While much of the international debate continues to interpret the present through categories inherited from the Cold War or the post-1991 unipolar order, a far deeper transformation is silently reorganizing the structure of the international system. This work proposes a polycentric reading of this historical moment: not as a succession of regional wars and isolated crises, but as the convergence of economic, technological, philosophical, military, and civilizational processes that herald the transition toward a new world order. Drawing on primary Western and Eastern sources—Chinese strategic planning, international and human rights organizations, contemporary geopolitical thought, and the political economy of technology—this research argues that the current dispute does not merely pit states against one another: it confronts different projects for organizing power, knowledge, production, and, eventually, intelligence itself.
Abstract
There is a persistent tendency to explain the present through events. A war. An election. A financial crisis. A pandemic. But major historical changes rarely occur through an accumulation of events: they occur when the system connecting those events changes.
The central hypothesis of this research is that humanity is living through one of those moments. The international order built after the Second World War and consolidated following the Soviet collapse is ceasing to serve as the planet’s organizing framework. What is emerging in its place still has no definitive name, but it already displays identifiable features: the displacement of the world’s economic center toward Asia; the relative weakening of Western hegemony; the militarization of the Atlantic bloc to levels unseen since the Cold War; the consolidation of China as a civilization-state engaged in long-term planning; the emergence of artificial intelligence as civilizational infrastructure; and the terminal crisis of legitimacy of the institutions created in 1945—institutions now capable of documenting a genocide in real time while simultaneously being incapable of stopping it.
This research rejects the treatment of these phenomena as independent processes. The political economy of European rearmament, Eurasian infrastructure, the genocide in Gaza, the renewed war in Lebanon, the attacks against Iran in 2026, and the deadlock in Ukraine will be understood as different expressions of the same historical transition, examined through a deliberately polycentric approach: no actor will be used as the universal measure of all others. To accomplish this, the work engages in a sustained dialogue with four contemporary Chinese thinkers—Wang Huning, Yan Xuetong, Zhao Tingyang, and Qin Yaqing—and with the documentation produced by international human rights bodies, particularly the corpus of Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
The conclusion gradually developed throughout this inquiry is that the real struggle of the twenty-first century no longer revolves solely around territories, resources, or markets. It revolves around the capacity to keep the world in circulation—and to decide who is brought to a halt when the routes are closed.
Introduction
Every era believes itself to be living through extraordinary events. Few generations understand that what is truly changing is not the events themselves, but the entire system that gives them meaning. Daily headlines convey the impression of a planet engulfed in chaos: Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Taiwan, Iran, tariffs, artificial intelligence, BRICS, NATO, semiconductors. Each phenomenon appears to demand its own analytical space and to produce specialists dedicated exclusively to that fragment of reality. That fragmentation is precisely one of the principal obstacles to understanding this historical moment, because reality does not unfold in compartments. Wars alter trade; trade reorganizes industry; industry redefines technology; technology transforms military power; military power alters diplomacy; diplomacy conditions international law; law reshapes political legitimacy; legitimacy determines economic stability; and the economy ultimately finances the scientific capacities that will once again transform warfare. Everything forms part of the same system.
For much of the twentieth century, the center of gravity of international analysis was fixed by the historical experience of the West. Even when studies concerned Asia, Africa, or Latin America, the underlying question remained Western: how do these processes affect the order built by Europe and subsequently led by the United States? That intellectual structure continues to dominate academic, journalistic, and strategic production. When China appears, it does so as “the Chinese challenge.” When Russia acts, the discussion turns to “the Russian threat.” When BRICS expands, it is interpreted as “a challenge to the liberal order.” Even the concept of multipolarity is usually formulated from an implicit premise: the prior existence of a center whose loss of predominance must be explained.
This research begins with a different suspicion. Perhaps the problem is not merely that the world is changing; perhaps the intellectual categories through which we attempt to understand it are also becoming obsolete. Contemporary geopolitics still uses—often without realizing it—concepts created to interpret the Cold War or the liberal expansion that followed 1991. Yet those concepts struggle increasingly to describe a scenario in which China plans its development over horizons spanning decades; India is emerging as a technological and demographic power; Africa is acquiring strategic weight because of its critical minerals and population growth; the Global South is beginning to grow collectively; Eurasian railway routes are redrawing economic geography; artificial intelligence is simultaneously reorganizing production, warfare, education, and public administration; and institutions created more than eighty years ago face challenges coming even from some of their principal founders. We are not merely witnessing a change of actors. We are witnessing the gradual replacement of the entire stage.
This research does not seek to answer who will win the competition between the United States and China, nor to demonstrate the superiority of one political model over another. Its purpose is more ambitious and, at the same time, more elementary: to understand the deeper logic connecting apparently unrelated processes, and why much of contemporary strategic thought continues to describe the present through categories that belong to the past. Answering that question requires abandoning a customary practice in international studies: taking a single intellectual tradition as the point of departure. Western strategic thought is an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding the rise of capitalism, the formation of the modern state, colonial expansion, the world wars, and the Atlantic order. But it is insufficient for interpreting a civilization that does not plan its development according to those assumptions. Understanding China requires reading China—not only its statistics, but its concepts, its historical categories, its political philosophy, its way of understanding time, its conception of order, and its relationship between harmony and conflict.
This is why the present work will maintain a permanent dialogue with four of the most influential Chinese thinkers of our time: Wang Huning, the intellectual architect of much of contemporary Chinese political doctrine; Yan Xuetong, the creator of a theory of international leadership based on moral realism; Zhao Tingyang, whose reinterpretation of the concept of Tianxia proposes an alternative architecture for world order; and Qin Yaqing, the author of a relational theory of international relations that differs profoundly from the individualism prevailing in Western thought. They will not appear in a specialized chapter about China: they will be permanent interlocutors, in continuous dialogue with Western authors, international organizations, and the strategic decisions of the great powers.
For the ultimate purpose of this research is not to replace a Western narrative with an Eastern one. It is to understand how different civilizations are simultaneously imagining the world to come. And to understand that this dispute is no longer being fought solely over territories, markets, or natural resources: it is being fought over the very meaning of progress, order, knowledge and—for the first time in human history—the future forms of intelligence that will coexist with our civilization.
CHAPTER I. WHEN MENTAL MAPS CEASE TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD
“Nothing is more dangerous than continuing to use an accurate map of a territory that no longer exists.” (The sentence does not belong to any author: it summarizes the methodological principle of this research.)
The Blindness of the Victors
Every dominant power develops a recurring illusion: it mistakes the order it has built for the natural order of the world. It happened to the Roman Empire, it happened to the British Empire, and it happened to the United States after 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union was interpreted in the West not merely as a geopolitical victory, but as definitive confirmation that liberal capitalism, representative democracy, and US-led globalization constituted humanity’s inevitable destiny. Francis Fukuyama captured that sentiment in his discussion of the “end of history,” and beyond the criticisms that followed, the thesis reflected a collective psychological state: not that wars would cease to exist, but that alternative models with a genuine capacity to contest the organization of the world system would no longer exist. Liberal democracy would be perfected, markets would integrate the planet, multilateral institutions would consolidate a rules-based order, and technology would accelerate convergence. The expansion of the Internet appeared to confirm it; China joined the World Trade Organization; Russia participated in Western economic forums; global production chains reached unprecedented complexity. Everything seemed to indicate that history was moving in a single direction.
Beneath that surface, however, something different was occurring. The West assumed that economic opening would inevitably produce political opening. China assumed precisely the opposite: that economic opening could be used to strengthen national capacities. The West believed it was exporting capitalism. China understood that it had gained valuable time: time to learn, industrialize, train scientists, build universities and infrastructure, absorb technology, and accumulate capital. While Washington imagined an ideological convergence, Beijing was carrying out a technological convergence. They were not pursuing the same project. They were simply using the same stage.
Two Conceptions of Time
Here we encounter the first profound philosophical difference. The West thinks politically in short cycles: elections, annual budgets, presidential terms, quarterly results, immediate profitability. China thinks differently: not because it disregards the short term, but because the short term is always subordinated to a longer trajectory.
The Fifteenth Five-Year Plan can only be understood as the fifth minute of a conversation that began decades ago. It does not exist as an isolated document: it is an operational stage within cumulative planning, in which each plan prepares the conditions for the next. The logic is not to improvise; it is to build continuity. Many Western analysts study each plan as though it were a new policy; from Beijing, the opposite is true: each plan is an incremental correction along an already defined trajectory. The destination does not change. The route is adjusted. This way of thinking has enormous geopolitical consequences. While many democracies modify their national priorities every four or five years, China can sustain industrial policies for twenty or thirty years: railways, higher education, semiconductors, electrical grids, the aerospace industry, quantum computing, artificial intelligence. This does not guarantee success, but it provides extraordinary continuity for projects whose maturation requires decades. The West generally asks what China will do over the next five years. The Chinese question is probably different: what place will China occupy in thirty years, and what must be done today to reach it? These are different temporalities—and a difference in temporality ultimately produces differences in strategy.
Wang Huning and the Civilization-State
No author helps us understand this continuity better than Wang Huning. Outside China, his name remains relatively unknown; nevertheless, he is probably the most influential political intellectual of the twenty-first century. He has worked with Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping: three leaders, three stages, three political generations—and Wang remains. That fact alone provides a clue. While in many democracies leading intellectuals change along with governments, Wang represents doctrinal continuity. He is not merely an adviser: he is one of the conceptual architects of the contemporary Chinese state.
After touring US universities, cities, and political centers in the late 1980s, Wang was impressed by the country’s enormous scientific and technological capacity. But he observed something else: an extraordinarily innovative society that was, at the same time, becoming increasingly fragmented. Decades later, that intuition has acquired extraordinary importance. For Wang, a civilization does not survive through its economy alone: it needs cohesion, identity, continuity, and a shared narrative. While much of liberal thought considers society to arise from individuals, Wang reverses the logic: collective strength is the condition that makes individual development possible. This is not merely a political difference. It is an anthropological difference—and it permeates the entire contemporary Chinese project. The West generally interprets the strengthening of the Chinese state as an obstacle to development; China understands precisely the opposite: a strong state is the instrument that sustains development across generations. That divergence explains much of the misunderstanding between the two worlds.
The Western Error About China
For years, a simple assumption prevailed: as China grew wealthier, it would eventually come to resemble the West politically. This did not happen, and it did not happen because the hypothesis rested on a mistaken assumption: the conflation of modernization with Westernization. China modernized—it industrialized, urbanized, digitized, electrified, educated, researched, and built—but it did not Westernize its political architecture. The error lay in assuming that these two transformations were inseparable. History demonstrates that they are not.
This brings us to an essential methodological issue for this research. The question is not which model is superior, but rather to understand that each begins from different assumptions about how a society is organized. While the West places the individual as its initial unit of analysis, China tends to think first about the system: the individual exists, but within a broader structure—the family, the community, the state, the civilization. The difference extends even to artificial intelligence. The West asks how individual freedom can be protected from AI; China asks how AI can be integrated into collective development. These are not different answers: they are different questions. And the questions determine which answers are possible.
The World Did Not Change in 2022
There is another idea that must be dismantled from the outset. Many analyses locate the beginning of the new world in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; others place it in the pandemic, Trump’s rise to power, or the 2008 financial crisis. All identify important moments; none explains the complete process.
The change began much earlier. Probably when China decided that economic opening would serve to strengthen national capacities rather than dissolve them. Probably when the West transferred its manufacturing capacity to Asia in the belief that it would indefinitely retain its monopoly over knowledge. Probably when the Internet ceased to be an academic network and became economic infrastructure, and when production was broken down into hundreds of stages distributed across the planet. The new world was not born with a war: the war made visible a process that had been developing for decades.
The distinction is fundamental. Because if the transformation began much earlier, it will not end when the war in Ukraine ends either. What is changing does not depend upon a battle: it depends upon a far deeper redistribution of industrial, scientific, energy, and technological capacities. And that redistribution will continue even if every armed conflict were to disappear tomorrow.
CHAPTER II. THE WORLD NO LONGER REVOLVES AROUND THE ATLANTIC
“There is no international order without an idea of the world to sustain it.”
The Center Is Not a Place: It Is a Capacity
There is an image deeply rooted in Western thought: the world has a center. For centuries, that center was Europe; after 1945, it began to shift toward the United States; following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the system appeared to have been definitively transformed into an order organized around a single power. But that image contains a problem: it confuses geography with structure.
The center of the world has never been a point on a map. It has been the region capable of simultaneously concentrating five fundamental capacities: production, knowledge, finance, military power, and the ability to define the rules accepted by others. When a region ceases to possess all five conditions, the center begins to shift—even if the maps continue to be drawn in the same way.
Economic history teaches that these shifts occur slowly and only become evident afterward. Fernand Braudel demonstrated that world-economies never remain static; Giovanni Arrighi developed that intuition by showing how the great cycles of accumulation pass from one power to another throughout the history of capitalism. Their works allow us to understand that hegemonic transitions are processes spanning several decades, rather than discrete events.
