Donald Trump’s second-term foreign policy has accelerated the collapse of the postwar liberal international order by abandoning its institutions, norms, and sources of legitimacy. Economic integration is now widely used as a tool of coercion, placing middle powers in an unstable interregnum defined by great-power rivalry, forced alignment choices, and a widening contrast between U.S. unilateralism and China’s defense of globalization and multilateralism.

China’s deal with the EU to replace proposed electric vehicle tariffs with a price floor reflects a broader shift in Beijing’s economic and diplomatic strategy to ease trade frictions and rebuild ties with Europe and other U.S. allies amid uncertainty over U.S. leadership. The success of this outreach will depend on China’s ability to address persistent trade imbalances and geopolitical concerns, rather than assuming that tensions with Washington will automatically translate into closer alignment with Beijing.

In 2025, Ukraine gradually changed from a battlefield confrontation to a complex contest centered on cease-fire terms, postwar arrangements and the responsibilities of the world’s major powers. The war in Ukraine did not end in 2025, but a new reality was clearly defined.

In the near future, the supposed “multipolar” world has been deferred, giving way instead to “orbital bipolarity”—a system in which global politics and industry are pulled into competing gravitational fields centered on the United States and China. Multilateralism has become inert, and every other power now orbits these two anchors while maintaining the fiction of choice and autonomy.

John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains one of the most prescient critiques of postwar settlement in modern history. In it, Keynes warned that victory can hollow itself out when the victors lose their sense of humility. The punitive reparations imposed upon Germany after World War I, he argued, sowed the seeds for future instability by humiliating and impoverishing a nation that, once stripped of dignity and hope, would not long consent to the order imposed upon it. His insight was both economic as well as moral and political: sustainable peace requires magnanimity, not vengeance; it presupposes an architecture of inclusion, not one of exclusion. In today’s parlance, it rejects blocs aimed at those outside and seeks to ground relations in the idea of indivisible peace.

The military parade in Beijing on Sept. 3 and the SCO summit in Tianjin elicited a profound psychological response in the United States and other Western countries. Debates over China’s strategic ascent and the prospect of a continental alignment have intensified.

Since fall 2023, Israel has engaged in genocidal atrocities in Gaza. So, why hasn’t the Genocide Convention been used to preempt the violence? Why has the Convention proved ineffective since its creation? The West’s long struggle against the Genocide Convention is one of the central questions of Dan Steinbock’s new book, The Obliteration Doctrine.

With the Global South rising, Europe’s renewed emphasis on strategic independence from the United States could partially offset its relative decline in hard power and accelerate global multi-polarity.

The world’s future will hinge on a choice between unilateral confrontation, as exemplified by U.S. President Donald Trump; multilateral confrontation, as in America’s alliance with the EU; or multilateral cooperation, as advocated by China. It’s clear which one will be better for mankind.

If one takes Marco Rubio’s recent remarks on the end of unipolarity at face value, one could be mistaken for believing that the question of a multipolar world is settled. On the contrary, Rubio’s ruminations, together with remarks from members of the new Trump Administration, including the President himself, buttressed with decisions made in the first few weeks of the new administration, suggest that the issue of multipolarity is very much in question.