By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 5/10/26

Introduction

It has been difficult for me to accept and to write about the impact of this illegal, dangerous, and highly complex war. Hopefully, this essay will help me get back on track.

The immorality and utter savagery of this war, both on Iran and Lebanon, is deeply troubling. It does not bode well for future world peace. The war was launched during peace negotiations, killing the Iranian negotiators, making future negotiations difficult. The US wants to end the war without resolving the underlying issues or accounting for the damage to Iran or the Gulf region.

The consensus within the US financial elite is that the war will end in 2 to 4 weeks, and that the closing of Hormuz will not be a major issue. What if this consensus is incorrect, the damage is greater, or the war continues for several more months–or even longer?

As this Substack has discussed the American economy is massively dependent on the AI buildout with trillions in venture capital pouring into artificial intelligence and building data centers. AI is not currently profitable, consumes a lot of energy, and the data center build out is facing growing public opposition as the public backlash to data centers continues to grow.

Oil industry and other experts have just begun to acknowledge that a crisis from Hormuz closing is now within sight. It could end up involving vastly rising energy costs, disrupting agricultural supply chains, and straining global transportation networks. If this happens, it will force Big Tech to face up to the AI profitability crisis. The sector that was supposed to carry the US economy forward is currently structurally unprofitable, dependent on cheap energy and stable supply chains, both of which are now under direct threat. The war is placing the AI bubble under stress at the worst possible moment.

This is similar to the internet bubble of the late 1990’s. Many of the high-flying internet stocks crashed in 2000, but the crash did not impact the long-term future of the internet. People like Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt may be correct that artificial intelligence, as a technology, will dominate and radically change the future. The tools will improve. Applications will find footing. The real question is whether the continuation of this war will disrupt the financial edifice built around AI, the expectations, the capital allocation, and the growth assumptions, especially if those assumptions are predicated on a world of cheap energy, stable geopolitics, and endless scaling. The war on Iran has called that world into question, at least for now. As this essay will demonstrate, the billionaires and the financial players do not see the Iran war as a threat, even as it eats into the financial security of most Americans.

Will the effect of the Gulf War be to reinstate the primacy of the physical world over the virtual world? Will other consequences lead to the bursting of the AI bubble? The answer to these questions is currently unknown.

Energy Shortages Begin to Bite

We finally have a time frame for when inventories will be drawn down and shortages begin to bite–June–oil executives and industry insiders are warning that the world is heading for an energy and global trade shock if the maritime chokepoint of Hormuz remains closed for another month

Here’s Bloomberg on May 9^th: “The world has burned through oil inventories at a record speed as the Iran war throttles flows from the Persian Gulf, eating into the very buffer that protects against supply shocks.”

“The rapidly shrinking stockpiles mean that the risk of even more extreme price spikes and shortages is getting ever-closer, leaving governments and industries with fewer options to cushion the impact of the loss of more than a billion barrels of supply, two months into the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The sharp depletion will also mean the market stays vulnerable for longer to future disruptions even after the conflict ends.”

“Morgan Stanley estimates global oil stockpiles dropped by about 4.8 million barrels a day between March 1 and April 25 — far exceeding the previous peak for a quarterly drawdown in data compiled by the International Energy Agency. Crude accounts for almost 60% of the decline, and refined fuels the rest.”

“Crucially, the system also requires a minimum level of oil, which means that the “operational minimum” is reached long before the inventories hit actually zero, said Natasha Kaneva, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s head of global commodities research.”

““Inventories are acting as the shock absorber of the global oil system,” she said. But “not every barrel can be drawn.””

Here’s the litany of warnings over just the last few days:

—Chevron CEO: “We’re starting to see risks of supply outages in some of these economies.”

–Frederic Lasserre, head of research at Gunvor, one of the world’s largest oil traders, warned earlier this week: “The tipping point is clearly June. This is the point at which something has to give.”

–JPMorgan analysts warned that the world is spiraling toward a catastrophic cliff-edge shortage of crude oil if the maritime chokepoint is blocked for another four weeks.

–Here’s Maersk CEO on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” last week, saying a “new wake-up call“ has emerged beyond energy markets and that if the Hormuz chokepoint remains shuttered, it could severely impact global trade in the coming months. Clerc was speaking to CNBC after Maersk reported a plunge in profitability and kept its guidance unchanged but warned that the US-Iran war and the resulting Gulf energy shock are “dominant forces shaping the macroeconomic outlook, as well as the trade and logistics environment.”

JPMorgan’s Kaneva warns that inventories in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development could reach “operational stress levels” early next month, if the strait doesn’t reopen, and then “operational minimum” floors by September. That’s the point when the world hits the bare minimum amounts of oil needed for pipelines, storage tanks and export terminals to function properly.

The chart below provides the duration variable. They are operational stress level by June, operational floor by September. This is the hard infrastructure timeline. The forward question is whether absorption outlasts depletion. The data here says 4 months to test it. This is a relatively short time frame.

Forbes focuses on the looming jet fuel crunch, in Jet Fuel Shortage In ‘Crisis Mode’—More Flight Cuts And Higher Airfares: Note: Aviation is critical to the US economy.

• “It’s not going to be a short-term issue, because it can’t be easily solved,” Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler, the energy data and analytics platform, told Forbes, having likened the jet fuel shortage to a “slow-motion car crash.”

* “We’re going to be in crisis mode,” John Gradek, who teaches aviation risk management at McGill University, told Forbes, noting “the industry has never seen this before, where the actual supply of the product needed to support aviation, that pipeline, is drying up.”

* Europe’s jet fuel inventories are expected to dip below the International Energy Agency’s critical 23-day shortage threshold sometime in June, according to a recent Goldman Sachs research note to investors.

What about other inputs

The above discussion focuses mainly on oil and certain derivatives such as jet fuel and diesel; other inputs are equally important such as shortages of fertilizer, plastic, and the other inputs discussed in previous essays.

Plastics are needed for endotracheal tubes, syringes, pill bottles, IV kits, CPAP and BiPAP headgear, ventilators, peel-apart bags, water-proof gowns and drapes, trash bags, bags for dripping blood, antibiotics, etc., chucks, dialysis ports, gas sterilization, and on and on. Shortages could greatly affect the one-use, disposable, sterile protection of many of these products. The impact could explode the cost of medicine.

Then there’s fertilizer and the prospect for food shortages.

