Between Annihilation and Renaissance: The Blueprint for a New Global Order

When technologies outrun our emotional maturity and the mineral spine of the clean-tech economy tightens into chokepoints, law and power must be rebuilt together—or not at all.

The world as we have known it is no longer merely at risk—it is already in free fall. The old international order has not simply weakened; it has fractured, its pillars crumbling under the weight of crises our institutions were never designed to withstand. The United Nations Charter still stands on parchment, but in practice its foundations are corroded. The Security Council, once the chamber of last resort, has become a theatre of vetoes. International humanitarian law, which should stand above politics, is applied selectively—sometimes with moral urgency, sometimes with quiet convenience. Trade rules are enforced when they serve the strong and suspended when they do not. What remains is not a rules-based order, but a power-based scramble masked in the language of law.

History teaches that no such vacuum remains empty for long. The Peace of Westphalia arose from the smouldering ruin of the Thirty Years’ War. The Concert of Europe was forged from the wreckage of Napoleonic ambition. The post-1945 settlement—Bretton Woods, the Geneva Conventions, the UN—was conceived in the shadow of total war. Always the sequence is the same: collapse, contestation, settlement. Always the interval between old and new is the most dangerous.

This time, two forces make the interregnum more perilous. The first is planetary instability. Climate change is no longer a distant hypothesis but an active destabiliser, driving migration, scarcity, and social strain. Demographic asymmetries between an ageing North and a youthful, underemployed South are feeding geopolitical friction. The second is the concentration of technological and material power in fewer hands than ever before. The AI revolution is advancing faster than the governance that might guide it, with capabilities emerging before we can comprehend their full implications. Compute capacity—the raw muscle of the new age—is chokepointed in a handful of fabrication nodes and data centres. And the minerals without which a net-zero economy is fantasy—lithium, cobalt, rare earths—are processed overwhelmingly in a single geopolitical sphere, turning energy transition into a strategic vulnerability.

The deeper problem, as biologist E.O. Wilson once framed it, is that “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” Our political architecture is designed for slower, more predictable change. It was never meant to regulate systems that learn, scale, and replicate faster than any law can be drafted, or to secure supply chains whose critical points can be shut with a single executive order. We are inventing capabilities we cannot yet govern, and entrenching dependencies we cannot yet escape.

We (The People) must not settle for the false choice between revolution and drift. What is needed is a constitutional moment for the twenty-first century—a deliberate, negotiated re-founding of the principles and mechanisms that hold the system together. Not nostalgia for the last order, but design for the next. That work begins with a new clarity of purpose: that law and power must be rebuilt together, and that legitimacy in the new order will rest on enforceability as much as on ideals.

We need a doctrine for the governance of transformative technologies—one that embeds duty of care at every stage of the chain, from model training to deployment. This means jurisdiction-agnostic audit standards, mandatory safety testing for systems above defined capability thresholds, and liability regimes that are not optional depending on the corporate address. The same ambition that once gave us arms control must now give us compute control—a Bretton Woods for AI, data, and the infrastructure that powers them.

We must build a mineral commons. The critical materials of the energy transition must be treated as shared strategic assets, not bargaining chips for moments of geopolitical leverage. That requires diversification of processing, pooled stockpiles, and a binding code of conduct on export restrictions. In the nineteenth century, maritime law guaranteed the flow of trade; in the twenty-first, we need the equivalent for refining capacity.

We must anticipate and govern climate-driven mobility. Migration will be the most visible political fault line of the coming decades. We can either prepare now—through regional compacts, climate visas, and adaptation-linked resettlement—or we can wait for unmanaged flows to ignite political crises. The moral case and the strategic case are the same: ungoverned displacement is cheaper to prevent than to contain.

We must restore the moral authority of international law by ending its selective enforcement. This is the foundation stone without which nothing else will hold. When violations by the strong are excused and those by the weak are punished, the very idea of law becomes performative. Consistency is not naïve—it is the only currency of legitimacy.

We must close the distance between our technical capacity and our emotional maturity. This means protecting not only borders and markets, but the civic realm itself—the informational and cultural spaces where societies form consensus. No new order will endure if attention remains a commodity optimised for outrage, if truth is treated as a partisan possession, or if the public sphere is ceded to systems that measure engagement but not understanding.

None of this will happen by accident. It will require political courage of a kind we have not seen in a generation—the courage to accept constraints, to trade short-term advantage for long-term stability, to put rules before expedience. In every previous settlement, from Vienna to San Francisco, the powers of the day acted not because they were altruists, but because they understood that stability was the cheapest way to protect what they valued most.

We are approaching that point again. We can choose to let the interregnum harden into a permanent state of crisis—a brittle world of impunity, scarcity, and mistrust—or we can choose to write the rules that make renewal possible. A future worth living in will not be handed to us; it will be negotiated, engineered, and enforced. If the twentieth century’s lesson was that peace is an achievement, not a default, the twenty-first’s is that peace in the age of godlike tools demands godlike responsibility. The order we have is dying. The order we build next will decide whether this century is defined by collapse—or by the civilisation that came after.

All of this, at present, may sound utopian. And yet the first obstacle is not the complexity of the task but the absence of those willing and able to lead it. The question is immediate: who? Global leadership is not merely absent; in many places it is being actively dismantled. Where we need statesmen and stateswomen with the vision to rise above national grievance, we have nationalists fortified by grievance. Where we need builders of consensus, we have architects of division. Autocrats proliferate; democracy itself is under siege, its institutions hollowed from within, its spirit reduced to a slogan.

The alternative to action is dreadful. Without leadership capable of renewing the moral and institutional fabric of the world, we will drift toward a state of semi-permanent crisis: proliferating wars, economic fragmentation, resource nationalism, technologically supercharged propaganda, and climate shocks that break societies faster than they can rebuild. In such a world, mistrust becomes the default currency, violence the default tool, and the prospect of a major war—god forbid, even a world war—ceases to be unthinkable.

I am no idealist; I am a pragmatist who believes that the world, for all its flaws, can flourish if we have the courage to preserve what is worth keeping and the wisdom to change what must be changed. The path forward must be built on values that are not the ornament of politics but its foundation: the equality of human dignity, the primacy of law over force, the recognition that freedom without responsibility is license, and power without restraint is ruin. These are not abstractions. They are the difference between a century defined by flourishing and one remembered only for its destruction. The choice is ours—but not indefinitely. History has a way of deciding for those who cannot decide for themselves.