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analysis
The fight for a new world order is at a crucial stage.
December 25, 2025, 08:08December 25, 2025, 08:08
Alexander Stubb is the president of tiny Finland, but his ideas have a major influence on thinking about geopolitics. He has just published an essay about the future world order in the magazine “Foreign Affairs”. A detailed book will be published soon.
Stubb speaks plainly:
“We must now begin to reorganize the balance of power within the UN and other international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Without these changes, the multilateral system will collapse. This system is not perfect; it has inherent flaws and can never represent the entire world. But the alternatives are far worse: spheres of influence, chaos and disorder.”
To understand what Stubb means, we need to take a brief excursion into the world of political science.
Alexander Stubb, President of Finland.Image: keystone
There are two schools of thought about the future world order: the liberals and the realists. In his book “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics,” the renowned political scientist John Mearsheimer summarized the two schools of thought. He writes:
«Liberalism is the optimistic view of international politics. It is based on three fundamental assumptions. (…). First, liberals view states as the primary actors in international politics. Second, they emphasize that a state’s internal variables can vary massively, and that these differences have a major impact on its behavior. Liberal theorists often hold that internal arrangements (such as democracy) are inherently preferable to others (such as dictatorship). For liberals, there are “good” and “bad” states in the international system. (…) Third, liberals believe that power calculations say little about the behavior of good states.”
Realists, on the other hand, Mearsheimer continues, see the world in a much more sober and pessimistic manner. He writes:
“Their gloomy view of international relations is also based on three fundamental assumptions. First, like liberals, realists view states as the primary actors in world politics. For them, however, it is mainly the great powers that dominate and influence international politics, and that also cause the deadly wars. (…) Realists hardly make a distinction between “good” and “bad” states, because the logic of the great powers is the same for all, regardless of their culture, their political system or who is in power. (…) Great powers are like billiard balls that only differ in their size. Third, realists are convinced that power calculations determine the thinking of states and that states are engaged in a struggle for power among themselves. (…) States may occasionally cooperate with one another, but fundamentally they have interests that conflict with one another.”
The war in Ukraine is an exemplary clash between the thinking of liberals and realists. Let us first look at the realists, embodied in the German-speaking world by people such as the publisher Jakob Augstein or the philosopher Richard David Precht. They argue as follows:
Vladimir Putin is not a madman like Adolf Hitler was. He acts rationally in the sense of Mearsheimer, who describes this action as follows: “He knows his external environment and thinks strategically about how he can survive in it.” For Putin, NATO’s eastward expansion is therefore an immediate threat that must be averted. He wants to protect himself against this with his invasion of Ukraine.
One of the realists: David Precht.Image: IMAGO/Christoph Hardt/imago
From the perspective of realists, the West is complicit in the war in Ukraine. By deceiving Ukraine and Georgia into the possibility of joining NATO, as did then US President George W. Bush in 2008, he also triggered the Russian president’s security concerns. As soon as this threat disappears, Putin will stop his aggression. From this perspective, Russia is not a threat to the West.
Liberals, such as the political scientist Herfried Münkler in the German-speaking world, see this as follows:
The political scientist Herfried Münkler.Image: Ralf U. Heinrich
Putin is not acting rationally; if he did, he would never have invaded Ukraine. Not only did he sacrifice more than a million soldiers in this war – exact figures are not known – he also destroyed the wealth of his citizens for decades to come. Most Russians still live in poor conditions today, even though the country has huge raw material reserves and the West has been willing to buy these raw materials at good prices.
Russia does not need a security zone because the West never even dreams of attacking it. Word has now gotten around that the country is very large and the winters are very cold. Putin’s fears for his country’s security are either the figment of a paranoid fantasy or, more likely, a pretext. He pursues the megalomaniacal plan to restore the Russian Empire as it existed during the time of Catherine the Great.
Flowers in memory of the victims of the Maidan uprising in Kyiv.Image: keystone
The Americans can rightly be accused of many things. To suggest that they instigated the Maidan uprising in Ukraine in 2014 in order to move their nuclear weapons closer to the Russian border is nonsense. The Maidan uprising had economic causes: During the Soviet era, the prosperity of Ukraine and Poland was about the same level. The Poles joined the EU after the collapse of the USSR, and as a result their prosperity doubled compared to Ukraine. The reason for the Maidan uprising was therefore primarily because the then President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, refused at the last moment and under pressure from Putin to sign an already agreed economic agreement with the EU.
The completely opposite assessment of the war in Ukraine consequently leads to completely different suggestions as to how it can finally be ended. It is assumed that both want peace.
The realists want to achieve this goal by negotiating with the rational Putin, taking his security fears seriously, and not supplying Ukraine with more weapons. This prolongs the bloodshed and is of no use because Russia is ultimately bigger and more powerful and will therefore win the war. We should therefore be grateful to Donald Trump for finally negotiating a peace treaty with Putin and implement this treaty as quickly as possible.
The realists do not see a danger for the West. Ultimately, the rational Putin knows that NATO is far superior to him militarily and that his army will be weakened for a long time. The feverish rearmament that has begun in the EU is therefore money thrown out the window. Money that would be much better used for pension reform in Germany, for example.
Devastation in Kostyantynivka, a town in Donbas.Image: keystone
The liberals see it completely differently. The West is already in a hybrid war with Russia. A partial victory for the Russians in Ukraine would not bring peace to Europe; it would simply be a step in Putin’s plan to bring the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea under his control and restore the balance of power that existed before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
In other words: Putin not only wants to reverse NATO’s eastern expansion, but also wants to ensure that, ideally, both NATO and the EU are dissolved. In order to avert this danger and guarantee the security of its citizens, Europe must quickly remedy the shortcomings of the last decades and invest in armament, debt brakes or not.
The example of the war in Ukraine shows the different worldviews of liberals and realists. However, much more depends on it. It is also about whether the new world order will be multilateral in the future, or whether it will be arbitrarily dominated by the major powers USA, China and Russia and the smaller ones will have to submit.
In this regard, too, the assessments differ diametrically.
Annalena Baerbock, the former German Foreign Minister.Image: keystone
For the realists, the rule-based world was always an illusion that only naive people like the former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock believed in. In reality, this was a hypocritical cover-up of the true balance of power. Whether the USA, China or Russia, ultimately everyone wanted and wants to assert their interests first and foremost and everyone else has to see how they don’t fall by the wayside in this struggle.
For liberals, however, the rules-based world order is anything but perfect. However, to paraphrase Churchill, it is the best of all the bad options. From this perspective, democracy, the rule of law and human dignity are not empty phrases, but rather something worth fighting for.
These values are clearly in danger. Last September, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference in Beijing, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong and Vladimir Putin stood up and declared war on the liberal world order. You ignore their threats at your own risk, because it is now well known that the authoritarian states are increasingly working together to implement their vision of a new world order.
In contrast, Alexander Stubb advocates a liberal, “values-based” realism. By this he does not mean a naive view of a rules-based world in which everyone has equal rights. Rather, he is concerned with reforming the existing institutions already mentioned so that the countries of the Global South can also voice their legitimate concerns.
There is not much time left for these reforms. “The next five to ten years will probably determine what the world order will look like for decades to come,” says Stubb.