Lorenzo Maria Pacini
We can only hope that endless escalation will cool down and that the return of great-power politics will find a sustainable balance.
An era without rules
Anyone observing the international scene in the summer of 2026 would struggle to recognize the liberal order that, for a quarter of a century, had presented itself as the natural horizon of world politics.
In the space of a few weeks, there has been open discussion of the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran, a country without a nuclear arsenal; Russia has threatened to strike British military targets "in Ukraine and beyond"; the European Union has revived plans to mobilize frozen Russian sovereign assets to finance Kiev; and Washington has claimed control over an international strait as if it were national territory. The widespread sense - that of a system that has ceased to recognize any constraints - does not stem from a sudden loss of reason on the part of government officials. It stems from a structural shift that Western elites have been slow to grasp, and which they largely continue to deny.
The clearest interpretation of this shift was offered by John Mearsheimer in a recent interview with Prof. Glenn Diesen. The point is simple and equally uncomfortable: today's disorder is the combined result of a systemic transition - from unipolarity to multipolarity - and the persistence of problems inherited from the very era when the United States was the world's sole superpower. Anyone who wants to understand why people today speak so lightly of thresholds that were sacrosanct during the Cold War must keep these two dimensions in mind.
Realist thought, as a school of American international relations doctrine, starts from a premise that belongs to the discipline's most ancient grammar: international orders rest on the distribution of power, and when that changes, the order changes with it. The liberal international order was not a moral achievement destined to last; it was the global projection of the Western order born during the Cold War, made possible by the fact that the only major power remaining after 1991 was a liberal state. With the end of unipolarity, that condition ceased to exist. Three great powers have reemerged, and with them three distinct visions of what order - or orders - the world should have.
The BRICS institutions - from the development bank to alternative payment systems - are not mere rhetorical flourishes but the embryonic infrastructure of an order that competes with the one centered on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Viewed in this light, what we are witnessing is not the collapse of the order, but rather its competitive redefinition: the United States wants to preserve its own, while China and Russia intend to build different ones. It is a configuration that bears more resemblance to the Cold War than to the fifteen-year liberal era, compounded by greater complexity. A three-polar system generates combinations of alignment and rivalry that a two-polar system did not experience.
Added to this structural complexity are the legacies of the unipolar era. NATO's expansion began in 1994, at the height of American power, and continued in successive waves - in 1999, then in 2004 with the inclusion of the Baltic states - until it extended to Ukraine in 2008. The Ukrainian crisis that erupted in 2014 and the ongoing war are, from this perspective, the heaviest legacy of that era: a web woven at a time when it was believed th, no Russian reaction was truly possible. In the Middle East, the dynamic is the mirror image. From the "dual containment" policy adopted after the 1991 Gulf War to the Bush doctrine of regime change, the United States has immersed itself in the region with the same logic of political engineering that elsewhere was called "liberal hegemony."
The most original aspect of Mearsheimer's argument does not concern the structure, but rather those who govern it. The generation that shaped foreign policy during the Cold War had been forged in the crucible of World War II and instinctively reasoned in terms of the balance of power. With the end of the USSR, that language was declared obsolete: Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis instilled in an entire ruling class the conviction that realism was dead and that liberalism represented the inevitable future. In European universities, the study of the balance of power has all but disappeared; those who devote themselves to it are perceived not only as outdated, but as dangerous.
George Kennan had accurately predicted the consequences of Atlantic expansion as early as 1997. His was a realist assessment: any state would view the advance of a military alliance to its very borders as an existential threat. But the Clinton administration did not interpret this as a mistake made in bad faith. On the contrary, that leadership sincerely believed it could expand NATO and the European Union without alienating Moscow - that it could have its cake and eat it too. In the 1990s, Russia seemed to be moving toward liberal democracy, and China itself was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001 on the belief that economic integration would produce a "responsible stakeholder," not a systemic competitor.
The result is an elite that handles nuclear weapons and great-power crises without mastering the theory of deterrence or the logic of the security dilemma. During the Cold War, thinking about nuclear weapons was part of a strategist's daily work; in the unipolar era, with the possibility of a war between equals off the table, that culture dissolved. The sudden return of the nuclear issue in a tripolar world thus finds decision-makers unprepared.
The illogical option
The debate over the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran illustrates this lack of preparedness well.
During the Cold War, the reference scenario for the use of tactical nuclear weapons was a Warsaw Pact armored offensive in West Germany: a ground war between symmetrically armed armies. The Carte Blanche exercises and, in 1983, Proud Prophet revealed two unpleasant truths. The first: stopping the Soviet advance would have required a large number of weapons, with an estimated death toll of around 1.7 million Germans and the destruction of the very country they were meant to defend. The second: keeping the war at the "tactical" level was illusory, because escalation to the strategic level seemed almost automatic.