The biggest impact on food availability is likely to be in West Asia, Africa and South America. Here’s a report from Thailand by Rebecca Tan: “Thailand is one of the first ag countries to enter a planting season since the Iran war. We went to document the impact of supply shocks to fuel/fertilizer — It was worse than I anticipated. Farmers are leaving huge tracts of land barren because they can’t afford to plant.”

What will this mean for global food security in the future? If crops are not planted now, it means less food will be harvested.

The Damage Could Be Long Term

There has been a great deal of discussion about the potential damage to Iranian energy assets if Iran is forced to stop pumping oil. Iran disputes this and even US intelligence has said that Iran can hold out for at least another 3 to 4 months.

What about the damage this shut in has caused to other gulf suppliers like Iraq, Bahran, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Saudi’s and UAE have pipelines that can avoid Hormuz, but it will take time and money for the other countries to resume production.

The issue of confidence cannot be discounted. When will insurance become available, when will transport companies be willing to expose assets and crews to transit Hormuz.

It will take time and a real peace deal to resolve these issues and get gulf energy production back to where it was before February 28^th. This may take much more time that market players assume at this time.

US Financial Elite–What Me Worry?

Financial traders point to this contradiction; if the US and the world is facing an energy and economic shock, why is the US stock market hitting new highs? Financial players do not see the closing of the Strait of Hormuz as a threat to US markets. They point to ample liquidity and the fact that global financial flows still favor US markets. Some acknowledge the potential for a short-term squeeze in immediate delivery, but the market does not expect it to last. For example, the future’s contract for April 2027 oil delivery is only at $74 a barrel.

Big finance does not see Hormuz as a threat to economic growth: OECD/IMF forecasts show global GDP growth cut by 0.3–0.5% or more in 2026. This decline is just a rounding error for GDP forecasts. Such a decline is trivial and an indication that there is NO Global Economic Crisis. It is also noted that the Iran war took place at a time of oversupply and falling prices in the oil markets. Mr. Market anticipates that in 3-6 months oil traders will work out new ways to spread the oil around.

According to the Financial Times, the former “Predators Ball” organizer i.e. the Milken Economic conference, was characterized by exuberance as the financial elite basked in the glow of roaring US financial markets. One “high-powered banker” asked, “Does anyone really care if the Strait of Hormuz is open?”

Insulated by their wealth and social position, the Financial Times reported that attendees were living in “blissful ignorance” of the economic pain hitting workers in the US and around the world. Ted Koenig, chief executive of Monroe Capital, told The Financial Times that, while people at the conference were vaguely aware of the suffering of middle-class and working-class Americans, “at the end of the day, everyone’s focused on their own investment portfolios, especially here”.

Is big finance right to be unconcerned? After all, many past scares turned out to be non-events–this one may as well. Yet, war has changed, for example, during the last Hormuz crisis in the 1980’s (the tanker wars) there were no drones or cheap missiles. US war ships could safely escort tankers. This is no longer possible. Also, most traders today have never witnessed a disruption of this magnitude. You have to go back to the 1970’s and 80’s to grasp the potential impact. Then, the oil embargoes led to a decade of high inflation that ended only when US interest rates were raised to 20%–something that would be impossible today given current debt levels.

According to Jeff Currie, every analyst he speaks with calls the current disruptions unprecedented across supply chains. Yet oil and other commodity prices remain strangely calm, as if none of it matters. The market’s dangerous disconnect could be correct or it could be due to flawed assumptions and short-term thinking. It could soon prove catastrophic.

The result, according to Jeff Curie, is that markets are discounting this crisis because of recency bias, surface-level notional metrics, and a total failure to respect volumetric shocks that actually move the real economy. If this is correct, the calm you see today is simply the quiet before inventories run dry and reality hits hard.

US Consumer Sentiment

While the mood at the Milken conference may have been buoyant thanks to the record-setting stock market, fresh data released Friday showed Main Street America is feeling the exact opposite. The University of Michigan’s latest Surveys of Consumers found that consumer sentiment has hit another all-time low, driven in large part by anxiety over price increases caused by the Iran war.

“Taken together, consumers continue to feel buffeted by cost pressures, led by soaring prices at the pump,” explained Joanne Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers. “Middle East developments are unlikely to meaningfully boost sentiment until supply disruptions have been fully resolved, and energy prices fall.” Meanwhile, Tahra Hoops, director of economic analysis at Chamber of Progress, noted 30% of respondents in the latest Surveys of Consumers said that Trump’s tariffs were driving up their expenses.

McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski said this week that signs of real strain are starting to appear. As CNBC reported Thursday, Kempczinski described the current economic environment as “challenging,” and warned that “it’s certainly not improving, and it may be getting a little bit worse. “The fast-food CEO pointed to high gas prices as a particular strain on working-class consumers, who are the most regular customers at McDonald’s.

It’s not only the fast food industry that is being impacted, According to a Thursday report from Market Watch, Whirlpool CEO Marc Bitzer said during a quarterly earnings call that the appliance industry had seen a 7.4% drop in demand in the first quarter of 2026.

“This level of industry decline is similar to what we have observed during the global financial crisis,” said Bitzer, “and even higher than during other recessionary periods.

Financial Valuations Remain Stretched

How stretched? Equity valuations sit at 172% above the long-term mean — higher than 1929, higher than 2000. This level of valuation measures risk, not timing. According to the Economic Long Wave Substack, from here, Economic Winter is no longer a forecast. It is an outstanding obligation. Many have warned about the impact of the financial engineering that has been employed to maintain the bull market in stocks–but so far–the bull market rules and the people forecasting an end to the bull market have been wrong.

The chart below, from Hussman Strategic Advisors, compares the market value of U.S. nonfinancial companies with the gross value added they produce. In simpler terms, it asks: How much are investors paying for each dollar of real corporate economic output? And right now, the answer is uncomfortable. Investors are paying one of the highest prices in modern financial history. Higher than 1929.Higher than the late 1960s.Higher than the dot-com bubble. Higher than 2007. Higher than 2021.That does not mean the market has to crash tomorrow. But it does mean the broad U.S. stock market is priced for a very optimistic future.

The most disturbing comparison is set out in the chart below between today’s market and the internet bubble of the 1990’s. Today, the S&P 500 is heavily concentrated. Ten stocks account for 40% of the market cap of the S&P 500. This is a very concentrated market. Most of the economic growth in the US economy last year from the growth of AI especially from the building of data centers.

