After the Abdication

Power, Order, and the Return of History

For the longest time, the powers that once shaped the world chose comfort over consequence.

After the Second World War, and even more decisively after decolonisation, they abandoned not only territory, but responsibility itself. Authority was replaced by procedure. Sovereignty by treaties. Power by vocabulary. The architecture of international law became a moral language rather than an instrument of order.

What followed was not peace. It was vacancy.

For five centuries, European power had structured global space, however imperfectly. Empires imposed hierarchy, administered territories, controlled resources, and enforced security across vast geographies. This was not benevolence. It was order through dominance. When that structure was dismantled after 1945, nothing of equivalent authority replaced it. Institutions were created. Declarations were signed. Norms were proclaimed. But the foundational question of who would actually govern the vacuum was never answered.

Decolonisation did not merely transfer power. It dissolved the architecture of power itself.

Into that vacuum stepped regimes, movements, networks, and criminal sovereignties that did not pretend to be virtuous, only durable. Dictatorships, war economies, ideological militias, narco states, and predatory elites filled the space left by those who preferred neutrality to stewardship. International law spoke beautifully, but it did not govern. It narrated a world that no longer obeyed it.

For decades, this abdication was disguised as virtue.

Ukraine: The Return of War to Europe

The war in Ukraine shattered the final illusion that Europe had transcended history. For three decades, the continent believed that borders were administrative, that deterrence was obsolete, and that economic interdependence would civilise geopolitics. Yet when force returned to the map of Europe, the response revealed the structural weakness beneath the rhetoric.

Europe reacted morally, legally, emotionally. It sanctioned, condemned, deliberated. But it could not decide the outcome. Strategic initiative, military escalation, and ultimate arbitration remained external. The continent that had built the language of “never again” had also built a system incapable of enforcing it without others.

Ukraine is not only a war of territory. It is a war over who still has the authority to shape order. It exposes the fundamental asymmetry between those who act and those who comment.

Venezuela, Greenland, and Resources: Power Without Apology

The same logic governs Venezuela, Greenland, and strategic materials. The vocabulary differs. The structure does not.

In Venezuela, humanitarian collapse coexists with oil geopolitics. The regime survives condemnation because condemnation does not govern. Markets remain calm because reality is already degraded. Stability will return only under political control, not moral statements.

In Greenland, Europe invokes sovereignty while avoiding confrontation. Washington calculates geography, resources, and security. One side speaks in values. The other in power.

In rare earths and energy, Europe regulates while others secure. It debates sustainability while remaining structurally dependent on China. The United States rebuilds supply chains. China consolidates industrial sovereignty. Europe manages frameworks in a world that now rewards command.

The race for sovereignty is not over. Europe is simply not running it.

The Middle East: From Containment to Eradication

Nowhere is the collapse of post Cold War illusions more visible than in the Middle East. For decades, terrorism, proxy militias, ideological insurgencies, and religious absolutism were treated as phenomena to be managed through dialogue, aid, and containment. Violence was moralised.

Atrocities were contextualised. Radical movements were analysed rather than dismantled.

That phase is ending.

What is now unfolding is not diplomacy. It is eradication. The so called “cleanup” is the reassertion of state logic over non state absolutism. Terrorist organisations, militias, and shadow sovereignties are being targeted not as political actors but as existential threats to any form of order.

This is not humanitarian language. It is the language of survival.

The Middle East is entering a phase in which the permissiveness of the past decades is being reversed. Power is being re concentrated. Borders, security, and control are returning as first principles. The moral discomfort of this reality does not change its inevitability.

Europe and the Southern Pressure: Demography as Strategy

Simultaneously, Europe faces a transformation from within. Migration from the South is no longer a marginal issue. It has become a civilisational question. Populations arriving from fragile states, conflict zones, and collapsing economies are reshaping demographics, urban structures, political alignments, and cultural coherence.

For years, European elites framed mass migration exclusively in moral terms. Objections were dismissed as fear, nostalgia, or moral deficiency. Yet societies do not dissolve simply because they are told that boundaries are obsolete. When demographic change becomes rapid, asymmetrical, and culturally discontinuous, it ceases to be integration and becomes transformation.

This is why accusations of population replacement, once marginal, now resonate across electorates. Not because citizens reject humanity, but because they sense the erosion of collective identity without having been asked to consent.

Here again, Europe responds with vocabulary. Others respond with policy.

Terrorism: From Management to Suppression

The global ecosystem of terrorist organisations that flourished in the permissive decades of post Cold War governance is now encountering a different world. No longer romanticised as insurgencies or contextualised as resistance, these groups are being treated as what they are: anti civilisational actors.

The age of managing extremism is giving way to the age of eliminating it.

This does not produce stability immediately. It produces confrontation. But confrontation is the price of restoring hierarchy in a system that mistook tolerance for governance.

The Colonial Arc: What Was Dismantled

Decolonisation is often narrated as moral awakening. Structurally, it was something else: the dismantling of a global framework of authority without the construction of a replacement.

For five hundred years, European power organised global space. When that power was abruptly withdrawn after 1945, governance did not evolve. It evaporated. Empires did not transform into stable postcolonial systems. They fragmented into weak states, contested territories, and ungoverned zones.

This is not nostalgia. It is architecture.

Remove the framework without replacing it, and disorder fills the void. Dictatorships, warlords, criminal networks, ideological regimes, and transnational terror did not emerge because they were strong. They emerged because no one else was willing to carry responsibility for order.

Decolonisation became not the transfer of stewardship, but its disappearance.

The Post 9/11 Inflection

After 11 September, the world entered a different age. Territory returned. Security returned. Borders returned. Yet Europe continued to behave as if history had ended, as if sovereignty were obsolete, as if order could be outsourced to law alone. It mistook the absence of conflict for the presence of governance.

What we are witnessing today is not the brutality of a new empire. It is the reappearance of a principle that others forgot: order requires agency. Stability requires authorship. Sovereignty is not a slogan. It is a responsibility.

The End of the Post 1989 Illusion

The post 1989 world believed that markets would replace power, institutions would replace sovereignty, law would replace force, and values would replace strategy. That experiment has ended.

What is returning is not empire in the classical sense, but responsibility through domination.

Those who are willing to secure territory, resources, borders, and populations will shape the system. Those who prefer commentary will inhabit it.

International law was never designed to replace power. It was designed to discipline it. Without guardians, it becomes decoration. Without authority, it becomes theatre.

Where the “New World Order” Is Actually Going

The so called new world order is not being negotiated. It is being imposed by those who still understand that history does not reward intentions, only decisions.

It is a world in which sovereignty is again the currency of survival. Resources define relevance. Borders are re legitimised. Terror is not managed but dismantled. Demography is recognised as strategy. Power is no longer apologetic.

This is not a moral judgement. It is a structural one.

The tragedy of our time is not that force has returned. It is that those who once shaped order now hesitate to carry it. They speak the language of a world that no longer exists, while others write the architecture of the one that is emerging.

The question is no longer whether this offends our sensibilities.

The question is whether we still remember how to govern.

W.