice, which in one telling have devolved into ‘worthless currency’.³⁰ The more these ‘higher men’ of the West speak of their own increasingly discredited ‘values’, the more one suspects that, in their heart of hearts, they really do still believe that regimes that are not ‘representative liberal democracies’ are inherently illegitimate. This would mean that they reject, at least in principle, anything other than tactical accommodations with much of the non-Western world: temporary lulls in a zero-sum, winner-take-all contest in which every country across the globe must pick a side—with the assumption that the vast majority will pick theirs and espouse their ‘values’. As discussed above, they believed that this would result in the reign of a hegemonic peace over an ever larger swath of the earth, as ‘rogue states’ put down in quick succession in military demonstrations so awesome that effectually all other states would choose to fall in line. They fully expected that the concatenation of raison de planète or raison de démocratie would henceforth hold sway, and face dwindling resistance.

Until 2008, the hubris of this Western posture at least had to be humoured and sometimes even grudgingly embraced by the rest of the world (i.e. the global majority); today, it is increasingly being dismissed—an irrelevant model for a world characterized by the restoration of raison d’état and intensified global cleavages in which the ‘pecking order of power lacks coherence and a shared [normative] vision of the future’.³¹

The cameras have arrived, and Norma Desmond is waiting for her closeup, but no one wants to play along in the remake version. As the new American director might put it, the washed-out star’s ‘values’ have lost whatever power of attraction they may once have had. Other, more competitive ones beckon. And they are being embraced with considerable enthusiasm by most non-Western countries, particularly the small and medium-sized ones.

Perhaps the most important of these new yet old values is the overt readoption of a posture of strategic transactionalism in which ‘the preferred mathematical operations are addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division. Extract more from more.’³² The overarching operating principle for such countries is receptivity towards all outsiders, including Western powers, but this does not come with a license for any outsiders to interfere, reform, transform, or impose. This translates into a growing aversion to aligning primarily or exclusively with any one major power. The logic here is that relying on what we might call an ‘all-eggs-in-one-basket’ policy of unilateral alignment reduces a country’s room for manoeuvre and, in turn, its national security prospects, because such a policy has the effect of incentivizing other major powers to take—let us call it—corrective action. This, in turn, almost guarantees that a small or medium-sized country would find itself unable even to aspire to anything resembling independent agency—to being an actor in the international order. In other words, such a country pursuing such a policy would effectually consign itself to being a weak object of major power rivalry or, at best, a state that is compelled to conduct its affairs within a framework analogous to the Roosevelt Corollary or the Brezhnev Doctrine.

In an essay I published a few years ago,³³ I referred to this sort of thing as ‘Atticism’. Atticism (attikizo) is a Thucydidean neologism that appears five times in his book and twice more in its companion, the Hellenica by Xenophon.³⁴ The straightforward definition of Atticism is ‘to become like or join or side with the Athenians; to work for the interests of Athens’. However, it also has a normative connotation—to amaze or stupefy—and is therefore a ‘special word of sorts for Athenian expansionism’.³⁵ Figuratively, then, Atticism can mean ‘alignment to a stronger power by a subordinate one acting under constraint’.

Guarding against the illusion of the protection that Atticism offers in the short term is one of the most important postures that small and medium-sized countries can adopt in the time ahead. Undoubtedly, a strategy of Atticism sometimes works. In the context of the non-Western world, one can point to, say, Laos, Lesotho, or Palau. However, most others will not be able to pursue such a strategy successfully. They will neither subscribe entirely to any outsider’s vision of world order nor accept any claims of primacy, international leadership, or spheres of interest.

‘Whatever the new world order ends up looking like, it will not be a world order held together by Western “values”, as has been the case for several centuries’

This speaks to Fiona Hill’s acknowledgment that the countries belonging to the ‘rest [of the world] want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest’.³⁶ It speaks to the point made by S. Jaishankar that ‘When we look out at the world, we look for partners; we do not look for preachers, particularly preachers who do not practice at home and preach abroad.’³⁷ And it speaks to the veracity of Gérard Araud’s observation that ‘We, in the West, underestimate the resentment of the rest of the world against us’.³⁸ To the foregoing, I can add a reference to a statement made by the president of the country in which I have lived now for more than five years: ‘Bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg just live on their own planet. They think that everybody around them is trying to come closer. No, that time [has] passed…Partnership? Yes. Friendship? Also yes, if you do not interfere in our affairs and if you don’t want to impose your so-called values on our society. But nothing more.’ ³⁹

The logic behind this ‘nothing more’ is ultimately rooted in the judgement made by most non-Western states that, for the first time in centuries, they can increasingly determine their own future course, and that their common cause is to prevent this future from ever again being shaped by those who they believe held them down whilst they tried to stand up. For men and nations, this striving to stand tall and proud cannot be vanquished. Human beings, like nations, strive to find their place in the sun. They strive to overcome shame or humiliation, whether real or perceived. If they succeed, the resulting pride is strong; the defiance it almost always produces is even stronger. The West no longer has the ability to channel any of this, much less mould it, into something it can direct or control. This tilts most of the West toward despair and the rest of the world toward hope. The side that will be better able to manoeuvre to occupy the space in between will determine the future course of world order.