The NASDAQ 100 and the S&P 500 continue to hit new highs. Meanwhile, Jonathan Krinsky with BTIG posted this chart comparing today’s market to the internet bubble:

Per Jonathan: “If we look at the top 10 performing NDX stocks in 1999, they were up an average of 559%. The top 10 in the year leading up to 3/24/00 were up an average of 622%. The top 10 NDX names over the last year are up an average of 784%, beating both the dot-com periods. The median gain is still 354%, which is less than the 455% into dot-com peak, but well above the ‘99

There are many differences between the two eras. But the chart shows that the most explosive corner of the market has already moved into dot-com-scale territory — and the cast list makes the comparison feel a little eerie.

In the year before the Nasdaq’s March 2000 peak, the index’s top performers included Strategy (MSTR), Qualcomm (QCOM), Sandisk (SNDK), Analog Devices (ADI), Lam Research (LRCX), Regeneron (REGN), Nvidia (NVDA), Cognizant (CTSH), Apple (AAPL), and Adobe (ADBE). Many of the same names are included today in Krinsky’s list. Hopefully, this time is different.

Conclusion

We can argue about the impact of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, about whether US strategy is failing, Iranian strategy is succeeding, and how Hormuz has changed the balance of power and leverage in the gulf, but until there is peace, the global economy will be at risk.

Maybe Toynbee was right. Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated; wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principal form of control.

---

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 4/20/26

Launching a public protest in Russia amid wartime restrictions can get a person fined and thrown in jail. But Lialia Sadykova, who runs a network of beauty salons in St. Petersburg, stumbled upon a work-around by accident a couple of months ago.

Ms. Sadykova was on the website of her organization, the Association of Beauty Industry Enterprises (APIC), posting an emotional commentary about the deteriorating economic conditions she was experiencing in Russia. Suddenly, others started joining in with tales of hardship.

A “digital flash mob,” where people congregate in online forums and chat rooms to share their grievances, was born.

The group began initiating actions on wider platforms. On VKontakte, the Russian version of Facebook, Telegram, and Instagram, users began posting their stories and reposting others’ as comments mounted. Their audience on Instagram at one point reached 360,000. “It’s become the symbol of thousands of small businesses on the verge of closure because of drastic changes to the rules of the game. We never had any idea it would be so big.”

Digital flash mobs have become a key tool for small-business owners in Russia to draw attention to a near-perfect storm of economic headwinds threatening to pull them under. Thanks in large part to the Russian government’s struggles to pay the escalating costs of the 4-year-old war in Ukraine, businesses are facing sky-high interest rates, labor shortages, falling consumer demand, persistently high inflation, toughening regulations, and huge tax hikes.

Russian government budget deficits have been exploding, with falling oil revenues in the first part of this year and growing war spending. They are estimated to be as much as 3.5% of gross domestic product this year. President Vladimir Putin recently admitted that Russia’s GDP shrunk by around 2 percentage points in the first quarter of this year. Taxes have been hastily raised, and formerly generous exemptions for small businesses have been retracted. Hence the flash mobs.

“The tax burden for the majority of small businesses has leapt between 30 and 80 times,” says Ms. Sadykova. “In our industry, profit margins are around 5 to 7%, and now are we supposed to work just to pay taxes?”

“We are Mashenka”

The protesters were inspired by the experience of one small-business owner, Denis Maksimov, who complained personally to Mr. Putin during the president’s annual public digital “town hall” last December. He said that he was being forced to shut down his chain of bakeries – named “Mashenka,” after his daughter – due to the tax burden.

The publicity, and a surge of new customers that followed it, convinced him to keep his bakeries open. Later, the government acted by temporarily exempting a whole class of food businesses from the newly raised value-added tax.

The flash-mob protesters call themselves “We are Mashenka” to underscore that they are in the same boat as Mr. Maksimov. “It’s great that the situation has improved for small businesses in public catering, but the problems remain for all the rest of us, whether we are in retail trade, services, or small educational establishments,” says Ms. Sadykova.

She adds that the changes to the tax code, which include a rise in the VAT, as well as the progressive removal of exemptions that were previously in place for small businesses, was sprung on them almost without warning. “When you’re in business, you have to be able to plan ahead,” she says. “They’ve changed the tax rules three times in the past four years.”

The digital flash mobs organized by APIC asked small-business owners to come online and tell their stories. “Mashenka represents hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs across the country,” reads the movement’s mission statement, “[who] believed that if you work honestly, you can survive. … This is a systemic story that is happening right now.”

Ms. Sadykova says their online actions had at least half a million participants over two weeks earlier this year.

Kalinka Shoe Stores posted a typical commentary in an impromptu conversation on VKontakte in late January: “We remember [past] crises and hard times, but then our problems were caused by objective reasons. Now we are being ruined with laws and ill-considered decisions, which are made by specific people who think that they can raise a lot of money at once. … Listen to us before it’s too late! Because there are a lot of us ‘mashenekas’ out there.”

Russia’s gray economy

Small businesses in Russia have always existed on the margins, often living in semilegal limbo and subject to extortion from predatory bureaucrats. They are usually last in line for assistance from a state that favors big business, and the first to go bankrupt when an economic shock hits, such as the crisis of 2008 or the pandemic lockdowns. But circumstances have steadily worsened over the past year, with about a quarter of small businesses reporting that they were on the verge of bankruptcy in 2025, and almost a third saying so today.

Ironically, this crisis hits at a time when Russia has a record number of registered small businesses: 6.5 million, accounting for about 20% of GDP. The government has spent several years trying to coax them out of the gray economy with special tax rates, VAT exemptions, and easing of state regulations and inspections. Where official corruption and graft were routine in the past, few entrepreneurs complain about it today.

It’s a complicated issue, say economists, since many small businesses still have one foot in the gray economy and practice various dodges to hide income, avoid regulations, and stay below the tax collector’s radar. One common scheme is for a “medium-sized” business to break itself up into several smaller enterprises in order to take advantage of special income tax rates of 6% for small entrepreneurs and 4% for self-employed people.

“Our prime minister [Mikhail Mishustin] is a former head of the tax service, and he seems intent on squeezing more out of the small-business sector,” says Oleg Buklemishev, a prominent economist. The state also seems determined to roll back the contraband goods, unreported employment, and tax evasion of the gray market, which is estimated to be responsible for up to 25% of Russia’s GDP.

“However, the recent decision to make allowances for the catering industry suggests the government is listening, and might be prepared to show more flexibility,” Mr. Buklemishev adds.

