The Greenland psychodrama together with some of the startling opinions aired in Davos last week – especially Mark Carney’s definitive language on the end of the rules-based order – have sent the Western geopolitical angst to new heights of alarm, confusion and, often, despair. This is certainly true in Europe where the increasingly-likely demise of the transatlantic relationship – at least in the substantive form we’ve known it for over 80 years – raises almost existential questions from a security point of view going forward.
Beyond security, the consequences for future European economic and technological competitiveness of a serious “civilisational” break with the US, perhaps even a transition to an adversarial relationship, could well be disastrous or even terminal. There is no telling where the widening split between America and its allies will lead all of us, the US included. Some hopes are now being placed in a midterm upset for Trump, and then in a Democrat presidential win in 2028 – as if such events were magic keys that could turn back the clock and restore the inter-allied trust, ethos and sense of common destiny (for better or worse) that still existed, in some form, a few years ago.
Of course, there is no such magic key, and such hopes are misplaced. Even if Trump’s domestic political project, MAGA, somehow stalls and even breaks up in the coming years, the underlying issues, from immigration to the culture wars, will remain and will likely aggravate. The potential for yet another MAGA resurgence will be conserved for many years. America’s foreign partners, having now been given a real taste, over Greenland, of how a rogue version of the US might behave – something which until now could only be contemplated in some purely theoretical sense – cannot and will not ever return to pre-Trump “business as usual” regarding the US alliance, whatever happens. Their newfound determination to reduce the dependency on the US military for defence, for instance, and to build more sovereign capabilities, is now a permanent fact of life in the politics of Europe. It may take a long time, it may cost a great deal, and it may never really work, but the new fundamental reality is that no one can now count on the US in the long run to provide the “backstop” to their inadequacies and failures.
The particularly fraught nature of the present geopolitical moment comes from the fact that two great, world-altering forces are now in play at the same time, and reinforcing each other: the new-model US foreign policy of the second Trump administration (with its quasi-hostile turn against Europe); and the accelerated disintegration and discrediting of the “rules-based” framework of institutions and laws that has nominally sustained, by and large, the post-1945 world order. So where do we go from here? There are four broad scenarios:
In the first scenario, which we may call “Spheres of Influence”, we would see a gradual, de facto partitioning of the globe among the great military powers – the US, China and Russia – according to the strength and reach of their armed forces. Soft, emasculated and debilitated Europe will count for little militarily during the crunch period, regardless of how much it spends on defence; its military problem is societal and cultural – the result of decades of mollycoddled pacifism.
There would be no “global system” or any kind of formal arrangement in place to govern the interactions of the principal players. This tripolar world would emerge after a prolonged period of turbulence and war, as a practical equilibrium at the points on the globe where neither of the three main states can exercise exclusive, persistent control.
This equilibrium would be generally unstable and prone to further conflict arising from clashing interests in key locations, but crises would be solved through pragmatic, transactional diplomacy – at least for a period of time until one of the key powers accrues the wherewithal to expand the boundaries of its sphere. The fundamental assumption in this scenario is the primacy of military power – also used for economic coercion – which would be exercised in a manner that would be increasingly free from any of the constraints that have been in place since WWII.
The second scenario, “Concert of Powers”, recalls the so-called Congress System negotiated mainly at Vienna in 1815 that stabilised Europe after the Napoleonic Wars and avoided large-scale warfare on the continent for a hundred years. Broadly speaking, this was a conservative and generally repressive system designed to prevent revolutions and upheavals and to provide stability along clearly negotiated lines. The ethos of such an arrangement is antithetical to the “values” dearly-held by the West – and especially the modern EU – in recent decades; but for that very reason it appears to be a rather good fit with our times.
This impression is strengthened by the idea of a new “Core 5” (C5) grouping of key powers – US, China, Russia, India and Japan – that is reportedly included in the unpublished, extended version of the US National Security Strategy. The C5 appears to be more than an alternative to the G7 which is a rather generic coordination mechanism; the new format seems designed to enable substantive great power negotiations in the old Vienna tradition. Again, “Europe” would have no place at the top table since it is neither a coherent actor nor a serious, autonomous military force.
Of course, the problem with the Concert of Powers scenario is that it is predicated on a formal, clearly negotiated settlement of all outstanding issues – i.e. on serious diplomacy that requires skill, patience and political sensitivity, as well as a large dose of common interests between the principal leaders. Purely on practical grounds, this kind of future seems unlikely to be realised anytime soon, and certainly not under the leadership of president Trump.
