In the past two decades, stories of global disaster and destruction have surged in popular-cultural media: Moira Young’s YA (Young Adult) Blood Red Road novels (2011-2014), Naughty Dog’s game The Last of Us (2013), Chitwood, Ens, & Nichols’s comic Afterburn (2020-21), and Alex Garland’s film 28 Years Later (2025-26), to name few. With extreme weather events rising in frequency and impact, the legacy of Covid, and a surge in authoritarian politics and military conflict across the globe, it is not surprising that the popular-culture industry is tapping into an apocalyptic zeitgeist. The horrors in such narratives often revolve around cosmic catastrophes, pandemics, or runaway technology; yet some find the seed of destruction in the global economic status quo: the ever-ongoing race between powerful nations to own, extract, and control not only the staple foods that feed humanity but also the resources that feed the insatiable mass-production and consumption industry, like oil and rare-earth materials.

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As Downey et al. (2010) explain: “because of their position in the world system hierarchy, core nations are able to take advantage not only of the labor power but also of the natural resource wealth of periphery nations, while simultaneously exporting many environmentally degrading activities to the periphery” (417). What is more, past colonial and present neocolonial practices have shown that “armed violence and militarism play [a structural role] in degrading the environment and securing core nation access to developing nation natural resources” (Downey et al. 2010, 418-19). Films such as Avatar (2009), The Colony (2013), and Dune (2021-2024), The Expanse novels by James S. A. Corey, as well as the graphic novel Travelling to Mars (2024), explore the challenges, dangers, and long-term social, environmental, and political impact of large-scale resource extraction to human civilization, often with grim predictions of near-future collapse.

Two recent entries in the economic-apocalypse subgenre are Chen Qiufan’s novel Waste Tide (English translation 2019), and the latest chapter in George Miller’s Mad Max saga: Furiosa (2024). Both texts foreground the social and political violence inherent in human resource extraction, production, and use; through harrowing representations of environmental and communal breakdown both texts suggest the economic apocalypse is coming not despite but because of the globalisation of neoliberal industrialism. Hall & Lamont (2013) point out that the global economic status quo has engendered “structural insecurity and rising inequality” (3) by championing “heightened competition in more open markets” (3) fuelled by “declining confidence in the capacity of states to allocate resources efficiently” (4) and growing “individualization of risk, responsibility, and reward” (6). Both texts narrate a race to the bottom between small-groups of like-minded and equally selfish people, aiming only to live in relative comfort and ease just that little bit longer than the rest, before the inevitable end. Yet in their different forms – an epic action-adventure story and a cerebral speculative fiction – Furiosa and Waste Tide present different attitudes towards the oncoming end.

On the face of it, Waste Tide and Furiosa seem to give the lie to neoliberal shibboleths such as the necessity to ever-expand global production and trade, to technologically innovate for maximum socioeconomic efficiency. Both texts imply that the neoliberal status quo resembles Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature” in which everybody “endeavour[s] to destroy, or subdue one an other [sic]” in a persistent “warre [sic]… of every man, against every man” (1651 [1996], 87-88). I will argue, however, that where Waste Tide’s frequently surreal and reflective figurative language allows it to appeal emotionally to the reader’s moral sense and the need for greater altruism and less competition, Furiosa’s cynical acceptance of humanity’s innate enmity leads it to perform what Johan Galtung (1990) terms “cultural violence,” a mediated form of violent representation that “makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right – or at least not wrong” (1). I am not saying that Furiosa glorifies this violence; rather the opposite is true: it is a tragedy that laments humanity’s enmity, but in its focus on physical and mental violence, themes of greed, torture, and revenge, and its despair concerning humanity’s fatal flaw, it also normalises the violence and destruction that result from it. There can be no other way with humanity, the History Man suggests at the close of the film: “there always was, is, and will be war” (117:40).

The latest “Mad Max” film’s ambivalent stance towards civilization’s collapse and its moments of cultural violence are shaped by what Niklas Salmose (2018) defines as “the action apocalyptic sublime” (1419), an aesthetic he contrasts to “the poetic apocalyptic sublime” (1422). In both modes of representation, “the sense of the apocalyptic grants the sublime an immediate existential angst where diegetic humans are not only observers but also victims” (Salmose 2018, 1418-19). But in the action mode “the apocalypse of the world is haunting and cool, supported by a pompous musical score” (1420), for instance. By contrast, the poetic mode is “non-narrative. It opens an opportunity for feeling the true angst of the destruction” (1423), which facilitates contemplation of the ethics involved in establishing the economic origins of the apocalypse. According to Salmose, the “potentially positive outcome” of any apocalyptic narrative “is severely diminished by [the] limitations of the narrative structure of the Hollywood mainstream adventure film” (1422), a genre to which Furiosa belongs. Such a film’s “spectacular, affective scenes” of apocalyptic events, “must … be placed within [a] generic adventure narrative” (Salmose 2018, 1424).

These stories feature ordinary, small, protagonists whose character arc allows them to develop into larger-than-life heroes or heroines who take on a David vs. Goliath struggle, are nearly defeated but ultimately achieve a moral victory, even if this comes at great cost. According to Salmose, “dependence on the formulaic release of tension and the victorious protagonist in the third act … diminishes audiences’ real fear of the apocalypse” (2018, 1424), which also validates the violent action to some extent as the violence leads to the evil being defeated, for now. The final victory, leaves the audience on an emotional high, feeling a proper resolution has been achieved, which hinders the development of critical reflection on the causes of the apocalypse and its relation to human institutions and practices. By contrast, the poetic mode, according to Salmose, halts action by foregrounding introspection and moral contemplation of the social, economic, and political institutions that structure the society on the brink of apocalyptic. This mode allows the audience do develop more critical insight and potential agency because heroism in competition and conflict, as well as any sense of victory is displaced. In Waste Tide, everybody loses, and rather than a race to victory, there is a dance of death which cajoles the reader to recast the apocalyptic tendencies of the neoliberal status quo not as an inevitable, but as a potential future that must be averted at all cost by a new model based on cooperation and sharing, rather than an inherently competitive and conflict-ridden “state of nature,” on plenitude rather than growth through exploitation.

The Neoliberal Economy and/as the State of Nature

Before exploring the crumbling and violentworlds of Furiosa and Waste Tide, it is useful to outline the “state of nature,” as explicated by several Hobbes scholars. Hoekstra (2007) explains that the basic mental and physical equality amongst humans in state of nature gives everyone “equal hope of attaining what they desire” (110). Yet any desirable goods and resources are always “in relatively short supply,” making competition and rivalry inherent aspects of lived experience (Newey n.p.). Inherent rivalry, in turn, leads people to “naturally endeavour to dominate one another” (Jaede 2015, 56) to ensure self-preservation. The “state of nature” is thus not a theory of “savage” origins from which civilization develops, but a theory of anarchy, in the sense of a lawless state in which everybody needs to fend for themselves and competes with others for survival. This invokes Hall & Lamont’s argument about neoliberal ideology, which “generally leads people to think of themselves as governed less by others and more by themselves” (2013, 9).

To some extent, this is what happened after “advanced capitalist countries had dismantled or watered down their regulatory states by privatizing publicly owned enterprises, lifting capital controls, deregulating markets, and more selectively, par[ed] back welfare guarantees” (Evans & Sewell Jr, qtd in Hall & Lamont 2013, 35). In this new status quo, self-reliance, and competitive self-interest become key character traits for realising the so-called good life. For Hobbes “competitiveness is a fundamental aspect of the concept of natural enmity”; here, enmity should be understood as “the inherent feeling of hostility that exists between all in the state of nature” (Jaede 2015, 56). As the current economic, often militarised (see Downey et al. 2010, 422), battles over oil and rare-earth materials playing out across the globe illustrate, enmity is very much an aspect of the globalised neoliberal economy. Where Furiosa’s world of epic battles, explosions, revenge plots, and ingenious cruelties affirms Hobbes’s notion of natural enmity in humanity, Waste Tide, by contrast, places specific man-made institutions at the core of enmity, suggesting that the dismantling of hierarchies of social, political, and economic power can lead towards a more just, peaceful and sustainable world based on altruism not enmity as a core value.  

Furiosa: riding the apocalyptic roller-coaster

The opening voice-over of Furiosa – voiced by the character History Man – foregrounds the Hobbesian nature of the apocalyptic narrative: “as the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” (1:10). In Furiosa, the total collapse of human civilization is inevitable because humanity’s natural enmity will overpower its penchant for altruism, benevolence, and forgiveness. The innocent child of the utopian Green Place, the young Furiosa, develops into a ruthless and vengeful warrior intent on a personal moral victory by means of cruel torture. At the climax, the broken yet living body of the film’s Goliath – Dementus – becomes the fertile soil from which grows a peach tree that will bear new fruit. This image suggests, albeit grotesquely, that a new world could arise out of the remnants of the old. However, during the film, Furiosa has developed a character similar to Dementus’s; she is ready to use the most extreme forms of violence and cruelty to survive and protect her own. She plucks the first fruit from the tree whilst Dementus is still alive, symbolically reproducing the exploitation and destruction of one human body to ensure production of goods to sustain another, what Subhabrata Bobby Bannerjee calls “necrocapitalism.” The nature of her revenge implies the perpetuation of the wasteland’s status quo: humans will continue to feed the economic machine until either humanity has destroyed itself, or resources have finally dried up entirely. Furiosa’s character arc from innocent abductee to fierce and feared Amazonian warrior is epic in scope and cinematically thrilling, but it also normalises the Hobbesian state of nature by presenting its many and gruesomely violent acts as inevitable because they are intrinsically human acts.

Yet at the outset of the film, one group of people have managed to establish a peaceful commonwealth. The Green Place, Furiosa’s childhood home, has strict rules that need to be always obeyed; but it is clear to all citizens that obedience is crucial to survival. This is the last “place of abundance” (12:23) sought after by the individual marauders and war-mongering gangs in the wasteland. But even the good life in this society does not stop Furiosa from disobeying the law, treading out of bounds to sabotage a gang of hunters, only to find herself abducted and trapped in the cutthroat world of the wasteland, ruled by gas-guzzling tyrants. Audiences familiar with the previous film, Fury Road (2015), to which Furiosa is a direct prequel, already know that the Green Place is doomed to exhaustion, like most resource-rich environments on the planet. When Furiosa finally returns, her green and pleasant home has become a dismal swamp inhabited by seven survivors.

The Green Place of plenitude is a genuine alternative to the militaristic and exploitative wasteland, peopled by 1) the roaming biker-gang leader, Dementus, and his Congress of Destruction, 2) the nameless oil tycoon of Gastown, 3) Immortan Joe and his Citadel of Sustenance, and 4) the Bullet Farm, run by Major Kalashnikov, named after one of the most ubiquitous, because most reliable, weapons in human history, first produced in the Soviet Union, but later manufactured globally, also in the USA. The Green Place’s destruction, in Fury Road, suggests the film sees it not as a potential future, but a nostalgic myth, a romantic dream of a pre-industrial golden age that was never truly real, a strange aberration from the norm. By contrast, the four grotesque, authoritarian, strongholds, in perpetual war with each other over resources, represent absolute reality; they also resemble the some of the most powerful industries in the current neoliberal era: motor vehicles, oil, weapons, and food. Their innate animosity illustrates the suggestion made by Downey et al. “that in most instances, rebels, corporations, and states use violence or the threat of violence in association with resource extraction activities to achieve their own goals, such as enriching themselves, increasing their power over others, maintaining social stability, or securing good relations with other actors” (2010, 22). Dementus champions individual, competitive, entrepreneurship when he says: “we are indeed in the land of opportunity” (40:01). Yet, after his military take-over of Gastown, he despairs about a business venture gone wrong: “we can’t keep up supply, everyone is saying they’re being swindled and short-changed” (85:07).

In its depiction of how all the wasteland tyrants seek control over Gastown, the film satirically illustrates the claim made by Downey et al. that “military violence and military aid” indeed “play a critical role in facilitating petroleum extraction and transport and in allowing the United States to maintain control over petroleum supplies” (2010, 436), a scenario playing out right now in South America and the Middle East. Like Donald Trump and other militaristic world leaders, Immortan Joe is hellbent on building bigger, stronger, and faster war rigs – Furiosa aids him in this endeavour – and has a penchant to technologize everything within his grasp. He employs the knowledge and skills of the “organic mechanic” to maximize his yield, as does Furiosa who first enhances her butchered left arm into a mechanical weapon and eventually transforms the body of Dementus into fertilizer to avenge her mother’s death. Significantly, at the end Fury Road, the second part of Furiosa’s life story, when all the male tyrants have been slain, Furiosa is left in possession of Immortan Joe’s Citadel, having structurally taken his place in the wasteland’s state of nature. With Furiosa inheriting Immortan Joe’s position and power, the franchise suggests that the incessant war for scarce resources will continue until everything has been used up and there is nothing left to fight over but barren sand. Furiosa’s abduction from home turned out to be a move from utopia to reality as not the Green Place but the apocalyptic wasteland presents humankind in its natural environment, making the apocalypse frighteningly but also thrillingly inevitable.

Waste Tide: a poetic meditation on altruism

Research has revealed that “the mining of rare earth minerals produces as much as 2,000 tons of solid waste, including toxic heavy metals and radioactive thorium, for every ton of rare earth mineral produced” (Downey et al. 2010, 421). Waste Tide features various organisations involved in the running and exploiting of a Chinese e-waste processing plant on Silicon Isle. Local government officials, an organised crime syndicate, and an American recycling corporation vie with each other for control of the exploitation of the waste people who manage the technological offal. The novel tells two stories: 1) the magical story of Mimi’s transformation from a waste girl into an altruistic leader of a people’s rebellion with two distinct consciousnesses; and 2) the American businessman Scott Brandle’s discovery of the dark secret behind TerraGreen’s aim to monopolize Silicon Isle’s “rare earth metals, nonrenewable resources more precious than gold,” which in the digital age are  “like the witch’s magical dust in fairy tales” (216), giving their possessor the ability to gain massive advantages, technologically, economically, and militarily. Scott realises that despite the altruistic sheen of TerraGreen’s marketing double speak, “his actions” are “mercenary, despicable, even evil” (322), because “the pollution generated by the process” of the company’s so-called recycling “far exceeded EPA standards” (218), and the workers on Silicon Isle are physically and mentally mutating due to their total immersion in the toxic environment. The novel’s eye-opening power lies not in the way it dramatizes the ongoing battle over Silicon Isle’s rare earth materials, but in its focus on poetically expressing the physical suffering and psychological transformation of the coerced and exploited waste people.

The simile “Long Prosperity’s crew continued to spray the man with the high-pressure hose, treating him as a living flame spreading up the rope ladder” (5) foregrounds the irony and moral double standards at work within the e-waste trade. It is true that the ship, Long Prosperity, is bringing so-called wealth to Silicon Isle, in the shape of techno-junk; and the eco-warrior on the rope-ladder is indeed a danger to the ship’s success and thus needs to be nullified. But as a living flame, “the man” is also a cleansing power, intent on eradicating this mock-prosperity (all waste people live in dire poverty) based on the spread of toxicity. A metaphor on the next page clarifies the novel’s ethics regarding resource exploitation: “the most precious perfume, when made at the price of the extinction of a species, would turn into an intolerable stench” (6). Such moments of figurative language force the reader to contemplate the harsh truth underlying the digital revolution and the throw-away consumer society it supports with myriads of luxury gadgets, fast fashions, and instant foods. The global consumer-society makes life more efficient and comfortable for the affluent few at the expense of the wellbeing and welfare of the impoverished many. An extended simile describing the waste people foregrounds their dehumanisation by the waste of consumer-society: “Metal chassis, broken displays, circuit boards, plastic components, and wires … were scattered everywhere like piles of manure, with laborers, all of them migrants from elsewhere in China, flitting between the piles like flies” (28). Flies lay their eggs in manure, which is therefore the soil from which they spring. The simile is so apt here because the immigrant waste people too are presented as reliant for the survival of their kind on the continual production of waste by another.

Those who have lived and worked on Silicon Isle for long are becoming one with the waste they manage and burn, incorporating elements of discarded tech into their very physical being which directly affects their mental state. Their children “seemed to think this was the natural world” (29). When the waste-girl Mimi is violated by thugs and undergoes a near-death experience, her consciousness magically merges with the husk of a discarded mecha (a giant robot): “like a soul embedded into a strange new body” (174). Mimi feels how “the invisible cilia of electricity gently brushed across billions of neurons and agitated crystal blue ripples, which extended and spread along a complicated three-dimensional topology”; then “as her exoskeleton trembled, the starlike lights vibrated in sync, demonstrating their reality. The sky was a pale green and the sea indigo; wherever she looked, the center of her visual field became bright and limpid, with strongly defined outlines and clear details; however, the view grew dimmer and fuzzier in a radiating pattern from the center, distorted as though seen through the rim of a lens. All she heard was silence, as though the special alloy in the shell absorbed and filtered out all sound” (175).

The supernatural trope of the transmigration of souls allows Chen Qiufan to imaginatively represent the freeing of the human soul from the constrictions of its body, but also from repressive ideologies. Returned to her original human frame, Mimi realises that the label of waste girl “had been branded in her heart” so deeply that it was “impossible to erase” (243), but now “she felt this world differently” (245). Similarly, when Scott’s guide and translator, Kaizong, receives a mechanical eye, after being blinded by a waste person, he realises that “he hadn’t just changed one eye; his entire world had changed” (318). Only after their humanity has fused with the technology that surrounds them on all sides, do Mimi and Kaizong fully understand the essence and impact of their tech-driven world: technology equals power, and “people now worshipped power far more than honesty, kindness, virtue” (320), spiritual values impossible to artificially reproduce and monetise. At the climax of the novel, when the waste people rebel, “the thugs” wearing “quality equipment” set “their augmented muscles to the maximum enhancement” (380) and engage in “the mechanical, repetitive act of killing” (381). As these technologically empowered humans indiscriminately hack their way through the rebelling waste people, Mimi can breathe life into the mecha once more by fusing her second consciousness with its electronic systems. The mechanised humans are no match for the humanized robot, and Mecha-Mimi gains a victory in battle like Furiosa.

While both heroines defeat evil tyrants, Waste Tide’s denouement is not marked by the satisfaction of a revenge well plotted, and a realisation that war is human nature. Instead, it marks a turn towards altruism. Waste Tide ends with a scene of transformation from conflict to benevolence, from competitive individualism to an embrace of community. Only the soulless killers who directly threaten life on Silicon Isle are despatched by Mecha-Mimi. As a violent typhoon sweeps Silicon Isle, human Mimi convinces her allies to try to save all people still alive, whether they are government employees, gangsters, businessmen, or anyone else who has oppressed and exploited the waste people as disposable tools in the past. By inhabiting the technological Mecha and experiencing its destructive power first hand, the human Mimi has learned that “if we allow ourselves to be filled with hatred, then they’ve won” (393); they are all those on Silicon Isle who had accepted the international economic status quo as a state of nature, who thought “of life as some zero-sum game in which there must be winners and losers, even at the expense of the interests of others, including their lives” (408), a state taken for granted as natural by everyone in the wastelands of Furiosa.

Such a proverbial state of nature, like Hobbes’s theory, is a lawless existence in which those who wield most power will win. This is not a benevolent but a ruthless power that expresses itself through greed and a desire to possess and exploit. This power feeds on Hobbes’s natural enmity. Significantly, where Furiosa presented this state of nature as definitive of humanity, Waste Tide posits it within an ideological construct embodied by a corrupt government, organised crime, and the voracious TerraGreen Recycling corporation, which enjoys the status of personhood and can take on the guise of a sovereign when it gains a monopoly position in the market, but which remains necrocapitalist by valuing power and profit over human and environmental wellbeing.

References

Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. “Necrocapitalism.” Organization Studies, vol. 29, 2008, pp. 1541-1563.

Downey, Liam, et al. “Natural Resource Extraction, Armed Violence, and Environmental

Degradation.” Organization & Environment, vol. 23, no. 4, 2010, pp. 417-445.

Galtung, Johan. “Cultural Violence.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 27, no. 3, 1990, pp. 291-305.

Hall, Peter A and Michelle Lamont, editors. Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Cambridge UP, 2013.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck, Cambridge UP, 1996.

Hoekstra, Kinch. “Hobbes on the Natural Condition of Mankind.” The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, edited by Patricia Springborg, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 109-127

Jaede, Maximilian. The Concept of Enmity in the Political Philosophy of Hobbes. PhD

Dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2015.

Newey, Glen. The Routledge Guidebook to Hobbes’ Leviathan. Routledge, 2014.

Salmose, Niklas. “The Apocalyptic Sublime: Anthropocene Representation and Environmental Agency in Hollywood Action-Adventure Cli-Fi Films.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 51, no. 6, 2018, pp. 1415-1433.

Evert Jan van Leeuwen is a lecturer in English-language literature and culture at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He researches the history and development of the Gothic, Horror, SF and Noir popular-culture genres. He has published on the historical writers William Godwin, Charles Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as contemporary authors such as Stephen King and Patrick McGrath, and on gothic spaghetti westerns and graveyard poetry, amongst others. His most recent publication is the monograph Horror House Film: Possession, Obsession, Domination, Masculinity (Liverpool UP, 2026).

Editorial Credit: Giorgos Katrantsiotis

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Hobbesian Enmity and Resource Wars in Apocalyptic Popular Culture
– Evert Jan van Leeuwen

The Nuclear Brink Revisited: Assessing Coercive Diplomacy in Iran
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Artefacts of War, Politics of Memory: Material Witnesses in Occupied Kherson
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The War Against Iran Has Weakened the US in the Great Power Competition
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Interview – Rhys Machold

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Deterrence Without Alliance: What the Moroccan Crises Can Teach Japan and South Korea
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War Minus the Shooting: Sports and World Politics
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The Need for a More Assertive Diplomatic Stance from China on Iran
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Political Othering and the Discursive Construction of UK’s Small-Boat ‘Crisis’
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On this week’s episode of Thinking Global, Prof. T.V. Paul speaks with Dr. Tusharika Deka (⁠@Tusharika24⁠) in this episode two of two, on his advice for early career researchers, international security, artificial intelligence in the classroom, and much more.

Just War theory has been at the heart of discussion of the US/Israel war on Iran over the last couple of weeks. This is great for theorists and students of international relations because Just War has been, and still is, central to the conception of international order. So much so that practically every leading philosopher, jurist and theologian has written on it. Just War theory has a long history, going back to the Ancient Greeks (Aristotle, 4^th Century BCE) and the Romans (Cicero, 1^st Century BCE) as a moral and ethical compass, seeking to limit and to regulate war and its practice. The basis of the international law of war is held to stem from these pre-modern beginnings, mediated and given additional content by Saint Augustine (4^th Century) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (13^th Century).

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Today, Just War theory is normally reduced to a number of questions, divided into three temporal concerns: Jus ad Bellum (justice of war) including considerations of just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, last resort, proportionality and probability of success; Jus in Bello (justice in war) including the need to discriminate between civilian and military targets, proportionality to objectives and military necessity; and Jus post Bellum (justice after war) requiring a just peace settlement, reconstruction and holding perpetrators to account.

But why is Just War in the headlines now? There are a number of reasons for this return to a focus on Just War. Firstly, the breakdown of the liberal international order has left the United Nations toothless in the face of aggression by major powers. Secondly, it seems that domestic political orders are also lacking the capacity to hold leaders to account, a problem across the board, from Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America to Netanyahu’s Israel. Today it seems that international conflicts are driven as much by personalities and individual concerns as the strategic concerns of realpolitik. However, there is also a third reason for Just War to be at the heart of controversy, this is the one that I think is the most interesting. The crisis within the contemporary Christian order.

This may seem counterintuitive, for many it appears that Christianity is gaining in importance in domestic and international politics in the absence of traditional political loyalties and rise of more speculative, spiritual approaches to our world of crisis and contingency. However, the discussion of Just War brings to the surface the role that Christianity plays, still today, in upholding the legitimacy of the international order. It was Just War theory that helped to cohere and rationalise international order as a universal ethical concern at the same time as Christianity provided the framework of moral legitimation for western coloniality. This synergy between religion and politics was made possible through the reconstruction of Christianity for the modern era as the religious exception.

From the time of Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers, Christianity was remade for the modern colonial era as the religion compatible with universality, with reason and rationality and with secular modes of governance. Christianity could inform the rise of colonial modernity, providing ethical and moral legitimacy to an order that sought to constrain ‘war’ - conflict between European powers - but to enable extreme modes of colonial violence, genocide, dispossession and ecological destruction across the Global South. Christianity was the exceptional religion because it could present itself (like early modes of international law) as above petty material conflicts and particularist interests. Christianity provided the unmarked position of universality (of White Supremacy) while other world religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism were seen as too tied to limited and partial interests.

As J. Kameron Carter writes in Race: A Theological Account, the role of religion, specifically that of modernised Christianity, in the construction of the liberal political imaginary, and of understandings of both domestic and international political order, is rarely given its due. In large part this is because Christianity as a mode of discursively constructing a global or universal ethical framework, while particularising other ethical framings, works in the background. While the other world religions have beliefs that need to be respected, Christianity is held to be the only religion that is ‘beyond belief’, held to have a universal rationalist detachment from particularist or vested interests.