Dmitry Gorelov is proprietor of “Northern Fleet Motors,” which he named after his favorite Russian rock band, “Northern Fleet.” He stands here in his workspace in eastern Moscow, April 6, 2026.

“All the risks are on me”

Dmitry Gorelov started his automobile service center, Northern Fleet Motors, six years ago. He says he keeps his head above water, but can’t expand mainly due to the shortage of skilled labor. Since the war began, workers can earn very high salaries in the military sector that he can’t match.

He pays the 6% tax rate and says he doesn’t feel any pressure from government inspectors. He subsists thanks to his loyal customer base, plus fresh clients that find him through new services such as Yandex Service, a kind of online Yellow Pages that links businesses directly with customers.

Mr. Gorelov says he works an average of 12 hours a day, but he enjoys it and he’s doing fine so far. “Some expenses are rising, but I just raise my prices to compensate. I make more than I would as a hired worker, but then all the risks are on me. No one will help me with my problems.”

With thousands of small-business owners signaling deep and even existential distress, analysts say that authorities may ease up a bit, but are unlikely to fully roll back the tax hikes.

The war in the Middle East and accompanying spike in energy prices may bolster the state budget briefly. But no one expects it to last.

“A lot of small-business people find themselves in a pre-bankruptcy situation. Popular moods are changing,” Communist Party Duma deputy Mikhail Matveev noted on his YouTube channel recently. “This is serious. When people can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, that’s not just an economic problem.”

Intellinews, 4/20/26

Russia’s economy slowed in the first quarter of 2026 broadly as policymakers had anticipated, but the Central Bank of Russia now faces a more complex task as persistent domestic price pressures collide with fresh geopolitical risks abroad.

In its latest Talking Trends bulletin, the CBR said the cooling was partly due to purchases being brought forward into late 2025 and to businesses and households adjusting to tax changes. Yet it added that February data suggested the early-year weakness in demand was “likely only temporary”, implying the slowdown may prove shallow rather than structural.

That leaves monetary policy in an awkward position. The bank said annual inflation in March was little changed at 5.9%, while underlying price dynamics remained elevated through February and March. The desired deceleration of current price growth to 4% annualised “has not happened so far”, according to the bulletin.

For investors, the message is that rate cuts may remain gradual. Markets had already been pricing further easing, helping shape trading in March and early April alongside stronger export commodity prices and the planned resumption of fiscal rule-based foreign exchange operations from July. At the same time, Russia’s government bond yield curve steepened, with longer-dated yields rising.

The deeper concern for the CBR appears domestic inflation persistence. It noted that real wages were still rising significantly faster than labour productivity in January. In the bank’s framing, that supports consumption growth but also risks keeping inflation sticky unless the gap narrows. This reflects a familiar central banking dilemma: incomes growth can sustain demand even as policymakers attempt to cool prices.

The external backdrop has become less benign. The CBR said the escalation of conflict in the Middle East had lifted prices for commodities exported by Russia. In principle, stronger exports can support the ruble and create a disinflationary effect. But the bank warned that higher domestic prices for export goods, increased import costs, more expensive logistics and supply-chain disruption could all push in the opposite direction.

It concluded that the balance between these forces was highly uncertain and would depend on the duration of the Persian Gulf conflict and the scale of lasting production or transport losses. Most of the pro-inflationary shocks identified were temporary or one-off, it said, but policymakers would need to watch carefully for second-round effects on consumer prices.

By Gordon Hahn, Substack, 5/3/26

The recent two-day delay by Ukraine in extending state of martial law was largely the result of the need to adopt a reform of the Kiev’s brutal forced mobilization of men to fight in the beleaguered Ukrainian armed forces. On April 27th the Rada passed an extension of martial law and military mobilization until August 2nd on the basis of the standard three-month term, and Zelenskiy signed the law the next day. But without redressing the population’s increasing alienation from the war effort and the regime as a result of coerced mobilization of men to fight at the front, some deputies were unprepared to pass the martial law resolution. The violent recruitment process has included the killing and maiming of captured draft evaders, mass resistance against the mobilizers’ attempts to seize evaders, and even the use of firearms by both mobilizers and evaders resisting capture. This has raised a firestorm of criticism, resentment, and anger teetering on the edge of open revolt among the public, forcing Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelenskiy, the government, and the Verkhovna Rada deputies to at least feign an attempt to right the situation. Even the police are now hated by the public for failing to protect citizens against the mobilizers’ violent methods and often siding with the latter. Many are asking why can not the Rada deputies, government ministers, their sons, the 120,000 police, and 100,000 mobilization center press gangs be subjected to the draft.

Therefore, two days after martial law and mobilization both were extended Zelenskiy ordered a kind of army reform touching the mobilization system and an increase in pay for soldiers at the front from 100,000 to 250-400,000 griven/month and for those in the rear from 33,000 to 100,000 gr/mo. Zelenskiy’s instruction also called for establishing guaranteed rotation from the front to the rear for resting Ukraine’s exhausted frontline soldiers (https://strana.news/news/504704-voennoe-polozhenie-i-mobilizatsija-v-ukraine-prodleny-eshchjo-na-90-dnej-.html). There has been no such rotation for troops leading to the AWOL of some 300,000 troops from the front.

Zelenskiy’s reform envisages an unrealistic reform that would drain the number of troops serving on the constantly receding front lines and is based on increased expenditures Kiev cannot provide if it hopes to purchase weapons at the levels needed. A previous program provided a similarly advantageous remuneration for contract soldiers, which led to only several hundred takers over the course of months. Ukraine needs several hundred thousand new recruits this year at a minimum. Russia recently reported some 35,000 recruits per month this year. None are coerced; there is good pay promoting the number of contract soldiers and steady flow of volunteers.

The only thing that could make Zelenskiy’s army reform marginally workable would be a fundamental shift in the mathematics of Ukraine’s recruitment potential. Ukraine is lucky to garner 25,000 recruits per month. There are virtually no volunteers, and almost all of the mobilized men have been captured or otherwise coerced into the armed forces, hurriedly trained if trained at all, and deployed to the front wholly unprepared for what they are about to face.

The Ukrainian government has proposed reducing the number of people eligible for exemptions, which will not come close to increasing sufficiently the number of recruits but will increase the flight of Ukrainians, particularly men, abroad. Kiev may be counting on the new policy of many European states, including Germany, of terminating subsidies for Ukrainian refugees and returning men to Ukraine to be conscripted. However, the likely outcome of this is Ukrainian violence in Europe by those seeking to avoid de facto extradition to Ukraine as well as in Ukraine by those who are forced to return to their war-torn homeland or are ineligible for, or soon lose exemption or deferment.