In one of his essays, Kurt Riezler speaks of an ‘ancient tradition’ rooted in the writings of thinkers like Polybius, Livius, Sallustius, and Machiavelli, according to which ‘there are or are believed to be a number of fundamental elements constituting the situation of the political actor. Machiavelli calls them necessità, fortuna, and virtù. The Greeks called them ananke, tyche, and arete. Machiavelli sometimes adds a fourth element which he calls occasione—opportunity.’⁴⁰ I believe that today’s grand opportunity lies in the fact that the geopolitical weight of the global majority has begun to match its geoeconomic heft. Whatever the new world order ends up looking like, it will not be a world order held together by Western ‘values’, as has been the case for several centuries.

I end with this: the leaders of the most successful small or medium-sized countries tend to be acutely aware of the dexterity required to maintain security and project influence in a prudential manner beyond their immediate borders. And at least in part because of that, such countries are apt to have facility in promoting connectivity with their neighbours and their neighbours’ neighbours. All other things being equal, this last, it seems to me, is a key ingredient in the recipe for success that small and medium-sized countries need to adopt in our present geostrategic circumstances, for it seems very unlikely that they and others like them will get lost in their own imagination or succumb to the self-fulfilling fatalism of the postmodernist cosmopolitan mind that gave birth to the ‘end of history’, the ‘rules-based liberal international order’, and all the rest of that dangerous nonsense.

NOTES

1 At its core, nationalism is about putting one’s country first: borders are not mere lines on a map but sovereign markers of territorial integrity and statehood. Borders represent an axiomatic basis of a country’s identity and architectonic definition of itself. Nationalism is manifested as collective pride ‘in what [a nation] actually [is] or in an image of [those who belong to it]’, as defined by Kurt Riezler, ‘Comment on Hans Spier’s “The Future of German Nationalism”’, Social Research, 14/4 (December 1947), 450.

2 The ‘liberal international order’ has been defined as the combination of practices designed to advance a vision of ‘open markets, international institutions, cooperative security, democratic community, progressive change, collective problem solving, shared sovereignty, [and] the rule of law’ in John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton University Press, 2011), 2.

3 Perhaps the clearest articulation of this way of thinking is contained in a speech by Tony Blair: ‘We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not. […] The principles of international community apply also to international security…In the end, values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights, and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer.’ See Tony Blair, ‘Address Before the Economic Club of Chicago: Doctrine of the International Community’, The National Archives (24 April 1999), https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/+/http:/www.number10.gov.uk/Page1297.

4 George Friedman, ‘Six Weeks in 2008 and the Forging of the Present’, Geopolitical Futures (11 August 2018), https://geopoliticalfutures.com/six-weeks-2008-forging-present.

5 Alexander Cooley, and Daniel H. Nexon, ‘How Hegemony Ends’, Foreign Affairs, 99/4 (July/August 2020), 147.

6 Like the second Gulf War, which began in 2003, the February 2008 attempted secession by Kosovo’s ethnic-Albanian authorities from a democratic Serbia, in violation of Security Council resolution 1244 (1999), followed by the recognition of Priština’s unilateral declaration of independence by major Western powers and the fact that many major non-Western powers refused to emulate it, foreshadowed in many ways the loss of Western credibility that came to light in late summer of 2008. Supporters of the West’s posture toward Kosovo’s separatist drive argue the case is sui generis and of no precedential value. Nonetheless, the Kosovo precedent represents the first time in the post-Cold War era that a great power gained support for unilaterally altering the borders of a UN member state. See Dmitry Medvedev, ‘Why I Had to Recognise Georgia’s Breakaway Regions’, Financial Times (26 August 2008), www.ft.com/content/9c7ad792-7395-11dd-8a66-0000779fd18c: ‘[I]gnoring Russia’s warnings, western countries rushed to recognise Kosovo’s illegal declaration of independence from Serbia. We argued consistently that it would be impossible, after that, to tell the Abkhazians and Ossetians (and dozens of other groups around the world) that what was good for the Kosovo Albanians was not good for them. In international relations, you cannot have one rule for some and another rule for others.’ Cf. Boris Tadić, ‘The Anatomy of Annexation: How a 2010 ICJ Ruling Destabilized International Law to Putin’s Benefit’, Horizons, 23 (Spring 2023), 12–21, www.cirsd.org/files/000/000/010/45/842c4e2d7751ac 89eefe9e2351236b963a867f4d.pdf.

