Back in 1971, Henry Kissinger slipped quietly to Beijing. While on an official trip to Islamabad, the United States’ top security adviser claimed a stomach ailment and, with Pakistan’s President Yahya Khan lending assistance, he made his way to the Chinese capital to confer with leaders of the People’s Republic of China. That concealed visit, conducted without public statements or press briefings, opened the door to Richard Nixon’s inaugural trip to Communist China — a geopolitical maneuver that launched the normalization of U.S. ties with the then-emerging Asian giant and transformed the balance of the Cold War.
Kissinger’s discretion wasn’t an anomaly in the conduct of diplomacy but rather an essential tool that enables parties to reach agreements. The diplomat captured the idea with his usual precision: diplomacy is the art of curbing power. When events unfold in real time—when every maneuver is a media coup or display of force—there is little room for nuance, composure, or the construction of durable, stable agreements.
“The rules-based international order is too slow, too rigid, too analogue for a world that must always react at full speed”
Fifty-five years later, on April 7th, in the midst of the confrontation with Iran, the leader of the world’s foremost power announced on his private social platform that “an entire civilization will die tonight, never to return.” A few hours later, he declared a ceasefire, as well as “total and complete victory.” His ultimatum — launched via Truth Social, in language that any ordinary citizen might use to vent daily grievances — signals something far beyond a mere change of style. It stands as the most visible symptom of a structural transformation decades in the making, because traditional diplomacy cannot operate with the immediacy and saturation of today’s social networks. The result is often resentment toward the rules-based international order, now deemed too slow, too rigid, too analogue for a world that must continually respond at full speed.
Brexit, Cambridge Analytica, and the geopolitics of social networks
Brexit represented the first major laboratory for this new order. The referendum of June 23, 2016, was decided by less than 2% of the UK vote. Within that narrow margin, there was ample space for a major debate about whether democracy can endure big data.
According to a UK Parliament inquiry, Cambridge Analytica accessed the data of 87 million Facebook users through an application designed to construct psychological profiles of voters. The firm’s stated aim was to identify pro-remain voters, supporters of traditional parties, and citizens who planned not to vote, all to persuade them to back departure from the EU—or to demobilize them. Christopher Wylie, the company’s former head of research and the whistleblower at the center of the scandal, told Parliament that without that micro-segmentation operation, the resulting vote would have diverged. Cambridge Analytica’s data-mining and micro-segmentation infrastructure demonstrated how private and public actors could potentially influence a referendum with consequences that could reshape Europe’s geopolitical landscape.
Since then, social networks have become a staple tool in every electoral campaign, serving as an additional instrument in Vladimir Putin’s daily toolkit to destabilize the European Union and as a direct conduit for the radicalization of Islamist groups, amplifying their capacity to mobilize terrorist cells around the world.
“The existence of regulation to protect European democracy in the digital space is itself good news”
The power of social media became so evident that the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, acquired what is now known as X — a platform with more than 600 million users — with the stated aim of shaping the future of politics in the United States and beyond. The consequences didn’t take long to ripple through European politics. On December 20, 2024, the owner of X (then serving as a high-profile adviser to the Republican candidate for the White House) posted: “Only the AfD can save Germany,” just weeks before that country’s federal elections. The German government described the statement as electoral interference. Around 150 European Commission officials monitored in real time Musk’s subsequent interview with AfD candidate Alice Weidel, to assess whether he breached the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The existence of regulation to protect European democracy in the digital space is itself good news. Yet the EU’s institutional response was merely to observe, underscoring that there remains a long road to adapt our institutions to the new digital geopolitical chessboard.
Iran, Trump, and the European response to the new digital disorder
The ongoing case of Iran has pushed this logic to its extreme consequences. Trump’s aforementioned message (“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”) would have provoked genuine stomach churn in a planner like Kissinger if he had happened to read it. Moreover, that threat was preceded by another one, two days earlier, directed at Hormuz: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” And in that same missive, with the same bluntness: “Praise be to Allah.”
