When the Future Failed to Arrive
From Ukraine to the Taiwan Strait, today’s crises are often framed as ruptures — as signs that geopolitics has returned after a long absence.
This interpretation is reassuring — and deeply convenient. It suggests that the liberal order functioned largely as intended until it was disrupted by revisionist actors, unforeseen shocks, or a breakdown of norms.
It is also profoundly misleading.
For much of the post–Cold War era, global politics was shaped by a quiet confidence that history had turned a decisive corner. The collapse of bipolar rivalry was interpreted not merely as a geopolitical shift, but as a civilizational milestone. Liberal democracy, economic interdependence, and international institutions were expected to achieve what balance-of-power politics never could: render strategic competition structurally obsolete.
This confidence was not naïve optimism. It was embedded in policy practice, academic theory, and institutional design. Trade agreements multiplied. Security alliances expanded their remit beyond deterrence. Diplomacy increasingly spoke the language of norms rather than interests. Power, it was assumed, had been disciplined.
Yet three decades later, the international system is once again defined by rivalry, coercion, and strategic calculation. Wars of territorial revisionism, renewed great-power competition, and weaponized interdependence dominate global headlines. The prevailing explanation is familiar: geopolitics has “returned.”
This framing is comforting — and wrong.
What has failed is not a temporary order destabilized by external shocks, but a long-standing illusion: the belief that power politics could be permanently transcended. The current moment does not represent a regression to an earlier age. It marks the exposure of assumptions that were never structurally sound.
Strategic competition did not re-emerge. It endured — quietly, selectively, and often inconveniently — beneath the surface of a liberal order that mistook stability for transformation.
The Liberal Order’s Original Sin
The liberal international order did not fail because it was betrayed. It failed because it misunderstood itself.
From its inception, the post–Cold War system treated power as a transitional problem rather than a permanent condition of international life. Institutions were designed to manage cooperation, not rivalry. Economic interdependence was assumed to neutralize strategic intent. Norms were expected to discipline states whose interests diverged from the collective good.
This was not an accident. It was a deliberate theoretical choice.
The architects of the liberal order believed that repeated interaction would socialize states into predictable and benign behavior. Over time, material incentives would outweigh strategic suspicion. Conflict, if it occurred, would be marginal — a residue of incomplete integration rather than a defining feature of the system itself. In doing so, they mistook the management of power for its transcendence.
What this vision underestimated was not the capacity of institutions, but the durability of power asymmetry. States never stopped calculating relative gains. They merely learned to do so more efficiently within liberal frameworks.
Trade became leverage. Institutions became arenas of contestation. Rules were followed selectively — invoked when useful, ignored when constraining.
The liberal order did not abolish power politics. It reorganized it.
“The great illusion of the post–Cold War era was not that power disappeared,
but that it had been tamed by institutions.”
Power Never Left — It Simply Changed Form
The most persistent myth of the post–Cold War era is that power politics temporarily vanished, only to resurface in the twenty-first century. In reality, power never withdrew from the international system. It adapted.
Direct military confrontation increasingly gave way to economic statecraft. Territorial conquest was supplemented — and in many cases replaced — by market access, supply-chain dominance, technological dependency, and financial leverage. Influence was exercised not only through armies, but through standards, institutions, and regulatory regimes.
States that appeared most fully integrated into the liberal order were often the most adept at exploiting its mechanisms. Compliance did not signal submission; it signaled patience. The absence of open conflict was not evidence of harmony, but of deferred confrontation.
As realist scholars have long observed, international politics has always been governed by the logic of power. The only variable is how openly that power is exercised.
What changed after the Cold War was not the nature of competition, but its visibility.
Power learned to speak the language of cooperation.
A Realist Reading of the Liberal Order
The Return of Strategy Without Illusions
The contemporary era is not defined by the collapse of cooperation, but by the erosion of illusion. States have not abandoned institutions, trade, or diplomacy; they have recalibrated how they use them. Strategic competition today unfolds within — not outside — the architecture of interdependence.
What distinguishes the present moment is not heightened hostility, but increased clarity. The belief that rules could permanently override power has faded. Institutions remain relevant, but are no longer presumed neutral. Economic ties endure, but are increasingly securitized. Cooperation persists, but it is conditional, selective, and reversible.
Strategy has returned without the expectation of final resolution. There is no “end state” in which rivalry disappears — only phases in which it is managed, postponed, or obscured. Stability is no longer confused with harmony; it is understood as a temporary alignment of interests.
In this environment, restraint is strategic rather than moral. Engagement is tactical rather than transformative. The language of partnership survives, but it no longer conceals the logic beneath it.
This is not a descent into chaos. It is a shift toward a more honest international system — one that recognizes power as permanent, competition as structural, and order as fundamentally contingent.
Honesty about power does not guarantee stability — but illusion guarantees neither.