7 See Michael D. Swaine, ‘Perceptions of an Assertive China’, China Leadership Monitor (3 May 2010). See also Niall Ferguson, ‘America and China Are Entering the Dark Forest’, Bloomberg Opinion (5 July 2020), www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-05/is-the-u-s-in-a-new-cold-war-china-has-already-declared- it: ‘Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.’ On the term ‘Chimerica’, defined as the marriage of convenience between the Chinese and American economies, see Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, ‘Chimerical? Think Again’, The Wall Street Journal (5 February 2007).

8 The ‘keystone state’ concept was introduced by Nikolas K. Gvosdev, ‘Keystone States: A New Category of Power’, Horizons, 5 (Autumn 2015), 104–120, www.cirsd.org/en/horizons/horizons-autumn-2015–issue-no5/keystone-states—a-new-category-of-power, and refined in Gvosdev, ‘Geopolitical Keystone: Azerbaijan and the Global Position of the Silk Road Region’, Baku Dialogues, 4/1 (Autumn 2020), 26–39, https://bakudialogues.ada.edu.az/media/2020/08/27/ bd-1-gvosdev.pdf. See also Damjan Krnjević Miškovic, ‘Superseding Middle Power Theory with the Keystone Concept: The Persuasive Case of Azerbaijan and the Silk Road Region’, Caucasus Strategic Perspectives, Special Issue, 1 (February 2024), 31–65, https://cspjournal.az/uploads/files/CSP Middle Power/(3) Damjan Krnjevic Miskovic_S24.pdf; and Carlos Roa, ‘Between East and West: The Prospect of Hungary as a Keystone State’, Hungarian Conservative, 4 (December 2022), www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/between-east-and-west-the-prospect- of-hungary-as-a-keystone-state.

9 An articulation of the Hungarian approach is provided in various works by Balázs Orbán, such as The Hungarian Way of Strategy (MCC Press, 2021); ‘Connectivity: A Hungarian Globalization Strategy’, European Council on Foreign Relations (6 March 2023), https://ecfr.eu/article/connectivity-a-hungarian-globalisation-strategy; and Hussar’s Cut (MCC Press, 2024).

10 Michael Kimmage, ‘The World Trump Wants: American Power in the New Age of Nationalism’, Foreign Affairs 104/2 (March/April 2025), 14–15.

11 Both the formulation and deriving argument is provided in Damjan Krnjević Mišković, ‘Back with a Vengeance: The Return of Rough and Tumble Geopolitics’, Orbis: A Journal of World Affairs, 65/1 (Winter 2021), 118–135. The rest of this paragraph and several of those that follow draw heavily on formulations and arguments I have developed elsewhere. See Damjan Krnjević Mišković, ‘Henry Kissinger and Ending the Conflict Over Ukraine’, The National Interest (3 June 2023), https://nationalinterest.org/feature/henry-kissinger-and-ending-conflict-over-ukraine-202774; Krnjević, ‘Superseding Middle Power Theory with the Keystone Concept’; and Nikolas K. Gvosdev, and Damjan Krnjević Mišković, ‘Great Power Populism’, The National Interest, 167 (May/June 2020), 39–48.

12 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, VI:31.5–6; VII:75.6–7; VII:87.

13 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, V:85–116.

14 For an excellent differentiation between the ‘statesman’ and the ‘politician’, see Kurt Riezler, ‘The Philosopher of History and the Modern Statesman’, Social Research, 13/3 (September 1946), 375.

15 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, VIII.24.4.

16 This last formulation is found in Rod Dreher, ‘Is Civil War Coming to Europe?’, The European Conservative (14 April 2025), https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/is-civil-war-coming-to-europe.

17 Riezler, ‘The Philosopher of History and the Modern Statesman’, 373.

18 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, and Delba Winthrop (University of Chicago Press, 2000), vol. II, pt. 4, ch. 6.

19 Wolfgang Munchau, ‘The End of the Transatlantic Alliance: Europe Has Lost Its Way’, UnHerd (17 February 2025), https://unherd.com/2025/02/the-end-of-the-transatlantic-alliance.

20 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, 16 (Summer 1989), 3–18. See also Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (The Free Press, 1992).

21 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, seconde édition (1933–1939) (Gallimard, 1968), 145. Cf. Alexandre Kojève, Esquisse d’une phénoménologie du droit (1943) (Gallimard, 1981), 133.

22 Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, 113–114. A similar formulation is found at 145–146 and elsewhere.