It is worth establishing at this point where this book stands within that conversation. Dominant US literature has framed the transition as a collision: Graham Allison popularized the “Thucydides Trap”—the alleged structural tendency toward war when a rising power threatens an established one (Allison, 2017)—and John Mearsheimer argues that China’s rise cannot be peaceful because the anarchic logic of the system compels every great power to seek regional hegemony (Mearsheimer, 2001). This work challenges both frameworks at the level of their shared premise: both measure the transition according to the clock of European transitions, as though the only possible grammar of ascendance were the one produced by Western wars. Arrighi’s perspective is more fruitful here: in his final major work, he anticipated precisely the possibility of an East Asia-centered transition that would follow the path of markets and accumulation rather than military conquest (Arrighi, 2007). The chapters that follow will put that hypothesis to the test—without assuming it has been proven, but also without accepting that the Greek trap is the inevitable destiny of the Chinese century.
The Chinese leadership, moreover, states the formula plainly: since 2017, Xi Jinping has repeatedly said that the world is undergoing “changes unseen in a century”—a formulation that the Western press often cites as rhetoric but which is, in reality, a thesis about historical periodization. This work adopts that temporal perspective. We will not study a crisis. We will study a transition.
China Is Not a “Challenge”: It Is a Reorganization
Much of US strategic literature uses a recurring expression: the China Challenge. The formulation appears innocent, but it is not, because every formulation presupposes a vantage point. If China constitutes a “challenge,” a challenge to whom? The expression only makes sense if the order led by the United States is taken as the point of reference. From Beijing, the question is different: China does not officially define itself as a challenge to anyone; it presents itself as a national modernization project whose objective is to build—according to the formula its leadership has repeated for years—a modern socialist country that is strong, prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful. Neither narrative should be accepted uncritically. What matters is understanding that they respond to different rationalities.
Wang Huning reappears here, and his position should be specified. In the West, he is often described as a Party ideologue; the characterization is too narrow. Wang thinks on historical scales, and his constant concern revolves around a question that scarcely exists in the US tradition: how can a civilization more than five thousand years old avoid losing its continuity during modernization? The United States was born within modernity; China had to modernize a civilization that preceded the modern European state. This is why Wang insists on combining openness with institutional continuity, innovation with stability, and modernization with cultural cohesion. His early diagnosis of the United States—the formidable technological power marked by growing social fragmentation, introduced in the previous chapter—was not merely a travel observation: it was the negative blueprint underlying all his subsequent thought. Rather than copying the US model, China had to learn from its strengths while avoiding the reproduction of what Wang interpreted as its structural weaknesses. This is where the Chinese path begins to diverge from the Western one.
Time as a Strategic Resource
One of the most common errors is to interpret five-year plans as administrative programs comparable to the national development plans of other governments. They are not: they function as operational instruments within a far more extensive planning structure. The Fifteenth Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) must be read alongside the targets for 2035 and the objectives established for the middle of the century. It does not exist in isolation. It is a station, not the journey.
The practical consequence is visible in every sector that now supports China’s economic weight: the high-speed railway network, electrification, university expansion, the shipbuilding industry, electric vehicles, data centers, and artificial intelligence. None emerged during a single five-year period; all represent successive accumulations, with corrections incorporated at every stage without abandoning the overall horizon. The West usually observes the result. China usually plans the trajectory.
Yan Xuetong: Power Is Not Enough
If Wang Huning helps us understand the continuity of the Chinese state, Yan Xuetong allows us to understand how Beijing interprets international leadership. Yan is one of Asia’s most influential international relations scholars, and his proposal—moral realism—directly engages with classical US realism. Authors such as Hans Morgenthau or John Mearsheimer place material power at the center of the international system; Yan accepts the importance of power but introduces an additional element: political leadership. Great powers may accumulate extraordinary military and economic resources and still fail if they do not generate sufficient legitimacy to attract lasting allies.
In Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (2011), Yan draws upon a distinction from classical Chinese political philosophy: the difference between humane authority—wangdao, leadership that others follow because they regard it as morally trustworthy—and mere hegemony—badao, dominance sustained by the ability to compel. His argument partially recalls Joseph Nye’s “soft power,” but differs on the decisive point: it is not about projecting an attractive image, but about exercising leadership that other actors perceive as morally superior. This does not mean that China already possesses such leadership; it means that a significant part of its strategic thought considers it insufficient to explain international politics through military capabilities alone.
The idea acquires enormous relevance when we observe the recent behavior of the system. Many countries in the Global South simultaneously maintain relations with Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Brussels, and New Delhi—not because of ambiguity, but in order to maximize autonomy: they do not wish to replace one dependency with another. From that perspective, competition between the United States and China no longer consists solely of manufacturing more aircraft carriers or more semiconductors. It consists of demonstrating which project is more stable, more predictable, and more beneficial to third parties.
The Error of Looking Only at Armies
There is a further methodological consequence. For much of the twentieth century, geopolitics was explained through borders, military bases, and nuclear balance. All of that remains relevant, but it is no longer sufficient. The true strategic map of the twenty-first century also includes ports, railways, submarine cables, data centers, power grids, satellite constellations, critical minerals, semiconductors, logistics corridors, battery plants, and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Power can no longer be measured solely by the number of tanks: it must be measured by the capacity to keep a highly complex economy functioning.
China understood that transformation early. This is why it is insufficient to describe the Belt and Road solely as an infrastructure project: it is also a logistical reorganization of world trade, in which every financed port, every railway corridor, every gas pipeline, and every fiber-optic cable represents a potential reduction in strategic vulnerabilities. While numerous Western analyses interpret that infrastructure as an instrument of political influence, Beijing presents it as a material condition for shared development. This research will not automatically accept either version: it will analyze each case individually, because infrastructure can simultaneously benefit both its recipient and its financier. Geopolitics rarely operates as a zero-sum game.
An Uncomfortable Question
At this point, it is worth formulating a question that rarely appears in Western public debate: if China had attempted to build its rise through military campaigns comparable to the major US interventions of recent decades, would it have attained its current economic position? Probably not. Its expansion has rested primarily on industrial production, trade, infrastructure, financing, education, and investment. This does not mean the absence of strategic interests, coercion, or conflict. It means that China’s principal instrument of expansion has been economic rather than military.
This difference will be fundamental when we analyze trade routes, the political economy of Western rearmament, and the militarization of the North Atlantic. For one of the central hypotheses of this research is precisely this: while part of the Atlantic bloc is reorganizing its economy around security and defense, China continues attempting to reorganize the world economy around production, logistics, and connectivity. Not because it is altruistic, but because that model is consistent with the structure upon which it built its power.
CHAPTER III. TWO CIVILIZATIONAL PROJECTS
“The decisive question is no longer who has more power, but what kind of order each considers legitimate to exercise.”
When the World Ceases to Speak a Single Language
For approximately three decades, much of the literature on international relations asserted that there was an almost universal language for discussing world order: liberal democracy, markets, globalization, governance, the rule of law, multilateral institutions, and human rights. These concepts remain essential, but they are no longer sufficient to describe the entirety of the international system. Not because they have lost their validity, but because they are no longer the only frameworks from which the world is conceived. This observation requires enormous methodological caution. It does not mean that all models are equivalent, nor does it mean relativizing universal principles. It means recognizing that different civilizations organize the relationship between the individual, the community, the state, history, and power in different ways. While the West developed the modern state from a tradition that privileged the individual’s autonomy from political power, China developed a historical continuity in which the state appears as the guarantor of civilizational stability. These are different genealogies—and every genealogy produces different categories. This is why attempting to understand Chinese strategic thought exclusively through concepts born in Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries often leads to errors of interpretation. Not because those concepts are incorrect, but because they were constructed to answer different questions.
Zhao Tingyang and the Idea of Tianxia
If Wang Huning represents reflection on the continuity of the state and Yan Xuetong the discussion of leadership, Zhao Tingyang introduces a more radical question: what if the problem of world order were not merely who occupies the position of hegemon, but the very concept of international order?
Zhao recovers an ancient Chinese concept: Tianxia, generally translated as “all under heaven.” The literal translation can be misleading: it does not refer to an immense territory, but to a way of thinking about the world. In the modern Western political tradition, the point of departure is the sovereign state: states exist first, then establish relations, and finally construct international institutions. In Tianxia, the reasoning appears inverted: the world exists first, and political communities subsequently find their place within it. The difference may appear philosophical; in reality, it is profoundly geopolitical because it changes the fundamental question. The West asks how sovereign states can coexist. Zhao asks how a politically stable world can exist if each state acts solely according to its own interests. The issue is not to accept his answer automatically. It is to understand that the question is different—and a different question completely reorganizes the field of discussion.
The concept, it must be said, does not circulate without resistance—and this book will not conceal its critics. William Callahan formulated the most serious early objection: Tianxia, he argues, would not represent a post-hegemonic universalism, but rather a new hegemony dressed in cosmopolitan clothing—a Sinocentric hierarchy presenting itself as an order for everyone precisely because its center declares itself invisible (Callahan, 2008). The criticism is powerful: historical Tianxia was, indeed, a tributary system with Beijing at its apex, and projecting it as a future architecture without examining that genealogy amounts to disguising ritualized subordination as inclusion. Zhao responds that his proposal is a philosophical reinvention rather than an imperial restoration; but the burden of proof, as we will see when analyzing the Belt and Road, rests upon practice: the question of whether a Chinese network can exist without Chinese centrality is not a Western attack on the concept—it is the test that the concept itself must pass.
Is an Order Without Permanent Enemies Possible?
Here, Zhao diverges even from much of classical realism. In many Western schools, conflict appears as an almost inevitable condition of the international system: competition is the rule, cooperation the exception. Zhao attempts to reverse that logic. His thesis, developed in All Under Heaven (2021), argues that a stable order cannot be built merely by balancing enemies: it must create relationships in which actors find greater benefit in remaining within the system than in destroying it. The implication is enormous because it shifts the focus from military balance to institutional architecture. Preventing wars is not enough. An order must be built in which war becomes increasingly irrational.
And here a notable convergence appears with contemporary Chinese economic strategy. The enormous development of international infrastructure—railways, ports, energy corridors, digital networks—can be interpreted not only as commercial expansion, but as a way of increasing the economic cost of conflict. The greater the material interdependence, the more costly a generalized rupture becomes. This does not eliminate wars. But it changes the incentives.
Trade as an Architecture of Peace…and Power
A phrase has been repeated countless times within economic liberalism: countries that trade with one another do not go to war. History demonstrates that the claim is overly optimistic—powers have continued trading even while fighting one another—but it contains a partially correct intuition: interdependence modifies strategic calculations.
It is therefore worth introducing an idea that will run throughout this research. China does not need a peaceful world because it is philosophically pacifist. It needs a relatively stable world because its economic architecture depends upon extremely complex international chains: every major war introduces uncertainty into maritime insurance, transportation, ports, energy, financing, raw materials, and consumer markets. This does not mean that China renounces force when it considers interests it deems essential to be at stake. It means something else: its model of expansion derives greater benefits from a connected planet than from a destroyed one. China’s true power does not rest solely on producing goods. It rests on keeping them in circulation.
Qin Yaqing and Relationships as Power
Thus far, we have discussed the state, leadership, and world order. Qin Yaqing introduces the final and most subtle conceptual shift. Much of Western theory imagines independent actors first and then studies the relationships between them; Qin proposes reversing the reasoning: relationships are not merely consequences of actors—they also contribute to producing them. In his most frequently cited formulation, relationships create actors’ identities (Qin, 2018).
This may appear to be a philosophical discussion. Consider one example: Taiwan. Numerous Western analyses present it as a territorial problem. From Qin’s perspective, the question would be different: what type of historical, economic, cultural, and political relationship simultaneously produces cooperation and shared identity, but also conflict? The relationship ceases to be a simple connection: it becomes part of reality itself.
This approach is enormously helpful in understanding why so many countries in the Global South simultaneously maintain relations with the United States, China, Russia, Europe, India, and the Gulf states. Not necessarily because they are ambiguous, but because they consider the wealth of relationships to be, in itself, a strategic resource. Autonomy no longer consists of isolation. It consists of avoiding exclusive dependence on a single center. We will return to this theory repeatedly throughout the book—in infrastructure, Europe, and Latin America—because it is probably the most fertile tool in the entire contemporary Chinese conceptual repertoire.
Here Our Question Begins to Change
Up to this point, it might appear that we are writing a chapter on Chinese political philosophy. We are not: we are deliberately changing the tool with which we will analyze the rest of the book. For if we continue to use Western categories alone, we will end up describing China as a permanent anomaly—and that would prevent us from understanding the true historical phenomenon.
The question should no longer be why China did not ultimately come to resemble the West. The correct question is different: why did the West assume it was inevitable that every civilization would eventually organize itself according to the West’s own historical categories? The methodological shift is decisive because it frees the research from an invisible premise: the idea that there is only one legitimate trajectory toward modernity. There is not. There are different modernities. Some prioritize markets, others industry; some privilege individuals, others institutional continuity; some think in electoral cycles, others in generations. And all of them interact simultaneously within the same international system.
A Necessary Warning
At this point, I must introduce a warning that will accompany the entire research: understanding does not mean endorsing; explaining does not mean justifying. Analyzing Chinese strategic rationality is not the same as turning it into a universal truth, just as analyzing Western rationality does not mean accepting it as an objective description of the world. This book does not seek to construct a new orthodoxy. It attempts to show how different civilizational projects interpret the same planet from profoundly different premises.
