FP - Essay
Order Without Order
Our fixation with defining the emerging global order hides the true complexity of our neo-medieval moment.
April 17, 2026, 3:30 PM
By Parag Khanna, the founder and CEO of the geospatial analytics software AlphaGeo.
A disassembled world map with rips and tears.
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It has become popular to describe our current era as post-Western or perhaps post-American. The problem isn’t necessarily that these terms are wrong. Rather, it’s that they focus on what is being replaced rather than what is doing the replacing. I’ve been as guilty as anyone. Some years ago, I had an editor who titled one of my books The Future Is Asian. I was ecstatic at his bold framing. There’s just one problem, I chided him: “The present is already Asian for most of humanity.”
One of the hardest parts about finding the right term for the world we’re living in is the fixation on order. Western international relations theory, combined with the conventions of foreign-policy punditry, has left everyone trying to identify the rules and institutions that define the emerging global or international order.
But nothing about the intrinsic nature of history or geopolitics requires that there be some fixed and defined order. Geopolitics is the deep science of spatial power dynamics, not a popularity contest for who becomes secretary-general of NATO or the United Nations.
Geopolitics encompasses many scales and domains, whether territorial, financial, or digital. Evidence abounds that today’s landscape is populated by vastly heterogeneous regimes interacting in a multiplicity of ways, with no credible alternative on the horizon to replace it. There are no status quo powers and no meaningful institutions of global governance. In this world, James Der Derian’s notion of “heteropolarity” and Amitav Acharya’s “multiplex world” come closest to moving beyond the trite clickbait of “Who’s No. 1?” to capture the richness of global dynamics.
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Not surprisingly, both Der Derian and Acharya are proponents of the “Global IR” movement that has its origins in grappling with the work of Australian-born Oxford professor Hedley Bull. In his seminal 1977 work, The Anarchical Society, Bull made the case for a “new medievalism,” one with overlapping authorities and crisscrossing loyalties that transcend the Westphalian state system. Before the emergence of the modern European state system, power on the continent was contested among lords, kings, and the pope, whose writ mapped onto a complex array of local duchies, principalities, and the Holy Roman Empire. In crucial geographies such as the Baltic and North Sea region, confederations of city-states such as the Hanseatic League set the de facto rules for transnational commerce more than any “state” or supranational authority.
Reporters stand off to the side as Trump and Xi stand in front of U.S. and Chinese flags.
U.S. President Donald Trump greets Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a bilateral meeting in Busan, South Korea, on Oct. 30. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Even though we live in Bull’s world—replete with multilevel, multiactor dynamics involving imperial states, transnational corporations, stateless digital communities, and more—our mainstream discourse falls back on reductionist tropes, as if the complex world of 2050 can be explained by a coin toss between the United States and China. Instead, we should embrace pluralism, deprivilege universalistic ideology, and explore connections between powers at the subglobal level.
Bull’s most prominent intellectual heir, Barry Buzan of the London School of Economics, critiqued Bull’s eurocentrism at the global level while advancing the idea of “regional security complexes”. Indeed, a regional lens is helpful to illustrate the lack of a uniform global structure. Indeed, the closer one looks within any given part of the world, the more generalizations about power hierarchies break down and the nonlinearity of today’s world reveals itself. Instead of armchair academics weighing in on successive episodes of “Who Gets to Be a Superpower?” we should instead look at which powers have greater or lesser influence where and how that power is exercised.
Consider Latin America. For two decades, China has been making substantial inroads in financing critical infrastructure and building strategic trade relations and to unlock raw materials and promote its exports. Then, in a matter of months, the Trump administration shook all of this up. It successfully compelled Panama to rule unconstitutional a Chinese company’s concession to operate the Panama Canal’s ports; it deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, rerouting the country’s oil flows to the United States rather than China; and it signed bilateral agreements to advance the extraction and processing of critical minerals such as lithium with governments from Mexico to Chile and Argentina. While many joke of a “Donroe Doctrine,” the 2025 National Security Strategy and recent Shield of the Americas summit clearly embody the 19th-century geopolitical logic of prioritizing panhemispheric relations over distant entanglements. The Western Hemisphere, then, is as unipolar as ever—for now.
A slab of concrete is shown amid a copse of trees in between a highway and the Panama Canal.