Just War’s centrality to discussion of the US/Israel war on Iran is in large part due to the current schism in the Christian world. This schism reached its highpoint in the direct confrontation between JD Vance, the US Vice-President and Pope Leo XIV over the nature of Just War. This was in response to the Pope’s rebuttal of US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s claim that people should pray to Jesus to support the US war effort and in US President Donald Trump’s AI generated social media post, portraying himself as a Jesus-like figure, and his earlier direct attack on the Pope’s intervention in political issues. The question at the heart of this schism is: ‘Is God on the side of America?’.

The Pope’s apparent inability to take the side of Christian America against an Iranian state, portrayed as the chief sponsor of Islamic terrorism and violence, brings this schism into the open. In this way, the friction between Trumps’ US foreign actions and the Pope reflect the similar friction between Trump and the other institutions of the old international order, including the United Nations. While the Pope seeks to uphold the imaginary of a higher international order above the politics of states – the universal exceptionalism of Christianity, above the petty materialist concerns of earthly politicians - the rise of Christian nationalism in the US threatens to undermine Christianity’s exceptional status as the religion of modern universalism.

There is a certain irony in Trump’s AI image of himself portrayed as a modern-day Jesus. I’m sure many would like to imagine that this will come back to haunt Trump exposing him as lacking, once again, any respect for others and perhaps even questioning his mental state. This may well be the case. However, the important point to note is that it is not only Trump that risks being exposed here. It is also the Pope that risks being called out as the emperor without any clothes if the schism with the US establishment brings into full light the unstated universalist assumptions that enabled modern Christianity to provide the moral underpinning of international order.

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, London. He edits the open access journal Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. His recent mongraphs include Race in the Anthropocene: Coloniality, Disavowal and the Black Horizon (with Farai Chipato, 2024); The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (with Jonathan Pugh, 2023); Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (with Jonathan Pugh, 2021); Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (with Julian Reid, 2019); and Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (2018).

Who had it right? Was it George Orwell who called sports “war minus the shooting”, or Nelson Mandela who said that sports can “create hope where once there was only despair.” The answer turns on the empirical record and a deeper truth: sports and politics brings together two of the great undertakings of human society. Accordingly, sports on the international stage deserves serious scholarly consideration. 2026 is a banner year for international sports mega events. February’s Winter Olympics, held in Italy, and the FIFA World Cup, held across North America in June and July, anchor the international sporting calendar. At the same time, world politics is on a knife’s edge. Simply put, sports is a lens through which classic concerns of International Relations and political science are refracted.

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Let’s start with the grandest concern of them all: world peace. Any speech from a FIFA or IOC president would be incomplete without pieties about the unifying power of sport. These claims draw upon the ancient Greek idea of ekecheiria – an Olympic truce – the idea that warring factions would lay down their arms during the games. In actuality, the Olympic truce only meant safe passage for travellers, not a ceasefire. At best, the spirit of a sporting truce has a mixed record. Yes, ping pong diplomacy facilitated US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s, and yes, North Korea and South Korea marched under a unified flag in the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. But any good example is easily parried by a negative one. There is the 1969 Soccer War between El Salvador and Honduras, a simmering conflict that was inflamed by rioting during World Cup qualifying matches. Duelling Olympic boycotts by the US and Soviet Union in 1980 and 1984 were certainly not consistent with the spirit of truce, nor were the “vicious passions” observed by Orwell during the Soviet Dynamo tour of England in 1945. The notion that sports was politics by other means became a widely accepted trope during the Cold War and still is today.

Of course, no sports impresario has ever let history get in the way of a good story. But, like second marriages, the supposed unifying power of sport and the Olympic truce represent the triumph of hope over experience. Realists would certainly eschew any optimistic assumptions about human nature or the structural incentives of anarchy. the world. Liberals may place more faith in the harmony of interests or common international norms and institutions. The debate continues.

If world peace is unlikely to be achieved through sport, plenty of other political objectives are in play. Chief among them is the great standby of political modernity: nationalism. Few things rouse the national sentiment more than having all eyes on you, as a national contingent in the parade of nations, as a host country, or both. Similarly, sports mega events are major vehicles for soft power exertion on the world stage. Host cities in wealthy countries can preen and peacock in a bid for international prestige. Other countries, through hosting or competitive success, can announce their return to respectability, as was the case with Japan’s Olympics in 1964, or matriculation to the ranks of the great powers, as China did in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony. In the 1880s and 1890s, the US announced its early emergence on the world stage, in part, through sports diplomacy initiatives across Asia and Europe.

Post-colonial countries in the developing world can demonstrate their independence and capabilities independence and capabilities by playing host to mega-events or making a good showing in competition. South Africa’s turn as host of the 2010 FIFA World Cup is the arch example of this narrative, as were Brazil’s Olympics and World Cup duties in 2014 and 2016. Hosting games can help burnish the legitimacy or consolidate the authority of the regime that hosts a mega event, liberal and illiberal alike. The 1936 Berlin Olympics was a massive propaganda win for Hitler’s regime, as were the 2014 Sochi games in Russia, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

On the economic side, the most common claim is that hosting sports mega-events will accelerate economic development. For developed and developing countries, this means major infrastructure and public works projects, not to mention uncommon access to public finances. International development scholars have puzzled over this phenomenon for decades. The actual record of public expenditure and its relationship to economic development is decidedly mixed. In some cases, cities are left with expensive sports infrastructure that sit unused or unloved long after the tourists have gone. Perhaps the most absurd example is Montreal’s Olympic Stadium built for the 1976 Summer games, which remains a bottomless money pit fifty years later. Saudi Arabia has taken a different approach to economic development through sports. Its sports investments are part of a wide program to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil and attract international investment. This approach might be more sustainable than the quadrennial, one-and-done big mega event.

Sports mega events test the arch liberal claim that good things go together: principles of liberalism, democracy, human rights, as well as public policy goals like economic development, healthy lifestyles, and national unity. But of course, the ideal forms have their deviant counterparts: jingoism, corruption, graft, sportswashing, public debt, and the oppression and abuse of vulnerable populations.

Accordingly, global sports competitions are sites of protest and social contestation, which should be of interest to scholars of global social movements. Think about John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising a black gloved fist on the podium in Mexico City in 1968, protesting racism in America. In 1956, two separate boycotts marked Melbourne Olympics in response to Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In 1976, twenty-two African countries boycotted the Olympics after the IOC refused to ban the New Zealand team. New Zealand’s rugby team had played in Apartheid South Africa that same year. The most dramatic example took place in Munich in 1972 when the Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered members of the Israeli national team. More recently, the 2008 Beijing Olympics became a magnet for global protests, as were the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Russian laws prohibiting “gay propaganda” earned harsh reproaches from human rights groups. And, of course, Russia’s Olympic team has been banned from Olympic competition since 2017 over its war in Ukraine, though its athletes have sometimes been permitted to compete under a neutral banner. Activists have called for a similar Olympic ban on Israel over its war in Gaza and have decried the IOC’s “double standard.”

If we set aside a state-centric view, we can observe themes at the core of intersectional IR feminist scholarship: sex, race, and postcolonial power relations. Take, for example, the practice of sex segregation that is foundational to the administration of nearly all competitive sports. It is a powerful institutionalized norm but one that runs up against circumstances that defy sex binaries. The case of Caster Semenya is, perhaps, the highest profile case. In 2019, the Olympic gold medalist from South Africa was banned from international competition for refusing to take medications that would reduce her naturally high testosterone levels. Semenya fought her case in Swiss Federal Tribunal’s Court of Arbitration for Sport and the European Court of Human Rights. She had also been subject to sex verification tests that are still part of eligibility requirements for some international sports federations. Semenya’s case brings together critiques of the racist, sexist and postcolonial assumptions that underpin sports administration. In domestic courts, transgender athletes are challenging the legal and regulatory practices of sex segregation. In the words of veteran sportswriter Sally Jenkins, it is “the single most difficult issue I’ve seen in 40 years of covering sports…[making] gambling, performance-enhancing drugs, and regulation of collegiate athletics look like tidy challenges.” For their efforts, these legal challenges have incurred backlash from anti-gender movements in a culture war over the future of global order.

Just as the United States becomes an agent of global disorder, the international sporting centre of gravity will shift to the US. In 2026 and 2028, in the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States will host or co-host the FIFA World Cup and the summer Olympics. The 2026 FIFA World Cup will certainly be a magnet for protesters who will enjoy the protections of free speech and will have plenty to say about Trump’s foreign and domestic policies. How it will play out remains to be seen. But observers can expect every theme noted above to be on garish display.

In fact, it’s already started. The World Cup draw in December 2025 was a glittery affair, hosted by Donald Trump at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Trump was presented with the “FIFA Peace Prize.” Famously, Trump has lobbied unsuccessfully for a Nobel Peace Prize, even linking it to the threat to annex Greenland. Look past the theatrics and observe the underlying politics. The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be held across the US, Mexico and Canada at a time of significant tension in North America. Beyond Trump’s threats to annex Canada and to send US soldiers into Mexico to fight drug cartels, the three countries are in the middle of tense negotiations over continental trade. The USMCA trade agreement, negotiated by Trump in his first term, needs to be extended or renegotiated by July 1 – in the middle of the World Cup tournament – otherwise its sunset clause kicks in. For Canada and Mexico, access to the US market is crucial. Their export markets depend on American consumers, and their manufacturing sectors are deeply integrated with American counterparts. Trump aims to reverse all that by way of a punishing tariff regime and dismantling production networks that have developed over generations of trade. Trump calls it “America First”, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer calls it a “Hamiltonian” economic policy. However you say it, the promise of public bickering in front of dinner guests is very real.

Trump adds an element of instability to the already-fraught interplay of sports and politics. We can expect Trump to follow the same general playbook as many other leaders when hosting international sports contests. There will be shows of nationalism and jingoism, infrastructure spending and corruption, protest and confrontation. We can hope for moments of diplomatic grace but expect moments of cringe.

What makes 2026 so interesting is Trump and the way he has mobilized sports as a vehicle for reactionary politics at home and abroad. This includes differentiating himself from conventional politics, mobilizing his supporters through sports, and instrumentalizing sports in pursuit of wider policy goals. For decades, Trump has been adept at drawing attention to himself through sports. As a presidential candidate, Trump successfully mobilized young male voters partly by meeting them where they are. For example, Trump became a visible fan of the UFC, appearing ringside at events and on related podcasts. Appealing to a politically apathetic audience turned young male fight fans into voters. As a reactionary nationalist with populist stylings, Trump has used sports as a site of grievance and political signalling, most famously raging against Black athletes who refused to stand for the national anthem. On policy, the sports element is the thin edge of the wedge for broader radical policies. Before the current war with Iran, Trump imposed travel restrictions on parts of Iran’s national soccer team, for example. This policy sits alongside his broader anti-immigration program, including ICE raids across the country. Elsewhere, in early 2026, Trump signed the “Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order, not because he’s concerned about the integrity of women’s sports, but because it aligns with the anti-trans social conservatism that animates much of his base.

History tells us that Trump will use sports as tool for promoting his own movement and his own interests. But divisive and distasteful actions may come at a cost. Politicizing sports may prove electorally costly with voters in a midterm year where Republicans risk losing control of Congress. More widely, politicizing sports may undermine the fortunes of political actors around the world that are aligned with Trump. Viktor Orban’s election loss in Hungary is a blow to the global MAGA movement and a potential sign that Trump is more of a liability to populist-nationalists. As for the United States, once the centrepiece of the liberal international order, it may suffer soft disempowerment – the diminishing of soft power capabilities when bad behaviour attracts critical attention. This happened to Qatar when its World Cup hosting duties drew attention to its exploitative treatment of migrant labour. The same may occur when a global audience, that just wants to watch soccer, is treated to the spectacle of the ugly American. Billions of people will watch the World Cup and the Olympics – academics should tune in too.

Aaron Ettinger is an associate professor in International Relations at Carleton University. His research focuses on US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era and its implications for world order. Recent published work covers a range of issues including US and Canadian foreign policy, sports and politics, and International Relations pedagogy.

Editorial Credit: Simon Hilditch

There is a parallel universe where Donald Trump is the grand strategist of his own imagination. In this world, Trump remains bombastic, manipulative, and irresistibly drawn to casting himself as a risk-taker thriving on high-stakes moves. But he also somehow absorbs the hard-nosed realism and political sensitivity of his decade-long pen pal, Richard Nixon. The result is a leader who still craves spectacle, but understands the power of secrecy and executive control. Consequently, Trump would quietly work with key countries to hammer out a trade bloc instead of waging tariff wars. He would increase pressure on Venezuela while privately negotiating with regional actors on drugs, migration, and oil, rather than theatrically arresting Nicolás Maduro. He would turn to trusted intermediaries to open a back-channel with Iran on terrorism and nuclear issues, instead of launching unprovoked strikes. He would even revive the tentative back-channel diplomacy he once pursued with North Korea during his first term.

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The hypothetical grand strategist Trump would conduct U.S. foreign policy in a manner that is bold yet deliberately restrained: he would audaciously engage adversaries on controversial issues, but wait months – perhaps years – for negotiations to bear fruit before claiming victory. This prudent diplomatic style would be the near opposite of the “maximum publicity” ethos on display in Trump: The Art of the Deal, his self-promotional best-selling book. The reality, unfortunately, is that there is little evidence that Trump is capable of even the slightest degree of deferred gratification. In his second term, Trump has doubled down on brinkmanship, staging diplomacy as a kind of grand, cathartic performance – pulling it ever further from its traditional role as the careful, tactful management of relations between governments.

The result is that U.S. diplomacy is reduced to a contest of muscle-flexing, or even geopolitical “meme war.” Rather than serving as a carefully crafted, inherently discreet channel to circumvent bureaucratic obstacles, domestic political pressures, and media attention, it begins to resemble a political reality show, replete with policy whiplash, melodramatic infighting, and media hysteria. The fix, however, may be simpler than many think: restore back-channel diplomacy to the center of U.S. foreign policy – minimizing the number of officials involved, operating away from the glare of public pressure, and delaying publicity until an acceptable outcome is secured.

Such back-channels were once the norm and were championed for their efficiency. However, that changed on January 8, 1918, when Woodrow Wilson delivered his famous Fourteen Points speech to Congress. At the top of the list was a call for “open covenants of peace, openly arrived at,” insisting that diplomacy should proceed “frankly and in the public view.” His push for transparency won widespread support, largely because it aligned with the prevailing revulsion toward the European system of secret alliances and ententes.

Wilson’s push reshaped global expectations, and back-channel diplomacy started to become an executive choice: leaders who embrace policy transparency are often praised, while those who prefer diplomatic secrecy are viewed with growing suspicion – if not outright illegitimacy. From the Iran-Contra affair during the Reagan administration to the Bush administration’s rendition program, covert actions have cast long shadows over presidential legacies.

Yet history tells a more complicated story. Through back-channel diplomacy, U.S. leaders achieved some of the most consequential breakthroughs of the modern era: Richard Nixon’s secret dialogue with Beijing paved the way for the restoration of relations between the U.S. and China; Barack Obama’s quiet negotiations with Cuba helped end decades of hostility between Washington and Havana; John F. Kennedy’s back-channel with the Soviet Union helped spare the world a potential nuclear war. As Henry Kissinger observed, back channels can “short-circuit the lower-level process,” allowing negotiators to bypass bureaucratic inertia and public posturing and unlock progress where public diplomacy stalls.

Under Trump, however, the traditional strengths of U.S. back-channel diplomacy – strategic planning, interagency coordination, and alliance management – are taking a back seat to the impulse to publicize, politicize, and dramatize half-formed policy proposals, all in pursuit of attention and short-term political gains rather than lasting outcomes. As a result, the United States is no longer advancing its ideals through “the patient accumulation of partial successes,” but instead lapses into Cold War-style threats and ideological hostility.

Of course, secrecy raises valid ethical concerns. Should negotiations be scrutinized by the public? Yes. But should real-time transparency take precedence over resolving crises that cost thousands of lives? Not necessarily. Effective leadership requires separating domestic political messaging from international bargaining. Barack Obama’s presidency illustrates this balance. While publicly championing policy openness, his most significant diplomatic achievements – the normalization of relations with Cuba, the Iran nuclear deal, and climate cooperation with China – were all results of secret negotiations.

Reviving back-channel diplomacy offers a way forward. It would restore confidence in a methodical and credible United States, and also spare the world much of the avoidable turbulence of the Trump era. The United States needs to show the rest of the world that diplomatic breakthroughs can be achieved without resorting to bombing or finger-pointing. More importantly, it would help the world relearn a simple but enduring lesson, especially among populist leaders including Donald Trump, that effective diplomacy often requires knowing when to stay silent.

Jiachen Shi is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Tulane University. His research focuses on U.S. foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and political psychology.

Two months after US President Donald Trump initiated the US-Israeli war against Iran on February 28, the costs of the war are mounting, particularly due to the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Before the war started, the Strait of Hormuz handled about 20 per cent of worldwide oil transportation and a large share of natural gas shipments. The disruptions to these energy supplies are leading to increased fuel prices, higher electricity costs, rising transportation expenses across the world – and even endanger semiconductor production due to disruptions in the supply of helium following damage to key facilities in Qatar. The Middle East is also a significant producer of fertilisers. In 2024, up to 30% of global fertiliser trade passed through the Strait of Hormuz from the Persian Gulf to export markets worldwide. Disruptions to this supply have severely affected African nations (among others) which rely heavily on imported fertiliser.

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The war's economic impact has been particularly severe in the Asia-Pacific region, which depends heavily on Middle Eastern oil imports. Over 80 per cent of crude oil and LNG passing through the Strait of Hormuz goes to countries in this region, such as China, South Korea and Japan. In 2025, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh primarily obtained LNG from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, while Pakistan, Japan, and the Philippines each relied on over 90% of their crude oil imports from the Persian Gulf.  Fuel prices in key Indian cities have surged, with petrol and diesel costs rising by approximately 10-15 per cent over just a few weeks. In Indonesia, nickel producers have reduced output by at least 10 per cent due to shortages of natural gas and sulphur, which are essential for reaching the high temperatures required to extract and refine the metal. Additionally, garment factories in Bangladesh are experiencing severe production disruptions due to shortages of polyester and nylon, which are fossil-fuel byproducts used in clothing manufacturing. Another important impact arises from the disruption of remittances sent home by the millions of workers from South Asia and Africa who work in the Gulf region.

Many observers put the blame for this war on Trump’s personality. Trump's current foreign policy does not mark a full break from previous policies. The foundation was established by earlier Democratic and Republican governments. The global landscape has significantly evolved over the past thirty years. As a result of the rising economic success of emerging powers and the slowdown of the core economies of Western Europe, the previous world order under US/Western Europe's hegemony has visibly weakened. This ongoing fundamental power shift towards the global East and the decline of the Anglo-American core since the late 1960s lie at the root of the increasingly aggressive policies of US leadership.

By all indications, the age of dominance by any single hegemonic power, first experienced by European colonial powers and then by the US, seems to be coming to an end. The impact of new powers is so significant that the centre of gravity of the global economy has already shifted away. Despite the slowing down experienced by China, India and other emerging economies, the emerging world of the global East is still growing substantially, outpacing much of the rest of the world, not racing ahead fast, but with a more balanced growth.

The 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran, just like the wars of the War on Terror early in the century, is not helping to solve the problems of US power. All these wars are accelerating the end of the American century by draining US resources and creating a power vacuum, allowing China to expand its influence through pragmatic diplomacy, secure energy supplies, and observation of US military tactics. While the US faces economic strain, China gains influence by presenting itself as a non-interventionist partner, leveraging the conflict to advance its global economic interests and reshape the geopolitical order.

Several observers agree that the joint US-Israel military intervention in Iran has been characterised as the most detrimental foreign policy endeavour in the history of the United States and as the imperial overreach that marks the end of the American Century and the beginning of a prolonged decline in US hegemony. Political developments since 2001 have clearly illustrated that the superior military forces of the United States and its allies have been unable to retain control over the oil resources of Iraq, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries. Far from preventing the decline of US economic and financial hegemony, ongoing military aggression and arrogance may instead compel its regional and European allies to distance themselves from its strategic objectives. This development prompts an essential inquiry for the oil-abundant nations of the Gulf: if the United States cannot adequately safeguard them from attacks, and if having US military bases indeed increases their susceptibility, should they reconsider the wisdom of their dependence on the United States in the Middle East?

Gulf states are increasingly questioning their reliance on Washington. China entered this region around the early 2000s with strategic patience and diplomatic ambition. As of early 2026, Saudi Arabia exports more oil to China than to any other nation. The UAE has incorporated Huawei technology into its critical infrastructure. Chinese firms are building ports, railways, 5G networks, and smart cities across the Gulf. In March 2023, Beijing supported the Saudi-Iranian normalisation deal, highlighting China’s rise as a key mediator in the Middle East. That year, Saudi investment minister Khalid al-Falih stated that a multipolar world had formed and emphasised the important role of Gulf-Chinese cooperation. As the US is seen as an increasingly unreliable protector, the Gulf states might pursue increased security and economic ties with other powers.

By obstructing the Strait to hostile nations and selling its oil in alternative currencies, Iran is actively challenging the United States’ financial supremacy—the global dominance of the US dollar, which has historically dictated that most of the world’s oil is priced and transacted in US dollars. Iran is now contesting the dollar’s exclusive role by informing countries that, to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, they must cease supporting US-Israeli military aggression against Iran and agree to sell oil not in US dollars but in China’s currency, the yuan. The petrodollar system has been a geopolitical tool that has allowed the US to maintain a strong grip on the world economy and financial markets by ensuring the dollar remains the world’s primary reserve currency.  The system creates a constant external demand for US dollars and Treasury bonds, which allows the US to run large trade deficits while keeping domestic interest rates low.  The dominance of the dollar is not just a financial matter, but also something deeply rooted in the geopolitical role of the United States. It appears that Iran fully understands the implications of this challenge for US hegemony, the significance of the dollar system, and the petrodollar, which explains Iran’s direct targeting of this system.

The current war has exposed significant weaknesses in US power, often described as a "strategic paradox" in which overwhelming US-Israeli military superiority has failed to produce stable political outcomes or meet key strategic objectives. Despite achieving tactical successes in striking Iranian infrastructure and military leadership, the coalition has not forced Iran into submission. Instead, it has pushed the conflict into a long, uncertain war of attrition. Experts argue that even a US military victory could be Pyrrhic, leading to a fractured alliance network and a global economy gradually aligning more with Beijing's leadership.

For over seventy years, the United States has maintained its position as the cornerstone of the global order, not solely through military strength but also via the institutions, regulations, and economic frameworks that have shaped the post–Second World War international system. To navigate this strategic environment, the United States established a security and energy framework that has become integral to its worldwide influence. The February 2026 strike on Iran has raised significant questions regarding both the credibility and sustainability of the United States’ leadership. China has used the US-Israel war on Iran to present itself as the more responsible of the world’s two superpowers, and as one that often prefers to stay in the background rather than be out front and centre. Beijing has positioned itself as a voice of reason thanks to its longstanding policy of “noninterference” in other countries’ internal affairs, a cornerstone of its foreign policy since 1955, and its working relationships with all players in the war on Iran. The war in Iran is viewed in Beijing as validation that the US-centred liberal international order is eroding, reinforcing China's conviction that a multipolar world is emerging, in which its influence can expand.

Whether the current ceasefire signals a permanent end to the conflict remains uncertain, but the result of this ill-advised war is clear: the US, as a global superpower, is now weaker than before. While the strikes inflicted heavy damage on the Iranian military, command, and infrastructure, the conflict has failed to achieve its core objectives of swift regime change or total ballistic disarmament. Instead of strengthening the United States, Trump’s military move has given the world an impression of an unstable, untrustworthy, and aggressive military power, aiding China’s efforts to present itself as a responsible global leader.

Bülent Gökay is a Professor of International Relations at Keele University.

On this week’s episode of the Thinking Global Podcast, Prof. T.V. Paul speaks with Dr. Tusharika Deka (⁠@Tusharika24⁠) in this episode two of two, on his advice for early career researchers, international security, artificial intelligence in the classroom, and much more.

Professor T.V. Paul (@tvpaul1) is Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Montreal, Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He served as the President of International Studies Association (ISA) for 2016-17. He is the Founding Director of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC) and a Distinguished Scholar at Asia-Pacific Foundation, Canada. Paul is the author or editor of 24 books, co-editor of 6 special journal issues, and author of over 90 scholarly articles/book chapters in the fields of International Relations, Peace & Peaceful Change, International Security, and South Asia. He is the author of the books: The Unfinished Quest: India’s Search for Major Power Status from Nehru to Modi (Oxford University Press, 2024); Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era (Yale University Press, 2018); The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World (Oxford University Press, 2013); Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

He is the lead editor of the Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Change in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2021). Paul currently serves as the editor of the Georgetown University Press book series: South Asia in World Affairs. The several awards he has received include:the inaugural Kim Dae-jung Award by the International Political Science Association (IPSA), 2025 (named after former South Korean President and Nobel Laureate for Peace); the 2024 International Studies Association (ISA)-Canada Distinguished Scholar Award and the 2025 International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award.

Alongside that, we always enjoy hearing from you! Which Thinking Global Podcast episodes have you been listening to? Which articles on E-International Relations have you enjoyed reading? What are you currently publishing on? Send us your letters to thinkingglobal.eir@gmail.com and have them read out on the podcast! If you enjoy the output of E-International Relations, please consider a ⁠donation⁠.