And that is precisely why zones of friction will begin to appear. Because these projects are not competing solely for markets: they are competing to define what development means, what legitimacy means, what security means, what sovereignty means, and, increasingly, what intelligence means. Up to this point, we have observed how China thinks about order. In the next chapter, we will examine how the West responds to its gradual loss of centrality—and there an element will emerge that usually remains concealed behind the discourse of security: the political economy of fear.
CHAPTER IV. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FEAR
Threat as Budget, War as Market, and Europe as a Territory of Rearmament
A war can be real and, at the same time, its narrative can be industrially profitable.
The war in Ukraine is real. So are its dead, its maimed, its displaced people, its destroyed cities, its occupied territories, and its separated families. The Russian invasion launched in February 2022 is also real, as is the danger it poses to the countries in its immediate vicinity. Recognizing this does not, however, oblige us to accept without scrutiny the narrative that Russia is inevitably preparing an offensive against Europe as a whole and that European societies must organize their economies, infrastructure, and civilian life around that hypothesis for decades. Here begins the task that journalism cannot delegate to governments or military commands: separating the fact of war from the political, budgetary, and financial exploitation of that fact. A war can have specific causes and, simultaneously, generate actors interested in prolonging its most expansive interpretation. It may begin for territorial, historical, or security reasons and end up converted into an argument for industrial programs extending far beyond it. It can be a human tragedy and, for others, a market opportunity. The existence of a threat does not prove that every measure adopted in its name is necessary, that the magnitude assigned to that threat is objective, or—much less—that the economic beneficiaries of the military response are neutral observers of reality.
The question, then, is not whether Russia poses a danger. The rigorous question is another: what specific danger does it pose, to which countries, over what time horizon, with what demonstrated capabilities, and under what political conditions? And immediately afterward: who quantifies that danger? Who defines the appropriate response? Who receives the contracts? Who finances the debt? Who turns public decisions into investment products? Who loses budgetary resources when defense becomes a priority above all others? Without these questions, the concept of security ceases to function as an analytical category and becomes an ideological password.
From the Defense of Ukraine to Europe’s Permanent Preparation
The most revealing decision was not a specific transfer of weapons to Kyiv. It was the conversion of war preparedness into Europe’s economic horizon. In June 2025, NATO countries agreed to move toward spending equivalent to 5% of their gross domestic products by 2035: at least 3.5% allocated to core military functions and up to 1.5% countable as critical infrastructure, resilience, networks, civil preparedness, and defense-related innovation (NATO, 2025). The summit declaration itself justified the increase by characterizing Russia as a long-term threat to Euro-Atlantic security.
Let us pause over that figure. Five percent of GDP is not a budgetary adjustment: it is a reorientation of the historical state. It means that healthcare, education, housing, pensions, climate adaptation, and the fight against poverty will have to coexist with a military commitment of extraordinary magnitude, unless governments substantially raise taxes, increase their debt, or cut other functions. It is not enough for a government to declare that there will be no social sacrifices: political economy compels us to ask where the money will come from, because a budget is not a moral abstraction. It is a concrete allocation of scarce resources. We are therefore not confronting an exclusively military policy. We are confronting a decision about the kind of state Europe intends to become.
ReArm Europe: The Name Was Too Honest
In 2025, the European Commission presented the program initially called ReArm Europe—later incorporated into the Readiness 2030 framework—whose stated objective was to create the conditions for mobilizing up to €800 billion in additional defense expenditure over the following years; the SAFE instrument added €150 billion in lending capacity for joint military procurement (European Commission, 2025a, 2025b). It is worth writing the figure in full, because abbreviations anesthetize: 800,000,000,000 euros.
What would have happened if the Commission had proposed mobilizing that amount to build public housing, eliminate energy poverty, rescue healthcare services, or reconstruct civilian industry? An endless discussion would probably have begun over fiscal discipline, deficits, competition rules, and state interference. But when the destination is military, neoliberalism’s doctrinal prohibitions become negotiable. The state that for decades claimed it could not direct the economy suddenly discovers that it can: it can guarantee demand, grant loans, relax fiscal rules, subsidize industrial capacity, coordinate purchases, arrange contracts in advance, reduce administrative procedures, intervene in supply chains, and turn entire sectors into strategic priorities.
The question, then, is not whether the state possesses the capacity to plan. The question is for what purpose, and for whose benefit, it decides to use that capacity. European rearmament demonstrates that public planning never disappeared: it was selectively restricted when it could challenge private interests or redistribute wealth downward, and when recovered for the military industry it is once again presented as a national necessity.
Military Keynesianism: When War Replaces Industrial Policy
Europe enters this race at a moment of weakness. It has lost relative ground in the decisive digital sectors; it depends on US platforms, Asian hardware, imported energy, and foreign markets; its automotive industry faces China’s technological offensive; growth is weak, and austerity policies have eroded infrastructure and public services. In that context, rearmament offers something European elites had sought for years: a politically powerful justification for reactivating metallurgy, electronics, aeronautics, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and energy production. Defense thus becomes industrial policy by other means.
There is no need to argue that the war was manufactured to sell weapons; such an accusation, presented without evidence, would weaken the research. The rigorous thesis is different: the war opened an opportunity for industrial reorganization, and its beneficiaries have material reasons to prevent the state of exception from ending. The distinction is decisive because we do not need to demonstrate a centralized conspiracy: it is enough to study the convergence of incentives. Governments need to display resolve; military commands, to expand their capabilities; companies, predictable contracts; shareholders, returns; funds, growth sectors; think tanks, to produce threat scenarios; the media turn them into a public atmosphere; and critical parties are accused of naïveté, weakness, or complicity with the enemy. No one needs to meet in a secret room for the system to work. The structure aligns behavior.
Threat as a Financial Asset
Global military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, following years of uninterrupted growth; Europe increased its expenditure by 14% in a single year—the fastest rate since 1953—to $864 billion, while NATO members accounted for 55% of the planet’s military spending (SIPRI, 2026). These figures do not describe weapons alone. They describe capital flows: every budgetary decision creates expectations of future income for manufacturers, software companies, construction firms, banks, insurers, energy suppliers, and investment funds.
Contemporary warfare is no longer organized solely by the military-industrial complex denounced by Dwight Eisenhower in 1961. That concept remains valid, but it is no longer sufficient: today’s structure is military, industrial, financial, technological, logistical, and communicational. One company manufactures missiles; another develops sensors; another controls the cloud in which the data are processed; another produces the chips; a bank structures the financing; a fund acquires shareholdings; an insurer covers the facilities; a government guarantees purchases; a supranational body relaxes the rules; a media outlet transforms the economic operation into a moral duty. War becomes an ecosystem.
BlackRock: Neither an Arms Manufacturer nor an Innocent Actor
It is worth pausing over BlackRock, and doing so with precision, because imprecision gives the argument away. BlackRock is not an arms company, nor is it the direct owner of every company whose shares appear in its funds: it is an enormous asset manager administering the capital of pension funds, institutions, and millions of investors, and its holdings are generally exercised on behalf of those clients. This clarification is essential to avoid caricature. But correcting the caricature does not mean absolving the structure.
BlackRock and other asset managers such as Vanguard and State Street concentrate an extraordinary capacity to channel capital, define financial products, participate in corporate voting, and translate geopolitical transformations into investment opportunities. And BlackRock openly presents European defense as an investment theme: in its commercial communications, it has associated increased military expenditure with opportunities arising from “geopolitical fragmentation” (BlackRock, 2025–2026). There is nothing secret about this. That is precisely why it matters.
When collective security becomes a financial product, a structural conflict arises between two temporalities: peace requires the threat to diminish; thematic investment can generate returns if spending associated with the threat continues. This does not mean that a fund desires open war—total war destroys assets, markets, and stability. Something more manageable may suit it better: prolonged insecurity, serious enough to sustain extraordinary budgets, but not so destructive that it collapses the financial system. Complete peace closes contracts. Total war destroys markets. Permanent tension may be the point of maximum profitability. And is this not precisely the political-emotional regime established in Europe? There is no declared war between NATO and Russia. There is no negotiated peace. There is indefinite preparation.
Wang Huning: When the Economy Begins to Devour the Value System
Wang Huning reappears here, not as an infallible oracle but as an interlocutor. In America Against America, published in 1991 after his journey through the United States, Wang portrayed a society of enormous technical and productive capacity traversed by a contradiction: the market had ceased to be merely an economic mechanism and was beginning to penetrate spheres that had previously belonged to community, education, culture, and moral life. His most incisive question can be summarized in a brief sentence—according to the English translation of the work in circulation, whose Chinese original has no complete official translation: “If the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained?” (Wang, 1991).
That question must now be directed at militarized Europe. What happens when security ceases to be a public good and becomes an investment category? What happens when the perception of an enemy determines stock-market valuations? What kind of democratic deliberation can exist if questioning the scale of rearmament is presented as a threat to the nation? Can a society rationally assess danger when a growing part of its economic apparatus depends upon that danger being perceived as enduring? Wang feared that the commercialization of every aspect of social life would ultimately erode the cultural conditions sustaining US capitalism itself. Applied to the present, his reasoning allows another hypothesis to be formulated: militarized capitalism may ultimately need the insecurity it claims to combat.
How Much of the Threat Is Capability, and How Much Is Projection?
Western propaganda portrays Russia as a power preparing to advance across Europe; Russian propaganda presents NATO as an offensive encirclement seeking its destruction. Both narratives select real facts and arrange them to produce a totalizing meaning.
Russia has demonstrated a willingness to use force, a nuclear capability, expanding military production, and a readiness to sustain enormous human and economic costs: in 2025, its military expenditure reached 7.5% of GDP (SIPRI, 2026). But it has also demonstrated limitations. A power that has spent years attempting to establish complete control over Ukraine does not automatically become a force capable of conquering the European Union while simultaneously confronting NATO.
This contradiction is rarely examined: Russia is presented at once as a weakened military that can be defeated in Ukraine and as an expansionist machine capable of threatening the entire continent. Can both be true? Only partially. It may be incapable of occupying Europe and, at the same time, capable of causing immense damage: attacking infrastructure, exercising nuclear coercion, destabilizing borders, conducting cyber operations, and assaulting smaller states. But that possibility does not automatically imply that every European country should reach NATO’s 5% spending target. The scale of the response requires its own demonstration. The threat cannot function as a blank check.
Yan Xuetong: Leadership That Needs to Produce Enemies Is Leadership in Decline
Yan’s moral realism offers a useful tool for questioning the Atlantic response. His theory does not deny competition or military power; it argues that the international hierarchy also depends on the quality of leadership and the capacity to attract support. A power leads when others consider it rational to follow—not simply when it can compel them. This is the old distinction between wangdao and badao introduced in Chapter II, applied to the Atlantic.
Viewed through that lens, US pressure on Europe reveals a paradox. Washington demands larger contributions, conditions its security commitments, imposes tariffs on its allies, employs extraterritorial technological controls, and, at the same time, claims leadership of the bloc. Is this leadership or administered subordination? Europe increases its spending, but many of its critical systems depend upon US technology, intelligence, components, or authorizations; even when it purchases European weaponry, it operates within standards defined by NATO. The promised strategic autonomy may end up producing deeper dependency. Yan compels us to ask: is an alliance strengthened when its members acquire greater capacities of their own, or when they increase their dependency upon the center organizing the threat? If Europe spends more but does not autonomously decide when, against whom, and under what doctrine to use its capabilities, it has not acquired sovereignty. It has financed its subordinate integration.
Europe as Buyer, Logistics Field, and Frontier
Militarization is not limited to purchasing weapons. The additional component of NATO’s commitment allows critical infrastructure, networks, civil preparedness, resilience, and industrial capacity to be counted: roads, bridges, ports, railways, telecommunications, and energy systems must also be evaluated according to their military usefulness. SIPRI itself warns that, as states rush toward the new targets, the boundaries between military spending and spending “related to defense and security” risk becoming blurred, reducing transparency (SIPRI, 2026).
Europe ceases to be merely a collection of societies: it becomes an operational theater. Civilian corridors must permit troop movements; ports must receive heavy equipment; bridges must support military vehicles; hospitals must incorporate wartime scenarios; digital networks must be integrated into defense doctrines. The transformation appears technical, but it alters the political imagination: when every piece of infrastructure is reinterpreted as a potential military asset, the future war begins to colonize the present. It has not yet occurred, but it already organizes budgets, urban designs, and industrial priorities. This is the most effective form of a narrative: not when it persuades everyone of a story, but when that story becomes embedded in concrete, debt, contracts, and laws.
Who Benefits from a Fearful Europe?
The United States obtains several benefits simultaneously. First, it compels its allies to assume a larger proportion of the cost of the Western military apparatus. Second, it expands markets for US manufacturers and integrated transatlantic supply chains. Third, it limits the possibility of a European security architecture independent of Washington. Fourth, it obstructs an autonomous economic relationship between Europe, Russia, and China. Fifth, it consolidates the idea that European survival depends on US protection, even as US policy itself becomes less predictable.
The paradox is brutal: the more Washington calls the reliability of its commitments into question, the more resources Europe allocates to an alliance led by Washington. US uncertainty does not produce European autonomy. It produces European panic. And panic accelerates purchases.