The military-building process is further compromised by the massive corruption in the mobilization centers, where release (not exemption) can be purchased for large sums by those who can muster the funds. The process, therefore, has been totally discredited in Ukrainian society, prompting one symbolic search of a mobilization center by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Any promise or empty demonstration by the Zelenskiy Maidan regime to root out violence or corruption in the mobilization process is plagued by its own massive corruption scandals.

The regime’s corruption crisis intensified recently with a new release of ‘Mindichgate’ tapes implication Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Chairman and former Defense Minister Rustem Umerov in corrupt purchases of bulletproof vests among other things. Thus, not only are close personal friends of Zelenskiy, such as Timur Mindich himself, his former chief of staff Andriy Yermak, and his top national security official, Umerov, deeply implicated in massive corruption schemes directly impinging on the military’s fortunes in time of war, but ultimately so are Zelenskiy and the entire Ukrainian elite (www.pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2026/05/01/8032710/;

From the NABU wiretaps that were published two days ago, it clearly follows that the real owner of the company Firepoint is the corrupt official and criminal Mindich. Because of this, there are calls in Ukraine to nationalize this company and to deny it government contracts

;www.facebook.com/share/p/18Hyad2fZj/?mibextid=wwXIfr; https://epravda.com.ua/rus/biznes/mindichgeyt-pyshnyy-prokommentiroval-zapisi-gde-upominaetsya-ego-imya-821058/;www.facebook.com/share/p/1bZknKo96m/?mibextid=wwXIfr; https://strana.news/news/500462-shefira-videli-v-aeroportu-varshavy.html; https://strana.news/news/461261-ukhod-koshelka-prezidenta-chto-oznachaet-otstavka-serheja-shefira.html; https://strana.news/news/493841-nabu-mohlo-proslushivat-byvsheho-pervoho-pomoshchnika-prezidenta-serheja-shefira-chto-eto-znachit.html).

In sum, it is unlikely if not impossible that the return of potential recruits and the decrease in the number of exemptions will stop the bleeding of the Ukrainian army. And it is even more unlikely that the Ukrainian public will see the prospects that the reform will change the dismal fortunes of the Ukrainian state and its embattled army in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. The extension of martial law and mobilization means only the prolongation the war agony, the intensification of Ukraine’s multifaceted ruination, and the polarization of relations between the regime and society. Kiev is caught in a self-feeding cycle of deepening crisis in which the war requires forced mobilization, which alienates the population from the regime and the war, which reduces willingness to fight, which requires intensifying forced mobilization. In other words, the war requires forced mobilization, and forced mobilization undermines the war effort and around and around again…until the end of either the war or Maidan Ukraine.

By Arta Moeini, Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, 4/9/26

Dr. Arta Moeini is Managing Director of U.S. Operations and Director of Research at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy.

Introduction

Few concepts in contemporary international relations are invoked as often, or with as little precision, as ‘multipolarity’. The term has become a universal description for the transition away from unipolarity and Pax Americana, more generally, yet it conceals more than it reveals. Beneath its surface lies the deeper reality of a civilisational shift—an epochal transformation not merely in the distribution of power but in the very conception of world order. The modern system that arose from the Enlightenment and was consolidated under Western hegemony after the Second World War is now dissolving, and with it, the universalist assumptions that shaped the collective understanding of politics, progress, and peace.

That postwar regime, popularised as “rules-based” or liberal international order (LIO), is facing a total reckoning, or to quote Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a “rupture” that is world historical.¹ While the liberal and legalistic framing of the postwar order helped mask the logic of power and the reality of Western globalism for decades, that illusion has now been shattered by the socio-political discontents of neoliberal global integration, the re-centring of the world’s key regions as autonomous geostrategic theaters in their own right, and the relative decline (and identity crisis) of the United States as the LIO’s principal guarantor and enforcer.

Embodying a secular iteration of a universalist Christian worldview, the LIO initially supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States—promoted an ideological and humanist view of international relations that was not only artificial and performative but also instrumentalised post-Enlightenment European ideas like democracy, human rights, and international law to formalise Allied victory into permanent global management. It aimed to legitimise the postwar order under the guise of sovereign equality while hiding the true reality of Western global dominance.²

As a product of the 20th century, the LIO discarded the openly imperial, racial, and martial language that had characterised Western hegemony in the 18th and 19th centuries, repackaging hegemony behind an ideational veneer and lofty aspirations, with a (racially-diverse and international) class of liberal internationalists and Atlanticists gradually replacing the Anglo-Saxons and the WASPs as its core managerial elite. As a result, this order minimised the lasting importance of power politics through a comforting (if flawed) fiction of a One World (cf. the “global village”) unified through the Second World War as its shared founding myth: while downplaying the structures of power and control, this contrived ontology also decentred the world’s natural diversity and the reality of global cultural plurality in an attempt to normalise its underlying universalist tendencies and desire for global homogeneity.³

The international order of the modern age rested on three intertwined paradigms: the liberal, the national, and the global. Philosophically speaking, each carried within it the same metaphysical presumption—that humanity could be ordered, engineered even, according to a single, rational, and universal model. Liberalism sought to universalise moral norms around Enlightenment ideals, nationalism to universalise the political form of the modern state tied to popular sovereignty, and globalism to universalise the world itself as a single, coherent system (both normatively and economically). Together, they consolidated the modern spirit into an ideational architecture, forming the superstructure of modernity. That structure, once sustained by hegemonic power, is now collapsing under its own contradictions. The “Rupture”, or what this author has called the Great Transition, marks this turning point, underscoring the return of history amid the human need for rootedness and difference.⁴

From this perspective, the emerging order is not a simple rearrangement of global power, but a reconstitution of political life around deeper and older units of human association: civilisations. It signals the reassertion of cultural sovereignty, the revival of regional orders centred on spheres of interest, and the restoration of multiplicity as the natural condition of humanity.