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The idea for this article emerged during an interview I was conducting with Olena Afanasieva, head of the NGO Center for Cultural Development ‘Totem’. During our conversation, she shared her vision of establishing a “Museum of Resistance,” featuring exhibits that narrate everyday life in Kherson under occupation. Kherson was occupied by Russian forces from 2 March to 11 November 2022, becoming the only regional centre captured during the initial phase of the full-scale invasion. Despite active civic resistance, including peaceful protests, the city endured a harsh occupation marked by repression, kidnappings, torture, forced passportisation, and attempts at Russification. The Armed Forces of Ukraine liberated Kherson on 11 November 2022 following a strategic weakening of Russian logistics, and residents greeted Ukrainian troops with visible support.

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The everyday experiences of civilians during the occupation have been documented through various projects: the documentary “Window to Kherson”, the Ukrainian-Estonian project “Lament of Kherson region”, and the reportage collection “De-occupied: Stories of Ukrainian Resistance”. Human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, in the foreword to the book “De-occupied: Stories of Ukrainian Resistance,” points out:

It often lacks resonance against the backdrop of statements by politicians who suggest handing over the occupied territories to the aggressor country and satisfying its imperial appetites. The voice of the survivors makes such appeals immoral.

In this article, I will discuss the everyday experiences of Kherson inhabitants during the occupation by examining twenty artefacts collected for the future “Museum of Resistance”, which will be dedicated to the lived experiences of occupation. These objects have come to be regarded as artefacts following the liberation of the occupied territories, as they bear witness to life under occupation and convey its stories. De-occupation has conferred upon them significant historical value. As stated on the website:

This museum is not only a way to commemorate and preserve the memory of those who fought for a free Ukrainian Kherson, but also a place where its identity is articulated. It is a museum that documents not only our losses, but also our choice, our right to be Ukrainians and Europeans, and our strength to stand by that choice.

The artefacts collected by the “Kherson: Liberation of Memory” initiative for the “Museum of Resistance” represent a grassroots attempt to create such anchors. Rather than focusing exclusively on military artefacts or official documentation, the project emphasises everyday objects. These items capture the experiences of civilians who navigated the occupation through a combination of resistance and cultural continuity. The emphasis on everyday material culture aligns with broader trends in museum studies that prioritise bottom-up documentation of conflict experiences. Macdonald (2013) argues that contemporary memory museums increasingly seek to incorporate personal objects and narratives in order to humanise historical events and highlight the experiences of ordinary individuals. The Kherson initiative reflects this approach by inviting residents to contribute artefacts and stories from the occupation. The artefacts originate from diverse environments, such as private homes, workplaces, and public spaces, and represent different aspects of life during the occupation, including acts of resistance, survival strategies, and symbolic expressions of cultural identity.

Material culture provides a particularly valuable perspective for analysing such experiences. Heersmink (2023, p. 263) explores the relationship between cultural identity, collective memory, and artefacts, emphasising that “the use of cultural artefacts to remember events in the historical narrative of cultural groups is done on both an individual and collective level.” Thus, objects can function as mediators between personal memories and collective narratives (Macdonald, 2013). In contexts of war and occupation, everyday objects often acquire new meanings as they become associated with particular actions, emotions, or events. Moreover, as Broch et al. (2023, p. 353) hold, “objects and things also take on national identities through their conservation, their use in performances and the emotional weight we attach to them”. As these artefacts have been incorporated into commemorative practices, such as books or museums, they participate in the construction of public memory and historical interpretation.

Objects associated with conflict often become what Smith (2006) describes as “heritage in action”, a cultural process or performance. Accordingly, heritage is not a static “thing” or tangible item, but rather a social practice that occurs around the preservation, interpretation, and display of sites, objects, and stories. Thus, the significance of the artefacts, I argue, does not lie solely in their physical peculiarities, characteristics or materiality, but in the stories that communities attach to them. In many cases, objects gain mnemonic power precisely because they are ordinary items that have been recontextualised through extraordinary circumstances.

Botanova (2025) points out that the war destroys not only critical infrastructure and transportation networks but also memories, legacies, heritage, and identities. She also quotes an architect and cultural heritage expert, Andrii Lutsyk, who observes how new forms of identity and collective memory in Kherson are being forged under conditions of war, which can be understood as “the cultural heritage of the future”. Everyday cultural practices, local stories, and seemingly mundane objects thus acquire particular significance.

In times of war and occupation, everyday objects are transformed into memory artefacts, serving as anchors that stabilise collective narratives and enable communities to process traumatic events. These items are material traces that embody experiences, emotions, and narratives connected to those events (Macdonald, 2013), in this case, the Russo-Ukrainian War and Russia’s occupation of Kherson. Furthermore, artefacts possess discursive and material relevance in the moment of resistance (Johansson, 2017; Lilja & Wasshede, 2016). These material expressions enable the emergence and visibility of alternative communities of belonging by delineating symbolic boundaries between those recognised as members and those positioned outside these collective identities (Johansson et al., 2018, p. 7). The artefacts become important factors in resistance and in mobilising people.

By analysing twenty artefacts from Kherson as material witnesses, this study explores how everyday objects become embedded in the politics of memory in post-occupation societies. It demonstrates how tools used in acts of resistance or in the preservation of cultural identity can transform into powerful carriers of historical meaning. I have grouped the analysed objects into three analytical categories that reflect different dimensions of life under occupation.

Objects of resistance

The first category includes artefacts directly associated with acts of resistance. These objects document actions that challenged the authority or legitimacy of the occupying forces. For example, the scraper brush that residents used to remove Russian propaganda billboards represents an attempt to reclaim the city’s visual space. By physically erasing the occupiers’ messages, people intervened in the semiotic landscape and reaffirmed Kherson’s Ukrainian identity.

These personal objects derive their significance primarily from the stories attached to them and from the people who used them. A striking example is a plastic bucket used by Hryhorii Yanchenko, widely known in Kherson as Uncle Hrysha. On the one hand, the bucket itself is valuable because of the events associated with it: it became a silent witness to the occupation and the everyday practices of resistance that unfolded during this period. I recall recording an interview with Olena Afanasieva, who noted that Uncle Hrysha initially refused to donate the bucket to the museum. He considered it too worn and shabby and even suggested replacing it with a new one. Yet a new bucket would have been merely an ordinary household object, lacking the historical and symbolic value that the original had acquired. It is precisely the traces of use and the memories embedded in the object that transform it into an artefact of cultural heritage.

On the other hand, the significance of the bucket is inseparable from the activities of the person who used it. According to Afanasieva, Uncle Hrysha is known to almost everyone in Kherson and has become a local legend. Since 2014, the elderly wheelchair user has raised funds for the Ukrainian Armed Forces by collecting donations in a transparent bucket in public spaces. This plastic bucket has been immediately recognised by people as intended for the Ukrainian military. During the Russian occupation of Kherson in 2022, he continued this activity despite the considerable risks involved.

Moreover, fundraising was not his only act of resistance. Yanchenko also transformed his daily route into a performative expression of symbolic resistance by playing Ukrainian patriotic songs and the national anthem through a portable speaker. The music, audible across the streets, served as a reminder that Kherson remained part of Ukraine and visibly lifted the spirits of passers-by. On symbolic dates such as his birthday and Ukraine’s Independence Day, Yanchenko wore vyshyvynkas, (embroidered shirts) in national colours, openly displaying Ukrainian cultural symbols in an occupied city where even small expressions of national identity could lead to arrest.

Another artefact that illustrates everyday resistance in occupied Kherson is a self-made Ukrainian flag, assembled from ordinary household materials. Usually, the initiative to hang flags on official buildings, columns, etc. comes from the authorities (Falcó-Gimeno & Kemp, 2025). However, in this case, using a flag is strongly associated with local bottom-up dynamics and resistance. During the first weeks of the occupation, Ukrainian flags were widely visible in the city. However, as repression intensified, displaying national symbols became increasingly dangerous. Russian forces began detaining people for carrying Ukrainian flags or even wearing small yellow-and-blue ribbons. In response, many residents hid their flags to avoid arrest. Yet the absence of official symbols did not mean the disappearance of symbolic resistance. Unable to obtain Ukrainian flags or even blue-and-yellow fabric, residents began improvising new forms of national symbolism from everyday materials. One such improvised flag consisted of a blue medical mask combined with a yellow household cleaning cloth. Although modest in appearance, these small handmade symbols served as quiet yet powerful expressions of protest. Displaying them in public spaces signalled solidarity with Ukraine and offered encouragement to neighbours living under occupation. Under occupation, the flags play a crucial social function – uniting people, “because through ritual use they evoke a shared psychological state of solidarity with the group” (Shanafelt, 2008, p. 13).

The artefacts of this group illustrate what Scott (1990) describes as everyday forms of resistance, subtle actions through which individuals contest power without engaging in open confrontation. In the context of occupation, these micro-practices of resistance have played an important role in maintaining civic solidarity and undermining the occupiers’ symbolic authority.

Objects of survival and adaptation

The second category comprises artefacts related to everyday survival during the occupation. These items document how residents adapted to danger and uncertainty. Although such objects may appear mundane, they provide crucial insight into the lived realities of occupation, experiences that are often absent from official historical narratives focused primarily on military operations or political developments.

One example, presented in the exhibition, is an ordinary plastic basin filled with water that stood next to the desk of Kherson political scientist and local historian Dementii Bilyi throughout the occupation. Bilyi remained in the city during the entire period of Russian control and continued to document the situation in Kherson, writing analytical reports and articles for Ukrainian and international media. At the same time, this work placed him at considerable personal risk. As a public intellectual and civic activist, he was reportedly included on lists of individuals targeted for detention by the occupying authorities. The basin of water placed beside Bilyi’s desk served as a precautionary measure: in the event of a sudden search by Russian security forces, he planned to throw his mobile phone into the water to destroy the information stored on it. This artefact illustrates how survival strategies often relied on the repurposing of ordinary household items whose practical appearance concealed protective intentions. In this context, everyday domestic objects changed their primary functions and acquired additional ones.

War and occupation have redefined not only the meanings of everyday objects but also those of words. Ostap Slyvynsky underscores this in his book “A Ukrainian Dictionary of War”, where “people unconsciously were using other words in an unusual sense”, as according to Yurcaba (2025), “even the simplest word’s meaning can change, transform, and contract during times of immense and intense emotion.”

Another artefact, illustrating the terror and pressure of the Russian militants, is a “clean phone” used by Kherson photographer and artist Mykhailo Rai. In practice, he used two phones. One was his primary device, containing messages, photographs, and the materials he shared online. The second was a “zero” or “clean” phone that contained no personal data, no social media accounts, and no message history. Carrying such a device became a common precaution among pro-Ukrainian residents of the city. Russian soldiers regularly stopped civilians at checkpoints and searched their phones; any suspicious content could lead to detention or interrogation.

These objects of survival and adaptation provide material testimony to the everyday strategies through which residents of Kherson navigated the uncertainties of occupation.

Symbolic and cultural objects

The third category of artefacts comprises items that embody cultural identity and symbolic continuity, highlighting how Kherson residents preserved Ukrainian heritage under occupation. These objects range from traditional cultural items, such as the motanka doll, to personal and everyday symbols of resistance, including a wedding wreath and a hearing aid, demonstrating the centrality of material culture in maintaining identity.

The motanka, “perceived today as one of the national and regional cultural achievements” (Roman, 2022, p. 273), survived in the city’s Department of Education despite the occupying forces removing almost all school property. The survival of the motanka amidst the occupation illustrates how ordinary cultural artefacts acquire heightened significance, functioning as tangible markers of identity and continuity even when larger institutional structures are disrupted.

Cultural identity was similarly maintained through rituals and personal celebrations. One poignant example is a Ukrainian wedding conducted under occupation. In the exhibition, it is represented by the bride’s own wedding wreath. Despite the danger, the couple organised the ceremony, which included Ukrainian songs and traditional customs, symbolising defiance and continuity of cultural life. This wreath and the wedding itself demonstrate how cultural practices and rituals can function as acts of asserting belonging and maintaining social cohesion in conditions of political oppression.

Another symbolically significant object is a hearing aid used by an 82-year-old woman to hear her neighbours singing patriotic songs, such as Oi, u Luzi Chervona Kalyna, during the occupation. Singing became a form of peaceful, public resistance: residents would quietly gather at windows and balconies, creating spontaneous communities of solidarity despite surveillance and repression. The hearing aid thus connects sensory experience to cultural resilience, enabling individuals to participate in collective identity even from home.

The motanka doll, wedding wreath, and hearing aid function as conduits for collective memory, enabling audiences to participate in processes of cultural continuity, shared history, and resistance. In Kherson, symbolic objects became crucial tools for preserving Ukrainian identity, demonstrating that even under occupation, cultural practices and artefacts can sustain a sense of belonging and community.

Thus, the twenty artefacts analysed in this article demonstrate the powerful role that material culture can play in shaping the memory of occupation. These everyday items have been transformed into historical artefacts that document multiple dimensions of the Kherson experience: resistance, adaptation, cultural continuity, and civic solidarity. These artefacts are meaningful not only for their physical presence but also for the stories they carry. Each object is accompanied by narratives detailing its role during the occupation, transforming mundane or personal items into “material storytellers.” More broadly, the analysis illustrates how objects function as mediators between personal memory and public history. Material artefacts provide tangible evidence of experiences that might otherwise remain invisible in official accounts. As such, they play a crucial role in shaping how societies remember periods of conflict and political upheaval. In future research, I plan to develop this topic by conducting interviews with the people who gave these items to the museum, as well as with other survivors of the occupation, to investigate the processes of peaceful, private, and public resistance.

Dr Liudmyla Pidkuimukha is an Associate Professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). From 2022 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen (Germany), where she investigated language ideologies in the context of violence and conflict – and she has been a visiting scholar at the universities of Canada, Germany, and Poland. As a sociolinguist and slavist, her research interests encompass language policy, language ideology, bi- and multilingualism, and cultural and media studies. She is a co-founder of the Network “Vision Ukraine: Education, Language, Migration” and a consultant to the Young Scientists Council at the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. In 2016, she defended her PhD thesis on the language situation in Lviv between the two world wars.

Editorial Credit: Laura Innocenti

In the months leading up to the brief but violent 12-Day War in June 2025, when U.S. and Israeli strikes targeted Iranian nuclear sites, Tehran quietly but steadily crossed critical nuclear thresholds. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that, by May 17, 2025, Iran’s stockpile had reached 408.6 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity. This did not represent a marginal increase but marked a sharp and deliberate acceleration from earlier in the year, leaving the regime only a short step away from weapons-grade capability (Al Jazeera 2025). What makes this surge important is that it unfolded while diplomats attempted to continue negotiations to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions (European Parliamentary Research Service 2025).

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Iran’s expanded operations and deployment of advanced centrifuges at key facilities, such as Natanz and Fordow, were significantly reducing the breakout time required to produce a nuclear weapon (Psaropoulos 2025). Yet the nuclear program formed only one dimension of a broader strategic posture. Tehran had also expanded its regional reach, pairing advances in missile technology with sustained support for partner militias in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Through these efforts, it projected influence across the Middle East with notable consistency. Decades of heavy sanctions, prolonged diplomatic isolation, and intermittent negotiations designed to curb these activities had done little to slow this trajectory prior to the 12-day war (Atlantic Council 2024).

When we look at these trends together, they point to a fundamental question in international security: why has the continuous application of coercive pressure failed to generate lasting strategic restraint within the Iranian leadership? This article proposes a theoretical refinement of how we view coercive diplomacy, contending that failure stems not from a lack of pressure, but from a persistent credibility deficit regarding the target regime’s survival. It suggests a need to integrate insights from comparative authoritarian politics into the study of nuclear decision-making. Classical frameworks tend to treat coercion as a relatively straight forward bargaining interaction between states, emphasizing credibility, signaling, and cost imposition, while rational models often assume that unitary actors will respond to external incentives. However, a growing body of scholarship suggests that foreign policy is frequently filtered through the messy reality of domestic structures and the survival instincts of the ruling elite.

Drawing on the works of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Jessica L. P. Weeks, this article argues that we cannot truly grasp coercive outcomes if we ignore the internal constraints that bind political leaders. By comparing the trajectories of Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Libya, we can see clear and recurring patterns in how regimes react to external pressure. Rather than treating these as isolated events, this article uses them to refine theory by demonstrating that regime survival assurance operates as a non-negotiable condition for effective coercion (Ameli 2026). Stripped to its essentials, the argument is that coercive diplomacy is doomed to fail the moment that a target regime views compliance as a path to its own destruction instead of a path to security.

Beyond the Four Pillars

For decades, coercive diplomacy—or the art of using “sticks” and “carrots” to change an adversary’s behavior without starting a full-scale war—has been the go-to tool for U.S. foreign policy. Classical theory says that this works when four pillars are in place: threats must be credible, demands must be clear, objectives should be limited, and the incentives must be meaningful (Jakobsen 1998, 54). But the Iranian case demonstrates that these four pillars are not enough to hold the weight of existential stakes. Even under intense pressure and substantial incentives, an authoritarian regime will almost always choose resistance if it believes that concessions could trigger elite fragmentation, a palace coup, or a popular uprising.

This represents a critical gap in how we think about coercive diplomacy. To address this gap, a fifth pillar proposes that the target state must be convinced that complying with demands will not result in the overthrow of the ruling elite. Without this assurance, coercive strategies tend to backfire, hardening resistance instead of encouraging compromise. This creates a security dilemma, where sanctions and threats intended to secure international stability instead make the target regime feel so existentially vulnerable that it views nuclearization as its only rational shield. This fifth pillar is rooted in the internal logic of authoritarian governance. Power in such systems is concentrated among a narrow coalition of political leaders, security officials, and military elites. These actors must continuously manage both external threats and internal vulnerabilities. In these highly centralized states, the perception of strength often carries as much weight as material capability. When leaders interpret sanctions and diplomatic pressure as tools designed to weaken them ahead of regime change, they will conclude that resistance offers the safer path to survival.

Comparative Lessons from Iraq, North Korea, and Libya

History provides some brutal reminders of this dynamic. Take Iraq. The 1991 Gulf War demonstrated that coercion can work when the military threat is overwhelming and the goal (getting Iraq out of Kuwait) is narrow (Alterman 2003, 277). But once the war ended, the sanctions program offered no credible guarantee that Saddam Hussein would be allowed to remain in power if he cooperated. Saddam Hussein eventually saw the nuclear inspections as a precursor to his own execution, leading him to choose strategic defiance over transparency and cooperation.

North Korea offers a similar story. The 1994 Agreed Framework briefly paused Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions in exchange for energy aid and a move toward normalization. But as the implementation grew shaky and the North Korean leadership began to doubt their long-term security, they went back to the drawing board. Every diplomatic effort since then has hit the same wall: how to offer a regime security without appearing to reward a dictator (Park 2012, 189-218).

Then there is Libya, the case that likely haunts Tehran the most. In 2003, Muammar Gaddafi agreed to scrap his Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs in exchange for getting back into the world’s good graces. At the time, it looked like a win for diplomacy because the deal was framed as a benefit to the elite (Kerr 2004). But the 2011 intervention that culminated in Gaddafi’s overthrow and death changed the narrative. For the Iranian leadership, the “Libya Model” is not a success story but a warning that giving up your nukes is a one-way ticket to vulnerability.

This fear may be further reinforced by a parallel situation in Ukraine. The Iranian leadership has likely noted that Ukraine, which relinquished its nuclear arsenal under the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, eventually faced a full-scale invasion. This, in turn, has cemented the belief that only a nuclear deterrent, and not international law, guarantees sovereignty. These cases collectively suggest that successful coercive diplomacy is not based merely on effectively applied pressure. Target regimes must also perceive that compliance as strategically safe.

Iran’s Strategic Calculus and the Fragility of Nuclear Diplomacy

Iran offers a clear illustration of how political centralization and deep-seated mistrust can paralyze diplomacy. The Islamic Republic organizes political authority around the Supreme Leader and reinforces it through powerful institutions such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which holds massive sway over the economy and the military (Majidyar 2018). This structure enhances regime resilience against external shocks but creates high costs for the leadership. For the Supreme Leader, the IRGC represents a critical internal audience that views compromise as a threat to its economic and ideological interests. Giving in to Western pressure is a massive political risk that can signal weakness, trigger infighting among the elite, or give local rivals a chance to strike.

The history of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) captures both the potential and fragility of coercive diplomacy. For a time, the agreement appeared to validate the effectiveness of coercive diplomacy. Iran accepted constraints on its nuclear program in exchange for economic reintegration. But the U.S. withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 undermined the credibility of these commitments (Holmes 2025). From Tehran’s perspective, this reversal demonstrated that compliance does not guarantee either reciprocity or long-term stability. This led to a strategic pivot where Iran began cutting its ties to the agreement, ramping up enrichment, and locking out inspectors (Loft and Mills 2025). Iran also doubled down on its regional proxy strategy. While the West sees these groups as a threat to stability, the Iranian regime views them as a forward defense meant to keep a potential war away from Iranian soil (Kam 2021).

Furthermore, while classical bargaining models assume that the target state ultimately desires reintegration into the liberal international order, the emergence of a robust Russia-China-Iran axis suggests that Tehran is no longer seeking a seat at a Western-led table. Instead, it is actively building a counter-hegemonic alternative (Middle East Council 2023). When a target regime successfully pivots its trade and security dependencies toward alternative great-power patrons, the “sticks” of Western diplomacy lose their kinetic energy, and the “carrots” lose their perceived value. This structural shift indicates that the pressure intended to force a choice between regime collapse and compliance has instead catalyzed resilience and decoupling, where the regime finds security not through international law but through systemic realignment.

Beyond the immediate survival instincts of the elite, the Iranian case illustrates a process where decades of coercive pressure forge domestic structures that are fundamentally optimized for defiance. Having invested decades of capital into clandestine procurement networks, the Iranian state has developed a massive bureaucratic apparatus for the main purpose of managing external pressure. A successful diplomatic resolution, then, is not a strategic victory, but an existential threat to the regime’s institutional relevance.

A dimension that sharpens this analysis lies in the temporal credibility of coercive commitments. Much of the literature treats credibility as a function of immediate signaling; that is, whether threats will be carried out or incentives delivered. But in protracted rivalries such as that between Iran and the United States, credibility becomes inherently intertemporal. Regimes do not evaluate offers in a single bargaining moment, but instead assess the durability of commitments across electoral cycles, leadership transitions, and shifting geopolitical alignments. From Tehran’s vantage point, the collapse of the JCPOA was not simply a failed agreement but a point in a longer pattern of strategic volatility. This introduces an inconstancy in time with respect to coercion. Even if current policymakers intend to uphold assurances, target regimes discount those promises if future leaders can easily reverse them later (Fearon 1995, 401; Powell 2006, 169-203). This, in turn, reinforces the logic that irreversible concessions, such as dismantling nuclear infrastructure, are strategically irrational.

This temporal problem also interacts with a deeper structural issue, namely the asymmetry between reversible and irreversible actions in coercive diplomacy. While the United States can re-impose sanctions quickly and withdraw political commitments with relative ease, a nuclear rollback in Iran, particularly at advanced stages of technological development, would likely entail irreversible losses in capability, knowledge, and deterrent potential. This asymmetry creates an imbalance, where the coercing state retains flexibility while the target state bears the long-term risks of compliance. For authoritarian regimes, whose survival depends on maintaining both internal cohesion and external deterrence, this imbalance is especially acute. In Iran’s case, dismantling elements of its nuclear program would not merely signal cooperation, but would also materially constrain its future strategic options in an environment that it perceives as fundamentally uncertain and adversarial. Thus, even well-designed coercive strategies tend to falter when they fail to address this structural asymmetry. A durable solution would require not only credible assurances of regime survival, but mechanisms that more evenly distribute risk over time. This is an exceedingly difficult task, yet one that sits at the heart of why coercive diplomacy so often struggles in a high-stakes proliferation crisis.

Addressing Alternative Explanations

Some analysts may argue that coercive diplomacy has failed in Iran due to poor implementation rather than theoretical limitations. From this perspective, inconsistent signaling, insufficient incentives, or shifting political priorities in the United States explain the breakdown of negotiations. Others may contend that Iran’s ideological orientation makes it uniquely resistant to coercion. While these explanations capture important elements of the problem, they remain incomplete. Implementation failures and ideological factors cannot fully account for the consistent cross-case pattern observed in Iraq, North Korea, and Libya. In each case, regime behavior aligned closely with perceptions of survival risk, regardless of ideological differences or variations in policy execution. This suggests that the core issue lies not only in how coercion is applied, but in how it is perceived by regimes whose primary objective is survival.

A historical parallel in a different setting can be drawn to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The oil embargo imposed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands threatened the stability of the Japanese Empire by cutting off access to critical resources. Although Japan recognized that attacking Pearl Harbor would be a high-risk gamble, its leaders judged that failing to respond to the embargo would likely result in the empire’s collapse within a few years (Pape 2026). Thus, in a similar way to the threat of regime change in Iran, the oil embargo threatened the very survival of the regime in Japan. Withdrawing from China or French Indochina in the hope of lifting the embargo was not considered a viable option for Japan, due to the humiliation and political collapse it would likely cause.