China Observes a Strategic Self-Destruction
From Beijing, this race has another interpretation. China needs markets capable of consuming, stable routes, operating ports, reasonable insurance costs, available energy, and predictable supply chains. A Europe impoverished by military expenditure, expensive energy, and the loss of industry is a less attractive market, and a continental war would be catastrophic for China’s Eurasian connectivity project: the Belt and Road presupposes circulation; a wartime economy presupposes disruption.
This does not make China a morally disinterested power, nor does it exclude coercion in areas it considers essential. But it allows us to distinguish between models of expansion. Chinese power has grown primarily because it manufactures, finances, connects, and trades; the United States retains an external military dimension unmatched by China in its bases, alliances, and capacity for global power projection. This is why major international tensions do not produce symmetrical incentives: the United States can derive strategic cohesion from the division of the Eurasian continent; China derives greater returns from its connectivity.
Qin Yaqing: Break Relationships in Order to Dominate Actors
Recall the relational thesis presented in Chapter III: relationships help produce actors’ identities, interests, and possibilities. Applied to Europe, the idea is illuminating. The European Union does not exist independently of its relations with the United States, Russia, China, Africa, and the Mediterranean: it is produced through them. If its energy relationship with Russia is broken, the structure of European industry changes. If technological trade with China is restricted, its competitive capacity changes. If its military dependency on the United States deepens, its political autonomy changes. If the Mediterranean becomes exclusively a security frontier, its relationship with Africa and the Middle East changes.
Fragmenting Europe’s relationships is therefore not a secondary effect of geopolitics. It can be a means of reorganizing Europe. The great question is not only which territories a power controls. It is which relationships it succeeds in preventing among others.
War as a Policy Against Eurasian Integration
For decades, one of the most troubling scenarios for US strategy was the emergence of a Eurasia capable of combining European technology and capital, Russian energy and resources, Chinese industry and markets, Indian population and services, and Middle Eastern ports and corridors. Such integration did not require a formal political alliance: a growing network of exchanges reducing US centrality would have been sufficient. The war in Ukraine produced the opposite effect. It broke much of the energy relationship between Europe and Russia, militarized the eastern frontier, increased European dependence on liquefied natural gas and US security, forced a review of investments and supply chains, and weakened the political space for European autonomy. This does not prove that Washington created the war: it demonstrates that Washington has known how to exploit its consequences strategically. Serious research must distinguish intention from outcome. Not every resulting benefit proves authorship. But every powerful beneficiary deserves scrutiny.
Fear as a Form of Government
The political economy of fear does not end with contracts: it produces discipline. When a society considers itself to be on the verge of war, criticism can be presented as disloyalty; information is subjected to security criteria; surveillance becomes normalized; secret spending increases; emergency procedures replace deliberation; the boundaries between civilian and military industry become blurred; social policies are subordinated to national resilience; and the external enemy reorganizes internal conflict.
This is an old political technology. What is new is its integration with financial markets, digital systems, and algorithmic information campaigns. Threats no longer circulate solely through presidential speeches: they circulate through notifications, interactive maps, drone videos, simulations, leaked intelligence reports, stock-market indices, and financial products. The citizen receives fear. The investor receives an opportunity.
The Point This Report Cannot Avoid
We cannot responsibly claim that all European defense policy is fraudulent, that Russia poses no threat whatsoever, or that every military investment is unnecessary. But we can assert something governments rarely permit: the threat assessment is being conducted within a system whose institutional and economic actors benefit when that threat increases. This demands more scrutiny, not less.
Defense may be necessary; unlimited rearmament does not logically follow from that necessity. Security may require military capacity; it does not require turning an entire society into an antechamber of war. Russia’s existence does not oblige Europe to surrender its fiscal future to the military-industrial-financial complex. Protecting Ukraine does not require abandoning diplomacy. And supporting the victims of an invasion does not require accepting that the only legitimate peace is the one defined by those who profit from prolonging the confrontation.
The question that remains open is the most uncomfortable one: is Europe preparing for a war because that war is likely, or is the likelihood of war increasing because Europe, Russia, and NATO are progressively reorganizing their entire existence around it? The next chapter must leave the abstract map behind and enter the materiality of power: straits, ports, railways, oil pipelines, submarine cables, and continental corridors. Because wars are not fought solely over territory. They are fought over the possibility that things may continue—or cease—to circulate.
CHAPTER V. THE POWER TO KEEP THE WORLD IN MOTION
Railways, Ports, Robots, Education, and Space: The Material Infrastructure of the Shift Toward Asia
Power Does Not Consist Solely in Possessing: It Consists in Moving
Wars are not fought solely over territories. They are fought over the possibility that people, goods, energy, information, capital, and knowledge may continue to circulate. An army without fuel is immobilized; a factory without components comes to a halt; an economy without ports loses markets; a digital network without electricity disappears. A country that controls no strategic corridor may formally retain its sovereignty and still remain materially dependent upon decisions made elsewhere.
This is why the true map of global power does not coincide with the political map. It consists of railway lines, port terminals, canals, straits, oil pipelines, gas pipelines, submarine cables, satellites, data centers, payment platforms, and electrical grids. It is a map of flows. And on that map, China appears not simply as a power that grew within a system built by others, but as the state that, over recent decades, developed the most extensive capacity to construct the physical infrastructure upon which that system can continue to function.
This is one of the historical changes least understood by Western analysis. For a long time, superiority was assumed to belong to whoever controlled financial rules, multilateral institutions, and the major consumer markets. But globalization produced a brutal correction: whoever manufactures, transports, connects, electrifies, and maintains acquires a decision-making capacity that cannot be reduced to the size of its monetary reserves or the number of its military bases. China does not merely produce an enormous share of the planet’s goods. It is building the routes along which they circulate.
China’s Railway Network Is Not a Means of Transportation: It Is a Way of Organizing Territory
At the end of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan period (2021–2025), China’s railway network had reached 165,000 kilometers, of which 50,400 were high-speed lines—growth of nearly 33% in the high-speed segment in only five years. Official planning envisages approximately 180,000 kilometers of operational track by 2030, including around 60,000 kilometers of high-speed rail, while the 2021 long-term strategy projects 70,000 kilometers of high-speed rail by 2035 (China State Railway Group, 2026).
The figures are so vast that they can become abstractions; they must be translated into concrete meaning. China has built more kilometers of high-speed railway than the rest of the world combined—the network covers 97% of cities with more than half a million inhabitants. These are not a few showcase lines between wealthy cities, but a territorial mesh connecting metropolitan areas, industrial hubs, inland cities, agricultural regions, and geographically difficult areas. Railway infrastructure performs at least six functions simultaneously: it reduces the economic distance between regions, expands labor markets, makes it possible to distribute industry inland without isolating it from ports, reduces logistics times, favors the political integration of the territory, and produces exportable industrial knowledge. It was not built solely to transport passengers. It was built to transform the meaning of distance. A city located a thousand kilometers from the coast can participate in a common economic space if it is connected by fast trains, stable energy, telecommunications, and logistics centers. That is the underlying principle of Chinese infrastructure: to transform territory into a system.
The pace is not slowing. In 2025 alone, fixed railway investment reached 901.5 billion yuan—approximately $129 billion—and more than 3,100 kilometers of new lines entered service; for 2026, the state operator plans to bring more than 2,000 additional kilometers into operation as part of the priority projects of the Fifteenth Five-Year Plan (China State Railway Group, 2026). While Europe spends years debating authorizations, national jurisdictions, and the fiscal impact of every major corridor, China continues building upon an already existing network. The contrast is not the product of some mysterious cultural difference: it arises from institutions, industrial capacities, and political priorities. China has construction companies capable of operating on a vast scale, domestically manufactured rolling stock, state financing, territorial planning, accumulated engineering expertise, technical training, and coordination between local and central governments. Europe possesses some of the world’s finest railway and engineering companies, but lacks a political authority capable of transforming that fragmented excellence into a continental network. It is not that Europe does not know how to manufacture trains. It is unable to decide, finance, and execute as a system.
Qin Yaqing: Railway Lines Do Not Connect Preexisting Places; They Produce New Places
Qin’s relational theory—introduced in Chapter III—helps explain why a railway line is much more than a physical construction. Conventional international theory imagines that cities, countries, and fully formed economies exist first, and connections are then constructed between them. Qin reverses the reasoning: relationships also produce actors. A city connected to a high-speed network is no longer the same city it was before that connection: its market, land, companies, universities, relationship with the capital, and position within the national division of labor all change. Infrastructure does not merely facilitate existing relationships. It creates possibilities that did not previously exist.
The principle extends to the continental scale. An African port connected by railway to inland regions changes the economic value of those regions; a corridor between China and Central Asia alters the position of landlocked countries; a rail route between China and Europe creates a partial alternative to ocean transport; a digital connection can integrate a local company into previously inaccessible chains. The power of infrastructure lies not only in the object constructed. It lies in the new relationships that the object makes possible.
The Belt and Road: Neither a Charity Plan nor a Simple Trap
The Belt and Road Initiative is usually presented through two incompatible narratives. China’s official narrative defines it as cooperation, connectivity, and shared development; part of Western discourse presents it as a debt mechanism designed to place critical infrastructure under Beijing’s influence. Both narratives contain verifiable elements and self-interested simplifications.
The Belt and Road is not a single organization, treaty, or homogeneous fund: it is a political framework under which agreements, loans, corridors, ports, railways, energy networks, telecommunications, and social projects are grouped. Its flexibility is both a strength and an analytical difficulty: it allows initiatives to be adapted to each country, while also allowing highly diverse projects to be retrospectively labeled as part of a single strategy. Serious analysis must reject both idealization and demonization. There is no single Belt and Road experience: there are projects that improved connectivity and oversized works, opaque contracts and local employment, limited technology transfers and infrastructure that Western institutions were unwilling to finance, as well as countries that used competition among financiers to improve their bargaining position.
What matters is understanding its systemic logic: China seeks to build redundancy. If a maritime route becomes unsafe, it needs land routes; if a strait can be blockaded, it needs alternative corridors; if it depends on a port controlled by third parties, it seeks access to others; if its international payments can be subjected to sanctions, it develops complementary mechanisms. The Belt and Road is therefore a development policy, a commercial strategy, and a program for reducing vulnerabilities—all three at once.
Railway Eurasia: It Does Not Replace the Sea, but It Changes the Calculation
China–Europe rail services had cumulatively surpassed 100,000 journeys by 2024, and in 2025 alone they completed approximately 20,000 additional trips (China State Council Information Office, 2025; China State Railway Group, 2026). They do not carry a volume comparable to maritime trade—ships remain far more efficient for massive container shipments and raw materials—but they offer shorter transit times for higher-value goods and create an alternative logistics route between Asia and Europe. And the strategic importance of a route is not measured solely by the percentage of cargo it transports: it is measured by what it makes possible when another route fails.
Redundancy has value. During the pandemic, port blockages and container shortages demonstrated that extreme efficiency can produce extreme fragility: a chain optimized to operate without reserves collapses when a single node disappears. China learned that logistics security requires multiple routes, multiple ports, inventories, alternative suppliers, and the capacity to reorganize production rapidly. Europe, by contrast, pursued the logic of just-in-time production for decades until it became a form of strategic dependency. Trade was not the problem. The problem was confusing short-term efficiency with long-term security.
Zhao Tingyang: Can Infrastructure Transform an Adversary into a Participant?
Zhao proposes that a sustainable order should not be limited to containing enemies: it should transform relationships so that remaining within the system becomes more advantageous than destroying it. Chinese infrastructure appears to partially materialize that intuition: a country integrated into a network of trade, energy, transportation, and production has something to lose if the system collapses.
But here the first objection arises, and this book will not evade it: interdependence does not eliminate power—it can redistribute it. An intense trading relationship can reduce the incentive for war while also creating dependency; a port constructed with external financing can increase the recipient’s exports while simultaneously granting influence to the creditor; a digital network can expand connectivity and generate dependency on suppliers, standards, and maintenance. Zhao’s contemporary Tianxia theoretically aspires to a system from which no one is excluded; the difficulty lies in demonstrating that inclusion does not reproduce a hierarchy with Beijing at its center. Can there be a Chinese network without Chinese centrality? Can shared benefit exist when most technology, financing, and construction capacity come from a single actor? To what extent do recipient countries participate in the design rather than merely accepting it? These questions must accompany every analysis of the Belt and Road. The Western error is to assume that all Chinese centrality is necessarily colonial. The Chinese error would be to assume that all shared infrastructure automatically produces equality.
Africa: The Continent Where Infrastructure Ceased to Be a Promise
For decades, Western governments and institutions discussed African development through adjustment programs, conditional aid, governance, and institutional reforms. Many of those issues were real. But a country does not industrialize its economy through seminars on governance: it needs electricity, roads, ports, railways, water, telecommunications, credit, and productive capacity. China entered that vacuum not because it was free of interests, but because it offered something numerous African countries urgently needed: construction.
UNCTAD recorded that Chinese investment in Africa reached approximately $42 billion and diversified beyond extractive sectors into construction materials, food processing, pharmaceuticals, and light manufacturing; approximately one-third of African projects linked to the Belt and Road were already directed toward social infrastructure and renewable energy (UNCTAD, 2025). The relationship continues to contain asymmetries: China requires minerals, energy, and markets; Africa needs infrastructure, industrialization, and employment. The outcome will depend upon each African state’s capacity to negotiate local content, knowledge transfer, financial conditions, labor protections, domestic processing of raw materials, and control over strategic assets. The Chinese presence does not guarantee development. But it expands the available options—and the expansion of options constitutes power for countries that for decades negotiated with very few creditors. Here the political character of multipolarity is revealed: it does not consist solely of the existence of several great powers. It consists of a smaller state being able to negotiate among them.