The Discontents of Modernity and the Myth of the Global

The universalist ambition of modernity was to dominate nature, obfuscate reality, and transcend history—to dissolve the multiplicity of civilisations into an integrated political and moral world governed by human reason, commerce, and shared norms and institutions. This was the promise of the “end of history”, modernity’s fatal conceit.⁵ The assumption that humanity could be unified under a single moral and political order denied the evolutionary reality of human plurality: that societies develop through distinct cultural complexes and civilisational traditions, each embodying its own distinctive vision of order, the good, and life itself.⁶

The world was never “one”; it was always a plurality of distinct regional spheres (a “pluriverse”) with different geographies, normative horizons, and forms of life. As jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt correctly observed, “The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe…the political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world.”⁷ This inherent multiplicity in human political and normative life would inevitably produce multiple, competing, and bounded “spatial orders” and “greater spaces” (Großräume) that would resist a single international legal or political regime.⁸

Yet the globalist bias that has permeated all modern paradigms—even those professing to be realist—treated the Earth as a single, interconnected, and rather mechanical system. It mistook the local as the universal and redefined security, order, and meaning not as particular civilisational achievements but as global constructs to be imposed on all. This mentality, rooted in the modern will to homogenise, produced both the alienation and the quest for recognition that have characterised our era.⁹

As realist scholar Christopher Mott explains, the ultimate blind spot for the postwar approaches to international relations is their failure to realise that, “Rather than a single international system that one nation could lead or dominate in a zero-sum fashion, the world is actually made up of multiple overlapping and different systems (in the plural sense) [emphasis in original] that are regionally defined.”¹⁰

The collapse of the postwar order and its “rules” is therefore not a temporary crisis but a long-brewing reckoning with the contradictions of modernity itself. From the United Nations (UN) to human rights, postwar institutions and values are increasingly ceremonial or exist only in form; their legitimacy has evaporated, and they lack genuine enforcement mechanisms. By underscoring the inherent anarchy of international politics, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are emblematic of this disintegration, exposing the limits of an order that once promised peace through abstract universality but instead delivered instability due to its hypocrisy, hubris, and hegemonic drive.¹¹

The Epochal Break: Post-Liberal, Post-National, Post-Global

The unravelling of postwar globalism marks a historical watershed more significant than the inevitable end of unipolarity. The modern state, the liberal subject, and the global system are all outgrowths of the same modernistic metaphysical impulse: the will to unify, standardise, and homogenise through systematic atomisation. Despite its technological facades, modernity is a form of theology with an insatiable appetite for converts, and, ultimately, our era of general discontent is fuelled by a crisis of faith in modernity and its paradigms. What is emerging in the wake of this collapse is not a simple return to classical Westphalian balance-of-power politics but the birth of a new paradigm—one that is post-liberal, post-national, post-global, and decidedly multi-nodal.¹²

The post-liberal orientation reflects the reaffirmation of multiplicity and the exhaustion of moral universalism. The liberal project’s claim to embody universal truths and a timeless code of humanist values has been undermined by its selective application and transformation into a tool of domination, not to mention the reemergence of contested interpretations of human virtue across various civilisations, including within the West itself.¹³

The post-national turn marks the precarity of the modern Westphalian system—a byproduct of internecine European conflicts and colonial expansion. The modern nation-state is hardly a natural form of human community but an ideological construct in which long-dormant sectarian fault lines, such as ethnicity or religion, were propagandised and instrumentalised to break up the once sizeable Eurasian empires and render them vulnerable to Western imperialism. Its proliferation under Wilsonian nationalism¹⁴ fragmented and balkanised older civilisational spaces and imposed a uniform political model upon profoundly different peoples and cultures.¹⁵ 

Under the cover of national self-determination and freedom, the Wilsonian model (cf. League of Nations) abstracted and reified a “people” to form new, smaller “democratic” republics. Under the pretext of resisting capitalism and emancipating the people from the bourgeoisie worldwide, Vladimir Lenin and the Soviets did the same in their own domain, effectively promoting nation-states as “socialist” republics within their internationalist framework.

Regardless of their adopted ideology, most of these artificial republics have enjoyed the veneer of sovereignty and autonomy. Still, their rhetoric of “self-determination” notwithstanding, they have, in practice, become thoroughly dependent on Western powers and entrenched in the liberal, United States (US)-dominated international order, advancing the global reach of modernity. Since 1991, modern nation-states like Ukraine have been the perfect tool to advance cosmopolitanism in the name of democracy and progress: far too weak to resist the onslaught of Western capitalism and globalisation, yet just strong enough (with foreign backing) to disrupt historical geopolitical anchors in their region and prevent civilisational and region-wide integration. As such, the nation-state system, far from guaranteeing stability, has become a vessel of fragmentation, moral confusion, and geopolitical conflict.

The post-global attitude represents the end of modernity’s greatest illusion: that the world forms a single, coherent system of politics and morality. The new epoch restores politics to its natural scale—the regional and the civilisational—and reaffirms difference as the foundation of order rather than its negation. Often organised as Middle Powers, the world’s great cultures and civilisations—Indic, Euro-Atlantic, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Arab—are both geographically and historically contingent and enduring modes of being, sacred yet dynamic worlds with their own outlooks and internal logics.¹⁶ They are older and more resilient than the modern, artificial nation-state and are more deeply rooted than the ephemeral global institutions that have sought to control and govern them.

It follows that liberal internationalism was always predicated on a fiction: that universal moral norms could be detached from cultural foundations, that a single civilisation’s historical experience could stand in for humanity as a whole. Such a project could endure only by American power and an abstractly universalist, if not missionary and apocalyptic, moral narrative (further bolstered by unipolarity). Thus, as American global dominance has waned, the universalist edifice it upheld has also crumbled, revealing the plural, unequal, and culturally diverse reality of the world beneath it.

The emerging global landscape is characterised not merely by multipolarity but by a multi-nodal configuration—an intricate constellation of civilisational hubs and regional systems existing concurrently without a substantively unified organising principle. All conventional modern ideologies and theories, including neorealism, exhibit a (Eurocentric) bias toward totality and ontological certainty—the presumption that security, prosperity, and legitimacy should be interpreted within a global framework rooted in fixed philosophical categories derived from modern Western philosophy.

However, borrowing the terminology of Japan’s Kyoto School, the new epoch repudiates this idealistic logic in favour of a “world-of-worlds” or a “multi-world,” wherein the formless and indeterminate emptiness (ku) of global space functions as the fabric or topological field (ba) for the concrete, creative, and authentic becoming of sui generis cultural worlds.¹⁷ By supplanting the totalising logic of the ideal with the concrete yet fluid logic of place, the post-unipolar world order thus realigns politics with its inherent scale: the civilisational and the regional.

