The American–Israeli strike that ended the life of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Jamenei, and that marked the beginning of the United States’ most consequential venture in the Middle East since the Iraq War, took many in Europe by surprise. Faced with a cascade of crises—from an oil shock reminiscent of the 1970s to a transatlantic rupture that threatens Europe’s security architecture—many analysts have arrived at the same conclusion: the conflict represents a collapse of the multilateral system and portends a new era of global disorder.
However, this interpretation misses something deeper. The Iran war shows what geopolitics looks like when the very idea of order has collapsed, a situation I call unordered.
“An ‘unordered’ situation implies that those norms are overwhelmed by events and that there is no longer a shared understanding of what is right and what is wrong”
The distinction matters. Disorder is what happens when established rules are deliberately broken. Describing a situation as disordered is, paradoxically, to affirm that there are still shared norms, even if violated. An unordered situation, by contrast, implies that those norms are overwhelmed by events and that there is no longer a shared understanding of what is right and what is wrong, not even of truth itself. Instead there remains a deeper and irreducible uncertainty.
Rather than being guided by shared norms, the international system today is besieged by episodic bursts of coercion and retaliation. The Iran war is a clear example: the February 28 attack in which Jamenei was killed and which triggered the current round of regional escalation occurred while negotiations were still ongoing, evoking the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7, 1941, when Japanese negotiators were still in Washington to keep talks with the United States.
Worse still, the law and international institutions have proven largely ineffective at preventing the United States, Israel, and Iran from openly violating the foundational norms against assassination or kidnapping of political leaders, assaults on civilian infrastructure, and even the long-standing taboo against aggressive wars.
Most importantly, the principal actors in the war do not appear to be conscious at all that they are breaking the rules. When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin offered a slew of legal justifications for the invasion—an implicit admission that a crime was being committed. By contrast, when U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to strike Iran’s civilian infrastructure, or when the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the armed forces would show “no mercy or clemency”, there were few signs that any of them knew, or cared, that they were inciting war crimes.
No institutional architecture can function when the principal actors stop obeying the rules. That is the essence of the distinction between a disordered world and an unordered world: in the former, rules are broken; in the latter, there are no agreed rules.
The policrisis is the new normal
The new unordered era cannot be attributed solely to Trump, even if his theatrics have come to embody it. It is better understood as a symptom, rather than the principal cause, of a world that has lost its organizing principles. The deeper forces driving this transformation are structural: economic perturbations, climate change, technological advances, and demographic shifts converge at the foundations of the existing global order.
As a result, crises are becoming more complex, less predictable, and potentially catastrophic. Instead of simply spreading, they often intertwine. In a hyperconnected world, contagion, tipping points, and extreme volatility become the norm. Oxford economist Ian Goldin has termed this dynamic the “butterfly defect,” using the familiar image of a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world and triggering a tornado on the other to illustrate the destructive potential of global interdependence.
“The Iran war exemplifies the kind of permanent policrisis that will likely define the coming decades”
A more moderate version of this dynamic surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which rapidly unleashed a global economic crisis as supply chains collapsed and vaccine nationalism sharpened geopolitical tensions. Dramatic changes often stem from the cumulative impact of small disturbances.
The Iran war exemplifies the kind of permanent policrisis that will likely define the decades ahead. Rather than a single crisis, it is five: an energy-supply crisis, a nuclear proliferation threat, a regional security collapse, a global economic disruption, and a transatlantic rupture, all developing in an accelerating sequence.
In response to U.S. and Israeli attacks, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, which triggered rises in global energy, fertilizer, and food prices. Even if the strait reopens and Trump lifts his own blockade of Iranian ports, the crisis will have long-term effects on Asian budgets, European interest rates, and global energy reserves. If the fragile ceasefire collapses and prices continue to rise, the resulting cost-of-living pressures could bolster populist movements across Europe ahead of crucial regional elections in Germany and the presidential elections in France next year.
To understand why Western responses remain misguided, it helps to distinguish between two contrasting ways of conceiving order. The first could be called the “architect’s strategy.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, European and U.S. leaders believed they had discovered the definitive model to organize the world, placing their faith in a set of rules and institutions designed to maintain global stability.
The fate of that system now hangs by a thread. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the preservation of a “rules-based order” has become the leitmotif of Western foreign policy, evident in strategic documents, leaders’ speeches, and in the communiqués of G7 summits and NATO meetings. European leaders, in particular, tend to resent change, assuming it will undermine the system rather than strengthen it. As those who have benefited most from the current order, they expect others to accept it or build an alternative. In this sense, they think as architects, concentrating on the world’s institutional structure.
The rise of artisan states
The second way of thinking about the international order could be described as the “artisan strategy,” whereby, in an unordered era, the principal task of governments is to survive while positioning to profit from disruption. China is the primary exponent of this view, but the same logic appears to drive many rising powers, from India and Turkey to Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
These states were not among the architects of the current order and have grown used to adapting and revising the frameworks conceived by others. Despite their size and influence, they display the pragmatism and flexibility of artisans: they repair, repurpose, and recombine existing elements to create something new, instead of designing systems from scratch.