Africa’s Danger Is Not China: It Is Returning to Exporting Without Transforming
A serious interpretation should not ask only whether China “is taking over Africa.” It must ask whether these new relationships allow African countries to transform their economic structures. Is raw mineral exported, or is it processed locally? Does the railway connect communities and markets, or exclusively a mine to a port? Are local engineers trained and domestic suppliers created? Do profits finance healthcare and education? Does the recipient country control its data, electrical grid, and ports?
Africa’s historical problem has not been foreign exploitation alone: it has been forced specialization in low-value functions within the world economy. If the relationship with China reproduces that structure, the partner changes, but the continent’s position does not. If it enables industrialization, energy access, connectivity, and technological learning, the relationship acquires another nature. The same project can contain both possibilities.
Latin America: A Major Market, a Wasted Opportunity
China has become one of Latin America’s principal trading partners and the leading market for several South American economies. ECLAC estimated that in 2025 the region’s exports to China would increase by approximately 7%, driven by meat, soybeans, copper, and other minerals; Chinese direct investment, however, represented barely 2% of the foreign investment received by the region in 2024, a sign that the relationship remains concentrated on trade and specific projects rather than industrial transformation (ECLAC, 2025).
Latin America faces a contradiction. It possesses lithium, copper, energy, food, biodiversity, water, and scientific capacity, yet it continues exporting an excessive share of primary products while importing technology, machinery, vehicles, and high-value-added goods. It is not enough for China to buy more: the question is what it buys and what it leaves installed. If the region exports copper and then imports electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, and digital systems, it has entered the new order in the same subordinate position it occupied in the previous one. Latin America’s challenge is not to choose between China and the United States: it is to stop negotiating exclusively as a supplier of raw materials. The relationship with China should be used to demand local processing, joint research, battery manufacturing, railway infrastructure, technology transfer, sovereign digital connectivity, and professional training. Latin America does not lack resources. It lacks regional planning: it negotiates in a fragmented manner with actors that plan on a continental scale.
Qin Yaqing and Latin America’s Error of Choosing Masters
From the relational perspective, autonomy does not require an absence of ties: it requires a diversity of relationships. Latin America often reduces its foreign policy to a childish question—with whom do we stand: Washington, Beijing, Europe, or BRICS?—when the mature question would be different: what network of relationships allows us to increase our own capacity? The point is not to replace one form of subordination with another, but to use each relationship to reduce dependencies: trading with China without abandoning other markets, cooperating technologically with Europe, maintaining ties with the United States, pursuing regional integration, and developing our own institutions. Sovereignty is not isolation. It is the capacity not to be paralyzed when a great power changes its rules.
Vietnam: The Factory That No Longer Wants to Be Merely a Factory
Vietnam occupies a particularly revealing position. In certain respects, it resembles the China of several decades ago—an abundant labor force, export-oriented industrialization, foreign investment, and manufacturing relocation from higher-cost economies; in others, it is entering the digital stage directly without traveling the same path.
It has become an important center for electronics, textiles, machinery, and assembly, benefiting from companies seeking to diversify production outside China without abandoning the Asian ecosystem. But it should not be described as “the new China”: its scale is different, its domestic market smaller, its scientific base less developed, and its dependence on foreign companies considerable.
The World Bank warns that, although Vietnam is moving rapidly toward technology-intensive manufacturing, much of its export growth continues to depend upon volume rather than domestic value added; to meet its goal of becoming a high-income economy by 2045, it would have to sustain annual per capita GDP growth close to 6% and advance toward more complex manufacturing and services (World Bank, 2024). And that ambition requires not only a large number of STEM graduates, but a critical mass of experts capable of directing laboratories, conducting research, and transforming knowledge into marketable products (World Bank, 2025). This is the decisive point: Vietnam does not want to limit itself to assembling products designed in other countries. It seeks to move up the chain—to train researchers, design components, develop semiconductors, and create domestic suppliers. Vietnam’s advantage is not merely wage-based. It is political: there is an explicit determination to use the manufacturing stage to build its own capacity.
Asia Is Not a Chain of Countries Imitating China
To speak of “Asia in alignment” does not mean that the region is homogeneous. Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, India, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia have different political systems, levels of development, and strategies; they also compete, vie for investment, protect their industries, and distrust one another. But they share an important characteristic: a significant number of their governments consider it legitimate to intervene in the development of productive capacity. Industrial policy was not expelled from public discourse with the same intensity as it was in Europe or Latin America. The state can direct credit, create industrial zones, train technicians, protect sectors, demand performance, coordinate companies, and invest in infrastructure before immediate profitability exists. This does not mean that all interventions work. It means that development is not abandoned entirely to the market. In Europe, by contrast, industrial policy spent decades subordinated to competition rules, fiscal discipline, and national fragmentation. By the time it decided to recover it, China had already built complete ecosystems.
Robotization: China Does Not Compete Solely Through Cheap Labor
The image of China as a factory based on low wages is decades out of date. In 2024, China installed approximately 295,000 industrial robots: 54% of all installations worldwide and its highest figure on record. Its operational stock surpassed two million units, around four and a half times that of Japan, the country with the second-largest stock; and for the first time, Chinese manufacturers sold more robots than foreign suppliers in their own market, with the domestic share rising to 57% (IFR, 2025).
A methodological clarification also illustrates the difficulty of measuring the Chinese phenomenon: the IFR had reported a density of 470 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers for 2023, a figure that placed China above Germany and Japan; using updated labor data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the federation itself corrected that density to 166 units—because the denominator, China’s manufacturing workforce, proved to be much larger than estimated (IFR, 2026). The correction does not weaken the argument: it makes it more precise. China is not yet the world’s most densely automated economy; it is the economy automating at the greatest speed and absolute scale, across the planet’s largest manufacturing workforce.
The consequence is strategic. China can maintain productive scale while reducing its dependence on cheap labor by combining robots, skilled workers, artificial intelligence, computer vision, 5G networks, automated logistics, nearby suppliers, and high volumes. Automation is not replacing Chinese industry: it is enhancing its capacity. While Western companies debated whether to transfer production to countries with lower wages, China began neutralizing those competitors’ wage advantage through automation. Labor costs matter less when the factory operates with robots, sensors, algorithmic control, and integrated logistics. The competition of the future will not be China against cheap labor. It will be the automated Chinese manufacturing ecosystem against countries still hoping to attract factories by offering low wages alone.
Europe: Excellence Without Scale
Europe does not lack science, engineers, or exceptional companies: it has ASML, Airbus, Siemens, SAP, Schneider Electric, ABB, research centers, and world-class universities. The difficulty lies in transforming those dispersed capacities into systemic sovereignty. The Draghi report was unequivocal: the European Union faces a persistent productivity, innovation, and investment gap relative to the United States and China and would need to mobilize additional investment on the order of €750 to €800 billion annually to prevent further deterioration (Draghi, 2024). The Commission itself acknowledges that administrative burdens and regulatory inconsistencies hinder innovation and the expansion of digital startups.
Precision is necessary here. Europe’s problem is not that it regulates: every society must regulate systems capable of discriminating, surveilling, manipulating, or causing harm. The problem is regulating without possessing. Europe establishes rules for US platforms, Asian chips, foreign clouds, and models developed in other territories. Regulation can protect rights; it cannot replace a capacity-building policy. If a European startup must overcome fragmented national markets, insufficient financing, high energy costs, multiple administrative processes, and limited access to computing resources, it will arrive too late even if its technology is brilliant. The talent exists. The scale does not.
Protection and Spinning in Place
Europe and the United States are responding to their loss of competitiveness with tariffs, export controls, local-content requirements, subsidies, and restrictions. Some of these measures may be necessary to rebuild industrial capacity: free trade has never been completely free, and China did not open every sector without conditions either. But there is a difference between protecting an industry in order to develop it and protecting it to avoid admitting that it has fallen behind. Productive protectionism buys time to invest, train, innovate, and scale. Defensive protectionism buys time without knowing what to do with it.
Europe faces that risk. It can restrict Chinese electric vehicles, investigate subsidies, and impose security requirements. But if it cannot produce automobiles comparable in price, software, batteries, range, and speed of renewal, the restriction will not close the gap: it will merely make the transition more expensive for consumers and prolong the life of companies that will not transform in time. Spinning in place means producing administrative movement without strategic displacement: new commissions, new frameworks, new consultations, new documents. Meanwhile, another country builds the factory.
Wang Huning: The System’s Capacity to Produce Results
Wang observed in the United States an extraordinary social power that could not be reduced to the central government—universities, companies, associations, communities—but he wondered what would happen when institutions ceased to produce cohesion and shared results. That question must now be directed at Europe. What use are sophisticated regulations if homes are not built? What use is proclaiming strategic autonomy if data, chips, platforms, and military systems depend upon third parties? What use are excellent universities if their finest researchers emigrate or sell their companies before reaching scale?
A system’s legitimacy does not depend solely on its principles: it also depends upon its capacity to execute. China does not gain recognition through discourse alone: it gains it when it builds a functioning railway, an electrical grid, a port, a factory, a city. This does not make all its decisions legitimate. But it compels us to recognize that material effectiveness is a form of political power.
New Curricula: Educating for a World That Already Exists
China is not treating artificial intelligence as a specialty reserved for programmers. In April 2026, it presented a national AI literacy system envisaging its incorporation from primary education through university and vocational training: universities will be required to make AI a foundational general course, develop discipline-specific textbooks and interdisciplinary programs, while technical education must integrate it into traditional industrial careers to train workers capable of operating in plants transformed by automation (State Council of China, 2026).
This point is far more important than it appears. A technological revolution is not consolidated when a few companies develop tools: it is consolidated when a society changes the education of millions of people—maintenance workers who understand sensors, doctors who understand algorithmic systems, technicians who operate robots, and teachers who use and question models. The advantage will not lie solely with whoever possesses the best algorithm. It will lie with the population that knows how to incorporate it into production. Europe is still debating which uses should be prohibited and which risks are acceptable—legitimate questions. But Asia is simultaneously answering another: how to educate the entire population to use these technologies. A society can protect itself from a danger and, at the same time, remain outside the very capacity it is attempting to regulate.
Chinese Efficiency Is Neither Magic nor Free
China’s speed of execution inspires admiration and, at times, idealization; it must be analyzed critically. State coordination can accelerate construction and reduce public deliberation; standardization can lower costs while ignoring local particularities; speed can entail displacement, environmental impacts, or indebtedness; labor discipline can increase productivity while producing exhaustion; digitization can optimize services while expanding surveillance. Efficiency is not neutral: every capacity to execute contains a politics of who decides, who pays, and who may object.
But recognizing these costs does not authorize us to deny the material result. Western analysis often performs a convenient operation: it attributes China’s achievements to authoritarianism and its failures to the Chinese system. That avoids studying its actual capacities. Not every authoritarian state builds efficient railways, produces innovation, or trains engineers. The explanation requires more than a political label: China combines planning, business competition, public investment, market scale, institutional discipline, technological learning, and an administrative culture oriented toward achieving objectives.
The Space Race: Two Ways of Imagining the Frontier
The current space race does not replicate the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States structures its lunar program through NASA, the Artemis program, private companies, and international partners, with an architecture seeking to establish a sustainable human presence on the Moon as a step toward Mars; it retains the objective of another crewed lunar landing around the beginning of 2028 and incorporates commercial landing systems, robotic mobility, and surface nuclear power (NASA, 2025). China is advancing through sequential state planning formally initiated with the Chang’e program in 2004, following preparatory research announced from 2000 onward; its program integrates lunar exploration, launch vehicles, a space station, BeiDou navigation, and future crewed missions, while the Fifteenth Five-Year Plan includes reusable heavy-lift rockets and new lunar missions among its major technological projects. In July 2026, China’s space agency reported that the rocket for the Chang’e 7 mission had arrived at the Wenchang launch center for assembly and testing; the mission will study the lunar south pole, a region considered strategic because of the possible presence of ice and usable resources (CNSA, 2026).
But the difference lies not only in the missions: it lies in the model. The United States uses a public-private architecture in which commercial companies perform functions that once belonged to NASA; China uses an integrated state architecture that is gradually opening space for commercial companies under national direction. The United States emphasizes leadership, alliances, and entrepreneurial capacity; China combines technological sovereignty with a discourse of multilateral cooperation: its space administration maintains that exploration should be conducted through open frameworks with the United Nations at the center of governance, and it has criticized the formation of exclusionary space blocs (CNSA, 2022). The discourse must be tested against practice. But it expresses a real dispute: will space become an extension of terrestrial geopolitical alliances, a commercial market, a shared heritage, or an extraction zone? Who will define the rules?
Space and Routes Are the Same Problem
At first glance, an African railway and a lunar mission appear to be completely different matters. They are not: both concern access—to territories, resources, information, communications, and strategic positions. Satellites are invisible routes: they transport data, navigation signals, images, financial communications, and military intelligence. An economy without autonomous access to space depends upon the constellations of others; an armed force without satellites loses navigation, communication, and surveillance; agriculture without Earth observation loses planning capacity. The space race is the vertical extension of the struggle over routes.