Rejecting Bloc-Thinking and the New Manichaeism

In this transitional moment, many observers and policymakers have sought comfort in old paradigms. They would prefer to resurrect the familiar moral geography of the Cold War, casting the world once again into binary opposition: democracies versus autocracies, civilisation versus barbarism, the free world versus the axis of evil. These narratives share a Manichaean impulse—the need to impose moral clarity upon a world that no longer conforms to Western certainties.

Such dualisms are dogmatic, intellectually sterile, and strategically dangerous. They deny the complexity of the emerging world and reproduce the ideological rigidity that once plunged humanity into decades of containment, proxy conflict, and moral absolutism. The rhetoric of a “new Cold War” resurrects precisely the globalist and hegemonic mindset that the world is now outgrowing: a belief that security and legitimacy can only be achieved through global struggle between rival camps, rather than through dialogue, coexistence, and regional balances of power.¹⁸

This attitude also reflects a deeper anxiety within the declining liberal order. Unable to conceive of geo-cultural plurality and power politics without exceptionalism, moral absolutes, and permanent global hegemony, the waning Atlanticist establishment must reframe every assertion of cultural sovereignty or regional autonomy as a threat to “democracy” or “civilisation” itself. In this way, it conceals its own parochialism under the guise of universalism. Yet the moral authority of such claims has dissolved. Given the double standards in Gaza and Ukraine, the non-Western world no longer accepts that legitimacy flows from conformity to Western liberal ideals. A truly posthegemonic world will necessarily transcend such binary thinking and the coercive moralism it entails.

The new age demands the opposite: the cultivation of cultural realism, which accepts that (global) pluralism, (local) hierarchies, and contestation in human communities are not pathologies to be overcome. Rather, they are the normal conditions of human coexistence from whose dynamic interaction within specific territories emerge our various cultural complexes. As such, reducing the world into two antagonistic global blocs fails to reflect reality. It belongs to the past, and even then, it was always an aberration. The future lies not in the reconstitution of hostile ideological camps but in fostering a modus vivendi among distinct civilisational powers—a practical (valueneutral) ethic of coexistence grounded in restraint, reciprocity, strategic empathy, and mutual recognition.¹⁹

Cultural Realism and the Civilisational Foundation of Order

Cultural realism begins from an ontological premise: civilisations—not nation-states, international institutions, or individuals—are the fundamental and enduring units of human political life at the global level.²⁰ Rooted in a particular geography and organic cultural evolution, each civilisation constitutes a unique, albeit dynamic, normative and historical world with its own internal coherence—a distinctive vision of order, justice, virtue, and even reality within specified boundaries.

This civilisational world order is neither static nor universal, and the civilisations that comprise it—contrary to the Huntingtonian thesis²¹ —are neither essentialised categories abstracted from history and untethered from geography, nor reducible to religions destined for permanent hostility.²² Real-world civilisations are complex organisms, internally diverse, and telluric. They rise and fall, engaging in strategic competition with neighbouring realms over resources and territory. Nonetheless, given their multiplicity and continued historical survival, a natural balance exists among them despite disparities in power and size. As such, during normal periods, the order tends to favour an equilibrium that sustains global stability at any given epoch, without a global hegemon or enforcer. From a cultural realist perspective, therefore, the world is—strictly speaking—anarchic and rejects formal laws and structures; however, an underlying order—rooted in geography and historical continuity—persists, preventing both convergence and worldwide chaos.²³

The civilisational nature of the inter-state order reflects the reality of human life as a political, agonistic, and cultural animal. The civilisational order emerges from history and human cultural evolution as the natural global condition that mediates humankind’s inter-civilisational political conflicts. Given the incommensurability of civilisations, this global order neither prescribes nor is it based on universal morality. Still, it has a set of informal rules—an ethic derived from a heuristic process and millennia of diplomatic practice. Here are seven of the more fundamental of these realist principles, stemming from diplomatic history and the real-world requirements of inter-state relations:

1

Ontological Pluralism: Humanity consists of multiple civilisations, each a law unto itself, incommensurable, and irreducible to the others.

2

Cultural Sovereignty: Every civilisational state fights to order its moral and political life according to its own traditions and ways of life.

3

Regional Primacy: Global stability is best maintained by powers anchored in their civilisational spheres, rather than by transregional superpowers intervening to disrupt regional balances of power.

4

Realpolitik and Sovereign Realism: All civilisational states aim to maximise their security by aggregating power, prioritising their vital interests, and attempting to establish or maintain their sphere of influence in their respective regions.

5

Strategic Restraint: While war and conflict are inescapable, all powers benefit from recognising the geo-cultural limits of their spheres of influence and refraining from transregional ideological, religious, and imperial projects that would disrupt the fragile global equilibrium and mobilise other civilisational states against them.

6

Modus Vivendi: Convergence and ideological proselytisation are a recipe for global war. Sustainable peace requires true coexistence achieved through dialogue and diplomacy that affirms global cultural pluralism and exhibits strategic empathy for the true red-lines of rival powers.

7

Diplomatic Concert: An informal, pragmatic arrangement for constructive engagement and conflict mediation based on mutual recognition that reflects the privileges of civilisational states and their higher share of global power and influence.

By recognising the civilisational basis of the global order and its inherent relationship with power, cultural realism thus provides a concrete alternative to both the idealism of liberal universalism and the nihilism of power politics detached from meaning and the authentic experience of human life—both of which, in different ways, universalise the world and reduce it to a zero-sum battle-space for global hegemony.

The Concert of Civilisations

A cultural-realist framework regards the desire for global hegemony and ideological conformity as irrational and ultimately destructive to both the world and the states pursuing it. Instead, it perceives self-contained regional conflicts at the civilisational fault lines and a global equilibrium among civilisations as the natural condition of international politics, in the absence of the universalist compulsions of ideology and religion.

The practical expression of this worldview is not a rigid alliance system or a new universal organisation, but an informal concert of civilisations: a flexible architecture of coexistence among leading civilisational and regional powers. By promoting dialogue, non-interference, and mutual recognition, such a concert could sustain global stability without recourse to hegemony or an all-out war. Each civilisational power would exercise primacy in its region, assuming responsibility for upholding order and security in its own sphere while respecting the total autonomy of others. By adhering to realpolitik and sovereign realism while leveraging the balance of power through prudent diplomacy, these keystone states would manage the inevitable agonism of international life without recourse to global ideological crusades that could trigger nuclear armageddon.

