What we are witnessing now is not a new world order. It is an old one returning – not fully restored, but no longer restrained.
The language may be modern and the tools more sophisticated, but the logic is unmistakably familiar. Powerful states are asserting their entitlement over space. Borders are treated as negotiable. Proximity is taken as justification. Assets are elevated above people. This is not innovation. It is regression.
For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was simply how global politics worked. Great powers moved where they could, not where they should. Influence was asserted through force, coercion, or quiet domination. They drew Durand Lines and straight-edged borders across Africa and Asia – lines that made sense to mapmakers in distant capitals but ignored the people living on the ground. Borders were drawn to suit foreign rulers, not local peoples. The consequences were absorbed by those who living on the wrong side of the ink.
The Great Game was not an aberration. It was the system.
That system produced borders that made sense only on maps but not on the ground. It embedded the foundations of instability that lasted generations. And yet, at the time, it was justified as realism – the natural behaviour of serious powers in an unregulated world.
The devastation of the first half of the twentieth century was meant to bury that logic.
Out of two world wars came an explicit attempt to civilise power. Not to eliminate it – that was never realistic – but to at least constrain it. Institutions were built. Norms were articulated. Sovereignty was elevated from convenience to principle. Even when violated, the rules mattered because they imposed friction. They forced justification. They slowed escalation. They created reputational cost.
For decades, that constraint held. Imperfectly, unevenly, and often hypocritically, yes – but it held.
What has changed now is not that powerful states pursue self-interest. They always have. What has changed is the absence of disguise.
There is no serious attempt to anchor action in legitimacy. No sustained effort to persuade others that rules still apply. No pretence that these moves reflect anything beyond advantage. Power is asserted openly, transactionally and without apology. The language of restraint has been replaced by the language of entitlement.
This is the real inflection point.
Not a dramatic return to nineteenth-century imperialism, but the quiet normalisation of a world where rules exist until power decides otherwise.
When power expanded in earlier eras, it was rarely presented as naked domination. Even systems that subordinated local interests to distant capitals were framed as civilising missions, legal necessity or historical right. Today, even that paltry effort is thinning. The assumption is simpler and colder: we can, therefore we will.
That matters because norms rarely collapse with spectacle. They erode through tolerated exception. Once one major power acts without consequence, others do not need convincing. They only need precedent.
The result is not immediate chaos. Order does not disappear. It hardens.
In such a system, power becomes legible to those strong enough to impose it, and unpredictable for everyone else. Borders hold until they do not. Sovereignty is respected until it becomes inconvenient. Stability exists, but only conditionally.
This is why the current moment feels so unsettling. Not because it is unprecedented, but because it is recognisable. We know where this logic leads. We have lived with the instability it produces before. We built an entire post-war architecture to prevent its return.
And yet now, without embarrassment or disguise, that logic is being revived. The danger is not ignorance. It is indifference.
We are not watching the accidental collapse of a moral order. We are watching a conscious shift away from restraint – a revival of an older system, stripped of the rules, institutions and pretences that were designed to contain it.
The Great Game has returned. This time, no one is pretending otherwise.