Rethinking the Strategy

The deeper challenge to coercive diplomacy in Iran lies not only in the psychology of regime survival but also in the structure of the global system itself. As great-power competition intensifies, the credibility of U.S.-led coercion erodes when adversaries find alternative sources of political, economic, and military support. Structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz remind us that the international order conditions state behavior more profoundly than bilateral pressure does. States seek security and not merely reassurance in a self-help system (Joyner 2013). For Iran, the emergence of a multi-polar world, anchored by China’s economic leverage and Russia’s willingness to defy Western sanctions, creates a permissive environment for resistance. This underscores that coercive diplomacy today operates not in isolation but within a geopolitical marketplace where assurances and alignments offset deterrent costs.

Iran, unlike smaller authoritarian regimes, possesses enough strategic depth to balance between major powers, bargaining for survival while exploiting systemic fragmentation. This equilibrium dynamic reduces vulnerability, makes coercion less credible, and strengthens the logic of nuclear latency as a hedging strategy. From a theoretical standpoint, understanding coercive failure thus requires a dual-level model that integrates regime survival instincts (domestic level) with systemic incentives for defiance (international level). Diplomacy falters not merely because Tehran fears for its regime, but because the global structure increasingly offers it viable escape routes. Recognizing this intersection marks a crucial step toward more adaptive and theoretically grounded approaches to nonproliferation.

Against this backdrop, the Iranian case underscores the need to rethink coercive diplomacy beyond a narrow focus on pressure and incentives, sticks and carrots. While credible threats remain essential, policymakers must pair them with credible, institutionalized assurances that compliance will not jeopardize regime survival. This does not require abandoning sanctions or deterrence. Rather, it demands recalibrating strategy to align external objectives with internal political realities.

Within such a recalibrated framework, several design principles become important. First, policymakers should link sanctions to small, verifiable milestones. This approach allows both sides to realize tangible benefits while reducing the risks associated with large, irreversible concessions. Second, they must design incentives that can withstand political transitions in Western governments. Mechanisms such as multilateral agreements or institutional guarantees can help mitigate the risk of abrupt policy reversals. Third, consistency is critical. If the policy shifts every four years with the election of a new president and congress in the United States, no adversary will trust the assurance of survival. Finally, communication plays a central role. Signaling through institutional channels that the objective is behavioral change rather than regime change may reduce existential fears that drive resistance. While such assurances are inherently difficult to guarantee, their absence significantly reduces the likelihood of successful coercive diplomacy.

Closing Thoughts

Coercive diplomacy remains a central instrument of international statecraft, particularly in efforts to address nuclear proliferation. The failure to restrain Iran does not reflect a lack of pressure; it reflects a failure to account for the internal logic that governs state behavior. No regime will willingly trade away a strategic capability if it believes that doing so invites its own collapse. Introducing the concept of a fifth pillar representing regime survival assurance helps explain why years of coercion have failed to produce durable restraint. Regimes adjust their behavior when they perceive compliance as safe; they resist when they perceive it as existentially threatening. The central challenge for policymakers lies not in intensifying pressure alone, but in reconciling external security objectives with the internal survival imperatives of target regimes. Without this alignment, coercive strategies will continue to fall short, leaving underlying conflicts unresolved and increasing the likelihood of future confrontation.

These implications reach far beyond the borders of Iran. Without incorporating regime survival into coercive strategy, future nuclear crises are likely to follow similar trajectories of escalation and mistrust. For scholars, they serve as reminders that international security theory is incomplete without the nuance of comparative politics. For policymakers, they illuminate a frustrating paradox: strategies designed to compel behavioral change often convince target regimes that compliance carries greater risk than defiance. Without resolving this tension, coercive diplomacy will continue to fall short, leaving underlying conflicts unresolved and increasing the likelihood of future confrontation.

References

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Martina Sprague holds a PhD in International Relations and is the author of Swedish Volunteers in the Russo-Finnish Winter War, 1939-1940 (McFarland 2010). Her scholarship examines alliance dynamics, strategic decision-making, and the evolving conduct of security cooperation in contemporary statecraft. Drawing on both historical and modern case studies, her work explores how states navigate shifting threat environments, balance national interests with collective defense commitments, and adapt political discourse in times of geopolitical change. Her research contributes to broader debates on security policy, civil-military relations, and the role of alliances in an increasingly multi-polar world.

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Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Through engagements with International Relations, political geography and urban studies, his research has focused on exploring regimes of power, violence and empire from a transnational perspective. He is author of Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024) and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Studies on Security.

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

My research sits at the intersection of a number of different fields and disciplines, namely International Relations (IR), critical security studies and political geography as well as area studies fields focused on South Asia and the Middle East. So, there are a range of current debates that are currently motivating my work and which this work speaks back to. Within IR I have been primarily inspired by postcolonial and decolonial strands of the discipline and these also thread into my contributions to critical security studies and political geography respectively, where I have been inspired by thinking about long histories of police power and regimes of security and their relationships to projects of empire broadly and settler-colonialism in particular, with a strong focus on race-making. I have also been very inspired by engagements with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) in engaging with questions about the global and the international as well as in relation to security, policing and surveillance regimes.

In relation to political geography broadly and that on the Middle East and Palestine in particular, I have also been particularly inspired by ongoing efforts to rethink what we mean by settler-colonial formations and how these connect to but also depart from other imperial and colonial projects past and present. And because much of my work to date has centered extensively on policing, homeland security and counterterrorism in India, thinking about relations between global histories of counterinsurgency vis-à-vis post-Independence India has been particularly fruitful as of late.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The majority of my work has been and remains contemporary in focus. But I believe what has most changed the way I think over the past few years has been my deepening engagement with historical scholarship. This is particularly in relation to how we think about global power and its relations to empire. One thing that has especially impressed me as of late as well is how prescient certain historical thinkers were in their own times and how often such insights have been long buried and forgotten. For instance, the recent recovery of Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, which was first published in 1965, provides an extremely sophisticated account of how Palestine was colonized by Zionist settlers in ways that resonate closely with what became the field of settler colonial studies later on. Yet, Sayegh’s work had until recently not received nearly the degree of engagement it deserved.

Additionally, STS and ANT have profoundly shaped my thinking and played an enormous role in enabling me to frame my first book Fabricating Homeland Security, which was published last year. These two bodies of work have enabled me to think about knowledge production geographically in ways that I simply would not have been capable of otherwise. They bring a toolbox of concepts and ways of thinking that can be deeply counterintuitive and as such, they have enabled me to find new ways to wrestle with complex and contradictory empirical dynamics in very productive and unexpected ways.

Your book presents homeland security as a global rather than purely domestic project. How does this challenge conventional understandings, and what are the broader implications for current security policies and practices?

Yes, one of the things that is most commonly conjured when you hear “homeland security” is the protection and fortressing of domestic and/or specifically urban spaces. And there is something to this no doubt. After all, many of the things that have happened in the name of “homeland security” have been domestic in their geographical remit and spatial extent. After all, things like infrastructures of mass surveillance, border walls, intelligence “fusion centers” in the United States – all things that the US Department of Homeland Security has jurisdiction over and continues to govern are (at least ostensibly) primarily domestic in character.

Yet as I completed the research for the book and began to write it, I repeatedly found that some of the main characters working in the area of homeland security, always seemed to have more expansive ambitions in their crosshairs that spanned much of the world. This can be seen in their incessant comparisons between different forms or national versions of homeland security amongst a number of countries. But it is also apparent in these characters’ more explicit attempts to bring homeland security to new places, such as India as is the case in the book. This matters greatly with respect to policy and practice because it underscores something more fundamental about police power more broadly. The frames of police power and pacification I argue offer some most adept ways to approach homeland security as a site of critical study but also through forms of resistance and popular struggle. Indeed, while the police as an intuition of the state is typically seen as quintessentially domestic, actually-existing forms of police power historically and in the present have always depended on various transnational (and also trans-temporal) connections. These connections and relations have continuously remade how police power practically works in particular places and spaces but also as a force of global change.

How do you define "fabrication" in the context of homeland security? Why did you choose this concept as central to your analysis?

Through my own direct ethnographic engagements with the global homeland security industry, I argue that we can see the ways in which the constituent relations in the making and remaking of homeland security are constituted and how a range of actors and interests are woven together in the service of its global mission. In this way, the book theorizes homeland security as a form of what I call ‘world-making’ through circulations of expertise, equipment and training but also through the production of mythologies.

More specifically, I argue that we need to understand homeland security as what I call ‘fabricated’. This notion borrows heavily from Mark Neocleous’ early and significant critical theorization of police power, which came out in his book The Fabrication of Social Order: a critical theory of police power, first published in 2000. But my notion is a bit different from Mark’s in that it seeks to capture the relational, politically contested and geographic process through which homeland security is continuously made and remade, under three distinct but overlapping senses. First is the literal making of the homeland security state and its surrounding global industries. Second is the making up of “homeland security” as a new category and so-called “model” of governance. This sense relates to the illusory, mythical, and ideological dimensions of fabrication. Third, is the weaving together of the various threads that come to constitute homeland security. And while I argue that it is useful to split up these different aspects of fabrication conceptually, in practice they are typically melded together and often hard to actually separate in meaningful ways. This becomes clear throughout the stories in the book.

Could you elaborate on how homeland security is not exclusive to the "homeland" and how it operates as a world-making project entangled with imperial and colonial histories?

In the context of the book, the main way we see this claim playing out is in relation to the efforts to build a global homeland security industry in the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks and thereby bring homeland security to places like India, where the notion generally had limited obvious resonance or apparent utility to state officials, corporate actors and wider publics. One of the first ways that the book runs into the importance of the entanglements of homeland security with colonial and imperial histories, however, is origin of the term ‘homeland security. I draw attention to the fact that the term “homeland” was not commonly used in the context of the US prior to September 11^th attacks.

This was pointed out by historian Amy Kaplan already in 2003. But as she noted then, homeland was deeply resonant with at least two other settler-colonial projects, namely that of Zionism in Palestine as well as in Apartheid South Africa. Reading Kaplan’s and others’ work alerted me early on to the need to grasp homeland security’s deep and constitutive ideological resonance with settler projects historically and in the present. But as Kaplan also pointed out already at this time, the newfound appreciation for “homeland” in the aftermath of September 11^th attacks was likely to give rise to new forms of state power and justify the US’ violation of other nations’ sovereignty, which as we know is precisely what took place thereafter perhaps most spectacularly in relation to Iraq but also many other places. So, when I say homeland security is not exclusive to the "homeland", this is some of what I mean though the claim is also borne out in a range of other ways that I would not elaborate on further here.

Based on your research, in what ways did Israel emerge as a pioneering force and internationally recognized exemplar in the development and advancement of the global homeland security industry?

Before I answer that I want to qualify that although the book does directly engage with the notion of the State of Israel and Zionism as a “pioneering force” in these realms, this is not a status that I accept as a given or something that works as advertised. Instead, in keeping with the book’s focus on “fabrication” what I am trying to understand is how Israel’s global image as a “homeland security pioneer” was built, when and out of what. Elements of this image were already in place by September 11^th. Yet, show that in the aftermath of the attacks, Israeli officials and their allies in began to argue that they had seen this all coming and had effectively invented something akin to ‘homeland security’ well before the term came into vogue in the context of the global war on terror. Their so-called ‘experience’ fighting Palestinian resistance moments as well as other Arab adversaries in the Middle East was the supposed basis of this claim to being exceptionally ‘experienced’.

And this strategy to position Israel as a pioneer of domestic security preparedness generally worked. During the days and weeks after September 11^th attacks, a range of American state officials and media pundits were repeating claims about Israel’s primacy in counterterrorism as gospel and Israeli officials like sitting prime minister Ariel Sharon were welcomed by US officials, including New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. And in the months and years thereafter, this praise of Israel materialized into policy. American officials gravitated to Israel as a “model” for fighting their counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Israel, they also saw an inspiration for the emergent architecture of domestic surveillance, fortification, and intelligence-sharing. Indeed, Israel has since been credited with developing the all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control that became associated with the moniker “homeland security” well before the term was coined by the Bush administration with the creation of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in November 2002.

However, I argue that this ‘pioneering’ image can be traced all the way back to the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which began in the late 19^th Century. The book chronicles how it developed and matured over time, often in relation to major international controversies concerning the Zionist colonization of Palestine as well as the State of Israel’s violence abroad. But after the war on terror took hold after 2001, Israel’s image as a security model became solidified as a kind of almost unshakable common-sense.

It should also be stressed, however, that Israel’s status as a model of homeland security has also been destabilized since October 7^th 2023, which is something I have also started to write about since the book came out, including in a long-form essay that just came out in the magazine Jewish Currents. Indeed, since October 7^th, a considerable disjuncture has opened up between the still prevalent idea of Israel as a powerhouse in security “innovation” and its operational record of genocide and forever war. Israeli leaders mobilized the killing of Israelis and foreigners on October 7^th to justify their genocide in Gaza under the pretense of protecting Jewish Israelis and recovering hostages. But it has since come to light that the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) deliberately targeted Israeli military bases and kibbutzim on October 7^th, killing IOF personnel and non-combatants under its infamous Hanibal Directive and later admitted to “mistakenly” killing numerous Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Over the past few years, the IOF have proven themselves all-too capable of aerial bombardment, mass starvation and countless other atrocities. Yet, the IOF have been unable to successfully execute their ostensible goal of eliminating Hamas from Gaza. They have also repeatedly shown themselves to be much less capable of strategic achievements in ground combat. This has significantly undermined their prior ‘pioneering’ reputation.

What are some of the key differences and tensions you found between the Israeli homeland security model and its attempted adoption or adaptation in India?

The most obvious tensions relate to differences in perceptions and practices of counterterrorism between India and the State of Israel, which have long been referenced by scholars of the bilateral relations between these two countries as well as a range of mainstream journalists and policy commentators. And at first glance, these appear fairly straightforward in terms of where they might stem from. India and Palestine/Israel are in many indisputable ways vastly different, for instance in terms of size and scale and religious, ethnic, and linguistic makeup or any other number of things. There are also significant differences in terms of as well as material conditions between India and Palestine/Israel related to levels of wealth as well as that of industrialization.

But India and Palestine/Israel also have some very significant things in common as well, which reflect their common and connected histories of British empire. These histories have profoundly shaped structures of policing, warfare and legal regimes in both contexts. These regimes have also resulted in the presence of large disenfranchised and displaced Muslim and Indigenous populations, which though not equivalent, do have clear parallels and overlaps. So, although the book grapples with a range of difference, including political, geographic, ethnic, etc. and suggests that these differences matter, ultimately it argues that the significant tensions and impasses faced in encounters between Indians and Israelis in rolling out the project of homeland security in India are not reducible to these differences alone.

Indeed, I argue that although India is indeed different from Palestine/Israel in all kinds of ways, this does not in and of itself tell us much about why so many Israeli security officials found themselves out of their depth in India. After all, as I spell out in the book, negotiating various differences between Palestine/Israel and various other places was nothing unusual, according to my interlocutors from Israel’s homeland security industry that the book features. Many saw flexibility as a definitive aspect of their work across diverse contexts. But as many explained India proved unusually challenging as a place to work. I argue in the book that what proved crucial in this regard, was Indians’ unwillingness to fully capitulate to working on the terms that Israelis wished, namely where Israelis were the (supposed) all-knowing experts and the Indians the recipients of their expertise and technologies. Thus, in chapter 5 of the book, I argue that greater attention to difference is necessary, specifically in order to recover the ways that different and indeed incommensurable social orders endure alongside hegemonic projects, like that of homeland security.

How do domestic policing practices and security technologies circulate and multiply across international borders, contributing to the evolving formation of homeland security worldwide?

This happens in a range of diverse and complex ways that the book only covers a part of but in answering this question I’ll focus on those.

First of all, it should be said that in general, though more overtly at moments of political crisis where politicians and other state actors are under significant public pressure, many domestic agencies will look beyond their borders for various ‘solutions’ to develop responses to these events. The book talks about this dynamic through the terms of the ‘politics of response’. Such was the case in the wake of the September 11^th attacks as it was in relation to the November 26^th 2008 Mumbai attacks, often known as ‘India’s 9/11’or simply as 26/11. It was out of this dynamic I argue in the book that the very notion of homeland security as well as its associated policies, practices and technologies emerged out of. And a similar dynamic took place after 26/11, when Indian authorities went looking for so-called ‘Israeli solutions’ to the threat of terrorist violence.

Second, and closely relatedly, because of the development of a sprawling multi-billion-dollar political economy working under the banner of ‘homeland security’ as well as the development of a vast private- and public-sector industries developed to supply it with expertise, weapons and other technologies, there is a constant churn of all things ‘homeland security’ across borders now all the time. The book focuses on how such industry events like policy conferences and trade shows work to showcase such ‘solutions’ and market them to would-be clients both in the state as well as private industry. The actors involved in this production and trade work hard to keep these products and services in circulation and to do so engage in significant marketing and lobbying efforts to try and ensure that demand stays as high as possible. And in the wake of events like bombings of public spaces, which in turn give rise to questions about states’ unwillingness and/or incapacity to protect ordinary people, you can reliably expect these self-proclaimed ‘experts’ to rush onto the scene and tell everyone who will listen how things could have been different if only somewhat had bought whatever it is they are selling. By excavating these events in depth, the book also shows how the ‘politics of response’ does not always begin merely after these moments but often is in-built into these events themselves (as was the case with 26/11). And by tracing such events’ aftermaths and repercussions, I further show how this multiplication and circulation can endure long after, albeit sometimes with considerable impasses and limitations.

What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?

Follow your instincts. Sometimes it can be hard to tell if you are really onto something or not. This is especially the case for younger scholars where ‘imposture syndrome’ often looms large. But in my experience at least, staying with my instincts has proven fruitful even though this can be trying at times. One example that comes to mind for me is being uncomfortable with the prevailing representation of Palestine as a kind of ‘laboratory’ for real-world military- and police ‘experimentation’, an issue I first took up in an article that came out in 2018. This representation has long held a lot of currency both in policy circles as well as the critical literatures on the ongoing settler colonization of Palestine that I engage with, including some very formidable scholars and thinkers that have inspired my own work. But for me, following my impulse to trouble or at least unsettle the term’s usage has proven fruitful and inspired some others as well I believe to develop this line of critique further. But at various points I doubted whether my commitment to this critique actually made sense or would be fruitful in thinking about new ways to grapple with contemporary empire and its surrounding industries.

At the same time, I want to emphasize that on such journeys what you are holding onto and following can (and will) change. These things need to and should change as you develop as a scholar.  But in my own experience I have found repeatedly that an initial hunch, something that nags at you and would not go away has been productive to stick with and not brush aside. The book I think reflects that experience for me and was a fraught and at times agonizing thing to write. It also took more than a decade to do. But I am glad I managed to see it through to fruition and hopefully others will gain something from the account of that journey through its pages.

In a 2024 article, Navigating New Realities: Central Asia’s Role in Contemporary Geopolitics, my co-authors and I argued that the Central Asia was experiencing a structural change. Driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine and the growing ambitions of China, we contended that the region's states were no longer objects of influence but were taking on a more active role in international politics. Going back to this point at the beginning of 2026, the record of experience has not only ascertained it; it has exceeded it. The speed, complexity, and multi-dimensionality of the transformation of Central Asia requires a significantly enhanced analytical structure; one that goes beyond the Russia-China dichotomy, takes into account the institutional inertia of the region, and takes seriously the material interests that have rendered Central Asia essential to virtually each of the major powers on the planet.

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The argument in this article is that Central Asia has now passed a qualitative threshold. It is no longer merely a region whose importance is explained by the interest of external powers, but one which is increasingly developing its own interests and pathway in international politics. This change can be traced in five areas that are closely interconnected, including the maturation of intra-regional collaboration; the advent of critical minerals as a new geopolitical battlefield; the proliferation of external partners and diplomatic modalities; the internal institutionalization of collective agency; and the structural constraints which nonetheless condition the autonomy of the region.. 

Contested Space to Cooperative Community

The most notable phenomenon since we wrote in 2024 is the unification of an indigenous Central Asian regionalism. During the majority of the post-Soviet era, cooperation between Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan was intermittent, externally motivated and structurally weak. In 2005, the Central Asian Cooperation Organization was liquidated as Russia incorporated it into the Eurasian Economic Community – an event that President Putin called a favourable one, the greatest birthday gift he had ever gotten among his peers (Crossroads Central Asia, 2025). The symbolic inferiority in that commentary reflected a structural fact: Central Asian regionalism was in the mercy of Moscow. 

That fact has radically shifted. A regional security structure was approved by the Seventh Consultative Meeting of Heads of State of Central Asia, which took place in Tashkent in November 2025, establishing a permanent Secretariat, and (possibly the most symbolically loaded decision made at the meeting) formally admitted Azerbaijan as a full participant, effectively turning the C5 into a C6 format (The Diplomat, 2025). The President of Uzbekistan, Mirziyoyev, described the inclusion of Azerbaijan as the reason why the voice of Central Asia in the global community would become even greater, whilst the President of Kazakhstan, Tokayev, referred to it as a historic decision (The Diplomat, 2025). The logic is strategic. By expanding its institutional boundaries to the Western coast of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia forms a continuous geopolitical space stretching from the Pamirs to the Caucasus. This connected and continuous “Middle Corridor” intensifies the region's leverage over Eurasian transit. 

The settlement of the most knotty territorial issues of the region was also important. On 31 March 2025, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed a treaty that finally demarcates their almost 1,000-kilometre shared boundary, the longest-running interstate dispute in Central Asia, after the trilateral Khujand agreements of March 2025 resolved boundary issues between Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan (East Asia Forum, 2025). These deals, which are being celebrated as a landmark in the geopolitics of Central Asia, eliminate a structural barrier to regional collaboration that has long existed, and are an indication of a qualitative change in the political intent of regional leaders to take charge of their own lives without outside mediation (East Asia Forum, 2025). A "Catalogue of Security Risks in Central Asia and Measures to Prevent them in 2026-2028" codified collective responses to non-traditional threats, such as climate-related resource shortages, cyber warfare, as well as extremist spillover from Afghanistan (The Diplomat, 2025). It is not a language of the states that think of themselves as subjects of great power politics. It is the language of a fledgling security community. 

The institutional picture is supported by survey data. In both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, more than 70 percent of the respondents now hold positive attitudes about the enhanced regional connections – a very impressive result considering bilateral relations were often very tense during the early post-independence years (PONARS Eurasia, 2025). Moreover, the 2024 Astana Summit’s agreed roadmap for 2025-2027 regional development exemplified a common long-term purpose that would have been inconceivable a decade earlier (PONARS Eurasia, 2025).

The New Geopolitical Commodity and Critical Minerals

Perhaps, the most important emerging aspect of Central Asian relevance pertains to an issue largely absent in academic literature, until recently: critical minerals and rare earth elements. Whilst hydrocarbons defined Central Asia’s strategic importance during the first post-independence decade, China’s Belt and Road Initiative brought transport connectivity to the forefront during the 2010s. Now, subsoil reserves of lithium, tungsten, cobalt, rare earths, and uranium are re-defining the relationships of the major powers in the region. 

The Central Asian five republics generate about half of all the uranium in the world and contain large deposits of minerals needed in the green energy transformation and high-tech defence systems (Standish 2025). President Tokayev of Kazakhstan has called rare earths the new oil, and President Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan has announced a 76-project initiative in 28 of the 2025-2028 critical minerals (Carnegie Endowment, 2025; TRENDS Research, 2025). In 2014, Kazakhstan endorsed a Comprehensive Plan for the Development of the Rare and Rare Earth Metals Industry 2024-2028, aiming to grow investment and volume of production by 40 percent (TRENDS Research, 2025). 

These domestic policy decisions are being taken with the complete understanding of their geopolitical valence. The first presidential-level critical minerals summit in the United States, November 2025 C5+1 in Washington, was expressly structured around the critical minerals agenda, with all five Central Asian presidents meeting with President Trump (East Asia Forum, 2025). The summit had notable bilateral results: Kazakhstan signed a 1.1 billion tungsten mining agreement with the U.S. based Cove Kaz Capital, with the Kazakh state corporation Tau-Ken Samruk keeping a 30 per cent stake. The U.S. CEO of the company admitted that Trump and Commerce Secretary Lutnick had negotiated the deal specifically to prevent Chinese companies from developing the deposit (Standish, 2025). Moreover, a Memorandum of Understanding on critical minerals and rare earths was signed between Kazakhstan and U.S, underscoring Kazakhstan’s reserves and production capacity for nearly half of the 54 minerals that the U.S. geological survey has declared as being important to national security (ECFR, 2026). 

China, as usual, was quick to retaliate. A few days after the Washington summit, the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, went on a three-country tour of Central Asia, reasserting Beijing as the biggest trade partner in the region (Standish, 2025). The second C5+China summit was in Astana in June 2025, which had already delivered the Treaty on Eternal Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation, as well as trade, green mining of rare earths, and scholarships initiatives (PONARS Eurasia, 2025). China’s involvement with Central Asian states differentiates by country: in Kyrgyzstan, it has been centred on extraction, with an MOU between Presidents Japarov and Xi in February 2025 targeting lithium, cobalt and rare earths. Meanwhile, in Tajikistan, engagement has shifted towards processing capacity, including support for its first major iron ore enrichment plant, constructed in April 2025 (TRENDS Research, 2025). 