Yan Xuetong: Leadership Is Demonstrated by the Capacity to Offer
Moral realism allows us to formulate a decisive question: which power offers third parties a more attractive project? The United States offers security, financial access, innovation, universities, and alliances; China offers infrastructure, trade, manufacturing, financing, and a promise not to formally condition cooperation upon political reforms. Neither offer is disinterested, but they are not the same. An African country may need a railway more urgently than a declaration about democracy; another may fear becoming indebted to China and prefer Western institutions; a Latin American government may need a market for its copper while also needing technology to stop exporting it unprocessed.
Competition for leadership will not be resolved through propaganda. It will be resolved through the concrete experience of recipient countries: does the road work? Is the debt sustainable? Are jobs created? Is technology transferred? Is sovereignty respected? Does the partner keep its word? Global leadership will be built less at summits than in the accumulated memory of these relationships.
The Great Contrast: Building Capacity or Managing Decline
China plans new railway lines, robots, artificial intelligence literacy, reusable rockets, fusion reactors, 6G systems, and integrated cities. Vietnam is attempting to advance from assembly toward innovation. India is expanding manufacturing, digital services, and space capabilities. South Korea and Japan retain decisive strengths in semiconductors, robotics, and materials. Europe, meanwhile, produces extraordinarily lucid diagnoses of its loss of competitiveness.
Therein lies the irony: Europe understands with increasing precision what is happening to it, but diagnosis is not the same as action. The Draghi report identified what had to be done, the Commission adopted initiatives, and significant projects exist in supercomputing, chips, and batteries. But strategic time is not measured by the quality of a document: it is measured by the distance others travel while that document is being implemented. Europe is not falling behind because it lacks talent. It is falling behind because it has allowed its individual capacities to exist within a system unable to scale them.
Competitiveness Versus Protectionism Is Not the Real Choice
Public debate generally pits an open market against protectionism. This is a false dichotomy: every great power protects the sectors it regards as strategic. The United States subsidizes chips and energy; China protects and directs industries; Europe establishes rules, subsidies, and barriers. The question is not whether protection occurs. It is what is done during that protection: is the time used to innovate, train workers, build factories, and develop suppliers, or to preserve companies incapable of competing?
Protectionism without productive policy is a wall built around stagnation. Openness without domestic capacity is a fast track toward dependency. An effective strategy combines competition, temporary protection, investment, learning, and performance discipline. China did not merely protect its companies: it required them to grow, export, reduce costs, and compete. Europe risks protecting rents without demanding transformation.
The Center of the World Will Be Where Capacities Are Integrated
The power of the future will not necessarily be the country possessing the best laboratory, the largest market, or the greatest army when each is considered separately. It will be the country that succeeds in integrating research, education, energy, manufacturing, logistics, financing, data, infrastructure, markets, and space capabilities. China is attempting to build that integration. The United States retains a formidable combination of science, capital, companies, military power, and alliances. Europe retains extraordinary components, but not an equivalent architecture. Asia as a whole does not form a single bloc, but it increasingly contains decisive parts of the global productive system.
This is why the shift toward Asia does not simply mean that China has a larger GDP. It means that a growing proportion of the capacity to transform ideas into objects, objects into networks, and networks into power is concentrated there.
The Final Question Is Not Who Builds Faster
China’s speed is impressive, but the analysis must go further. Who decides what is built, for whom, with what social consequences, under what form of ownership, and with what right to participate? Can efficiency coexist with freedom, diversity, and public oversight? Can Europe recover capacity without abandoning rights? Can Latin America industrialize without reproducing extractivism? Can Africa use competition among great powers to build autonomy? Can Vietnam rise without becoming trapped between China and the United States? These are the questions of the new order.
Infrastructure is not automatically emancipatory. But without infrastructure, emancipation becomes rhetoric: a society without energy, railways, knowledge, industry, and digital capacity may possess formal elections and still remain dependent upon foreign decisions for every material aspect of its existence. The power of the twenty-first century will be the power to keep the world in motion. To decide what moves, along which routes, at what speed, under which rules—and who is brought to a halt when those routes close.
CHAPTER VI. THE DOCUMENTED GENOCIDE
Gaza, Lebanon, and the Legal Death of the 1945 Order
The Event the Order Cannot Process
The preceding chapters argued that the international order born in 1945 is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy. Until now, that assertion has functioned as a hypothesis. Gaza turns it into a matter of record.
Because what is happening in Gaza is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe. It is an involuntary experiment in the international system’s capacity to name, judge, and stop the crime that the system itself defined as the gravest of all. The 1948 Convention was the foundational promise of the postwar order: never again would an extermination occur before the eyes of the world. Eighty years later, the system produced the most exhaustive documentation ever assembled in real time of an ongoing genocide—and simultaneously demonstrated its inability to interrupt it. That is the paradox examined in this chapter. Not the absence of the word, but its useless presence. On 16 September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, that senior Israeli officials—including Netanyahu, Gallant, and Herzog—had incited those acts, and that four of the five constituent acts defined by the 1948 Convention had been committed (UN Commission of Inquiry, 2025). The genocide has also been recognized by a United Nations special committee, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and numerous specialists in international law. Through its mandated bodies, the UN finally called the crime by its name. Language is no longer the problem. The problem is that the name stopped nothing.
Albanese: Documentation as Method
If this book engages with Wang, Yan, Zhao, and Qin in order to think about order, it needs an equivalent interlocutor to think about its legal collapse. That interlocutor is Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
Her work as Special Rapporteur is not a report: it is a corpus with its own architecture, and it should be read in the same way Chinese planning was read here—as a cumulative trajectory rather than a series of isolated documents. Anatomy of a Genocide (A/HRC/55/73, March 2024) developed the legal foundation: the existence of reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating genocidal intent had been met. Genocide as Colonial Erasure (A/79/384, October 2024) situated that crime within a historical logic of colonial erasure, shifting the analysis from the episode to the structure. From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide (A/HRC/59/23, July 2025) took the step that no international body had taken before: it named the corporate economic network sustaining and profiting from the destruction. And Torture and Genocide (A/HRC/61/71, March 2026) documented how the Israeli prison system had degenerated into an organized regime of humiliation, pain, and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels. In presenting it to the Human Rights Council, Albanese maintained that torture had effectively become state policy and that the governments of the world, by permitting it, had granted Israel a license to torture (Albanese, 2026). Anatomy, structure, economy, body. Four reports, a single argument: genocide is not an excess of war. It is a system.
The Economy of Genocide: Where Gaza Meets Chapter IV
Here, Albanese’s corpus connects with the backbone of this book. Chapter IV argued that the contemporary structure of war is military, industrial, financial, technological, logistical, and communicational, and that permanent tension may constitute the point of maximum profitability. From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide provides empirical verification of that hypothesis in its most extreme case: the report identifies the network of arms manufacturers, technology companies, heavy machinery producers, asset managers, and financial institutions whose profitability became associated first with the occupation and then with the destruction (Albanese, 2025).
The conclusion mirrors that of the European chapter and is therefore even more disturbing. In Europe, threat became a financial product. In Gaza, destruction itself became a financial product. They are two stations within the same political economy of fear: one sells preparation for the future war; the other is already charging for the present war.
Neither requires a conspiracy. The convergence of incentives described in Chapter IV is sufficient: when an entire system benefits from violence continuing, violence always finds new reasons to continue.
The “Ceasefire” as an Empty Sign
On 10 October 2025, a ceasefire negotiated under US mediation entered into force. It is worth examining what that expression actually designates, because rarely has the distance between a sign and its referent been so measurable. According to Al Jazeera’s record, Israel attacked Gaza on 252 of the first 279 days of the ceasefire: there were only 27 days with no reported attacks, deaths, or injuries. Since it entered into force, Israeli attacks have killed at least 1,123 Palestinians and injured 3,616. Only 35% of the stipulated aid trucks entered, while Israel blocked essential foods—meat, dairy products, vegetables—even as it allowed sweets and soft drinks to enter. By mid-July 2026, the total death toll since October 2023 had reached at least 73,246 people, including 21,500 children (Al Jazeera, 2026b).
And while the words “ceasefire” circulated through foreign ministries, the territory changed hands. At the beginning of the truce, the Israeli military controlled approximately half of Gaza; nine months later, it controls nearly 70%, after designating a new “orange zone” under its control in March—while the world’s attention was focused on the war against Iran. Netanyahu publicly described the expansion as a plan carried out in stages: before an audience demanding total control, he replied that first came 70%, and that this was the reason for it (NPR, 2026).
For research that has declared itself semiotic from its introduction, this is the chapter’s central finding: “ceasefire” no longer describes military conduct. It describes a narrative regime. It is the word that allows the international community to consider the matter managed while annihilation continues at a lower intensity and the map is redrawn. Analysts consulted by Al Jazeera warn that daily attacks against police officers, doctors, civil servants, and intellectuals are not isolated operations, but a calculated pattern intended to derail any governable future Gaza—and that Israel has conditioned the international community to accept daily violations as the new normal (Al Jazeera, 2026b). Chapter IV formulated it in relation to Europe: the most effective form of a narrative is not to persuade, but to become embedded in concrete, debt, and laws. Gaza adds the terminal variant: the most effective narrative is the one embedded in rubble.
Justice on a Calendar Extending to 2029
This book devoted a chapter to temporalities: the West thinks in short cycles, China in long trajectories. Gaza reveals a third temporality, the most corrosive of all: institutional time, which stretches in exact inverse proportion to the urgency of the crime it is meant to judge.
South Africa’s case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, initiated in December 2023, produced three orders imposing legally binding provisional measures. Israel did not submit its counter-memorial until March 2026, after two extensions, and in it challenged the Court’s jurisdiction; on 21 May 2026, the ICJ set 22 November 2027 as the deadline for South Africa’s reply and 22 May 2029 for Israel’s rejoinder (ICJ, 2026). The response from the South African Presidency condenses into a few words what thousands of pages of legal proceedings dilute: self-defense is not a defense to genocide—because there is none.
Read the contrast without anesthesia. Documentation of the crime advances in real time: reports by rapporteurs, commissions of inquiry, daily counts. Justice concerning the crime advances in geological time: rejoinders in 2029, hearings afterward, judgment at some unknown point. The gap between these two temporalities is not technical. It reflects a structural decision within the 1945 order: its institutions were designed to adjudicate completed genocides, not to stop genocides in progress. Bosnia learned this from a judgment handed down in 2007 concerning events from 1995. Gaza is learning it now, live.
Sanctioning the Witness
There is an episode that no analysis of the institutional crisis can omit, because it functions as its exact allegory. In 2025, the United States—a founding power of the United Nations system and the principal drafter of its legal architecture—imposed sanctions on the very Special Rapporteur tasked with documenting violations in the occupied territory. The sanctions against Albanese were not lifted until May 2026, one week after a US federal judge found that the administration had impermissibly targeted the UN expert’s speech because of the idea or message it expressed—and within the framework of a policy that also included sanctions against judges and prosecutors of the International Criminal Court over the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.
The fact deserves the driest possible formulation: the state that constructed the rules-based order sanctioned an official of that order for applying its rules. No rhetoric is necessary. The fact is the thesis.
Lebanon: The War That Returned
The Lebanese war is not a parallel theater: it is an extension of the same process. Since 2 March 2026, a war has unfolded in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, involving an Israeli invasion of parts of the country, more than 4,000 people killed by Israeli attacks, and over one million forcibly displaced. Hezbollah launched its attacks in response to the war Israel and the United States had begun against Iran—its principal backer—and the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader. The sequence matters: the Lebanese war of 2026 is a direct consequence of the February war against Iran, which the next chapter examines. The fronts do not accumulate: they form a chain.
The diplomatic outcome confirms the Gazan pattern of agreements that manage violence rather than ending it. On 26 June 2026, Lebanon, Israel, and the United States signed a trilateral framework agreement in Washington aimed at “comprehensive peace and security,” including a commitment to cease hostile actions even in international political and legal forums—that is, to abandon legal recourse—while Hezbollah, the conflict’s principal actor, was not a signatory. Its secretary-general, Naim Qassem, declared the agreement null and void, calling it humiliating, disgraceful, and a surrender of sovereignty, while Israeli ministers publicly suggested that Israel would remain in Lebanese territory even after Hezbollah’s eventual disarmament, and the defense minister instructed his forces to prepare for a prolonged stay in the occupied “security zone” (Security Council Report, 2026). To this must be added a detail that seals the chapter’s institutional argument: UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping mission present in southern Lebanon for decades, was terminated in 2025 by the Security Council under pressure from Israel and the United States; its mandate expires on 31 December 2026. At the moment of greatest need for international interposition, the international order is withdrawing from the field.
The Agreement That Manages the Next War
The most lucid analysis of the trilateral agreement did not come from Atlantic foreign ministries. An analysis published by Al Jazeera argues that the document is unworkable as written, politically explosive, and constitutionally suspect, because it requires the Lebanese state to act as sovereign precisely where its sovereign capacities are weakest: controlling armed actors it cannot defeat, negotiating with an enemy it cannot deter, and accepting obligations whose implementation depends upon external powers. Israel, the analysis recalls, has understood since Oslo the value of loosely worded interim arrangements and deferred questions; and the real agreement is not decided in Beirut, but along the regional track involving Washington, Tehran, and the mediators (Al Jazeera, 2026a).