The upshot would not be global disorder or power vacuums, but a pragmatic, peaceful coexistence (i.e., modus vivendi) that carefully preserves a pluralistic equilibrium—a world governed by tacit understandings rather than imposed universal values, by recognition rather than conceit, coercion, or convergence. The logic of containment, moral crusades, bloc-formation, and permanent alliances like NATO would give way to the more enduring logic of global coexistence.²⁴ In this sense, the coming order may prove not merely post-liberal and post-global, but decidedly post-ideological: an age that has learned from the exhaustion of both utopian cosmopolitanism and myopic nationalism and no longer abides Western parochialism.²⁵

Modelled on the 19th-century Concert of Europe,²⁶ its 21st-century iteration would accept hierarchy and differentiation as natural features of human existence: it would not aspire for universal and perpetual peace but for durable stability built on realism.²⁷ Interstate conflicts and disputes would remain, but they would be managed through the Concert and stopped from escalating into a global cataclysm. Such realism may appear modest by utopian standards of modernity, yet it is profoundly humane—for it is rooted in the tragic wisdom that peace among the many is only possible when no single power or ideology seeks to speak and decide for all.

The American Question

For the US, the challenge of the Great Transition is existential. America must adapt to the new multi-nodal world and rediscover its place within it as a lasting great power. To achieve this, Washington must recognise that it will no longer be the sole “indispensable nation” but one node among many such states: it must refocus its attention domestically and prioritise the American people.

The temptation to revive containment—whether against China, Russia, or any other perceived adversary in the old world—must be resisted. The decades-long projects of global hegemony, moral supremacy, and international social engineering by US Machtpolitikers²⁸ (cf. Boltonians), liberal internationalists, and neoconservatives have bankrupted the country and hollowed out its industries and the middle class while depleting America’s spirit and its republican virtues.²⁹ A sustainable and earnest American foreign policy must embrace the wisdom of sovereign realism: the art of aligning national interest with strategic restraint, while prioritising the collective security of its sphere of interest (cf. Großräum) in the North American continent.³⁰

So far, President Donald Trump’s effort to manage this transition has been paradoxical: the Trump doctrine accepts the logic of regionalisation and sphere of influence without shedding the trappings of empire.³¹ It has aimed, through the “Donroe doctrine”—an economic reinterpretation of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine that redefines great-power politics as a zero-sum competition over resources, technological superiority, and economic power—to refocus America on policing the Western Hemisphere rather than the entire world. Yet, it has continued to rely on old tropes such as American exceptionalism, coercive diplomacy, unrestrained military power, and imperial hubris, all in the name of nationalism.

Adapting to the new 21st-century realities is not to retreat in fear but to evolve—to exchange the hubris of global hegemony and an unchecked national-security state for the dignity of sovereignty and prudent national interest rooted in common sense. In a multi-nodal world of great and middle powers, America’s future influence will not derive from its ability to police the world, subordinate others, or demand maximalist compliance, but from its willingness to serve as one civilisational pole among others—a cultural and political model grounded in its own traditions, no longer an avatar for rootless universalism or an empty vessel for liberalism seeking to remake the world in its image. To recover its own cultural sovereignty and historical particularity is to allow others the same privilege. Only then can genuine dialogue and reciprocity among civilisational powers take root.³²

Since its founding, America has drawn strength and vitality from its self-conception as a singular cultural and moral community: America was neither meant to be a typical empire, nor a propositional nation forcing an abstract project of global governance. A return to sovereign realism as espoused by George Washington—a foreign policy rooted in strategic prudence, non-alignment, military restraint, and national renewal—would enable the US to coexist peacefully and honourably with other major civilisational powers.³³ The power of its example, not its military might alone, could once more serve as a source of inspiration.

Conclusion: Toward a New Nomos of the Earth

The now-unfolding epoch marks the end of modernity’s metaphysical illusions—the belief in universal progress, a single rational order of humanity, and the possibility of a global moral community. The smooth, borderless globe imagined by liberal modernity has shattered into a rich, textured world of regions and civilisations, each bound to its own geography, historical memory, and rhythm of life. What is emerging is not disorder, but the reassertion of the natural nomos of the Earth: a spatial and civilisational plurality that modernity had sought to suppress by force and ideology. The process has reconnected politics with the realities of space and territory, revealing that politics is fundamentally telluric and concrete. It has animated a re-politicised world in which distinct peoples and cultural complexes reassert their sovereignty against the flattening abstractions of global modernity and demand recognition.

To describe these fundamental transformations as a shift toward multipolarity is to misunderstand their essence. Multipolarity still presupposes a single integrated system—a world of distinct and equal “poles” competing within a common framework.³⁴ The Great Transition is something deeper: the disintegration of that framework itself. Power is no longer organised within one systemic model but diffused across multiple, discrete, and semi-autonomous civilisational domains, each with its own organising principles, historical trajectory, and conception of order.

The new nomos of world politics is thus better described as multi-nodal: a constellation of overlapping regional systems and civilisational spaces coexisting without a central authority or universal laws. It signifies the end of both the liberal internationalist dream of global governance and the nationalist illusion of atomised sovereignty. The modern nation-state, once celebrated as the universal political form, now yields to larger, more organic units of order—civilisational blocs and regional anchors that draw legitimacy from historical depth and cultural continuity rather than from abstract legalism and self-righteous moralism.

This reterritorialisation and thickening of politics is not a regression but a return to reality. It is the repudiation of the flattened politics of modernity: the recognition that order is always plural and nuanced, that justice is particular and contingent on both place and history, and that peace can only emerge from maintaining equilibrium and modus vivendi among distinct forms of life. Power in such a world means the capacity to preserve order within one’s sphere—not to impose it upon others. Sovereignty acquires a deeper connotation: the right of every great civilisation to live according to its own law and to guard its own horizon of meaning.

The 21st century will, therefore, not be defined by global integration but by regionalism and differentiated coexistence across civilisations; not by ideological struggle for universality but by pragmatic balance and the art of realpolitik; not by the Manichaean confrontation of blocs but by a concert of civilisations offering mutual recognition. This civilisational order will ultimately replace the moral abstractions of modernity with a tragic realism attuned to the dangers of idealism, the permanence of conflict, and the limits of human agency to dominate and recast the world as it wishes: the looming post-modern age thus affirms multiplicity and geo-cultural particularity, marking the reemergence of space anchored by civilisations as the foundation of world order.

This is the new Nomos of the Earth: a multi-nodal world that, having cast off the metaphysical trappings of modernity, begins to embody, at last, the inherent plurality of humankind as its elemental condition and seeks within it—not beyond it—the measure of order and human greatness.