What this competition game has shown is that Central Asia has successfully armed its mineral endowment, not in the sense of a weaponry, but as a source of leverage in a number of great power relationships. The leaders in the region know that structural rivalry between Washington and Beijing- notably, vital supply chains- will continue irrespective of the temporary diplomatic ups and downs. The incorporation of Central Asia to midstream processing and regional value chains is not a short term diplomatic issue but one of long term sustainability, as one Kazakh analyst opined before the Washington summit (Kazinform, 2025). The difficulty, as analysts at Carnegie Endowment have warned, is to see that this mineral wealth is a source of actual development and not increased commodity dependency. To ensure this, Central Asian states should increase processing capacity, develop cross-border value chains, and demand value-adding partnerships that do not merely strip it of its resources (Carnegie Endowment, 2025). 

Multiplication of External Partners

The idea of Central Asia emerging out of the Russia-China dichotomy into a more diversified form of external relations was one of the keystones of our 2024 article. This direction is confirmed by the events of 2025 at an empirical density that we could not have predicted. 

High level C5+1 bilateral summits reached a historic peak in 2025. Initially pioneered by Japan in 2004, this framework has since been adopted by other great powers, with the EU (April), the US (November), and Russia (October) all convening summits throughout the year. In April 2025, the EU hosted the first Central Asia-EU summit on a presidential level in Samarkand, declaring investments of up to 12 billion euros in the framework of Global Gateway, with special focus on energy, infrastructure, and the Middle Corridor- effectively, a new strategic partnership (ECFR, 2026). The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route has already increased its fees twofold within the span of two years and is estimated to deal with up to 10 million tons per year (Kazinform, 2025) – an impressive logistical success that demonstrates the long-lasting investment by various external powers and the Central Asian nations themselves. 

Turkey and India have also become significant regional players. Turkey’s linguistic and cultural connections with the predominantly Turkic countries of Central Asia have offered a natural basis of economic interaction. Indeed, Ankara has intensified its investment in Middle Corridor infrastructures, especially since Azerbaijan is a major transit country (Soufan Center, 2025). Central Asia’s emergence as a site for strategic diversification is being further accelerated by the involvement of middle powers- most notably India, who feels it has to lessen its reliance on Chinese-dominated mineral supply chains. The B5+1 forum, which was initiated by the United States in 2024 as a business version of the diplomatic C5+1, is another institutional layer at which foreign entities want to institutionalize their presence with Central Asia countries (Clingendael, 2025). 

Russia is still a major player, with its trade with the Central Asian block reaching over $45 billion last year (Soufan Center, 2025). The conditions of the Russian involvement, however, have radically changed. In October 2025, Putin announced the need to strengthen trade and infrastructure relationships, resulting in a Joint Action Plan for 2025-2027  (Aktaş 2025). Nevertheless, this bilateral cooperation came against a backdrop of escalating tension regarding Russian treatment of Central Asian migrant workers; Russian authorities are accused of engaging in mass deportations and detentions, in an environment of increasing public Islamophobia (Soufan Center, 2025). These trends are eroding the, once strong, social and cultural links supporting Russian influence in Central Asia, in a manner that cannot be easily reversed in any concerted action plan. The growing economic dependence of Russia on China, has, counter-intuitively, seen Moscow become more accommodative of the growing influence of Beijing in Central Asia, weakening its own relative position even more (Crossroads Central Asia, 2025). 

Agency Without Alignment: Multi-vector Diplomacy Logic

Underlining these developments is the conscious and more masterful practice of what the governments of Central Asia refer to as multi-vector foreign policy. This is not a new concept: initially developed in Kazakhstan in the early years of independence, the practices are more advanced and the institutional bases stronger. The main reasoning is simple: by having diversified relationships with great and middle powers, Central Asian states become less dependent on a particular patron, increasing their bargaining power to maintain the sovereign independence that the people of the post-colonial world cherish so deeply. 

In practice, this has meant simultaneously engaging Russia within CIS and CSTO frameworks, deepening trade ties with China under the Belt and Road Initiative, pursuing EU connectivity agreements, and courting Gulf capital and Turkish institutional partnerships. The result is a layered web of interdependencies that individual powers find difficult to unravel unilaterally, affording Central Asian governments a degree of sovereign autonomy that earlier, more mono-directional alignments did not permit. Figures like President Tokayev, for example, are now attuned geopolitical analysts, practicing fundamentally different statecraft when we compare with the prior decades of reactive hedging (East Asia Forum, 2026).  Trump’s message at the Washington summit- that the leaders of Central Asia no longer needed to isolate themselves from Russia or even make a commitment to democratic reforms- was a shift in U.S. posture; one that actually simplifies the diplomatic arithmetic of the region as it deprives the region of the conditions which had hitherto made engagement with the West hard (East Asia Forum, 2026). 

This dynamic can be elucidated with the help of theoretical literature on small state agency and asymmetric bargaining. The idea of ‘great games, local rules’ by Cooley was significant in that the states of Central Asia had learned how to play major powers off against each other. Yet, that framing still imagined agency in reactive terms. This is more proactive in 2025-2026, exemplifying states with agendas, institutionalizing regional structures, and mobilizing their resource endowments in a strategic, instead of merely responsive, way. The difference is analytic. It is the distinction between one area which enjoys immense power rivalry and another area which proactively frames the conditions of its operation with several great powers at once.

The bargaining power of Central Asia is significantly magnified by the adoption of combined positions in C5+1 formats, i.e. the involvement of all five states as one negotiating bloc that includes the EU, China, Russia, the United States, and others. The formation of a permanent Secretariat of the Consultative Meetings of Central Asian Heads of State and the adoption of the Central Asia 2040 Concept gives reason to believe that the region is gaining the institutional framework to ensure that collective agency will be maintained over the course of political cycles and changes in leadership (PONARS Eurasia, 2025). 

Formal Restrictions and the Bounds of Change

Intellectual honesty demands recognition of the structural limitations conditioning the agency of Central Asia, and which do not allow for any simple story of triumphant regionalism. The geographical isolation that has traditionally been considered as a drawback is a root limitation. The Middle Corridor, which is hailed as the alternative to Russian transit routes, entails multi-modal travel through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, the rest of Turkey, and Europe. Although cargo volumes are also increasing, the route is both more costly and unreliable than the Northern Corridor via Russia when the latter is fully operational (Eldem 2022). The construction of the infrastructure and logistical potential to transform the Middle Corridor into a truly competitive one should be a decades-long process, not years-long one. 

Primary commodities, including oil and gas, cotton, minerals, fruit and vegetables, continue to dominate Central Asia’s economic base, although there has been long-standing policy talk of diversification (East Asia Forum, 2025). In its October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook, the IMF forecasted that Central Asia and the Caucasus regions will experience real GDP growth of 5.6 percent and the poorest states in the region, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, would grow at 8.0 and 7.5 percent respectively, with energy exporters, such as Turkmenistan, growing at a slower pace of 2.3 percent (East Asia Forum, 2025). These divergent paths represent structural heterogeneity which makes it difficult to take collective action and, instead, provides varying incentive structures to engage external partners. 

Water is a source of tension that cannot be addressed completely by the border demarcation. The unresolved conflicts between upstream and downstream states on river flows and irrigation rights will become even more acute as the temperatures increase and the glaciers melt away. The security catalogue of the Consultative Meeting 2026-2028 recognizes climate-related scarcity of resources as a threat, yet the political economy of water management is hotly debated and not susceptible to easy institutional solutions (The Diplomat, 2025). 

The governance aspect is also worthy of open evaluation. Although the Central Asian states have shown a high level of strategic competence in their foreign policy, domestic politics remains highly centralized, characterised by little political competition and limited civil societies. This creates difficulties with its Western engagement. The European Union and the United States, for instance, have linked deeper trade access and investment guarantees to measurable progress on rule of law, anti-corruption frameworks, and civil liberties — conditions that Central Asian governments tend to regard as external interference rather than constructive conditionality. This tension does not preclude engagement, but it does set a ceiling on its depth and shape its political costs for both sides. The elimination of democratic conditionality for productive U.S.-Central Asia relations by the Trump administration might make short-term diplomacy easier, but fails to answer the long-term question of whether multi-vector diplomacy by the elites can be maintained in the face of societal pressures. The post-colonial mood – which our 2024 article had observed had been increasing – cuts in several different directions: anti-Russian cultural hegemony, anti-Chinese economic hegemony, and, in certain aspects, anti-perceived Western paternalism. 

The 2025 $6-billion construction of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway exemplifies the opportunities and frictions of Chinese involvement (Standish 2025). Anti-Chinese feeling in Kyrgyzstan has been a notable feature, with labour conflicts between the local and Chinese workers pointing to the social tension which can be created when massive investment in infrastructure is seen to be importing labour, rather than creating local capacity (Standish 2025). The social imperative of equitable development does not necessarily coincide with the strategic imperative of connectivity. While Beijing prioritises the speed and quality of delivery that comes from deploying its own contractors and workforce, host communities measure the value of such projects by the jobs, transfer of skills, and local procurement they generate. When expectations remain unfulfilled, even regionally transformative infrastructure projects can deepen local grievances rather than resolve them, resulting in a legitimacy deficit that poses challenges for both governments and investors.

Theorizing Central Asia's New Role 

The current vocabulary of International Relations (namely, of buffer states, secondary power, objects of great power competition, rentier states) does not explain what we are witnessing. A more effective model is regional actorness: the ability of a geographically delimited set of states to, not just react, but influence the international environment (Crossroads Central Asia, 2025). 

The coexistence of structural opportunity and political will is what makes the present moment special. Structural opportunity characterises this sincerely multipolar outer world where no one power can dictate to the region; ongoing war in Ukraine, which keeps Russia distracted and economically constrained; necessity by China of the Middle Corridor as an alternative passageway; the fact that the region is endowed with extraordinary mineral reserves at just the same time that those resources have become indispensable geopolitically and the urgent need of Western economies to diversify their critical mineral supply chains away from single-source dependency. Political will, in turn, is embodied in a new generation of leaders, especially in Astana and Tashkent, who have internalised the logic of collective agency, and have invested in the institutional infrastructure of collective agency, including the C5+1 format, and the Central Asia summits, to maintain it. 

The interplay of these forces does not assure an easy ride. The existent structural constraints, the high level of internal heterogeneity of the region, and the tremendous leverage of the great powers are real. But the crossing point that has been made is not in vain. Central Asia is no longer a field of rivalry of the strong states; it is a region where states establish the conditions of rivalry. The idea of Central Asia as a place of creation and not a geopolitical confrontation, formulated by President Tokayev during the first China-Central Asia summit, was more than a diplomatic rhetoric. It was a political declaration that developments in 2025 – the institutionalisation of the China-Central Asia mechanism, the conclusion of the Russia-Central Asia Joint Action Plan and the aggressive posture of the region at multilateral forums- are all being gradually implemented. This change is open to a two-fold interpretation: analytically, it can be evaluated as a structural change in the regional balance of agency; personally, to scholars and policy-makers, it has a more profound echo, as it signifies the materialisation of visions which had been central to an entire generation of post-independence statecraft. Scholars and policymakers currently impacting the foreign policy of Central Asia were raised in states that were defined by others. The desire to self-definition, not to be, as one of the regional analysts put it, a static thing, but to have a certain negotiating power and manoeuvre is no longer a mere desire (Makocki and Popescu 2016). It is, more and more, a geopolitical fact. 

References

Aktaş, Alperen. 2025. “Putin Calls for Deeper Russia-Central Asia Integration at Dushanbe Summit.” Anadolu Agency, October 9. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/putin-calls-for-deeper-russia-central-asia-integration-at-dushanbe-summit/3713017

Cooley, Alexander. (2012). Great Games, Local Rules. Oxford University Press. 

Drost, Niels.Cretti, Giulia. Van Giersbergen, Babette. 2025. “Central Asia Emerging from the Shadows: The Geopolitics of Central Asia”. Netherlands Institute of International Relations. https://www.clingendael.org/pub/2025/central-asia-emerging-from-the-shadows/ 

Dzhuraev, Shairbek. 2025. “Central Asia in a Shifting Geopolitical Landscape”. Crossroads Central Asia (2025). https://crossroads-ca.org/central-asia-in-a-shifting-geopolitical-landscape/ 

Eldem, Tuba. 2022. “Russia's War on Ukraine and the Rise of the Middle Corridor as a Third Vector of Eurasian Connectivity”. German Institute for International and Security Affairs. https://www.swp-berlin.org/publications/products/comments/2022C54_RussiaWarUkraine_MiddleCorridor.pdf

Grishin, Vadim. 2025. “Central Asia in Transition: New Regionalism, Geopolitical Realignment, and the Post-Carbon Future”. PONARS Eurasia. https://www.ponarseurasia.org/central-asia-in-transition-new-regionalism-geopolitical-realignme nt-and-the-post-carbon-future/

Kardas, Szymon. 2026. “The Green Great Game: Crafting an EU–Central Asia Energy Alliance”.European Council on Foreign Relations. https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-green-great-game-crafting-aneu-central-asia-energy-alliance/

Kushkumbayev, Sanat. Nuriddenova, Aizada. 2025. “From Dialogue to Agency: Central Asia's Strategic Transformation?”. The Diplomat, November 25 https://thediplomat.com/2025/11/from-dialogue-to-agency-central-asias-strategic-transformation

Makocki, Michal. and Popescu, Nicu. 2016. “China and Russia: An Eastern Partnership in the Making?”European Union Institute for Security Studies. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/chaillot-papers/china-and-russia-eastern-partnership-making

Meirkhanova, Aruzhan. 2025. “Can Central Asia Secure Growth With Rising Critical Minerals Investments? Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/02/central-asia-crm-offers

Nourzhanov, Kirill. 2026. “Central Asia Enters 2026 with Cautious Optimism”. East Asia Forum https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/02/17/central-asia-enters-2026-with-cautious-optimism/ 

Pomfret, Richard .2025. “Central Asia Balances Growth and Great Powers”. East Asia Forum https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/12/31/central-asia-balances-growth-and-great-powers/ 

Sakenova, Saniya. 2023. “President Tokayev Outlines Priorities for Cooperation at China-Central Asia Summit, Signs Xian Declaration”. The Astana Times, 19 May. https://astanatimes.com/2023/05/president-tokayev-outlines-priorities-for-cooperation-at-china-c entral-asia-summit-signs-xian-declaration/ 

Sharifli, Yunis. 2025. “Differentiated Engagement: China's Adaptive Strategy for Critical Minerals in Central Asia.” Trends Research & Advisory. https://trendsresearch.org/insight/differentiated-engagement-chinas-adaptive-strategy-for-critical-minerals-in-central-asia/?srsltid=AfmBOopXhD9oiFejTfW2GKqJDg71PlipUs7NSXWX263Fos kQ1WCUK5It

Soufan Center. 2025. “Building Beyond the Great Powers: The New Geopolitics of Central Asia”. https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-october-15/ 

Standish, Reid. 2025. “China Looks to Shore up Influence in Central Asia After US Minerals Diplomacy.” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, November 21, 2025. https://www.rferl.org/a/china-central-asia-wang-yi-diplomacy-minerals-mining-kyrgyzstan-debt/33597375.html

Supyaldiyarov, I., Supyaldiyarova, D., and Aliyeva, S. 2024. “Navigating New Realities: Central Asia's Role in Contemporary Geopolitics”. Memlekettik Basqaru zhane Memlekettik Qyzmet, 2(89), 126–135. doi.10.52123/1994-2370-2024-1237

Zhanibekov, Yerzhan. 2025. “Central Asia's Rare Earth Opportunity: The C5+1 Summit and the Future of Regional Economic Diplomacy”. Kazinform International news Agency https://qazinform.com/news/central-asias-rare-earth-opportunity-the-c51-summit-and-the-future of-regional-economic-diplomacy-181915

Islam Supyaldiyarov is Director of the Central Asian Research Center and Research & Internationalisation Coordinator at the School of Social Sciences, Business and Law, SDU University. He is also a member of the Academic Council at the “International Relations” Research Center under the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan. He is a Senior Lecturer at SDU University and a PhD candidate at L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University. His research focuses on Central Asian geopolitics, great power competition, and China–Russia dynamics in the region.

Editorial Credit: Sebastian Boyd

Contemporary debates on Indo-Pacific security often begin with an implicit assumption: that credible deterrence necessitates a formal alliance structure—either a bilateral one or collective defense system like NATO. In Northeast Asia, such an assumption is translated into a question of whether Japan and South Korea could effectively deter regional spoilers even without a mutual defense treaty. Yet the historical experience illustrates that this question might be misplaced. Deterrence has not always been dependent on legal commitments. On some occasions, it has emerged through political alignment, operational coordination, and repeated interaction during crisis situations.

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The evolving relationship between Britain and France in the decade prior to WWI offers a particularly meaningful example. The First Moroccan Crisis and the Agadir Crisis tested the durability of the Entente Cordiale—later evolved into the Triple Entente in 1907—which was quite different from a formal alliance. Germany, under Wilhelm II, attempted to exploit such ambiguity. Nevertheless, the result was the opposite. Germany’s coercive diplomacy transformed a limited diplomatic understanding into a strategically credible Entente. The end result was one form of deterrence that altered Germany’s strategic calculation without the existence of a binding treaty.

Originally, the Entente Cordiale was not designed as a military pact. Instead, its primary goal was to resolve long-standing colonial disputes in Africa—evidenced by numerous events including the Fashoda Incident. However, Germany perceived this arrangement as a potential step towards encirclement and tried to disrupt it before it could deepen. The First Moroccan Crisis was triggered by Wilhelm II’s visit to Tangier in 1905, where he openly challenged France’s influence in Morocco and called for an international conference. Berlin’s objective was clear: to diplomatically isolate France and to examine whether Britain would maintain neutrality on issues that were considered peripheral colonial matters.

Germany’s strategy was grounded on an important assumption—that Britain, traditionally cautious of intervening in continental affairs, could prioritize strategic flexibility over commitment. Yet this assumption turned out to be profoundly wrong. Germany failed to isolate France at the Algeciras Conference. Alongside other great powers, Britain generally supported a framework that largely preserved French influence. More importantly, this crisis changed Britain’s perception of Germany.

However, the most important consequence unfolded beneath the official diplomacy. After the crisis, Britain and France initiated a series of military staff talks, which prepared the foundation of operational coordination. In these talks, the potential deployment of the British Expeditionary Force to the European continent in the event of war, as well as a division of naval responsibilities—Britain focusing on the North Sea and the English Channel while France concentrating on the Mediterranean—were discussed. Neither of these measures was codified as a treaty. Yet they created practical expectations for cooperation, reduced uncertainty during crisis situations, and incrementally aligned strategic planning.

The 1911 Agadir Crisis reinforced this transformation. Germany’s decision to dispatch its gunboat Panther to Agadir was intended to extract concessions and signal German resolve. On the contrary, it triggered a stronger British reaction—the Mansion House Speech made clear that Britain would oppose any attempts to coercively alter the preexisting balance of power. The political signal was unmistakable: Germany’s confrontation with France would entail British involvement even in the absence of a formal defense treaty.

By this point, Germany faced a fundamentally different strategic environment—that pressure towards France no longer remained a bilateral affair between Germany and France. The Anglo-French relationship acquired deterrence without legal codification. Germany’s misjudgment lay in its misunderstanding of ambiguity; Berlin interpreted the absence of a treaty as weakness and fragmentation. However, in reality, the combination of political alignment, operational coordination, and ‘trustworthy’ commitment—albeit not lucidly defined—created strategic uncertainty, further complicating Germany’s decision-making. Deterrence, in this case, was forged not on legal obligation but on expected behavior under crisis.

These historical experiences offer invaluable insight into contemporary Northeast Asia. Yet it is worth underscoring one structural differentiation: unlike pre-1914 Europe, Northeast Asia is not a system of independent states pursuing alignment. Instead, it is anchored by a US-centric alliance structure—and is not composed of loosely aligned actors. Japan and South Korea are formal treaty allies of the United States firmly embedded within a hub-and-spoke system. Nonetheless, these distinctions do not nullify the logic of the Entente that was demonstrated during the Moroccan Crisis; rather, they transform its function. In today’s Northeast Asia, the Entente does not replace formal alliance. Instead, it guarantees that pre-existing parallel bilateral alliances do not fragment during crisis—especially when US military power is thinned out across multiple theaters.

These distinctions become especially important in an evolving regional threat environment. China’s military aggrandizement, North Korea’s advancing nuclear and missile capacity, and deepening Russian-North Korean cooperation—thanks to Pyongyang’s decision to dispatch its troops to the European front—are collectively generating strategic pressure in the region. Although these three countries have not formed a formal alliance similar to the pre-1914 Triple Alliance, their growing coordination is undoubtedly presenting multifaceted challenges to the existing regional security structure.

Under these conditions, the central risk hinges on the possibility of fragmentation within the existing alliance system. In a dual contingency scenario—where China embarks on an all-out war against Taiwan while North Korea takes provocative activities on the Korean Peninsula simultaneously—there is a high chance that Japan would concentrate on maritime operations and Taiwan-related missions, South Korea would prioritize the defense of the Korean Peninsula, and the United States would be forced to distribute its forces across both theaters. Without prior consultation, these divisions risk incurring security vacuums, delays, and misaligned responses that could be exploited by adversaries.

Recent developments illustrate movements in remedying this problem. For example, the 2023 Camp David trilateral summit has prepared the foundation for trilateral consultation, committing the United States, Japan, and South Korea to coordination on joint responses to regional challenges. Real-time missile warning data sharing and expanded joint exercises have started to transform political commitment into operational practice. Nonetheless, these measures remain insufficient; deterrence depends not on mere alignment, but on the expectation that coordination would function rapidly and effectively under crisis conditions.

To address these challenges, and to prevent alliance fragmentation during regional contingencies, the United States, Japan, and South Korea should move towards operational integration that goes beyond symbolic cooperation. To that end, the following five measures are advisable.

First, a standing trilateral crisis coordination mechanism—that connects the US Indo-Pacific Command, Japan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff—should be established. This mechanism should include clearly defined activation triggers—ranging from North Korea’s missile launches, maritime escalation, to cyber-attacks—and function as a platform for real-time joint evaluation and coordinated decision-making. The key goal would be to ensure that alliance responses remain synchronized under time pressure.

Second, cooperation on missile defense should evolve from information sharing to real-time operational integration. This includes the cross-cueing of Japan’s Aegis-equipped combat systems and the Korean Air and Missile Defense (KAMD) architecture, which would ultimately enable rapid and efficient interception in a high-intensity situation. By reducing vulnerability against saturated missile attacks, and effectively using the finite interceptors of both Japan and South Korea, this integration would directly enhance overall deterrence.

Third, trilateral planning must explicitly address a dual contingency scenario. Through joint exercises and simulation, each country should clearly define their respective roles: Japan on maritime and Taiwan-related operations, South Korea on peninsula defense, and the United States on cross-theater force management. The goal is not a rigid division of labor, but coordinated complementarity that minimizes potential operational vacuums.

Fourth, logistics and rear-area coordination should be institutionalized. Japan’s assistance to US forces operating on the Korean Peninsula—even if the nitty gritty of existing operation plan cannot be shared to the South Korean counterparts, the big picture need to be consulted—and South Korea’s contribution to maritime security and sea lines of communication (SLOC) protection during Taiwan contingency—both in a full-scale invasion as well as naval blockade scenario—would strengthen the durability of military operations in a protracted conflict scenario. This structure would be similar to the functional division of labor that was forged between Britain and France prior to WWI.

Fifth, and finally, strategic signaling should reinforce the expectation of coordinated response. Just as Germany revised its strategic calculations by factoring in the probability of Britain’s intervention, today’s potential regional spoilers in Northeast Asia should perceive that coercion against a single country would trigger a comprehensive and integrated response. This requires consistent trilateral cooperation through joint exercises, public messaging, and visible operational integration.

The Moroccan Crises remind us that, often, deterrence is built before it is formalized. Britain and France did not begin with a mutual defense treaty. They resolved disputes, coordinated under strain, while showcasing that external coercion can strengthen internal cohesion instead of fragmenting it. With the passage of time, such practices created a strategically effective form of deterrence without any binding legal obligation. The lesson for Northeast Asia is clear—alliance is far from unnecessary, yet alliance alone is insufficient. In this context, Japan and South Korea do not need to replicate NATO. What is needed is a structured trilateral Entente, anchored by the United States. Within this formula, coordination is expected, responses are repeatedly rehearsed, while preventing fragmentation during crisis. In this sense, the most important lesson of the Moroccan Crisis is how deterrence could acquire credibility. It is not written first in treaties but in the consistent integration of behavior among those who would resist regional spoilers that attempt to disrupt the status quo.

Dr. Ju Hyung Kim currently serves as a President at the Security Management Institute, a defense think tank affiliated with the South Korean National Assembly. He has been involved in numerous defense projects and has provided consultation to several key organizations, including the Republic of Korea Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, the Ministry of National Defense, the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis, the Agency for Defense Development, and the Korea Research Institute for Defense Technology Planning and Advancement. He holds a doctoral degree in international relations from the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Japan, a master’s degree in conflict management from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a degree in public policy from Seoul National University’s Graduate School of Public Administration (GSPA).

The conflict between the United States and Israel against Iran continues. The Iranian regime, despite the substantial damage it has sustained, is fighting fiercely for its survival with little regard for what it must sacrifice to ensure it. The United States has risked too much economically and diplomatically, only to end up relatively alone in a war where its objectives appear too abstract and the means employed clearly insufficient to achieve them. Israel, while having clearer objectives related to the perceived existential threat posed by the Ayatollah regime, seems to have bitten off more than it can chew, overwhelmed by the aggressive Iranian response and by relative international diplomatic isolation.