23 Frederik Pleitgen, and Luke McGee, ‘Juncker Lashes Out at “Stupid Nationalists” on Eve of European Elections’, CNN (22 May 2019), https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/22/europe/jean-claude-juncker-interview-european-elections-intl/index.html.

24 Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (University of Chicago Press, 1952), 106.

25 Pierre Manent, ‘Preface to the American Edition’, A World Beyond Politics: A Defense of the Nation-State (Princeton University Press, 2006), vii–viii.

26 Valerie Hopkins, ‘Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Sees EU Candidacy as a Crucial Step Toward Joining a “Liberal Empire”’, The New York Times (24 June 2022), www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/world/europe/ukraine-eu-dmytro-kuleba.html.

27 JD Vance, ‘Remarks at the Munich Security Conference’, The White House (14 February 2025), www.whitehouse.gov/remarks/2025/02/remarks-by-vice-president-vance-at-the-munich-security-conference.

28 Ian Bremmer, and Nouriel Roubini, ‘A G-Zero World’, Foreign Affairs, 90/2 (March/April 2011), 2. Note that, more or less contemporaneously, Nader Mousavizadeh popularized his ‘archipelago world’ concept in various publications, which is effectually synonymous with the G-Zero world concept. His first attempt was made in 2008, however: ‘a world of parts is emerging—of states drifting farther away from each other into a global archipelago of interests and values; and that in an archipelago world, appeals to freedom, democracy and human rights must compete with aims of stability, resource security and the projection of national power.’ See Nader Mousavizadeh, ‘How to Navigate the New Global Archipelago’, The Times (29 August 2008). It is also worth noting that the foreign editor of the Financial Times has coined the term ‘à la carte world’ and has contrasted it to its predecessor, the ‘prix fixe world’. This, too, is a variant on the G-Zero world concept. See Alec Russell, ‘The À La Carte World: Our New Geopolitical Order’, Financial Times (21 August 2023).

29 Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Yale University Press, 2004), 250. The entire passage reads as follows: ‘As long as the higher men [of today] are hypnotized by simulacra of their own cleverness, we will continue to dwell in the epoch of the last men.’ Compare with Leo Strauss, On Tyranny: Corrected and Expanded Edition, Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, eds. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 209: ‘The state through which man is said [by Kojève] to become reasonably satisfied [i.e., the universal and homogeneous state] is, then, the state in which the basis of man’s humanity withers away, or in which man loses his humanity. It is the state of Nietzsche’s “last man”.’

30 This formulation is found in Philip Pilkington, ‘The Liberal Imperium Is Dead’, Postliberal Order (blog) (11 February 2025), www.postliberalorder. com/p/the-liberal-imperium-is-dead.

31 Zbigniew Brzezinski, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power (Basic Books, 2012), 36. 32 Evan Feigenbaum, (@EvanFeigenbaum), X (Twitter), 20 June 2024, https://x.com/EvanFeigenbaum/status/1803835202734592107.

33 Damjan Krnjević Mišković, ‘Atticism and the Summit for Democracy: A Little Thought Experiment’, Baku Dialogues, 5/2 (Winter 2021–2022), 140–165, https://bakudialogues. ada.edu.az/media/2022/01/26/bd_w21_krnjevic.pdf. The rest of this paragraph draws from this account almost verbatim.

34 See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, III.62.2, III.64.5, IV.133.1, VIII.38.3, and VIII.87.1; Xenophon, Hellenica, I.6.13, and VI.3.14.

35 Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other (Random House, 2005), 14.

36 Fiona Hill, ‘Ukraine in the New World Disorder: The Rest’s Rebellion Against the United States’, Lennart Meri Lecture, International Centre for Defence and Security (13 May 2023), https://lmc.icds.ee/lennart-meri-lecture-by-fiona-hill.

37 S. Jaishankar’s remarks at The Arctic Circle India Forum, 4 May 2025, as reported in ‘Jaishankar Says India Is Looking for Partners, not Preachers; Highlights New Delhi’s “Russia Realism”’, The Hindu (5 May 2025), www.thehindu.com/news/national/jaishankar-says-india-is-looking-for-partners-not-preachers-highlights-new-delhis-russia-realism/article69537934.ece.

38 Gérard Araud, (@GerardAraud), X (Twitter), 26 March 2022, https://x.com/GerardAraud/status/1507742268777799692.

39 Ilham Aliyev, ‘Remarks to the ADA University International Forum on Facing the New World Order’, President.az (9 April 2025), https://president.az/en/articles/view/68514.

40 Kurt Riezler, ‘Political Decisions in Modern Society’, Part 2, Ethics, 64/2, (January 1954), 2.

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