European and Asian foreign ministries were compelled to evaluate these messages with the same rigor they would apply to an official diplomatic cable. A former State Department legal adviser warned that under international law, such statements could be interpreted as a threat of genocide. UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted that no military objective can justify the total destruction of a society. The world watched as the old international institutions proved unable to mount an effective response to this distressing form of diplomatic pressure.
“Anyone hoping for depth, double derivatives, and Florentine finesse is simply excluded from the analysis”
In another post, barely ten hours after the ultimatum, Trump announced a ceasefire, presenting it as a “total and complete victory.” What had been treated as a threat of mass destruction became just another forgotten remark in the clamor of social networks. No Security Council deliberation, no consultation with European allies, no procedure before any international body.
The diplomatic virtues of the old order—vocal prudence and deliberate rigor—have been abruptly displaced in the quest to resolve the Iranian crisis. Historically, communiqués were drafted, reviewed, and validated. Diplomatic cables traveled through numerous filters; protocol was the craft of eminent diplomats. That slowness served a purpose, cooling tensions, opening new avenues, and giving parties time to refine settlements. Today, those who disconnect for just a few hours can miss crucial turns. Anyone seeking depth, nuanced calculations, and finesse is simply excluded from the discourse. The new world order does not wait—digital platforms erase deliberate friction. And by erasing friction, they have turned impulsiveness into a standard tool of foreign policy.
This paradox raises alarms for all who defend liberalism. Liberal democracies built the international order on the assumption that more communication yields greater understanding, and the internet was the technological manifestation of that ideal. But today’s algorithmic design inverts the logic: more communication leads to more fragmentation, polarization, and susceptibility to manipulation. Hyperbole isn’t seen as a malfunction of the system; in many cases, it’s an intentional feature promoted by a platform’s business model, which prioritizes attention over truth and respect for facts.
“The new global disorder is precisely that: moving faster than the outdated rails of classical international institutions can withstand”
Evidence is clear. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report shows that 64% of experts expect a fragmented world order defined by great-power competition, while more than half anticipate instability in the next two years. NATO has already acknowledged the cognitive dimension as a new domain of warfare. What used to be editorial columns is now algorithms of personalized recommendation with the power to mobilize voters, destabilize governments, and legitimize extremism. The paradigm shift is two-sided: everything unfolds more rapidly, and we all possess greater capacity to influence events. The benefits are evident, but so are the risks—comparable to those of an AVE accident: when you move faster with more passengers, the consequences of a derailment are magnified. The new global disorder is precisely this: moving faster than the outdated rails of classical international institutions can withstand.
The takeaway is that the EU cannot sit on the sidelines of this transformation. We have already enacted the DSA, the most advanced regulatory instrument on Earth with regard to the responsibility of large platforms toward the real world in which they operate. Still, what we need now is something qualitatively different, or we will end up as impotent as preachers in a barren desert.
First, we require a regime of extraterritorial liability for external actors who involve themselves in the electoral processes of Member States, to enhance our ability to detect and neutralize content directed by foreign powers against European strategic interests. Second, we must reduce our dependence on non-European information infrastructures. The alternative is to remain under someone else’s umbrella, only to be struck when they decide to withdraw it. And finally, we must integrate the cognitive dimension into our collective security strategy, recognizing that we cannot counter the titans of the 21st century with 20th‑century capabilities.
“For 60 years, we Europeans have been patiently complying, supporting multilateralism and the establishment of an international order based on rules and institutions”
Kissinger cautioned about the importance of building a reputation for reliable responsibility to operate firmly and decisively on the world stage. Without that, deploying strategic intelligence becomes exceedingly difficult when seeking agreements. Europe already enjoys such a reputation. For six decades, we Europeans have shown restraint, backed multilateralism, and upheld an international order anchored in rules and institutions. We cannot allow our reputation and our faith in order over anarchy to be jeopardized by the incendiary rhetoric of actors who have learned that in the digital environment, scandal yields an audience, not consequences.
This conviction should guide all those who wander through social networks, as well as those who assess international policy by the number of online followers. Europe can and must demonstrate that it remains possible to craft an international chessboard where rules matter, where facts carry weight, and where diplomacy endures—as Kissinger proposed—as the art of limiting power.