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In such a stalemate, the position of non-belligerent powers carries significant weight. Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz has transformed a local conflict into one with global consequences. Despite the relative caution shown by the major powers, the message from non-belligerent countries has been clear: these nations do not wish to be drawn into a conflict they did not start and in which there appear to be no clear gains, not even for the initiators. In this respect, China's stance is quite revealing.

At first glance, China's relatively passive attitude toward the conflict may seem somewhat perplexing. China and Iran have maintained close political and economic ties for decades. Despite the sanctions imposed, China accounts for approximately 80% of Iran's oil exports, and the Chinese yuan has become indispensable for the survival of the Iranian regime. Iran, for its part, is a major energy supplier for China and a strategically vital point within its Belt and Road Initiative.

With this in mind, the reasons for China's relative passivity and restraint toward the American and Israeli attempts to eliminate the Iranian regime lie in a series of deeper political and economic factors. First, in the decades since its opening to the outside world in 1979, China has developed a rather distinctive style of diplomacy based primarily on flexible strategic alliances of an economic nature, rejecting agreements that involve security commitments. The Soviet Union's decline, partially caused by its endless pursuit of military hegemony in competition with the United States, taught China the importance of prioritizing resource allocation in areas that represent real economic growth; war (especially when initiated without clear objectives) is not one of them.

This pragmatism is also reflected in China's stance regarding the regime's survival. Economic and trade ties between the two nations are based on practical rather than ideological considerations. While this situation facilitated the establishment of relations between countries with seemingly very different ideologies at the time, it also determined that the Chinese government's main objective today is not to ensure the survival of the Iranian regime itself, but rather to uphold the agreements reached with the Iranian state. The lack of clarity regarding the regime's situation is prompting China to keep all its options open, which would theoretically allow it to maintain friendly relations with Iran in the relatively unlikely event of a complete change in political leadership.

China's geopolitical motivations also play a significant role. China is relatively better prepared than other nations to deal with the energy consequences of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, allowing it to position itself as a potential mediator or impartial third party in the conflict. At the same time, China can afford to allow its main rival to become economically and diplomatically weakened in a new conflict in the Middle East. This also provides China with the perfect opportunity to analyze in real time—and potentially counter—the military tactics and capabilities of the United States. Simultaneously, the mobilization of US troops from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, and the strain on the US military apparatus, constitutes a perfect opportunity for China to strengthen its presence in its own region, with potential future implications for the political situation in Taiwan.

China's diplomatic presence in the Middle East demands caution. While China is Iran's main trading partner, this importance is not reciprocated in terms of regional balance. Trade flows with Iran pale in comparison to those with other nations in the region, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have been involuntarily drawn into the conflict. These countries have expressed their strong opposition to Iranian activity in the region; therefore, China cannot afford to support one ally at the expense of alienating other, more economically important partners. Ultimately, pragmatism is the primary parameter for Chinese diplomacy.

China's historical experiences—which have shaped its unique style of diplomacy—as well as the obvious complexities of maintaining extensive diplomatic networks (some involving countries that are at odds with one another) demand caution from the Chinese government in handling the current crisis. China does not make commitments to other nations on security issues, does not send troops to solve other countries' problems, and, at least formally, tries to keep its actions within the realm of diplomacy. Therefore, it can hardly be described as an ally that reneges on its commitments in the event of aggression against its trading partners because those security commitments never existed.

However, this same caution could prove detrimental to China in the long run. As mentioned, the Soviet experience (and the American experience itself) taught the Chinese the disadvantages of constantly trying to increase influence through military means. However, if it wishes to position itself as a viable diplomatic and commercial alternative to the United States, China must confront in a more decisively way situations that jeopardize its own trade networks. It must reassure smaller countries that, by sharing common interests, China can be a reliable ally capable of exerting the diplomatic and economic pressure that smaller countries are unable to implement. China's tepid response to US interventions in Venezuela and Iran, while not violating existing agreements, offers little reassurance to its allies and risks emboldening aggressive actions by rivals in countries these powers consider part of their spheres of influence.

Ultimately, a more assertive diplomatic stance from China and other powers is necessary to end the current conflict. While China is better prepared in the short term to face the current energy crisis stemming from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, in the long term, the conflict seriously threatens to hinder its growth. A sharp and sustained slowdown in global economic growth will translate into domestic overcapacity and a further decline in corporate profits, with serious consequences for the financial health of Chinese companies. Wage growth is currently at a mere 1% and could fall even further. This will exacerbate weak domestic demand in China, lead to reduced investment by relatively less profitable companies, and generate a slowdown in consumption. China has spent years strengthening its energy grid and building up reserves for situations like this. However, the enormous fragility of the international economic system—which has been profoundly disrupted by the closure of a waterway barely 33 km wide—necessitates long-term, collaborative solutions.

Sergio Villarroel is an Ecuadorian lawyer and holds a Master’s degree in International Relations and Diplomacy from Shanghai University. He currently serves as an advisor and researcher at the Judicial Training School of the Ecuadorian Judiciary Council. His research areas include economic and political relations between China and Latin America, China’s diplomacy as well as development studies.

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This week on the Thinking Global Podcast, Professor T.V. Paul chats with Dr. Tusharika Deka in this first episode of two about his journey into academia, international security, Asian regional security, Indian foreign policy, and much more.

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The history of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a faith-based international body founded in 1969 in Rabat, Morocco, is intimately intertwined with the history of Israel and its political actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This connection is already visible in the organization’s founding document. Its Charter, signed in the same year and effective from 1972, explicitly mentions only two of its 57 Member States (MS) and three of its MS’ cities (cf. Arts. 14, 18, 21, 39), and it implicitly alludes to only one non-MS: Israel. It can be read in its preamble that the OIC MS determined ‘to support the struggle of the Palestinian people, who are presently under foreign occupation’ and ‘to establish their sovereign State with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital’.

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In this contribution, I argue that Israel acts as a quasi-non-MS within the OIC and, more specifically, as a case of what I define as negative memberness. Though formally excluded, it is able to shape the internal dynamics of the organization while serving as a constitutive other, or enemy, in Schmitt’s terminology (2007). The application of the friend/enemy distinction to International Relations is not uncontested: Teschke (2011) has argued that Schmitt’s conceptual vocabulary was forged within a specific ideological context, namely the legitimation of Nazi Germany’s spatial politics, which makes its de-contextualized application problematic. For this reason, the concept is employed here as a descriptive device aimed at mapping how opposition structures identity within an international organization, rather than as a general explanatory framework.

Religion and IR

IR scholars as social scientists were relatively late in recognizing the role played by religion, initially embracing the Orientalist tendency to label it as a primordial impulse destined to disappear as societies modernize (Modongal, 2023). Events such as the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the end of the Cold War led some scholars (Huntington, 1993; Juergensmeyer, 1993) to acknowledge that religion indeed plays a crucial role in IR. Such acknowledgment grew stronger after the 9/11 attacks and the rise and fall of ISIS, further consolidating the place of religion within the discipline. Authors have since re-interpreted old concepts in light of this perspective: for instance, the concept of ‘religious soft power’ (Ozturk, 2023) was developed from Nye’s idea of ‘soft power’ (1990). It is meaningful that, as of today, the second largest international organization after the UN is the OIC, a body founded on religious ground, whose very existence challenges earlier assumptions about the marginality of religion in global politics.

Although the OIC was founded in 1969, the idea of an Islamic supranational entity traces back to the concept of ʾummah, an Arabic term that means ‘community’ (cf. Quran 3:104). The idea of a political entity whose borders were defined not only by territorial conquest or treaties but primarily by the shared faith of its inhabitants took institutional form in the Caliphate immediately following the death of Muhammad in 632. The Caliphate, as a political institution, lasted until 1922 with the abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate by the Kemalist Turkish National Assembly. Since then, Islamist ideologues, pundits, thinkers, politicians, and theologians have advocated for the reconstitution of the Caliphate, often referring to the ideal model of the first four Caliphs, the Rašidūn, or ‘Rightly Guided’ (Rida, 2024). More generally, the renewed emphasis on unity on a religious basis in Islam has been labelled Pan-Islamism, a political movement initially proposed by Abdülhamid II to face the territorial losses suffered during his reign from 1876 to 1909, in opposition to the Tanzimat reforms (Chouinard, 2010). Influential thinkers such as Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1839–1897), Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), and Rashīd Rida (1865–1935) argued that the unity of the Islamic world could be both a source of decline, if neglected or misinterpreted, and a potential basis for its rebirth if properly understood.

Know your Enemy, Know your Friends

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the 1969 arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by Denis Michael Rohan, an Australian Christian fundamentalist. The subsequent summit in Morocco, which gathered representatives from 24 Muslim countries and preceded the First Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers in Jeddah the following year, effectively transformed the Pan-Islamic impetus into a recognized international organization. While religion was the common denominator, the Islamization of the struggle against Israel was simultaneously catalyzed, even though it would later crystallize in a more radical form with the Muslim Brotherhood’s activity in the Gaza Strip (Litvak, 1998).

Egyptian President al-Nāṣir’s Pan-Arabism was being counteracted by Saudi Arabia’s King Fayṣal through Pan-Islamism (Sheikh, 2003). After the death of the founder of the modern Saudi state ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz in 1953 and the consequent loss of a powerful legitimizing factor, the tendency of his son Saʾūd (1953–1964) to align closely with Egypt and Syria became increasingly problematic. Events such as the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1958 formation of the United Arab Republic led to al-Nāṣir’s surging popularity as the leader of a secular, socialist, and republican Pan-Arabism (Baba, 1992). The values he represented posed a direct threat to the region’s autocratic regimes. After succeeding his brother, King Fayṣal, a political and diplomatic maven, seized the opportunity to champion Pan-Islamism. Following years of efforts that included the foundation of the Muslim World League in 1962, he leveraged the aftermath of the 1967 war to take decisive action in 1969.

Even though reading the OIC as a purely anti-Israeli institution would be far from reality, the political, in Schmittian terms, was deeply rooted in the designation of Israel as the enemy. The struggle against Israel provided a common framework through which cooperation on a religious basis could be promoted and the organization’s identity strengthened, while the pervasiveness of Palestine-related concerns allowed for a further complexification of the OIC’s structure through the institutionalization of Committees and Groups specifically dedicated to the cause, such as the Al-Quds Committee, the Six-Party Committee on Palestine, and the Ministerial Contact Group on the Question of Palestine and Jerusalem (Alrantisi, 2025). Moreover, Israel as a common reference point of opposition has continued to shape collective action, as shown by Saudi Arabia’s call for an unprecedented joint Arab-Islamic extraordinary summit on 11 November 2023 in Riyadh, a format replicated in 2024 and 2025. While the Arab League has historically proven unable to create a common front capable of transcending national interests or, in other words, of preventing nationalism from becoming national particularism (Manduchi, 2017), Pan-Islamism has confirmed its role as a primary vehicle for collective action, leveraging the identification of a common adversary to bridge the gap between divergent national agendas.

OIC’s Internal Role-play

Although, according to its Charter, OIC MS are ‘equal in rights and obligations’ (Art. 2), some nations exert more influence than others, effectively promoting their interests within specific niches. Constructivist analyses highlight, for instance, how the organization’s foundational principles are interpreted by MS according to their respective identities and interests. In such scenarios, the Saudi conception of the ʾummah as a purely religious entity contrasts with that of Iran, which views it as a theological-political entity; meanwhile, Pakistan perceives it as a security community, whereas Turkey and Malaysia reframe the concept through the lens of moderation and modernization (Sheikh, 2003; Kayaoglu, 2015). Balances of power, identities, and values, however, are mutable variables that need to be reassessed periodically in IR.

The crisis that divided the GCC in 2017, driven by Qatar’s proximity to the Muslim Brotherhood and promoted by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt, pushed the Gulf monarchies to find common ground with Israel in order to face the perceived threat posed by Islamism, Turkey, and Iran (Mohamed, 2024). Reading the Abraham Accords normalization process between Saudi Arabia and Israel in this light allows one to grasp a potential reconfiguration of roles within the OIC: once the country that hosts two of the holiest sites in Islam (Medina and Mecca) moves away from the centrality of the Palestinian cause, the space it had long occupied within the organization becomes open to contestation. The attacks on 7 October 2023 and the subsequent war provided Turkey, the first Muslim-majority country to have recognized Israel, with an opportunity to recalibrate its stance: the normalization initiatives of 2022 were replaced by Erdoğan’s harsh criticisms and an escalation of tensions with Netanyahu.

Turkey, together with Qatar, played a crucial role in mediating the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, while at the same time pursuing a foreign policy aimed at consolidating its position as a regional power, a trajectory that has increasingly been perceived in Israel as a source of concern, at times even more significant than Iran (Ynet, 2020; Bar’el, 2025). To pursue this role, Turkey has progressively distanced itself from the position it had long occupied both outside and within the OIC: that of a bridge-country, an Islamic-Western actor able to mediate between different political and cultural spheres, as well as a secular leader oriented toward promoting Islamic art and culture (Kayaoglu, 2015). Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu’s election as Secretary-General in 2004 placed Turkey in a prominent role within the organization, promoting moderation and interreligious dialogue and further shaping its identity within the OIC. Whether Turkey will be willing to consolidate its increasingly confrontational stance towards Israel and to make the Palestinian cause a defining component of its role within the organization remains an open question. This issue also extends to other strategic choices, such as the OIC’s engagement with India as an emerging power (Kulaklikaya, 2025) or the possible intensification of tensions surrounding Kashmir (Rubin, 2025).

On the other hand, Turkey’s historical bridge-role could be reinterpreted or partially assumed by Pakistan. Unlike Turkey, Pakistan is a founding member of the OIC. To move in this direction would imply a shift from its traditional role within the organization, often characterized by a strong security orientation, its status as the only Muslim country to possess nuclear weapons, and its use of veto power in ways that have limited the inclusion of Indian and Chinese Muslims (Kayaoglu, 2015). The ‘Islamabad Peace Talks’ of April 2026, despite their limited results, were driven more by economic than security considerations (Peltier, 2026). Although Pakistan has previously engaged in mediation efforts, particularly with regard to Iran (Pirzada, 1987), its role in facilitating dialogue between the USA and Iran has contributed to presenting it as a potentially reliable intermediary, capable of repositioning itself within the OIC.

A Matter of Memberness: Where Does the Constitutive Enemy Fit?

In an article titled Porous organizational boundaries and associated states: introducing memberness in international organizations (2023), Hofmann et al. provide a useful framework to move beyond the binary conception of membership in international organizations (IOs) and the exclusive focus on formal members. They account for the influence exerted by so-called third-party states, namely countries that do not meet the formal criteria of membership, whether in terms of language, geography, or religious composition, but that can nonetheless acquire the status of observers, partners, or associates. Their objective is to conceptualize these actors as capable of influencing IOs. They introduce the concept of memberness, a variable aimed at capturing what associated states do within an IO. They distinguish between three types of memberness: payrollers, which provide general-purpose material contributions; sponsors, which provide ideational inputs that shape the allocation of resources; and advisors, which provide technical knowledge and expertise. In light of the dynamics outlined above within the OIC, and considering its specific historical and ideological trajectory, expanding this framework allows for a broader understanding of how IOs’ internal configurations are shaped in response to external actors and events.

Building on this typology, I propose the concept of negative memberness to describe a state that, while formally excluded from an IO, exerts structural influence over it by functioning as its constitutive enemy. Unlike payrollers, sponsors, or advisors, a quasi-non-MS shapes the organization not through direct participation but through its position in the international system, which compels member states to react, define themselves in opposition, and institutionalize that opposition.

If one asks which state most deeply influences the OIC, the answer depends on how the range of relevant actors is defined. Limiting the analysis to member states excludes actors such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, which have nonetheless influenced the organization (Karčić, 2013). Expanding it to include third-party states still risks overlooking a pivotal actor that has shaped the OIC’s agenda and identity to a considerable extent. Among Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Turkey, on the one hand, and Israel on the other, dismissing the latter on the basis of its non-membership obscures the extent to which many of the organization’s defining moments have been shaped, at least in part, by Israeli domestic and foreign policies. Even though critics have pointed to the OIC’s limited effectiveness in advancing the Palestinian cause, the organization has nonetheless contributed to the construction of what has been described as ‘a strong pro-Palestinian norm among Muslim states… [socializing] Muslim leaders across the globe into a pro-Palestinian world-view’ (Kayaoglu, 2015, 62). From a constructivist perspective, the identification of an enemy, understood in Schmittian terms, plays a significant role in shaping how an IO understands itself and its position in the international arena.

To revert the plot of Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (2019), in which Palestinians suddenly disappear and Israel is left to question its identity without them, one may ask what would become of the OIC if Israel’s role as a constitutive enemy were to be fundamentally altered. Whether through a full withdrawal from the occupied territories or through more coercive policies, such a shift would alter the condition of negative memberness on which a significant part of the organization’s identity has been built. This does not imply that the OIC lacks other functions: existing literature has highlighted its role in promoting economic cooperation and Islamic finance among its member states (Ma & Hou, 2015; Majeed, 2015; Badreldin, 2020). At the same time, the centrality of the Palestinian issue remains a key element in understanding its development.

How Israel’s position is framed, then, becomes crucial for extending this analysis beyond the OIC. Israel is neither a member state nor a third-party actor in formal terms, yet it exerts a form of influence that differs from that of both categories. Through its bilateral relations with member states, and through its capacity to activate or de-escalate issues such as the status of Jerusalem or the conditions in Gaza, it affects the organization’s agenda and internal cohesion. In this sense, Israel can be seen as one of the most structurally influential actors shaping the OIC, even if this influence operates differently from that of its member states. As the organization’s constitutive enemy, it does not promote a particular interpretation of the ʾummah from within the institutional framework. Its influence is indirect, and often not fully intentional in its mechanisms, even when it produces observable political effects. Processes of normalization with countries such as Morocco or Saudi Arabia, for instance, can contribute to redefining these states’ roles within the OIC and the positions they advance. Israel’s position can therefore be understood in terms of negative memberness: a quasi-non-MS whose influence operates through the structural pressure it exerts on member states’ identities rather than through institutional participation. The form of soft power at play in this case is peculiar, as it derives less from deliberate strategy than from the political consequences of Israel’s existence and policies.

Re-thinking the OIC

Starting the analysis of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation through a Schmittian lens risks overlooking the fact that enmity is a historically produced and institutionally mediated condition rather than a transhistorical constant. The concepts of quasi-non-MS and negative memberness are here proposed as correctives: heuristic tools aimed at mapping how a non-member state can, voluntarily or involuntarily, shape an IO’s identity, agenda, and internal equilibrium through its foreign and domestic policies.

In light of the most recent developments of the Israel-Palestine issue, a rethinking of the OIC appears necessary. Like other international organizations, it operates as an intergovernmental forum while also acting as a producer of collective norms and identities. In this context, Israel occupies a structurally central position within the OIC’s political and normative horizon. It is both an object of collective positioning and, indirectly, a factor that contributes to shaping that positioning.

Those member states that pursue normalization risk opening space for other actors, such as Iran, Turkey, Qatar, and various Islamist movements, to frame themselves as the primary defenders of the Palestinian cause and of a broader Islamic political identity. Developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict should therefore be read not only in their immediate geopolitical dimension, but also in terms of their implications for the internal equilibrium of the OIC and the ongoing reconfiguration of roles, identities, and forms of leadership within it.

References

Alrantisi, Mahmoud. 2025. “The Position of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation on the Palestinian Issue.” Politics and Religion Journal 19 (1): 35–47. https://doi.org/10.54561/prj1901035a.

Azem, Ibtisam. 2019. The Book of Disappearance: A Novel. Syracuse University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvj7wnkw.

Baba, Noor Ahmad. 1992. “Nasser’s Pan-Arab Radicalism and the Saudi Drive for Islamic Solidarity: A Response for Security.” India Quarterly 48 (1/2). https://doi.org/10.1177/097492849204800101.

Badreldin, Ahmed M. 2020. “Applying Risk-Sharing to Mitigate Economic Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” EJIF—European Journal of Islamic Finance 16. https://doi.org/10.13135/2421-2172/4389.

Bar'el, Zvi. 2025. “Turkey's Road to Middle East Hegemony Runs Through Gaza.” Haaretz, October 28. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-10-28/ty-article/.premium/turkeys-road-to-middle-east-hegemony-runs-through-gaza/0000019a-27dc-db3e-affa-bfdc9a4d0000.

Chouinard, Alyson M. 2010. “A Response to Tanzimat: Sultan Abdul Hamid II and Pan-Islamism.” Inquiries Journal 2 (5). https://doi.org/10.31703/gssr.2023(VIII-II).36.

Huntington, Samuel P. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72 (3): 22–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/20045621.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. 1993. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.2711658.

Karčić, Hamza. 2013. “In Support of a Non-Member State: The Organisation of Islamic Conference and the War in Bosnia, 1992–1995.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 33 (3): 321–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2013.863074.

Kayaoglu, Turan. 2015. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation: Politics, Problems, and Potential. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315751467.

Kulaklikaya, Musa. 2025. “Türkiye and the OIC: Navigating Challenges and Strengthening Alliances.” Insight Turkey 27 (1): 37–52. https://doi.org/10.25253/99.2025271.3

Litvak, Meir. 1998. “The Islamization of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: The Case of Hamas.” Middle Eastern Studies 34 (1): 148–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/00263209808701214.

Ma, Lirong, and Yuxiang Hou. 2015. “Analysis on the Potential of Strategic Cooperation between China and OIC under the 'Silk Road Strategy' Framework.” Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (in Asia) 9 (1): 22–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/19370679.2015.12023258.

Majeed, Muhammad T. 2015. “Distributional Consequences of Globalization: Is Organization of the Islamic Conference Countries Different?” The International Trade Journal 29 (3): 171–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/08853908.2015.1024899

Manduchi, Patrizia. 2017. “Arab Nationalism(s): Rise and Decline of an Ideology.” Oriente Moderno 97 (1): 4–35. https://doi.org/10.1163/22138617-12340137.

Modongal, Shameer. 2023. “The Resurgence of Religion in International Relations: How Theories Can Accommodate It?” Cogent Social Sciences 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2023.2241265.

Mohamed, Abdel Aleem. 2024. “'Ittifāqiyyāt Abrāhām' wa-al-namūḏaj al-ǧadīd li-al-taṭbīʿ: Qirāʾa taḥlīliyya” [The “Abraham Accords” and the New Model of Normalization: An Analytical Reading]. Maǧallat al-Dirāsāt al-Filasṭīniyya 35 (140): 173–89. https://www.palestine-studies.org/sites/default/files/mdf-articles/173-189.pdf.

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Ozturk, Ahmet Erdi. 2023. “Religious Soft Power: Definition(s), Limits and Usage.” Religions 14 (2). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14020135.

Peltier, Elian. 2026. “The ‘Islamabad Peace Talks’ Are Over. What Now for Pakistan?” New York Times, April 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/world/asia/iran-peace-talks-pakistan.html.

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Loris Botto is an Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology of International Mobility and Academic Tutor in Sociology of Islam at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society, University of Turin. He has held research positions on projects funded by the John Templeton Foundation and the EU Horizon 2020 programme, and completed a traineeship at the Directorate-General for External Relations of the Council of the European Union.

For much of the post-Cold War era, globalisation was presented not merely as a trajectory but as a universal pathway, one that would integrate economies, societies, and political systems into a shared, increasingly cooperative order. This narrative, however, was never neutral. It reflected a particular historical moment shaped by Western dominance, in which globalisation appeared as both an economic process and a normative project. It promised a future where interdependence would soften geopolitical rivalry and constrain the exercise of power. Today, that promise appears less like an inevitability and more like a historical assumption under strain. Rather than dissolving geopolitics, globalisation is increasingly being reshaped by it. Building on Eswar Prasad’s analysis in Foreign Affairs (2026), this article argues that the current shift is not simply a disruption of globalisation, but a revealing moment, one that exposes how global economic integration has always been entangled with power, hierarchy, and strategic interest.

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This shift has been gradual but cumulative. One of its key drivers lies in the uneven distribution of the benefits of globalisation. While global economic integration has generated aggregate growth, its domestic consequences have been far from evenly shared. In many advanced economies, globalisation has contributed to de-industrialisation, labour displacement, and widening inequality. Communities once anchored in manufacturing have experienced long-term economic decline, even as global markets expanded. Domestic tensions do not remain confined within national borders; they scale up into systemic consequences. As Prasad (2026) suggests, socio-economic disruptions have translated into political backlash, fuelling populist movements and protectionist policies that challenge the foundations of the liberal international order. Globalisation, in this sense, has not only economic consequences but also profound political implications: it has eroded the very legitimacy that once sustained it.

This erosion of legitimacy intersects with a second, more structural transformation: the intensification of great power competition. At the systemic level, rivalry—particularly between the United States and China has further accelerated the reconfiguration of globalisation. What was once framed as a mutually beneficial economic relationship has increasingly evolved into a strategic contest. Trade disputes, technological restrictions, and financial decoupling are not isolated developments, but manifestations of a deeper geopolitical shift. As this rivalry deepens, the meaning of interdependence itself begins to change. Economic interdependence, long viewed as a stabilising force, is now increasingly perceived as a source of vulnerability. States are becoming more cautious about their exposure to strategic competitors, particularly in critical sectors such as semiconductors, energy, and digital infrastructure. Policies once dismissed as inefficient, such as reshoring or restricting technology transfers, are now reframed as necessary for national security.