Of course, these two analytical models do not always align with real-world policy formulation. Yet they capture the widening gap between those who sketch grand designs and those who embrace change and adapt to it. While architects pursue bold visions and are often paralyzed by the gap between design and reality, artisans seek to understand where the world is headed and extract maximum value from emergent contingencies.
“In a complex and constantly evolving geopolitical landscape, artisans have the edge”
Architects typically thrive in a predictable world. Yet in a complex, rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape, artisans have the edge. For decades, international politics has been shaped by Western architects whose expansive visions fostered the creation of a global order based on universal institutions and a linear notion of progress. Artisans are better equipped to navigate the radical uncertainty of a world where no one seems to recognize the rules.
The conduct of Iran in its war against the U.S. and Israel is a paradigmatic example of an artisan state in action. Without air superiority, without traditional military parity, and without reliable allies, the Islamic Republic did not seek to wage war on U.S. terms. Instead, it identified the sole asymmetric leverage point, the Strait of Hormuz, and then used its decentralized command structure to adapt to changing conditions.
By closing the strait, rather than seeking a conventional confrontation it could not win, Iran has transformed the conflict from a military contest into an economic resistance in which it clearly has the upper hand. Consequently, the off-the-record negotiations have shifted to focus on the strait itself and not on the issues that led the United States to war: a regime change, Iran’s uranium reserves, its missile program, and its support for allied regional groups.
At the same time, the United States is increasingly constrained by its own architected assumptions. Paradoxically, while Trump is an instinctive disruptor —an agent of chaos with little patience for institutional frameworks—, the military and diplomatic machinery he leads continues to operate according to architectural logic.
The United States entered the Iran war with a set of maximalist objectives that bore little relation to what U.S. military power could actually deliver. Armed with state-of-the-art AI targeting systems and futuristic tools like the so-called “Ghost Murmur” —a long-range quantum magnetometer that, it is said, can track the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat and separate it from background noise— the U.S. achieved impressive tactical feats. But while the cutting-edge technology may have enabled the initial strike that eliminated much of the Iranian leadership and the recent rescue of its stranded pilot, when Iran closed the strait, the Trump administration discovered it could not reconcile its grand ambitions with the reality of Iran’s improvised defense.
The obsolete European manual
One might forgive those who assumed Europeans, as architeсts par excellence, are not well prepared for an unordered era. Undoubtedly, they have borne a disproportionate burden from the U.S. war in Iran, given their exposure to energy-market volatility. Moreover, European policymaking has become synonymous with overregulation, endless meetings about meetings, and discussions about the ideal curvature of bananas, instead of decisive action.
Yet, Europe is better prepared for this world than it believes, because its history, institutions, and political culture reflect deep traditions of adaptation and resilience. The European Union itself was not the product of a grand architectural design, nor are the bloc’s prosperity and security the result of a single carefully executed plan.
“The challenge Europe faces today is to leverage that experience and develop an artisan code to guide it through the current crisis in the Middle East”
Contrary to appearances, the European project evolved through a continual process of trial and error. What began as the Coal and Steel Community became a customs union, then a single market, and finally a monetary union with its own currency. The number of members gradually expanded—from six states to nine, then twelve, fifteen, twenty-five, and finally twenty-seven. Some promising initiatives, such as the European Defence Community, failed completely. Others arose in response to crises: European governments strengthened security cooperation after the Balkan wars, pursued fiscal consolidation after the eurozone debt crisis, broadened collaboration in public health in response to COVID-19 and, more recently, accelerated defense integration after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The challenge Europe faces today is to apply that experience and develop a craftsman’s code to guide it through the current crisis in the Middle East and the coming unordered era. To this end, policymakers should focus on three key priorities.
First, European leaders must accept the reality of the unordered world instead of pursuing an appearance of stability. The sooner they stop aiming for grand frameworks and focus on concrete objectives, such as maintaining nuclear nonproliferation and preventing regional crises from triggering systemic economic crises, the sooner they can develop strategies that actually work. Above all, they must recognize that crises like the war in Iran are no longer problems to be solved but conditions to be managed.
“European countries must take responsibility for their own security. For too long they have outsourced basic functions to external structures”
Second, policy-makers in Europe must rethink their strategy toward interdependence. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz, like the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, has underscored the risks of relying too heavily on a single supplier or bottleneck. European countries today understand they need to diversify their supply chains, but with migration and emerging technologies as arenas of competition, they must also be less reluctant to press others, whether Russia, China or even the United States.
Above all, European countries must take responsibility for their own security. For too long they have outsourced basic functions to external structures — NATO, the World Health Organization, the United Nations — rather than building their own capabilities. The result has been strategic passivity and dependence on American leadership. To survive an unordered era, Europe will have to increase defense spending and expand its national arms industry, strengthen social resilience, and be prepared to act without the United States when necessary.
Yet the greatest danger lies in Europe’s obsolete playbook. While rules, meetings, and plans have served for decades, clinging to these tools today risks blinding leaders to the hard realities of a global unordered era. The war in Iran is not an aberration; it is the first of many tests.
© Project Syndicate, 2026.