An aerial view shows the site where a Chinese monument once stood before it was demolished at the entrance of the Panama Canal in Arraijan, Panama, on Dec. 28. Daniel DE CARTERET/AFP/Getty Images
The picture looks decidedly different when you change hemispheres. Europe, long counted out as a geopolitical player, has stepped into higher gear. After decades of white-ribbon commissions followed by inaction, Europe has finally decided to do “whatever it takes” to no longer rely on the United States. Unwilling to go along with U.S. President Donald Trump’s designs to conquer Greenland and abandon Ukraine, the European Union is accelerating its plans for defense and nuclear consolidation, tech sovereignty, a capital markets union, banking union, and a dozen other initiatives to pool its power. Its equity markets outpaced the S&P 500 in 2025, and for the first time, more Americans have relocated to Europe than the reverse . Americans are making Europe great again—another example of how quickly geopolitical tides can shift. And if the United States were to pull out of NATO, Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy would only accelerate.
People hold up cameras behind a fence decorated with a European Union flag.
People watch French President Emmanuel Macron arrive at Nuuk Airport in Greenland on June 15. Macron expressed European solidarity and support for the Danish autonomous territory. LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/Getty Images
The Indo-Pacific realm also shows how strategic entropy trumps delusions of conformity to one empire’s grand strategy. A decade ago, it was commonplace to argue that China’s Belt and Road Initiative represented the country’s transcontinental ascent, weaving together railways and pipelines and a vast naval fleet into an extractive neocolonial operation stretching from the Arctic to Africa. But increasingly it is India that is flexing its regional muscles in its own maritime backyard, with more than 100 warships, new naval exercises, and a strategic doctrine focused on mutual security and rescue. For decades, it was said that only the United States could protect the global sea lanes. It turns out that maritime safety has to be negotiated situationally and can be collectively organized without Washington.
Officials stand before a draped wooden structure reading "Nilgiri" as the port and ships appear in the background.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (center) and defense minister Rajnath Singh (left) attend the tri-commissioning ceremony of two warships and a submarine in Mumbai on Jan. 15, 2025. PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP/Getty Images
But don’t count the United States out of Eurasia yet either. Europe, India, and Japan are asserting their own strategic interests, and they need Washington to ensure that Beijing cannot dominate the Eastern Hemisphere the way the United States dominates the Western one. Trans-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific powers are coming together to build resilient high-tech supply chains that aren’t under Beijing’s control. Think of it like NATO joining forces with the Quad but on a functional basis rather than formal treaties with security guarantees. And make no mistake that Washington has been the key driver behind the scenes—just look at Pax Silica.
Indeed, even the building blocks of the international system vary depending on where you look. While Western scholars see (their own) states withering, across much of Asia, and by extension much of humanity, the state has never been stronger. China today quite literally possesses greater state capacity than any empire in world history. The Gulf petrostates of western Asia have prioritized domestic modernization and economic diversification, with their energy trade ties leaning east and their military partnerships tilting west. The Iran war will accelerate this trend as they embrace alternatives to the dollar while also procuring more Western armaments to counter Iranian missiles and drones.
Yet at the same time, as some large states are growing more powerful than ever, some city-states continue to punch well above their weight. They embody the geopolitical physics by which gravity and connectivity dictate influence more than size alone. Cities such as Singapore and those of the United Arab Emirates have become the magnets to which capital and talent flow in unstable times. In fact, despite the Iran war, the vast majority of the UAE’s South Asian population has not fled, and even many Western Europeans who initially left are now coming back. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, a loose archipelago of hubs—Lisbon, Athens, Dubai, Bali, and others—have formed a circuit along which entrepreneurs and knowledge workers flow.
And what does this all mean for the United States? This neomedieval landscape is one of neither glory nor doom. The unipolar world is gone, both on paper and in reality—but no single power or order will replace it. We are not leaving a stable world of nation-states for a period of post-national chaos. Rather, we are witnessing the emergence of patterns that do not fit conventional hierarchies or historical paradigms. The one consistent truth is that power is perpetually contested, uneven and shifting on a nearly daily basis. The Middle Ages was not named until long after the era had passed. Today, we should learn to recognize the New Middle Ages we are already in.
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Parag Khanna is the founder and CEO of the geospatial analytics software AlphaGeo and the author of Connectography, The Future Is Asian, MOVE, and other books on geopolitics and globalization. X: @paragkhanna