Qin Yaqing’s relational theory finds its limiting case here. If relationships produce actors, the systematic destruction of relationships produces incapacitated actors. Gaza’s relationships with the world were destroyed: trade, movement, education, even the electrical cable. Lebanon is required to exercise a sovereignty whose relational conditions—a functioning economy, a funded army, political cohesion—were eroded over decades. In both cases, the result is the same: formally recognized entities rendered materially incapable. Sovereignty as an empty shell. Chapter V said this of the Global South in economic terms; Gaza and Lebanon demonstrate it in existential terms.
Zhao Tingyang: The Order That Needs an Outside
Zhao’s Tianxia proposes measuring every order by one standard: does it leave anyone outside? A world system worthy of the name cannot have an exterior, because every exterior is a postponed war.
Applied to Gaza, that standard produces a devastating verdict on the “rules-based order.” Gaza is not an anomaly within the order: it is its constitutive outside, the place where the order demonstrates what it is prepared to tolerate when the violator belongs to the core of its alliance system. The rules exist; the reports exist; the provisional measures exist; the crime has a name. What does not exist is the center’s willingness to apply the rules to itself and its own allies. Such an order is not being challenged from the outside by revisionist powers, as Atlantic literature repeatedly claims. It is being hollowed out from within by its own guarantors.
That is the profound connection between this chapter and the shift toward Asia described in the preceding ones: the loss of Western centrality is not merely industrial and technological. It is moral and legal. And in Yan Xuetong’s moral realism, that loss is the costliest of all, because leadership that can no longer offer even the validity of its own rules can offer only fear.
Methodological Warnings: What Naming Does Not Erase
The intellectual discipline of this book also requires precision here. On 7 October 2023, the Hamas-led attack killed 1,195 people in Israel and took 251 hostages. That crime is real, its victims are real, and nothing in this chapter relativizes it. But serious research must reject the narrative operation that turns that event into a perpetual license: the determination of genocide made by the competent international bodies does not depend upon denying 7 October, but upon establishing that the response exceeded it in nature, not merely in degree—that it ceased to be war and became the destruction of a group as such, accompanied by documented incitement at the summit of political power. Self-defense is not a defense to genocide. Not because anyone’s propaganda says so, but because the very structure of the 1948 Convention says so.
And one final clarification regarding language, which in this book is never ornamental: the vocabulary of “war,” “conflict,” and “clashes”—which dominated Western coverage for two years—was not an imperfect description. It was a narrative technology that delayed the correct name for as long as the correct name would have compelled action. Media manipulation did not consist of lying about the facts. It consisted of managing the category.
The next chapter follows the chain toward its other links: the war against Iran that engulfed the region in February 2026, and Ukraine, where the Atlantic bloc’s other great narrative confronts its deadlock. There, the sources that the West rarely allows to speak in their original form will speak: Beijing and Moscow, quoted from their own documents.
CHAPTER VII. TWO WARS, ONE LESSON
Iran, Ukraine, and the Strategic Exhaustion of Force
February 2026: The Month Negotiations Were Bombed
On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated attacks against Iran. The operation took place amid ongoing negotiations between Washington and Tehran and included the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Over the following weeks, the conflict spilled across the entire region: US bases were attacked in Gulf countries and Jordan, the Strait of Hormuz was closed, Beirut and Tehran were bombed simultaneously, and the Lebanese war examined in the previous chapter was ignited as a direct consequence.
For this book, the decisive fact is not military. It is semiotic and legal, and it should be recorded in the words of those who formulated it. The Chinese Foreign Ministry established its position in a primary source: the attacks lacked Security Council authorization and violated international law, while the assassination of the supreme leader constituted a grave violation of Iranian sovereignty that trampled upon the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. Spokesperson Mao Ning added a detail that Western foreign ministries would prefer to forget: China had not been notified in advance of US military operations (MFA of China, 2026a). A permanent member of the Security Council and strategic partner of the country under attack learning about it through the press. That scene is worth an entire treatise on the real state of multilateralism.
Observe the complete sequence from the perspective of the legal order this book has been dissecting. In Gaza, the crime was identified by the competent bodies and continued. In Iran, the system’s foundational crime—aggression, the use of force without Security Council authorization, aggravated by the assassination of a serving head of state during negotiations—was committed by the very architect of the system. Through its director, Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency had stated that no structured Iranian program to manufacture nuclear weapons had been observed and that some countries’ assessments might reflect political considerations. What was attacked, then, was not a demonstrated capability, but a narrative. Chapter IV described this mechanism in relation to Europe: threat as a blank check. Iran is its execution in the form of escalating regional war.
The War Over the Strait: This Book’s Thesis in Action
If Chapter V argued that the power of the twenty-first century is the power to keep the world in circulation, the war against Iran provided its laboratory demonstration. The Strait of Hormuz—through which a decisive share of the planet’s oil and gas passes—became the true battlefield. Iran closed it; reopened it during the April Lebanese truce as a negotiating gesture; and restricted it again when the United States refused to lift its naval blockade. The strait ceased to be geography and became an argument.
And here, Chinese behavior is more revealing than any speech. While Washington bombed, Beijing exerted pressure—but not in favor of its partner’s escalation; it exerted pressure in favor of circulation. The Chinese Foreign Ministry publicly called for the routes through the Strait of Hormuz to remain safe and for further consequences for the world economy to be avoided, and according to financial press reports, it pressured Iranian officials themselves not to interrupt shipments of Qatari gas. The power whose strength rests upon connectivity defended connectivity even against the tactical interests of its ally. Not out of altruism, but because of structural coherence. This is precisely the asymmetry of incentives formulated in Chapter IV: the United States can extract strategic cohesion from disruption; China derives its profitability from keeping things in circulation.
Chinese diplomacy during the war followed the same pattern. Xi Jinping formulated four proposals for peace and stability in the Middle East; Wang Yi held more than thirty calls and meetings with his counterparts, including Tehran and Tel Aviv; China and Pakistan jointly issued a five-point initiative to restore peace in the Gulf; and China’s special envoy engaged in shuttle diplomacy throughout the region (MFA of China and MFA of Pakistan, 2026). When the United States and Iran signed the first-stage memorandum of understanding in June—the reopening of Hormuz, relief from oil sanctions, sixty days of nuclear negotiations, and a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon—Beijing welcomed it with a formulation that encapsulates its entire strategic grammar: force is not a solution; negotiation on an equal footing is the correct choice (MFA of China, 2026b).
None of this requires idealizing China, and this book will not do so. The same war revealed the limitations and ambiguities of its position: Chinese companies sanctioned for processing Iranian crude, US allegations of dual-use technology transfers, denials from the Foreign Ministry, and an order from China’s Ministry of Commerce instructing its companies to disregard US sanctions on the grounds that they violated international law. China was not a neutral spectator: it was an actor protecting its interests. But the nature of those interests is the analytical point: they were interests of circulation, not conquest. Yan Xuetong’s moral realism helps us interpret the outcome: while one power offered the region a war without legal authorization, the other offered mediation, joint initiatives with countries of the South, and defense of common routes. In the accumulated memory of recipient countries—where leadership is built, according to Yan—February 2026 will be archived in two very different columns.
Ukraine: The War That No Longer Produces Anything
At the other end of Eurasia, the war in Ukraine entered its fifth year as the empirical refutation of every narrative managing it—including the two competing to define its meaning.
First, the numbers, because they are eloquent to the point of cruelty. By mid-2026, reported Western estimates placed Russian military casualties at around one million dead and wounded, and Ukrainian casualties between 250,000 and 300,000. Over four weeks in June and July 2026, Russian forces achieved a net gain of 31 square miles, barely larger than the island of Manhattan, after more than four years of total war. Russia’s casualty rate exceeded its recruitment rate in March 2026, while Ukrainian drones have damaged approximately 20% of Russian refining capacity since 2024 and at one point paralyzed 40% of its oil export capacity. And there is one fact no propaganda can digest: 64% of Russians support peace negotiations, while 66% of Ukrainians believe their government should seek to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible (Russia Matters, 2026). The societies want it to end. The apparatuses cannot. That is the anatomy of deadlock, and it confirms Chapter IV’s warning: when an entire structure—budgetary, industrial, and narrative—is organized around war, war acquires an inertia independent of its strategic performance and even of the will of the populations suffering it.
Moscow in Its Own Words
This book committed itself to reading each actor according to its own rationality, and Russia will be no exception—precisely because its declared rationality is the material both propagandas manipulate, each in its own way.
Russia’s objectives require no interpretation: they have been stated. Putin established them in his June 2024 speech, and his foreign minister repeated them in July 2026: complete Ukrainian withdrawal from the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson—including territory Ukraine still controls—and the abandonment of its aspiration to join NATO as preconditions for any ceasefire. The deeper conceptual framework is also public: in his July 2021 essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians, Putin argued that there was no historical basis for the idea of the Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians (Putin, 2021). The Kremlin also rejects Western security guarantees for Ukraine and seeks to exclude the Europeans from negotiations.
Quoted directly from primary sources, the Russian project explains itself, and also explains why the war does not end: Moscow demands as a precondition what it has been unable to obtain militarily in four years. This is the inverted temporality of the chapter on China: where Beijing subordinates the short term to a decades-long trajectory of construction, Moscow subordinates its future for decades to a territorial claim its present military cannot sustain. A power planning infrastructure for 2035 and a power bleeding one million casualties for 31 square miles do not inhabit the same strategic century.
But analytical honesty requires the complete mirror image, and here this book stands by what it said in Chapter IV without retreat: the fact that Putin’s objectives are maximalist does not validate the Atlantic narrative of a Russia capable of conquering Europe, does not make 5% of GDP a logical deduction, and does not transform every criticism of rearmament into collaborationism. Both things are true simultaneously: Russia is committing an act of aggression with declared objectives unacceptable to any legal order, and the Atlantic bloc is exploiting that aggression to justify an economic and military reorganization extending far beyond it. Distinguish intention from outcome; scrutinize every powerful beneficiary: the method does not change according to the accused.
The Two Wars Explain Each Other
Placed side by side, Iran and Ukraine cease to be separate news stories and reveal themselves as two rehearsals for the same test: what can pure military force still achieve within the international system of the twenty-first century?
The empirical answer is humiliating for its practitioners. The United States and Israel, with absolute technological superiority, obtained a memorandum of understanding in Iran—that is, the negotiation that existed before the bombing, now accompanied by tens of thousands of deaths, a Lebanese war, a strait turned into a hostage, and Western legal prestige in ruins. Russia, with an unlimited willingness to sacrifice human life, obtains territory in Ukraine measured in islands the size of Manhattan while its energy industry burns. In both cases, force demonstrated the capacity to destroy and an inability to construct the political result sought. And in both cases, negotiations became deadlocked or degraded—the talks on Ukraine, in fact, stalled in the shadow of the Iran war itself, confirming that the fronts do not accumulate: they form a chain.
Meanwhile, the power that did not fire a shot was the only one to end the first half of the year with an improved position: recognized mediator in the Gulf, defender of common routes, author of peace initiatives alongside countries of the South, and with its underlying thesis—that connectivity yields greater returns than disruption—demonstrated by its adversaries at their own expense. Zhao Tingyang might formulate it this way: in 2026, the Western order produced two further demonstrations that a system sustained by containing enemies manufactures the wars it claims to prevent, while the candidate alternative order accumulated evidence that making rupture more costly than membership is not only a philosophy, but also a profitable strategy.
The question left for the conclusions is this: if force no longer produces order, and the institutions of 1945 no longer produce justice, what will produce the order to come—and who is writing its grammar right now?
CHAPTER VIII. THE WAR OVER THE SMALLEST OBJECT
The Semiconductor, Rare Earths, and the Struggle Over the Infrastructure of Intelligence
The Most Political Object Ever Manufactured
This book argues that the power of the twenty-first century is the power to keep the world in circulation. It remains to examine the object in which that thesis is concentrated to the point of incandescence: the advanced semiconductor, the most complex thing the human species manufactures and, today, the most political.
A cutting-edge chip condenses the entirety of planetary circulation into a few centimeters: US or British design, US design software, Dutch lithography that only one company in the world—ASML—knows how to manufacture, German and Japanese components, Taiwanese or South Korean fabrication, Chinese and Japanese chemicals and consumables, rare earths processed under a near-monopoly in China, assembly in Southeast Asia, and an ultimate destination that is increasingly a single type of building: the data center where artificial intelligence is trained and operated. No country on the planet—none—can produce an advanced chip on its own. The semiconductor is interdependence made material. And for that very reason, it became the perfect battlefield: whoever controls a single link in that chain can bring the entire circulation to a halt.
Here, the theory has a name, and it is Western—this book cites critics of the system itself when they are correct: Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman called the phenomenon by which the networks globalization built to connect become instruments of coercion “weaponized interdependence,” because their central nodes can be used as chokepoints (Farrell & Newman, 2019). The chip war is the one-to-one-scale demonstration of that thesis. And its development between 2022 and 2026 allows us to observe, as in a laboratory, the collision between the two grammars this book has been contrasting: the grammar of disruption and the grammar of circulation.