This reconceptualisation of interdependence is not merely empirical, but also conceptual. It reflects what Farrell and Newman (2019) describe as the weaponisation of interdependence. In a deeply interconnected global system, states occupying central positions within networks—such as financial systems or supply chains can leverage those positions to exert coercive power. Access to markets, technologies, and financial flows becomes a strategic resource that can be restricted or manipulated.

These developments challenge one of the core assumptions of liberal internationalism. In this context, interdependence appears inherently ambivalent. While it enables cooperation, it also generates asymmetries that can be exploited. The long-standing belief that interdependence naturally promotes peace is therefore increasingly difficult to sustain. This is where theoretical reflection becomes essential. From a theoretical perspective, these developments suggest a renewed relevance of realist approaches in international relations. Realism, with its emphasis on power, security, and the primacy of state interests, provides a compelling lens through which to interpret the current trajectory of global politics. The reassertion of strategic competition and the securitisation of economic policy resonate strongly with realist assumptions.

Framing this shift as a return to realism risks overlooking a deeper structural continuity. What appears as a “return of power” may, in fact, be the reassertion of dynamics that were never absent, but rather obscured by the language of liberal integration. From a postcolonial perspective, globalisation has long operated within asymmetrical power structures that privileged certain states while marginalising others. The current fragmentation, therefore, does not mark a rupture as much as it reveals the limits of a previously dominant narrative. This resonates with Amitav Acharya’s (2014) call to rethink international relations beyond Western-centric narratives. Rather than viewing global order as a universal trajectory shaped by liberal norms, Acharya emphasises the plurality of world orders and the agency of non-Western actors in shaping them. From this vantage point, the current fragmentation of globalisation is not merely a systemic disruption, but also a moment that exposes whose ideas, institutions, and interests have historically defined what “globalisation” is meant to be.

Yet, the picture is not one of simple theoretical replacement. Liberal institutionalism continues to offer important insights into the role of institutions, norms, and economic interdependence. What we observe instead is a hybrid order in which liberal economic structures persist, but operate within increasingly realist constraints. It is within this hybrid condition that a new form of globalisation emerges. This condition can be described as fragmented globalisation. Unlike the earlier phase of hyper-globalisation, which prioritised openness and efficiency, the current phase is characterised by selectivity, alignment, and strategic calculation. Economic networks are reorganised along geopolitical lines, producing a more segmented system. One of the clearest manifestations is the rise of 'friend-shoring'. Rather than optimising supply chains purely on cost efficiency, states increasingly prioritise political alignment and trust. Similarly, efforts to “de-risk” economic relations, particularly with China, reflect attempts to reduce exposure to geopolitical vulnerabilities.

Such transformations point to a broader structural shift. Globalisation has not disappeared, but it is no longer universal or neutral. It has evolved into a system of managed interdependence, selective, strategic, and deeply embedded in geopolitical considerations. For middle powers and developing countries, this evolving landscape presents both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, fragmentation risks disrupting trade flows, reducing investment, and limiting access to critical technologies. On the other hand, it creates space for strategic manoeuvre. States that are not rigidly aligned with major powers may pursue hedging strategies, maintaining diversified relationships to preserve autonomy and maximise national interests.

Indonesia provides a useful lens for understanding these dynamics. As a non-aligned middle power with growing economic and diplomatic weight, it occupies a strategic position between competing geopolitical blocs. Rather than aligning exclusively with any single major power, it has pursued a pragmatic strategy of diversification, engaging China economically while maintaining security and diplomatic ties with the United States and its partners. However, this position also reflects a broader structural constraint faced by many Global South states. The emerging landscape of fragmented globalisation is not merely a neutral reordering of economic relations, but a terrain shaped by great power competition in which smaller states risk being positioned as sites of strategic contestation. In this context, the language of “choice” and “alignment” can obscure the asymmetries that continue to define the global order.

Indonesia’s strategy of hedging, therefore, should not be understood solely as a matter of agency, but also as a response to structural pressures. As fragmentation deepens, particularly in sectors such as digital infrastructure, energy, and supply chains, the space for genuine strategic autonomy may become increasingly constrained. Regional frameworks offer not only platforms for economic cooperation but also mechanisms for collective resilience. ASEAN, in particular, has long served as a buffer, enabling its member states to engage major powers without becoming fully subsumed in their strategic rivalries. Whether such mechanisms can remain effective in an era of heightened geopolitical tension, however, remains an open question.

From a Global South perspective, the transformation of globalisation raises a critical question: whose globalisation is being reconfigured, and on whose terms? If the earlier phase of globalisation was shaped by liberal norms and Western institutional dominance, the current phase risks being defined by great-power rivalry that continues to sideline smaller states. Fragmentation may open limited but significant space for alternative forms of cooperation. South–South partnerships, regional institutions, and issue-based coalitions offer opportunities to reimagine global engagement beyond binary alignments. Yet such possibilities remain constrained by enduring structural inequalities in the global system.

Globalisation, then, has not disappeared, but neither has it fulfilled the trajectory once imagined for it. The expectation that interdependence would constrain power has given way to a more complex reality in which power reshapes interdependence itself. What was once presented as a universal pathway now appears as a historically contingent project, shaped by hierarchy and contestation. The story of globalisation has come full circle: not as the transcendence of geopolitics, but as the return of power at its very core. The difference today is not that power has re-emerged, but that it is no longer obscured and that its consequences are increasingly unevenly distributed across the global order.

References

Prasad, E. (2026) ‘How Geopolitics Overran Globalization’, Foreign Affairs.

Farrell, H. and Newman, A. (2019) ‘Weaponized Interdependence’, International Security, 44(1).

Acharya, A. (2014) The End of American World Order. Cambridge: Polity.

Eko Ernada is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Jember, Indonesia. His research interests include international political theory, global order, and institutional politics, particularly around power, norm contestation, and contemporary debates on global governance. He has written about colonial legacies, international institutions, and non-Western perspectives in international relations, with frequent attention to issues of authority, legitimacy, and political change in global affairs.

In March 2026, the trial of former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China—the group long responsible for commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown—reopened a fraught debate over history, memory, and law. Under the city’s National Security Law, the Alliance’s decades-long advocacy is now deemed subversive, and in court, the judge controversially claimed that the events of June 4, 1989, do not constitute a “massacre.” This legal framing exemplifies how judicial discourse is employed to reshape collective remembrance, rendering politically sensitive commemoration a potential threat to the authoritarian control of the Chinese state.

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The Tiananmen Square Massacre cannot be understood without revisiting the events that precipitated it. In April 1989, the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, a reform-minded General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ignited widespread mourning among students and intellectuals, who saw his passing as a symbol of lost political openness. Mass demonstrations quickly followed, calling for political reform, transparency, and accountability. The movement escalated after the April 26 Editorial in the People’s Daily denounced the protests as “turmoil,” alleging they were instigated by a small group with ulterior motives attempting to destabilise the Party. It framed them as threats to the Party and state, signalling that continued protest would be treated as subversive.

By May 1989, Beijing declared martial law after the demonstrators refused to disperse. Zhao Ziyang, the reformist General Secretary, was in Pyongyang during the critical period when the Politburo Standing Committee deliberated on the city’s response. Zhao, alarmed by the growing likelihood of military action, sought to advocate de-escalation. He attempted to press Deng Xiaoping for restraint, but the meeting took place within the broader Politburo framework, where Deng, together with hardliners such as Li Peng and Yao Yilin, decisively supported the imposition of martial law. Zhao’s conciliatory position was overruled, marking the political marginalisation of reformist voices and clearing the path for armed suppression.

In the early hours of May 19, shortly after this decision, Zhao made his final public appearance in Tiananmen Square. Addressing hunger-striking students through a megaphone, he urged them to preserve their lives, telling them: “You are still young… you must live to see the future,” before adding the now-famous words, “We are already old, it doesn’t matter to us anymore.” These remarks have been widely interpreted in different ways. Some scholars argue that Zhao was attempting a last conciliatory gesture, hoping to regain political leverage against hardliners. Others suggest that he was motivated by genuine concern for the students’ lives, recognising that the situation was spiralling toward violence and that they would bear the consequences. At a deeper level, however, the statement reflects a stark moral asymmetry: Zhao, as part of an older revolutionary generation, acknowledged his own expendability, while emphasising that the students—young, educated, and representing China’s future—should not sacrifice themselves in a political struggle they could not win. His words were both a warning and a quiet act of dissent, signalling his refusal to legitimise the impending crackdown.

Zhao’s visit to the Square thus functioned as a final break with the Party leadership. Within days, he was removed from power and subsequently placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. His attempt to preserve dialogue, his refusal to endorse violence, and his final appeal to the students together reveal a rare moment in which political authority confronted moral responsibility, and chose, in Zhao’s case, not to act in service of coercion. The tragedy of June 4 therefore lies not only in the violence itself, but in the silencing of an alternative path that was briefly, but definitively, rejected.

On June 3–4, the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing with tanks and troops, forcibly dispersing students and demonstrators from Tiananmen Square and surrounding streets. The crackdown resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries, with some estimates reaching up to 10,000 civilians. In the immediate aftermath of the crackdown, the CCP moved swiftly to impose an official interpretation of events. In his June 9 speech, Deng Xiaoping characterised the protests as a “counter-revolutionary rebellion” orchestrated by hostile forces, and unequivocally justified the use of military force. This statement functioned as a definitive political verdict, transforming a complex and contested movement into a narrative of subversion and restoring ideological coherence within the Party. By reaffirming the April 26 Editorial’s framing and praising the People’s Liberation Army, the leadership closed off alternative interpretations of the crisis, recasting violence as necessity and dissent as threat.

Against the Party’s official narrative, Zhao Ziyang’s legacy has endured as a suppressed political alternative. Remembered as a reformist who refused to become the General Secretary who authorised the use of force, Zhao came to symbolise a path not taken—one grounded in dialogue, restraint, and political accountability. His final appearance in Tiananmen Square, where he appealed to students to preserve their lives, stands in stark contrast to the leadership’s subsequent justification of violence. Following his removal from power, Zhao was placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life, and his efforts to challenge the “counter-revolutionary” characterisation of the protests were systematically silenced.

The treatment of his memory after death further reveals the extent of this suppression. In Hong Kong, Zhao was publicly mourned following his death in 2005, with vigils and commemorations reflecting a civic space in which alternative interpretations of 1989 could still be expressed. On the mainland, however, his name was largely erased from public discourse, with strict controls over media coverage and historical discussion. This divergence is telling: Zhao’s legacy embodies a form of political legitimacy that directly challenges the Party’s authorised account of June 4. The marginalisation of his memory therefore reflects not only an effort to control the past, but an ongoing struggle to contain meanings that continue to resonate beyond the state’s control.

The significance of Zhao Ziyang’s position also invites consideration of an alternative trajectory that was foreclosed in 1989. Had Deng Xiaoping accepted Zhao’s proposal for dialogue and restraint, the immediate tragedy of June 4 might have been avoided, and the Party could have pursued a more gradual path of political reform alongside economic liberalisation. While it would be speculative to suggest that China would have become a liberal democracy, Zhao’s later reflections, particularly those recorded during his house arrest, indicate a reform vision that extended beyond the Party’s orthodoxy, including support for greater transparency, institutional accountability, and elements of press freedom. In this sense, Zhao’s ideas have, over time, come to appear more radical than they did in 1989, highlighting how the suppression of reform did not resolve underlying tensions, but deferred them. The silencing of this alternative trajectory underscores the broader stakes of historical control: not only what is remembered, but what futures are rendered impossible.

The British Response and Trajectory to the National Security Law

The international response to June 4 extended beyond condemnation and into policy, most notably in the United Kingdom’s introduction of the British Nationality Selection Scheme in 1990. Presented as a stabilising measure, the scheme granted full British citizenship to 50,000 selected households—primarily drawn from the civil service, professional classes, and key institutional sectors—amounting to approximately 225,000 individuals including dependents. Yet this was not a universal offer. The vast majority of Hong Kong’s population were instead designated as British National (Overseas), a status that conferred a form of travel documentation without the right of abode in the United Kingdom. In effect, Britain institutionalised a hierarchy of belonging, distinguishing between those deemed essential to Hong Kong’s continuity and those left outside the scope of full political inclusion.

This stratification produced enduring political consequences. While intended to stabilise confidence before 1997, the nationality scheme consolidated an elite administrative class whose institutional role persisted beyond the transfer of sovereignty. The career trajectory of Carrie Lam—a career civil servant shaped within the late colonial system and later the Chief Executive who oversaw the implementation of the National Security Law—illustrates this continuity. Her transition from a British-administered governance structure to alignment with Beijing’s post-2019 political order reflects not a rupture, but a reorientation of elite function under changing sovereign authority. The same governing class once tasked with maintaining stability became instrumental in enforcing a legal regime that now criminalises forms of civic expression previously embedded in Hong Kong’s public life.

The limitations of this earlier British approach have since become more apparent. By selectively extending full citizenship while withholding it from the majority, the policy did not establish a broadly grounded framework capable of sustaining civic freedoms after 1997. The contemporary BN(O) citizenship pathway can therefore be understood as a partial corrective, expanding meaningful rights to those previously excluded and acknowledging, albeit implicitly, that earlier measures failed to secure long-term protections for Hong Kong’s civic and political autonomy.

At the same time, the United Kingdom’s response to Hong Kong’s transformation reflects a broader pattern that extends beyond policy design to questions of values. While the People’s Republic of China asserts that Hong Kong is an “inalienable part” of its territory, this claim sits uneasily alongside the city’s historical development under British rule, where institutions of common law, civil liberties, and open civic expression shaped a distinct political culture. Britain’s responses at key moments—following June 4 and again after the imposition of the National Security Law—suggest a recurring dynamic: when these underlying civic principles are threatened, the UK re-engages, not as a sovereign power reclaiming territory, but as a state responding to the erosion of a shared legal and political inheritance.

Had the British government offered full citizenship to all Hongkongers in 1990, rather than a selected elite, the trajectory of Hong Kong’s governance might have been profoundly different. With widespread access to full British passports, civil servants, professionals, and ordinary citizens alike could have exercised real mobility, creating a population capable of exit if political or legal conditions deteriorated. In this scenario, the universal option would have shifted the balance of leverage. Hong Kong officials, faced with a population with legitimate avenues to relocate and assert their rights abroad, might have found it politically and socially riskier to fully align with Beijing’s post-2019 control over memory and civic life.

Broad citizenship could have created a structural deterrent to authoritarian consolidation, making the National Security Law, and by extension the prosecution of the Alliance, more difficult to enforce. In other words, a truly inclusive British Nationality Act at the time could have been a bulwark for civic autonomy and historical memory, constraining both the central state’s and local elite’s ability to monopolise political identity. The current BN(O) citizenship pathway and diasporic commemorations in the UK illustrate this point: with British citizenship, those determined to preserve civic memory could have relocated en masse, ensuring that the vigils and the remembrance of Hong Kong’s protests would have continued on British soil rather than being curtailed at home.

The Alliance trial thus represents the culmination of this trajectory. It demonstrates how law has become the primary instrument through which memory and political identity are redefined in Hong Kong. The prosecution of those who commemorate June 4 is not merely an act of suppression, but a transformation of the boundaries of permissible history and expression. Practices once central to the city’s civic life are recast as threats to state authority. This shift underscores a deeper contradiction: although sovereignty has changed, the values that shaped Hong Kong’s public culture remain contested. Their suppression, and the international responses it continues to provoke, reveals that the struggle over Hong Kong now extends beyond governance into the preservation of historical truth and political meaning.

Massacre Denied, Memory Punished

For decades, the memory of the Tiananmen crackdown persisted in Hong Kong through the annual Alliance vigil, a civic ritual that allowed society to honour victims and reflect on the legacy of totalitarian violence across the border. The enactment and enforcement of the National Security Law, however, criminalised these acts of commemoration, treating them as subversive. In effect, Hong Kong is being drawn into alignment with mainland China, where public acknowledgement of June 4 is strictly prohibited. This legal suppression directly contravenes the spirit of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which guaranteed the territory a high degree of autonomy, including freedoms of expression and assembly. By targeting civil society actors, restricting commemoration, and shaping judicial discourse, the state consolidates authority while signalling to domestic and international audiences that memory and truth are instruments of governance, not merely reflection.

The Alliance trial exemplifies a broader pattern: the CCP exhibits zero tolerance for dissent or alternative political identities. In IR terms, the Chinese state is strong in coercive capacity, yet fragile in the face of competing historical narratives. Any deviation from the Party line threatens its monopoly on legitimacy. This perspective is reinforced by the Party’s historical narrative of the “Century of Humiliation,” which frames external influence as a persistent danger; in the Party’s view, the 1989 student protests, like the 2019 demonstrations, were not purely domestic unrest but shaped or exploited by foreign actors. Through legal instruments, discursive framing, and political repression, the regime consolidates power while ensuring that both collective memory and civic critique are treated as threats.

The CCP’s influence over Hong Kong’s historical narrative is not without precedent. During the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping framed the 1997 handover as a “resumption of sovereignty,” implying that Hong Kong’s legitimacy had always resided with China and that British administration was temporary. This discursive construction created a historical fiction: Hong Kong was never a British colony. The 2021 overhaul of Hong Kong’s curriculum extends this logic, embedding the message that the territory was only “temporarily administered” by Britain into the education of a new generation. By shaping historical understanding through civic rituals and schools, the Party ensures that memory, identity, and political interpretation remain tightly controlled, marginalising pluralism and erasing recognition of civic autonomy.

Ironically, the Alliance is prosecuted not for violence, but for exposing these mechanisms of control—a paradox in which truth-telling and civic remembrance are framed as subversive. The National Security Law, rather than addressing genuine threats, functions primarily to restrict speech and regulate historical understanding, illustrating the consolidation of authoritarian power in Hong Kong. Comparative experience shows that pluralistic societies are better able to protect civic memory, autonomy, and freedom of expression. This case underscores the importance of safeguarding civic space, institutional checks, and the public’s capacity to reflect critically on history.

Remembering Tiananmen’s Young Lives Lost

Beyond the territory, the struggle over historical memory has extended to the Hong Kong diaspora, which commemorates the Tiananmen crackdown worldwide. These communities serve as custodians of a narrative the CCP seeks to erase, keeping the memory of June 4 alive despite distance. Yet diasporic commemorations often exist in stateless spaces, lacking institutional support or formal recognition. The dispersal of Hongkongers after the National Security Law highlights the fragility of memory when untethered from legal and civic structures capable of safeguarding it.

This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The Sino-British Joint Declaration, which guaranteed Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedoms, implies a continuing moral responsibility for the preservation of civic and historical rights. In this context, creating recognised civic spaces abroad—supporting memory, civic participation, and historical preservation—offers a mechanism to counterbalance the CCP’s monopolisation of identity and truth. Diasporic communities can thus maintain historical continuity, ensuring narratives erased within Hong Kong remain visible and politically meaningful.

The concept of a new Hong Kong space, potentially as a Crown Dependency or other semi-autonomous entity under British auspices, is not merely symbolic. It illustrates how sovereignty, memory, and legitimacy intertwine, and how states and transnational communities can construct alternative arenas of civic and political life when domestic spaces are restricted. Supporting these diasporic structures could provide a legally and politically recognised framework to safeguard historical memory, reinforcing transparency, pluralism, and civic autonomy, values increasingly imperilled in Hong Kong itself.

Such developments highlight a broader lesson: authoritarian regimes consolidate power not only through coercion, but by monopolising narrative and memory. Transnational and institutional mechanisms that preserve historical knowledge, protect civic ritual, and sustain political pluralism represent both cultural preservation and strategic resilience. Supporting diaspora initiatives, legal recognition, and civic infrastructure abroad can act as a counterweight to the CCP’s efforts to suppress historical and political plurality.

Ka Hang Wong received his PhD in History from the University of Technology Sydney in 2026. His thesis provides a historical analysis of BN(O) status and how it evolved from being a token of British nationality into a tool of political resistance against a totalitarian party-state’s assault on Hong Kong.

The widening U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran is usually narrated as a Middle Eastern crisis. That is true, but strategically incomplete. Since the 28 February 2026 strikes on Iran and the wider conflict that followed, European governments have tried to distinguish non-participation, defensive assistance, and offensive enablement, while Asian governments have had to reckon with disrupted shipping, energy risk, and the possibility that American attention and assets could be drawn away from the Indo-Pacific. The most revealing theatre of the war is therefore not only the Gulf. It is also the wider political space in which states decide whether international law still constrains allies as well as adversaries. That question matters well beyond Iran. Any future crisis over Taiwan, the South China Sea, or coercion against a treaty ally will require more than U.S. military power. It will require a diplomatic coalition willing to name aggression publicly, align sanctions, absorb economic costs, and defend a common legal vocabulary. The strategic issue, then, is not moral consistency in the abstract. It is coalition-organising power: the ability to persuade other states that the standards invoked against rivals also bind one’s own side.

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Iran is a hard case, which is precisely why it clarifies the issue. Tehran remains repressive at home, deeply troubling on the nuclear file, and violent through regional partners and proxies. The IAEA safeguards report of 27 February 2026 recorded grave and unresolved proliferation concerns, while also noting continued diplomatic engagement and serious verification gaps. Hard cases are where legal restraint matters most. If force becomes acceptable whenever the target is odious enough, law stops operating as restraint and becomes a vocabulary of selective exemption. My claim is not that legality overrides strategy. It is that legality is itself part of strategy. In a more plural order, partners are less likely to align durably behind states that present Charter limits as binding for adversaries but elastic for allies. The Iran war is therefore a Middle Eastern conflict with Indo-Pacific consequences. This is why the Iran case reaches far beyond the usual debate about Western hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral description. Strategy requires a different register. The relevant question is whether selective legality raises the diplomatic, fiscal, and domestic-political costs of future alignment for third states. In a system where many partners are neither dependants nor neutrals but selective co-producers of order, that cost matters enormously.

Law as Strategic Capital

This is why legality should be understood as strategic capital rather than ethical afterthought. Thomas Franck’s classic account of legitimacy in the international system, Ian Hurd’s work on legitimacy and authority, and Hurd’s later reflections on international legalism point toward the same reality: rules matter not only because they can be enforced, but because actors still feel compelled to justify themselves in legal terms. In world politics, law is part of how coalitions are assembled, contested, and sustained. That insight also sits close to John Ikenberry’s account of liberal internationalism and order-building and Amitav Acharya’s account of a more multiplex post-American order. If order is less hierarchical and consent matters more, then reciprocity matters more too. A state that wants others to share costs in a future Asian crisis must show that the rules it invokes are not merely discretionary instruments.

For that reason, the relevant benchmark in the Iran case should not be the infinitely elastic slogan of a “rules-based order”. Recent work by the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, Malcolm Jorgensen, and Marc Trachtenberg shows why the phrase can blur the line between binding law and looser political preference. In this case the relevant standard is the UN Charter. Once the issue is framed that way, the strategic stakes become clearer. Liberal democracies do not defend an order simply by wielding superior force. They defend it by persuading others that force is exercised under shared restraints. If those restraints are seen as optional whenever close partners act, then legal language becomes less persuasive when later deployed against Russia, China, or any other challenger. The point is less moralistic than it may sound. Legal argument is one of the arenas in which authority itself is contested. States can live with disagreement over policy. They are less willing to absorb serious costs for a coalition if they suspect that its legal vocabulary is reciprocal only when convenient. Selective legality therefore corrodes not merely reputation, but the practical willingness of others to align.

From Charter Restraint to Preventive War

The legal baseline is not obscure. Article 2(4) of the Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states, and Article 51 preserves self-defence only under narrow conditions. The Nicaragua judgment remains central because it resists the idea that a generally dangerous adversary supplies a standing warrant for force.

There is of course a long-running debate over anticipatory self-defence. But even narrower accounts of that doctrine still insist on imminence, necessity, and proportionality, as both recent legal analysis and the classic doctrinal literature on armed attack and Article 51 make clear. Anticipatory self-defence is still about an immediate and unavoidable attack, not a broad licence to strike because another state may later become more dangerous or less deterable. Once that temporal limit dissolves, prevention begins to masquerade as pre-emption.

The chronology matters. The IAEA safeguards report did not describe a benign nuclear file. It underscored serious proliferation concern, recalled that Iran had accumulated 440.9 kilograms enriched up to 60 percent, and stressed that the Agency lacked access sufficient to verify current inventories at affected facilities. But the same report also recorded ongoing U.S.-Iran negotiations on 17 and 26 February, and Rafael Grossi told the Board of Governors on 2 March that diplomacy and negotiations remained “the only way” to secure long-term assurance that Iran would not acquire nuclear weapons. That combination is precisely why the case is hard: the threat was real, but diplomacy had not plainly run its course.

Necessity is therefore as important as imminence. On demanding Charter readings, force becomes lawful only when peaceful alternatives are unavailable or exhausted. Even on broader accounts of anticipatory self-defence, the core intuition is the same: the attack feared must be sufficiently immediate that delay would forfeit the right of defence. Brian Finucane’s analysis of the U.S. Article 51 letter and Marc Weller’s argument converge here. The law does not ask whether another state is gravely threatening in a general sense. It asks whether resort to force has become unavoidable now.

