PARIS—The shambolic diplomacy between US President Donald Trump’s administration and Iran provides further evidence that world affairs have become unintelligible. But take a step back and you will see that all of today’s major conflicts are of a piece, and that despite the apparent entropy, a powerful logic of adaptation and resilience is at work.
The four biggest flash points today stem from historical processes that made them largely predictable. The ferocity of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have shocked the world, but the war itself followed from the Kremlin’s well-known resentments and insecurities. President Vladimir Putin had long made clear that he abhorred the idea of Ukrainian independence or strategic alignment with the West. As former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned in the 1990s, “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.”
The implication was that, with Ukraine back under its control, Russia would be made great again. Everything that has ensued stems from this historical longing. There is no need for chaos theory or psychoanalysis. The war is simply the result of a Russian determination not to accept its status as a post-imperial power.
A second flash point, Taiwan, holds the potential for global devastation. But here, too, the stakes have not fundamentally changed since the Korean War. That is when the United States brought both Taiwan and South Korea within its security perimeter. Mao himself hesitated to get involved, precisely because he feared that a war on the peninsula would divert him from the conquest of Taiwan he was planning. But it was too late. The Korean War, prolonged by the interposition of the American Seventh Fleet, froze the situation in place.
Three-quarters of a century later, the world is still dealing with the strategic ambiguity between the US and China over Taiwan. China wants the US to declare its formal opposition to the island’s independence, whereas the US will not say what it would do to defend the island. Admittedly, this ambiguity might not last. Trump may well renounce any US commitment to support Taiwan, or China may finally decide to blockade the island and force America’s hand.
But we are not there yet, and even if we were, the ensuing turmoil would not be incomprehensible to anyone who was paying attention. This is not to deny the danger of such a development, only to underscore its rationality. In a famous article published in the late 1990s, the historian and strategist Michael Mandelbaum wagered that a war between great powers was probably becoming obsolete. But he acknowledged two cases that could undercut his argument: Ukraine and Taiwan.
The same applies to the Middle East, where both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the US/Israeli-Iranian war have had grave consequences. What is most striking, yet again, is not their irrationality, but their persistence. It has long been obvious that only a compromise, trading some territory for the prospect of lasting peace can settle the dispute over the Holy Land. Yet we have moved further than ever from that outcome. The conflict has grown only more violent and terrible; but that does not make it irrational or unintelligible.
Like our previous examples, the war with Iran has roots in events that happened decades ago, namely the 1979 revolution. The Islamic Republic was established in open opposition to the West, which bears its own share of responsibility for how things have evolved. The basic contours of the conflict have not changed: Iran wants to assert its hegemony in the region at the expense of Israel, the US, and the Gulf states, which in turn want to clip its wings.
This has been the case for decades, during which time the Islamic Republic began to pursue a nuclear program. The Obama administration addressed that problem through the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which gave international nuclear inspectors access to Iranian facilities without resolving the broader regional security issue. But Trump scrapped the JCPOA in 2018.
All of these cases show that what pundits lazily describe as chaos is the culmination of developments that were long in the making and arrived at a time when the international system was no longer able to prevent or mitigate geopolitical shocks. We no longer have the institutional stabilizers that we once did, and Trump bears much of the blame for that.
But the situation today also reflects a broader hegemonic transition: the redistribution of power from the US to China. The US response to this change has been strategically incoherent. Trump seems to seek a modus vivendi with China, even one that might lead him to abandon Taiwan. But a president as mercurial and impressionable as Trump could also veer in the other direction, embracing Taiwan in a way that would provoke China.
China, meanwhile, is maintaining its own strategic ambiguity. It wants to play a greater international role, commensurate with its power, but it has no desire to do the hard work of building international alliances. The result is a void that makes international relations unstable. Even when China takes liberties with international rules, it never does so in a flagrant way, except in the South China Sea.
Without Chinese support, Russia could not continue its failed war in Ukraine. But that does not mean that supporting Putin is irrational. China backs Russia as a means of weakening the West, and the same logic applies to its relationship with Iran.
Faced with so many high-stakes conflicts and disruptions, it is not surprising that many are declaring the international system dead. But the reality is more nuanced. Despite the uncertainty incited by Trump’s import tariffs, for example, world trade continues to grow, and supply and value chains are simply reconfiguring, not collapsing.
If the world seems mad, that is because we do not have the instruments to understand it. Before seeking uncharted paths, we should focus on restoring intelligibility to international affairs.
About the author
Zaki Laïdi is a former special adviser to the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (2020–24), he is also a professor at Sciences Po.