The third scenario centres on the “Return of Empire” and of classic imperial statecraft – in a real, substantive way, complete with colonial practices – not as a metaphor or as a stand-in for so-called “corporate neo-imperialism” or other such notions. In recent years there has been increasing interest in imperialism as a potential successor to the age of “liberal democracy” – which, at the scale of history, has been a short-lived aberration. My own case for why a return to empire is on the cards, which I outlined in these pages back in 2024, rests mainly on the fact that modern ideological politics (of the real sort, not the tribal “chimping” that passes for politics today) seems to be dying out and that we are regressing to pre-constitutional, even medieval, patterns of political conduct.
Regardless of the deeper reasons pushing History back into an imperial groove, the practical value of a restoration of Empire seems well matched to the trends now underway in global affairs. A world running on imperial logic has little place for nationalism or even “statehood”, while sovereignty and legitimacy can hardly stand by appeal to the law or the constitution. We are already well advanced on this road. In his pre-invasion speech in 2022, Putin outright rejected the very idea of Ukraine’s statehood and held it up as a central reason for his attack on the country. Trump has given ample proof of his low regard for the sovereignty of other countries, whether foes or allies – Venezuela or Denmark. And of course the EU was designed from the beginning as an anti-nationalist project whose ultimate goal is to dissolve the sovereignty of its member states into the European Superstate of Eurofederalist fantasy.
All these entities would be more effective – for their own purposes – by operating in an overtly imperial manner rather than trying to “keep up appearances” under the now-old dispensation. And precisely because this is the direction of travel, and because Empire makes increasing sense (again) as a framework for organisation and action, there are good prospects for its return. Once the imperial principle is reestablished – dissociated from the burdens and limitations imposed by the largely Communist-sponsored decolonisation movements after WWII, and by the UN system of “rules” – then all sorts of new solutions become available to a variety of problems vexing the West (and not only) today: from migratory flows to access to resources.
None of this is to say that such developments would be necessarily “welcome” according to the moral and political codes that have prevailed over the past three-four generations; but simply that there would be a logic to their reappearance. Even Europe could find the best potential version of its collective future in shifting decisively towards an overt, imperial project and abandoning all pretences to “democratic values”, rather than continuing with the present dispensation of a half-baked attempt at unity without authority and authority without strength.
Finally, the fourth and more provocative scenario for the future might be called, “Sovereign Syndicates” – where most of today’s States have collapsed under the weight of their accumulated, unresolved failures, to be succeeded by new, hybrid public-private forms of sovereign authority. There seems to be a growing likelihood that the fundamental problem of the modern state – the inability to run an increasingly complex economy and society with diminishing levels of competency, as a result of both detrimental HR policies and insufficient public revenues – cannot be solved and will only get worse. This worsening will manifest through accelerated systems failure, which has already started to happen at the margins in many countries in specific domains, like health or transport.
The only solution – in absence of a hard turn to imperial governance, or perhaps in conjunction with it – would be to co-opt major private companies into what we now understand as the State machinery, as more than contractors or privateers: as co-decision-makers and, effectively, “shareholders” in the sovereignty of the country itself. Such a dynamic would soon lead to an inversion of power within the state and redirect the basis for legitimacy away from constitutional settlements (within defined borders) towards corporate loyalties underwritten by practical problem-solving capacity. In this scenario we would see a fragmentation of current nation-states as “territory” becomes de-linked from statehood in a world of private syndicates of power that operate and connect to each other on economic and other practical grounds, rather than national-cultural.
This would be a “turbo” version of globalisation, driven by the big Tech players and backed, at first at least, by the diminishing residues of State power. It would be a post-Westphalian system, perhaps dystopian from certain points of view, but one that would unlock new ways of achieving stability – through corporate-style negotiations between sovereign syndicates – and new solutions, including new legal paradigms, to deal with the aggravating problems of our age. The idea that the nation-state-based structure of the modern world, which is barely a couple of centuries old in its functional expression, can and will continue for many more decades is becoming less tenable with each year that passes.
To conclude, it is now high time for minds to focus more intently not just on how to “navigate” the current geopolitical moment – but, crucially, on what might the new destination be. What is the world order that we may hope to be able to build, or to guide into existence, on the other side of the disruptions and upheavals of our present times? How is stability and security going to be achieved, under what formula? The scenarios presented here are merely possibilities and perhaps templates, not forecasts; the future is all to play for.
A new tripolar world order is emerging without Europe