The U.S. Article 51 letter to the Security Council invoked self-defence to protect U.S. forces, regional allies, and freedom of navigation. Yet the letter also thickened the claim of present necessity by invoking a long history of Iranian hostility. As Finucane notes, that move turns a catalogue of past conduct into a continuing entitlement to use force. The difficulty is doctrinal and strategic at once: once decades of enmity can substitute for imminence, the exception starts to swallow the rule.

The broader reaction from legal experts is important because it shows that the objection is neither fringe nor anti-Western. A public letter signed by more than one hundred scholars and practitioners warned against the unequal application of international law and against aid or assistance to internationally wrongful conduct. UN experts speaking through OHCHR likewise insisted on de-escalation, accountability, and non-selective legal scrutiny. One need not endorse every line of these interventions to see the central point: the better view is that the opening resort to force was not convincingly covered by the Charter.

None of this romanticises Tehran. Iran’s own conduct, including attacks on civilians, maritime threats, and regional strikes, raises grave questions under both jus ad bellum and international humanitarian law. But later unlawfulness by Iran cannot retroactively legalise the initial resort to force. Once strategic intelligibility is allowed to displace legal sufficiency, law stops constraining war and starts explaining it away.

Europe’s Uneasy Conditionality

European reactions reveal the difficulty with unusual clarity. In their 28 February statement, the E3 stressed non-participation, regional stability, and renewed negotiations. Their 1 March follow-up, issued after Iranian retaliation spread across the region, kept distance from the opening strikes but introduced language about “necessary and proportionate defensive action”. London then published a summary of its legal position that confined British involvement to specific and limited defensive action in support of allies under attack. The sequence mattered. It showed not simple endorsement, but an effort to preserve legal distance while remaining operationally useful.

That distinction is harder to sustain than governments often suggest. In a 3 March NATO press conference, Mark Rutte described allied contributions as “key enabling support”. The phrase was unusually candid. Modern campaigns do not consist only of the states that visibly launch the strike. Overflight permissions, basing, logistics, intelligence-sharing, refuelling, interception, and cyber support are integral to how force is projected. As Marko Milanovic notes, legal scrutiny cannot stop where trigger-pulling ends if enabling support is operationally decisive.

By mid-March, that ambiguity had become harder to sustain. In Berlin, Friedrich Merz said Germany would not participate in the war or in using military means to keep the Strait of Hormuz open while hostilities continued, stressing the absence of a UN, EU, or NATO mandate. In Paris, Emmanuel Macron similarly ruled out French participation in operations to open or liberate Hormuz in the current context, while leaving open a later non-belligerent escort arrangement once the main bombardments had stopped. In London, Keir Starmer insisted that any UK action required both a lawful basis and a viable, thought-through plan and later rejected participation in a blockade.

What emerged was not anti-American rupture. It was Atlantic conditionality: continued alliance loyalty, coupled with growing unwillingness to convert that loyalty automatically into offensive participation. That pattern matters because it suggests that even inside the West, legality still functions as a language of political self-protection and public justification. Yet conditionality without candour is unstable. If public legal reasoning appears only after the offensive phase is under way, it does not meaningfully constrain force; it manages political distance from faits accomplis. For governments that want to invoke the Charter robustly against Russian aggression or future Chinese coercion, that sequencing is costly. Legal language delivered after the bombs fall is not restraint. It is damage control.

Europe is therefore caught in a genuine trilemma. It remains dependent on U.S. hard power, rhetorically invested in universal legal standards, and materially exposed to the costs of a wider regional war. Those three facts do not always align. Support Washington too openly and the claim to universality weakens. Oppose Washington too sharply and alliance cohesion suffers. Try to split the difference and governments drift into legal compartmentalisation: public non-participation, private facilitation, and selective resistance once the political costs become impossible to ignore. The point is especially delicate for Germany. Support for Israel’s security and an uncompromising struggle against antisemitism are non-negotiable. But equal legal scrutiny is not moral equivalence. It is the minimum condition of legal seriousness. The European Council’s March conclusions themselves called for de-escalation, protection of civilians, and full respect for international law. A credible European position has to be able to say several things at once: that Iran is dangerous, that antisemitism must be fought without compromise, and that preventive war without a persuasive Charter basis remains unlawful even when close partners wage it.

Asia Is Already the Second Theatre

For governments in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Canberra, Jakarta, and Manila, these questions are not abstract. In Tokyo, the immediate response combined the protection of nationals and the monitoring of sea and air routes with repeated calls for diplomacy, a negotiated settlement, and the proposition that Iran must never acquire nuclear weapons. That sequence mattered. It showed that a close U.S. ally was trying to hold together deterrence, diplomacy, and legal restraint at the same time. For Asian partners more broadly, legality is not ornamental rhetoric. It is a practical indicator of whether American force appears bounded, predictable, and therefore politically supportable in future crises.

Taiwan’s concern sharpened the point. Officials in Taipei feared that Beijing could exploit both U.S. distraction and the propaganda value of the war through intensified pressure and cognitive warfare across the Strait. China does not need to prove itself a principled guardian of law to benefit from that situation. It only needs to reinforce the perception that Washington invokes law selectively.

Material exposure is equally important. The IEA’s assessment of the Middle East and global energy markets shows how quickly the conflict translated into fuel-price anxiety, subsidy burdens, rerouted flows, and shipping risk across Asia. Japan and Indonesia moved to deepen coordination on energy resources and supply-chain resilience; South Korean officials described a KRW 26.2 trillion supplementary budget and related measures to stabilise prices and supply chains; the Philippines sought direct assurances from Tehran on safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz; and ASEAN called for continued negotiations, consolidation of the ceasefire, and restored navigation in accordance with the UN Charter and UNCLOS.

By mid-April, Japan had announced an approximately $10 billion regional framework to help Asian partners secure oil, expand stockpiles, and strengthen supply chains. South Korea, for its part, paired its emergency response measures with a supplementary budget designed to stabilise prices and supply chains. At the IMF and World Bank meetings, finance ministers from a wide cross-section of U.S. partners warned that renewed hostilities or continued disruption in Hormuz would threaten growth, inflation, energy security, supply chains, and economic and financial stability well beyond the Gulf. The economic message was clear: even if the fighting remains geographically concentrated, the costs do not.

The material transmission belt is especially important because the burden is structurally uneven. The IEA’s Strait of Hormuz brief notes that about four-fifths of the oil and oil products transiting the Strait in 2025 were destined for Asia, while its wider market assessment underlines that almost ninety percent of LNG volumes exported through Hormuz were likewise headed to Asian markets. That asymmetry helps explain why a war justified in Washington or Jerusalem in security terms is received in Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, Manila, and beyond as a question of vulnerability, resilience, and American prioritisation.

This is the Indo-Pacific meaning of selective legality. It does not arrive as a seminar about norms. It arrives as insurance costs, reserve releases, subsidy bills, rerouted cargo, and renewed doubt about U.S. prioritisation. The category of the middle power is contested, but that heterogeneity strengthens the present point. Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, and others do not experience exposure in identical ways. What they do share is the need to justify alignment to domestic audiences under conditions of material risk. That has a second-order coalition effect. In a Taiwan or South China Sea crisis, the United States will need more than bases and access. It will need diplomatic partners willing to bear political and economic costs in the name of rules they regard as genuinely shared. When legally disputed force reaches Asia as concrete economic and strategic risk, the rhetoric of universality becomes harder to sustain.

The domestic-political consequence should not be underestimated. Leaders across Asia must justify strategic alignment before publics that increasingly read contemporary conflicts comparatively: Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and perhaps tomorrow the Taiwan Strait. In that setting, legal credibility is not a moral luxury. It is part of what allows governments to defend costly strategic choices at home. Selective legality weakens not only interstate trust, but also the domestic coalition-building on which external alignment increasingly depends.

China’s Comparative Opportunity

None of this turns China into a principled guardian of international law. Isaac Kardon’s study of China’s maritime practice and the South China Sea arbitration are enough to preclude romanticism. Beijing uses legal language instrumentally, invokes sovereignty opportunistically, and rejects adverse rulings when it suits its interests. Yet geopolitics is comparative, not theological. Since the outbreak of the war, Beijing has repeatedly framed the crisis in the language of ceasefire, diplomacy, civilian protection, shipping security, and the primacy of the Charter. On 8 March, Wang Yi described the war as one that “should not have happened”. On 11 March, China’s Foreign Ministry stated that the use of force without UN authorisation clearly violated international law. On 31 March, China and Pakistan issued a five-point initiative calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities, peace talks, protection of civilians and peaceful nuclear facilities, safe passage through Hormuz, and a settlement grounded in the UN Charter and international law. On 14 April, Wang Yi again described the ceasefire as fragile and urged the international community to oppose any action that would undermine it.

The point is not that Beijing has become universalist. It is that Western conduct has made Charter language easier for China to inhabit and harder for Washington to monopolise. As Agathe Demarais argues at ECFR, China rather than Russia may prove the principal geopolitical beneficiary of the war. The important caveat is that China gains comparatively, not normatively. It benefits because many states are no longer asking which great power is virtuous. They are asking which appears less arbitrary, more predictable, and less openly exempt from the rules it proclaims.

That is a lower bar than liberal democracies once set for themselves, but it is increasingly the bar that matters. The issue is no longer whether Western states can prove themselves uniquely virtuous. It is whether they can avoid appearing exceptionally arbitrary. Every time they evade a direct legal appraisal of allied force, Beijing’s rhetoric becomes easier to market. Liberal democracies cannot repair that problem simply by denouncing Chinese revisionism more loudly.

Toward a Coalition of Legal Consistency

A more serious Western response would begin by treating legal consistency as a strategic asset rather than a moral luxury. First, governments should publish public legal reasoning before granting support to offensive military action that lacks an evident Article 51 case or Security Council mandate. That obligation should apply not only to direct participation but also to overflight, basing, refuelling, intelligence-sharing, cyber enablement, and maritime support. If enabling support is operationally decisive, it should also be politically accountable.

Second, parliamentary scrutiny should extend beyond trigger-pullers. Legislatures in Europe and the Indo-Pacific should treat enabling support as a matter of war scrutiny rather than bureaucratic routine. That is especially important for countries such as the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, and South Korea, whose territories and facilities can become indispensable to U.S.-led operations even when governments seek rhetorical distance from them.

Third, maritime coalitions in and around Hormuz should be explicitly defensive, multinational, and legally delinked from belligerent war aims. Their purpose should be safe navigation, demining, escort, and civilian protection, not the extension of a disputed war by other means. A joint statement of 19 March by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan pointed in the right direction by coupling navigation and de-escalation rather than subsuming both under offensive escalation.

Fourth, energy resilience should be treated as part of legal strategy. States that fear every oil shock will always be tempted to soften principle in the name of short-term stability. Diversification, stockpiles, alternative routes, and regional coordination are therefore not merely economic policy. They are what give governments the freedom to insist on legal standards when crisis strikes. Japan’s regional energy-resilience framework is significant for precisely that reason.

The broader point is that lawful alliance management is not an oxymoron. Alliances are more durable when members can distinguish collective defence from discretionary war. Europe has begun to rediscover that distinction under pressure. Indo-Pacific partners will need to do the same. Their task is not to choose between opposing Chinese revisionism and opposing allied exceptionalism. The two problems are connected.

The more consistently democracies apply legal standards to themselves, the easier it becomes to persuade others that Chinese coercion, blockade, or aggression should likewise be resisted. In a harsher and less forgiving international environment, power will remain indispensable. But power alone will not organise the coalitions that the next crisis will require. The real test posed by the Iran war is therefore not Tehran’s character. It is whether the governments that speak most insistently in the name of international order still believe that law binds friends as well as enemies. If they do not, the most durable strategic cost will not be borne only in the Gulf. It will be borne in the weakened coalition politics of the Indo-Pacific. If they do, then international law will have to become a reason of state rather than a vocabulary reserved for adversaries. That is not moral vanity; it is prudent strategy.

Stefan Messingschlager is a Research Associate in Modern History at Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany, Associate Researcher at the Chair of Contemporary Chinese Studies at Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg and a Non-resident Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin.

Analyses of the April 7, 2026 “Cheng–Xi meeting” risk falling into a conceptual blind spot: interpreting the encounter between the two party leaders through the lens of seeking peace or stability, while overlooking a crucial reality, namely that the Kuomintang (KMT) is not an actor capable of engaging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on equal strategic footing. Alas, this oversight carries significant danger, as it may push Taiwan toward greater insecurity rather than safety. Taiwan is a democracy and a resilient small state, but it is by no means a great power. In fact, Taiwan remains highly exposed to risk. Its critical strategic position means that, when facing the CCP regime that has never renounced the use of force, Taiwan must constantly think in terms of danger even in times of apparent calm. Accordingly, the central question is not whether "engagement” can bring peace or stability across the Strait, but rather how a structurally disadvantaged Taiwan can interact with a relatively advantaged authoritarian regime without undermining its own security. Historical experience suggests that for small states operating under unfavorable security conditions, engaging with a great power that denies their very subjecthood often produces counterproductive outcomes, leaving them more, not less, vulnerable (Kaufman, 1992; Labs, 1992; Christensen, 1997; Chasek, 2005).

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The fundamental problem with the "Cheng–Xi meeting” is not simply that it is risky for the leader of Taiwan’s opposition party to meet with the head of the CCP. Rather, even if the KMT were the ruling party in Taiwan, such a meeting would still entail substantial risks. What the "Cheng–Xi meeting” ultimately reveals is a deeper pathological syndrome within Taiwan’s perspective of security: a preference for symbolic reassurance over substantive action, and a tendency to equate cross-Strait "engagement” with peace-keeping or stability-making (Janis, 1972; Jervis, 1976; Stein, 1982). This pathology reflects a mistaken belief that high-level meetings with the CCP leaders contribute more to safeguarding national security than the sustained accumulation of Taiwan’s own capabilities (Chang Liao, 2012).

Structural Asymmetry across the Taiwan Strait

The Taiwan Strait is not merely a geographically defined space fraught with political contention; it is, more fundamentally, an asymmetric strategic environment shaped by three mutually reinforcing gaps.

First, there is a gap in material power. The CCP holds a clear advantage in both military scale and economic capacity, enabling it to steadily compress Taiwan’s strategic room and geopolitical space. Second, there is a hierarchical gap in the structure of interaction. In most instances, Beijing dominates the terms of engagement with Taipei. Nearly every cross-strait issue is framed or manipulated by Beijing as one of a hierarchical relationship between China and Taiwan, in which Beijing assumes the role of the superior actor while Taipei is cast in a subordinate position (Lin, 2022). Third, there is a disparity in narrative power. Although the authorities in Taipei do not exercise actual jurisdiction over mainland China, and the authorities in Beijing likewise do not exercise actual jurisdiction over Taiwan and its surrounding islands, the way these realities are framed in both domestic politics and international relations creates a profound asymmetry (Chen, 2022). Taiwan’s de facto independence is consistently overshadowed, and often constrained, by the controversy surrounding the de jure independence of Taiwan. As a result, a polity that is, in practice, already independent remains unable to ignore the political and legal weight of the “One China” issue. By the same logic, however, why is it that the government of the People’s Republic of China, which is legally constituted as an independent entity, has never been required to offer a detailed explanation for its claim that Taiwan—over which the CCP has exercised no authority since its founding in 1949—is nevertheless part of “China”? Put differently, why is a de facto independent Taiwan expected to justify why it is not yet recognized as a de jure independent state, while the PRC, despite never having de facto governed Taiwan, is not held to the same standard of explanation regarding its de jure claim to the island? If these questions are left unaddressed, or deliberately set aside, any discussion or practice of cross-Strait relations will be logically inconsistent and, more importantly, fundamentally unfair to Taiwan.

In an environment shaped by the intersection of the three structural asymmetries mentioned above, cross-Strait "engagement” resembles what the scholar David Shambaugh has described as Beijing’s deliberate strategy of selective interaction and the transmission of political signals (Shambaugh, 2004/2005). Beneath this approach lies a dense web of CCP’s calculation and tactical maneuvering, rather than any genuine pursuit of peace and stability. For Taiwan, which occupies the weaker position, the asymmetries create a fundamental dilemma; namely, increasing engagement may, paradoxically, exacerbate the very national security risks it seeks to manage. Conversely, reducing engagement often invites accusations of being the primary driver of instability in the Taiwan Strait.

The Root of the Pathology

Why do political elites and leaders within the KMT show a preference for engaging with the CCP? We argue that the answer lies in a misjudgment of “agency”. From the perspective of the parties involved in the April 7 meeting, the primary objective of such “engagement” was for Chair Cheng Li-wun to demonstrate the KMT’s indispensable role in managing cross-Strait relations. Yet whether the KMT truly holds such significance depends on whether its agency is symmetrical with that of the CCP on issues concerning Taiwan. However, the very reason the so-called “Cheng–Xi meeting” holds value for Beijing is precisely because this form of cross-Strait engagement is not one of mutual reciprocity or equality. Rather, it serves to signal to the international society that a leader of Taiwan’s opposition party is willing to engage under conditions set by the CCP. Consequently, what appears at the domestic level in Taiwan to be an expression of KMT agency actually reflects a different reality at the level of cross-Strait interaction: without the CCP as the principal actor, there would be no role for the KMT as the supporting actor.

From Taiwan’s perspective engagement with the Beijing authorities should not be reduced to political theater; it must serve as a form of communication essential to safeguarding national survival and security. A vast body of academic literature has already shown that Taiwan’s security depends critically on three pillars: sending the right signals to Beijing, offering clear assurances to Washington, and continuously strengthening the resilience of its own democratic society (Addison, 2001; Tucker, 2009; Rigger, 2011; Glaser, Weiss & Christensen, 2024). The so-called “Cheng–Xi meeting,” however, effectively casts all three aside, thereby heightening Taiwan’s sense of insecurity. If the chair of KMT were indeed to fly to Shanghai on April 7, it would signal that there are constituencies within Taiwan that the CCP can exploit and divide. It would also likely lead the international society to conclude that, even in the absence of formal government authorization, opposition leaders in Taiwan remain willing to engage with the CCP. The signals conveyed by such a meeting point not to greater cross-strait stability, but rather to deepening internal divisions within Taiwan over how to handle relations with the government of PRC. Moreover, the “Cheng–Xi meeting” undermines the clarity of Taiwan’s strategic positioning. For Washington, visible divisions within Taiwan complicate the management of U.S.–Taiwan–China relations, forcing the United States to retain a significant degree of strategic ambiguity. As long as the United States remains unable to move decisively from strategic ambiguity to strategic clarity, it will find it difficult to use its commitments to effectively counter the arguments of those in Taiwan who are skeptical of U.S. reliability. Finally, Taiwan’s democratic system risks turning what should be healthy electoral competition into a force that erodes its own democratic resilience. Politicians driven by electoral incentives, in their pursuit of party nominations or reelection, may be willing to trade away Taiwan’s national security in exchange for greater leverage at the political bargaining table for themselves.

In common discourse, "engagement” is often regarded as a means of reducing risk. Yet for smaller, disadvantaged states, engagement frequently fails to mitigate risk and may even produce the opposite effect by weakening their security. Within any interactive relationship, the relatively weaker actor tends to possess limited agency, while the stronger one is inclined to rely first on low-cost forms of engagement, such as talks or meetings, to induce compliance from the weaker side. Precisely for this reason, Taiwan is unlikely to derive greater security from the “Cheng–Xi meeting.” On the contrary, intense and adversarial political competition at home has already led Taipei to send misleading signals to Beijing, compelling Washington to maintain a certain degree of strategic ambiguity and, in the process, contributing to an erosion of Taiwan’s own democratic resilience.

Conclusion: A Seductive Agenda, a Fateful Capitulation

Set against the volatility of global energy markets in 2026 and the looming shadow of conflict in the Middle East, the upcoming “Cheng–Xi meeting” will almost certainly center on three themes: stability, avoiding war, and the future. At its core, the KMT chair is likely to put forward the idea of designating the Taiwan Strait as a zone free of armed conflict, underscoring that Taiwan should neither become a forward operating post in a U.S.–China confrontation nor be reduced to a geopolitical pawn. At the same time, with an Iran-related conflict intensifying pressures on global energy supply, Cheng will likely convince Xi to preserve the cross-Strait status quo, framing such restraint as consistent with Xi’s immediate strategic priorities, especially the need to sustain economic growth at home. Cheng is also expected to float the concept of a cross-Strait “economic safe haven,” designed to shield Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and other critical sectors from arbitrary trade tariffs and from the spillover effects of conflicts elsewhere. Cheng may even explore limited forms of cross-Strait cooperation in energy and electricity, particularly in light of mounting concerns over potential shortages.

If Xi responds positively to these proposals, even in purely rhetorical terms, the KMT would be well positioned to capitalize politically, using “Cheng-Xi meeting” to claim credit with the Taiwanese public and convert that momentum into electoral gains in 2026. If, however, Xi offers little in return, Cheng could still revert to the “1992 Consensus” as a fallback position, signaling to Xi that the KMT stands ready to “defend” the Republic of China’s constitutional interpretation of “one China” within the Legislative Yuan (the Preamble of the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the ROC), in exchange for a commitment from the People’s Liberation Army to refrain from the use of force against Taiwan. Such a move would aim to demonstrate to the international society that the KMT retains the ability to engage the CCP, while simultaneously dismantling the Democratic Progressive Party’s domestic “resist China, protect Taiwan” narrative.

Few observers are aware that Chair Cheng Li-wun came remarkably close to completing a doctoral degree in international relations at the University of Cambridge, and that during her tenure as a legislator she served on the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee. With such combination of academic training and hands-on experience, she would be well positioned to use the “Cheng–Xi meeting” to pursue a limited but meaningful opening in Taiwan’s international space. More specifically, she may seek to persuade Chair Xi to allow Taiwan some room for participation, in an observer capacity, in international organizations that are not politically sensitive but functionally oriented, such as the World Health Assembly (WHA) or the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Crucially, she could also insist that such participation be carried out by professionals affiliated with the KMT, effectively designating who would represent Taiwan in these international institutions. If this strategy were to succeed, the impact could be immediate. As early as the WHA session in late May this year, it could send shockwaves through Taiwan’s democratic system. Should the Taipei government reject what Beijing frames as a gesture of “goodwill” and decline to send representatives, it would almost certainly face sharp domestic criticism. Yet if it were to follow the pathway laid out through the “Cheng–Xi meeting,” it would, in practical terms, risk being reduced to a passive actor, forfeiting both its autonomy in international participation and its executive authority to appoint its own representatives.

Finally, one should not lose sight of a basic reality: Xi Jinping, a political figure who now concentrates the full weight of the CCP’s power and resources in his own hands, is by no means a leader who places the safety and well-being of the people above his personal interests. In front of the cameras, he will almost certainly extend a high-profile, ceremonially generous welcome to Chair Cheng Li-wun, giving her every appearance of respect and stature. Yet behind the closed door, Xi will just as surely seek to bind Cheng in a golden straitjacket of commitments centered on opposing Taiwan independence and advancing unification. For that reason, even if the “Cheng–Xi meeting” were to produce any so-called outcomes related to peace in the Taiwan Strait, such results would, in essence, amount to little more than a recycling of old formulas rather than any genuine step forward. Put differently, the meeting is unlikely to offer Taiwan a better future; instead, it risks locking the island back into the conceptual kekkai of 1992. The cost of such an outcome could prove exceedingly high. At a time when U.S.–China competition is intensifying, a meeting between the two party chairpersons would likely be interpreted in Washington as a strategic shift within Taiwan itself. It would suggest that Taiwan, as a small state, is not fully committed to standing alongside the United States, and that its domestic opposition party is willing to pursue accommodation with a regime that has long threatened it with the use of force. Under such circumstances, this form of cross-Strait “engagement” would not constitute diplomacy, nor would it meaningfully advance peace or security. Rather, it would amount to a high-stakes political gamble on the part of the KMT, coupled with a fateful act of capitulation.

In sum, it is not difficult to foresee that Chairman Cheng of the KMT will return from the "Cheng–Xi meeting” with what appears to be an enticing package of commitments, a deal filled with promises that look appealing but remain largely out of reach. These pledges are likely to place substantial strain on Taiwan’s democratic resilience, exacerbate social divisions, and, in turn, impose significant governing challenges on the administration. Yet such "commitments" appear deeply ironic when set against the reality of the CCP’s missile deployments, military exercises, cognitive warfare, and gray-zone operations directed at Taiwan. In essence, if Cheng Li-wun, acting in her capacity as an opposition leader, were to secure any form of commitment from the CCP, it would almost certainly come at the cost of diluting Taiwan’s will to defend itself. The more political dividends the KMT is able to extract from the CCP, the more Taiwan’s national security and societal resilience are likely to erode. What is unfolding is not a mutually beneficial rapprochement, but rather a slow constriction: Beijing is using “engagement” as a noose, tightening its grip on Taiwan’s sense of sovereignty. This is not a story of shared gains or peaceful coexistence. It is, instead, a textbook case of a Trojan horse.

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Wayne Tan is a Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Politics, National Chung Hsing University (Taiwan), where he also serves as Director of the Center for Indo-Pacific Strategy and Non-Traditional Security. His research focuses on the impacts of trade on state behavior and its implications for global health governance.

Anita Chu is a doctoral student at the Graduate Institute of International Politics at National Chung Hsing University (Taiwan). Her research specializes in the intersection of artificial intelligence and international political economy. She is the author of China’s Influence in Global Governance: The Case of Artificial Intelligence (Master’s thesis, published in Chinese, 2025). This master’s thesis was awarded Best Master’s Thesis by the College of Law and Politics at NCHU.