October 2022: Disruption as Doctrine
In October 2022, the United States inaugurated an export-control regime without precedent in the history of technological trade: it prohibited sales to China not only of advanced chips, but also of the equipment, software, and even US personnel needed to manufacture them; and through the foreign direct product rule, it extended its reach to any chip manufactured anywhere in the world using US technology. The subsequent escalation drew in its allies: the Netherlands restricted ASML machines, while Japan restricted its equipment and chemicals. The declared objective was to keep China “as far behind as possible” in advanced computing—that is, in the material infrastructure of artificial intelligence.
That decision should be read through the categories developed in this book. It was not a sanction imposed in response to conduct: it was an attempt to freeze a civilization’s relative position within the defining technology of the era. The order that describes itself as “rules-based” and committed to the “free market” suspended both principles without ceremony when the technological hierarchy appeared threatened—just as Chapter IV showed that European fiscal rules were suspended when military expenditure became their destination. The underlying doctrine is the same: the rules apply for as long as the center benefits from them.
The Chinese Response: Not Autarky, but Redundancy
The implicit prediction underlying the controls was that China would be brought to a halt. Something else happened, and this book had anticipated it in its logic: confronted with disruption, China responded as it always does—by building redundancy. Massive national funds for the chip industry; the acceleration of SMIC toward advanced nodes through alternatives to the prohibited lithography; Huawei’s return with domestically produced chips Washington had considered impossible; the progressive substitution of equipment and components; and the reorganization of the entire ecosystem around an objective that the controls themselves transformed into a national consensus.
Qin Yaqing’s relational theory explains what the design of the controls failed to anticipate: if relationships produce actors, the severing of relationships also produces them, but not necessarily in a weaker form. The embargo did not encounter a Chinese chip industry: it created one, in the strongest sense of the verb. Before 2022, it was cheaper for Chinese companies to buy than to develop, and the structural incentive favored dependency; the controls reversed that incentive overnight and transformed substitution into a matter of survival. Washington sought to manage China’s technological lag and instead created the guaranteed demand that no Chinese industrial policy had succeeded in producing on its own. Disruption, when applied to an actor capable of learning, functions as a subsidy to the adversary.
Rare Earths: China Discovers Its Own Chokepoint
But the complete symmetry arrived from the other end of the chain. If the West controls the links of design and lithography, China controls the link of matter: the processing of rare earths and critical minerals, where its position is nearly monopolistic. And in 2025, it decided to use that position with a level of sophistication that constitutes, for this book, the most revealing fact of the entire technological war.
In April 2025, Beijing imposed controls on seven critical minerals. In October, it implemented what analysts described as a major upgrade of its entire regime: case-by-case licensing for rare earths intended for the design and production of advanced semiconductors—logic chips of 14 nanometers or less, memory of 256 layers or more—and, above all, a de minimis rule of 0.1%: any product manufactured in any country in the world containing Chinese-origin rare earths above that threshold requires a Chinese license before it can be reexported. Read it carefully: it is the exact mirror image, clause by clause, of the extraterritorial US foreign direct product rule. China did not denounce the weapon of interdependence. It copied it, reversed it, and pointed it back. The pupil of the export-control regime turned out to be its clone—with the additional complication for the West that Taiwanese fabrication of advanced chips depends on Chinese consumables in a proportion that industry analysts themselves estimate at around 30% for nodes of seven nanometers or less.
The immediate outcome confirms the underlying thesis. Following the summit between Xi and Trump in late 2025, China suspended the application of its controls for one year and the United States relaxed its own: sales of Nvidia and AMD chips to China were authorized—under the extraordinary condition that the US government receive 15% of the revenue, the free market transformed into a state toll without anyone blushing—and by 2026 the entire regime had become what it really is: not a security policy, but a bargaining chip tightened and loosened according to the rhythm of summits, with companies and third countries held hostage by uncertainty. National security, invoked as absolute in 2022, proved negotiable in exchange for percentages in 2025. Chapter IV formulated this in relation to rearmament: threat as a blank check. Chips add the endorsement: the check itself is also traded.
The True Prize: The Infrastructure of Intelligence
All of this chess has only one final board, and it is the one announced by this book’s title. The chips contested by the two powers are not generic components: they are the material infrastructure of artificial intelligence—the physical substrate upon which the first technology in history to automate not muscle, but cognition, is trained and operated. AI is not merely one more industry within the competition: it is the meta-industry redefining the productivity of every other sector, scientific research, warfare, administration, and education. This is why the dispute over semiconductors is qualitatively different from the trade wars of the past: the struggle is not over a market. It is over the relative speed at which each civilization will be able to think.
And here the two strategies diverge once again according to the pattern this book already recognizes. The United States concentrates: the most advanced models, the densest computing resources, the deepest capital, and a foreign policy oriented toward denying those inputs to its rival. China diffuses: without full access to frontier computing, it has invested in open and efficient models, in integrating AI into manufacturing, logistics, and services, and—as Chapter V documented—in educating its entire population in the technology, from primary schooling to technical training. One strategy seeks a monopoly over frontier intelligence; the other seeks the capillary diffusion of available intelligence. It is too early to know which will prevail, and this book will not decide the question by decree. But industrial history offers an uncomfortable precedent for the monopolist: general-purpose technologies—electricity, the engine, computing—have always ultimately rewarded those who disseminated them most effectively, not those who hoarded them most successfully.
Yan, Zhao, and the Chip
The interlocutors in this book allow us to close the chapter with the correct questions. From the perspective of Yan Xuetong’s moral realism, the chip war is an episode of negative leadership: a power that exercises its advantage through denial—denying machines, denying chips, denying students—may preserve its technical lead while simultaneously squandering the trust of third parties observing it. Every country that saw its factories paralyzed by decisions taken in Washington or Beijing learned the same lesson, and that lesson favors neither of the two: it favors redundancy, diversification, and the development of domestic capacity. Weaponized interdependence, used by both sides, is producing a world distrustful of every dependency; that is, it is accelerating precisely the multipolarity that each side sought to prevent except on its own terms.
And from the perspective of Zhao’s Tianxia—read with Callahan’s warning incorporated—the war over the smallest object is the most elegant refutation of the existing order: a system in which the technology that will define the century is administered through reciprocal chokepoints is not a world order; it is a stalemate of vetoes. The question Zhao compels us to ask is not who will win the contest of strangulation, but whether an architecture is possible in which the infrastructure of intelligence has no outside—where access to the substrate of artificial cognition does not reproduce, with new materials, the old geography of the center and its peripheries. Nothing in 2026 indicates that such an architecture is near. Everything indicates that it will be one of the constitutive disputes of the order to come.
Because if the power of the last century was measured in barrels and the power of this one is measured in flows, the object in which the two converge already exists, fits in one hand, and cannot be manufactured by any single country. That final sentence is, perhaps, the only good news in this chapter.
CONCLUSIONS. THE NAME OF THE WORLD TO COME
This book began with a suspicion: that we are not living through an accumulation of crises, but through the replacement of the system that gave them meaning. Seven chapters later, that suspicion can be formulated as a finding—with the caution of someone who knows that she is writing from within the process she describes, not after it.
The first finding is structural. The center of the world was never a place: it was the capacity to simultaneously concentrate production, knowledge, finance, military power, and the ability to define rules accepted by others. Measured against that standard, the shift toward Asia ceases to be a debatable hypothesis and becomes an inventory: a growing proportion of the capacity to transform ideas into objects, objects into networks, and networks into power is concentrated there. The railways, robots, curricula, rockets, and corridors of Chapter V are not anecdotes of Chinese development. They are material evidence that one of the five capacities—production, and with it a growing share of applied knowledge—has already changed hemispheres. The others are holding out in the Atlantic, but holding out is the precise verb, and it is not the verb of centers.
The second finding is more uncomfortable, because it concerns not those who are rising but those who are declining. Confronted with the loss of productive centrality, the Atlantic bloc did not respond with a project for rebuilding capacities: it responded with a political economy of fear. The 5% of GDP pledged in The Hague, the €800 billion of ReArm Europe, the 55% of global military expenditure concentrated within NATO—none of this is merely a defense policy: it is the reorganization of a model of accumulation around threat. And that model has one characteristic that this book documented in two different settings, Europe and Gaza, and which perhaps constitutes its most specific contribution: when security becomes a financial product, permanent tension becomes the point of maximum profitability. Peace closes contracts; total war destroys markets; managed insecurity yields returns. No one needs to conspire for that system to function. A convergence of incentives is sufficient—and that convergence is plainly visible, publicly traded, and published in investment outlooks.
The third finding is legal, and it is the gravest. The 1945 order is not being overthrown by its adversaries: it is being hollowed out by its guarantors. The sequence from 2024 to 2026 permits a unified reading that no fragmented chronicle can reveal. The mandated bodies of the UN named the genocide in Gaza, and the genocide continued under the words “ceasefire” while the territory changed hands. International justice set a calendar extending to 2029 for a crime occurring in real time. The founding power of the system sanctioned the Special Rapporteur who applied the system’s rules, bombed a country in the midst of negotiations without Security Council authorization, and assassinated its head of state. Lebanon’s oldest peacekeeping mission was dissolved on the eve of the war it was meant to prevent.
None of these events is an anomaly: together they form a pattern, and that pattern has a name. The institutions were designed to judge the crimes of the defeated, not to stop the crimes of the center. When the center became the offender, the order revealed that it had never devised a plan for that eventuality, because that eventuality was its constitutive blind spot.
The fourth finding belongs to the terrain on which this book chose its interlocutors. The Chinese categories employed here were not an exercise in theoretical exoticism: they were instruments that produced verifiable analytical results. Qin Yaqing’s relational theory explained why fragmenting Europe’s relationships is equivalent to reorganizing Europe, and why destroying the relational conditions of Gaza and Lebanon produces shell sovereignties. Yan Xuetong’s moral realism made it possible to measure what material metrics do not capture: that leadership which needs to produce enemies is leadership in decline, and that the accumulated memory of recipient countries—does the road work? Does the partner keep its word?—will carry greater weight than all the summits combined. Zhao Tingyang’s Tianxia supplied the definitive standard: an order is measured by what it leaves outside, and Gaza is the constitutive outside of the order that calls itself rules-based. And Wang Huning, writing about the United States in 1991, formulated the question that became prophetic for the entire Atlantic bloc in 2026: if the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained? This book’s provisional answer is grim: it sustains itself by monetizing its own collapse—selling insecurity as an asset class.
The fifth finding is the one the two wars of 2026 wrote by themselves. And the silent war of Chapter VIII added the corollary: not even technological disruption, the most sophisticated weapon in the Western arsenal, succeeded in stopping what it intended to stop—it merely accelerated the adversary’s redundancy and third parties’ distrust.
Pure military force demonstrated simultaneously in Iran and Ukraine that its capacity to destroy remains intact while its capacity to construct political outcomes has been lost. One million casualties for a territory the size of Manhattan; a superpower bombing in order to obtain the memorandum that negotiations had already offered. Meanwhile, the power that did not fire a shot ended the first half of the year as a mediator, with its routes defended and its thesis demonstrated by its adversaries. This does not morally consecrate China—this book documented its ambiguities, its potential coercion, and the open question of whether a Chinese network can exist without Chinese centrality. But it establishes a historical fact: in the transition now underway, the grammar of connectivity is defeating the grammar of disruption. Not in speeches. In outcomes.
The question in the title therefore remains. If the center was a capacity and that capacity is becoming dispersed, what comes next: a new center or the end of centers? Honesty requires this book to answer that it does not know, and to distrust anyone who claims to know. What can be stated is where the matter will be decided. It will not be decided at summits, but through the accumulated experience of the Global South, which for the first time in centuries can negotiate among several providers—and whose mature question is no longer “Whose side are we on?” but “What network of relationships increases our own capacity?” It will be decided by whether Latin America stops negotiating in a fragmented manner; whether Africa succeeds in transforming rather than merely exporting; whether Vietnam moves up the chain without becoming trapped; whether Europe remembers that regulation is no substitute for capacity. And it will increasingly be decided in a field no previous hegemonic transition has known: that of the nonhuman intelligences one civilization is incorporating into the education of its entire population while the other debates—with legitimate reasons, but with the clock running—what should be prohibited first.
This book’s final questions are not rhetorical, and they should be left fully armed for the work that follows. Can efficiency coexist with freedom, diversity, and public oversight? Can there be an order without a sacrificial outside—a real Tianxia, rather than a hierarchy with a different center? Can international law survive the evidence that its guarantors became its violators, or will its successor have to be built by other hands? And can journalism—this profession—continue calling that which kills a “ceasefire,” that which generates profit “defense,” and that which excludes an “order,” without becoming part of the machinery it describes?
Infrastructure is not automatically emancipatory, we wrote in Chapter V. Neither is multipolarity. But both expand the available options—and the expansion of options is the most honest definition of power this inquiry discovered. The power of the twenty-first century will be the power to keep the world in circulation. The politics of the twenty-first century will be the struggle to ensure that this circulation does not reproduce, under new flags, the old architecture of the center and its exteriors. That is the unfinished work. This book sought, at least, to draw the true map upon which it must be undertaken.
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