The Iranian case is different, and it is precisely these differences that reveal its senselessness. Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, so there is no fear of nuclear retaliation; and there is no ground war, but rather an air-and-naval conflict whose stated objective is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. What, then, would the targets be ? Striking the Strait with nuclear weapons would mean contaminating with radiation a stretch of sea bordering the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Striking the Iranian hinterland would not guarantee surrender and would in any case require massive military deployment. In both cases, the nuclear taboo would be broken, legitimizing the use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state that is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty: a devastating message for global non-proliferation, as well as a precedent set for Moscow, Beijing, and Tel Aviv. It is not surprising that Trump's advisors, according to available accounts, oppose this scenario.
There is one element that distinguishes today's deterrence from that of the Cold War, which Mearsheimer captures through two complementary conceptual tools. The first is the security dilemma: any measure a state adopts to defend itself is interpreted by its adversary as an offensive move. China's expansion of its intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal is defensive for Beijing, offensive for Washington; the weapons supplied to Taiwan are defensive for the United States, offensive for China. Since there is no clear criterion for distinguishing one from the other, every arms race appears to each contender as preparation for an attack.
The second tool is the distinction between containment and "rollback." No competition between great powers is limited to containment: the United States does not merely seek to contain Russia, but to "inflict a strategic defeat" on it and expel it from the ranks of the great powers - the very same rhetoric of "greatly weakening Russia" that Russian officials invoke today. This is where deterrence is turned on its head. During the Cold War, it served to preserve the status quo; today, the West invokes it while it itself is the revisionist pole, committed to pushing the line forward through Atlantic expansion and the provision of increasingly advanced weapons systems. This is not deterring aggression; it is asking the adversary not to react while climbing the ladder of escalation.
Mission and risk
The most revealing episode of this strategic confusion is CIA Director John Ratcliffe's lightning visit to Moscow on August 25, 2026, which I wrote about in a recent article. Accounts agree on a twofold message: to dissuade Russia from taking action against the Baltic states and to press it to sever its military and economic ties with Iran. Yet the premise - an imminent Russian threat against Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania - is not supported by the facts. The Baltic governments themselves - and even European officials cited by Bloomberg - have stated that the threat level has not increased. On the ground, moreover, Russia holds the upper hand: an effective air campaign, Ukraine effectively cut off from the sea, and severe economic consequences for Kiev. Thus, the motive that would make the "Karaganov" thesis of a compensatory escalation beyond Ukraine's borders plausible is missing.
If anything, the most concrete danger comes from a front that the Ratcliffe mission does not appear to have addressed: British cruise missiles. Following the Ukrainian attack with Storm Shadow on Donetsk on August 26, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that Moscow could strike British military installations "in Ukraine and beyond its borders." That "and beyond" is not just a stock phrase: it alludes to British targets outside Ukraine, perhaps on the territory of the United Kingdom or at sea. It is the most explicit threat Moscow has issued so far against a NATO member, and precisely because it is verbal in nature - a declared shift in posture, not an operational move - it must be taken seriously without being dramatized.
The erosion of constraints is not limited to the military sphere. On the economic front, the U.S. assertion that it can seize Iranian oil tankers and the European push to mobilize frozen Russian sovereign assets are moving in the same direction. The "reparations loan" proposed by the European Commission - up to 165 billion euros guaranteed by Russian funds frozen at Euroclear - is the most ambitious attempt to transform the freezing of sovereign assets into a tool for war financing. Whether one views this as legitimate retaliation or, as Moscow claims, "theft," the systemic effect is the same: the inviolability of sovereign assets - a pillar of the financial order built by the West - is being called into question by the very states that established it. It is the internal coherence of the liberal order that is cracking, not just its military resilience.
The transition to a tripolar world is underway; the legacies of the unipolar era continue to fuel conflicts, and a significant portion of the Western leadership still thinks in terms of categories forged in an era when great-power competition had been taken off the table. This is what we are witnessing unfold.
The stakes are high. In a multipolar system, the absence of a shared strategic culture and the confusion between defense and offense make escalation more likely precisely when the margins for error are narrowing. Understanding how great-power politics really works is not an academic exercise, but rather the minimum prerequisite for ensuring that, in a world that has once again become dangerous, cool heads prevail over magic formulas.
We can only hope that this endless escalation will cool down and that the return of great-power politics will find a sustainable balance. Otherwise, it will be endless war.