Runes of treaties deeply pondered
graved Wotan in the shaft of the spear:
he holds it to sway the world.
A hero bold in fight has broken the spear;
in splinters shivered the treaties’ hallowed haft.
Gotterdammerung, Richard Wagner
Introduction
Great Power geopolitical conflict is back. The various efforts made after the two world wars, the result of the Cold War, all were pointing to a stabilization of these great power dynamics, to an end of what appeared to be a dangerous, risky way of balancing geopolitical conflicts.
Some of us thought that we have transcended those dangerous, uncertain times, and that we will be able to make our way in a more stable, more unipolar world, a world where the US, as the world’s unassailed superpower would play supercop, and all will be relatively under control. I would not want to be tasked with arguing in favour of that optimistic view, but it was certainly a rational view of the world to come.
Then, a few seemingly unrelated conflict events ripped the mask from that fantasy. In February 2022 Russia attacked Ukraine, the ever-simmering China / Taiwan conflict has reminded us that it has never been resolved, and the US debates whether to invade Canada and / or Greenland, while coyly manufacturing the thinnest of excuses for attacking Iran, completes the picture that we are no longer in Kansas, Toto.
Geopolitical realism, might makes right, barged back on to the world stage, making those earlier views of an evolved way of geopolitical stability and predictability seem quaintly misplaced. By the nature of these geopolitical realities these changes, profound as they may seem once noticed and in place, have no real date, no clearly visible dividing line that is crossed between then and now. It is a gradual, inexorable process that slowly dawns on most of us.
The reasons for this slide back into realism deserve their own treatment, and we need not pause here for long at that fascinating question. The real or imagined limitations and failures of liberalism, of capitalism, globalism, even democracy itself, a fast-changing economic landscape, artificial intelligence, a slow decay of norms and institutions, the rise in popularity of fascist and authoritarian perceived solutions, and a range of other contributing factors have seen a resurgence of the strong man in politics, of power as a hard currency.
President’ Donald Trump’s second administration, commencing its public work in January 2025 was as visible a reminder of the return of realism as anything else, and then confirmed on a nearly daily basis since then. Taking up these opportunities are the new superpowers. Interesting debates abound as to who really qualifies as such a superpower. There is not too much of practical value in the title, and the realities of the use of power will determine its own labels and efficiencies in the next few years. For our purposes here, I am prepared to work with the US and China s superpowers or great powers, with Russia and potential power blocks like NATO, the EU forming a sui generis group of big, powerful entities, followed by the middle powers, and then the small countries.
The sunset of empire
The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 brought about seismic shifts in great power dynamics. The Soviet Union finally fell apart, China survived its own internal upheaval to start taking those further steps towards dominance, the European Union started growing in influence, and a number of individual states, such as Germany and Britain continued their firm role as significant powers. At that stage, the US was, with few dissenting voices, the only hegemon in town.
Cynics and optimists alike, in significant numbers, started to regard the very concept of superpowers as having run its course, as being irrelevant. New eras of peace and ways to collaborate were envisaged and planned for. Conflict would be more contained, we would be able to work things out in new ways, with the one superpower playing a determining role if we could not. The word “unipolar” was used with confidence. Sceptics like John Mearsheimer and Samuel P. Huntington did not share this view, and expected the age of superpowers to return. For various reasons, they were to be proven correct.
The next global tilt back to where we are today started with 9/11 in 2001. Attempts at great powers working together in a spirit of collaboration lasted a year or two since that terrible event, and the definition and application of power became a contentious, seemingly intractable problem again, slowly at first, but slowly gaining pace.
The rise and realignment of new players
The liberal international order stamped a way of thinking about and resolving conflict all over the world, and this in itself started to create disagreement and resentment. In the early 2000s, and partially because of this growing dissatisfaction, we see concepts and organizations such as the Global South and BRICS starting to gain traction and influence.
As if confirming these changes in power alignments, the idea of a “G2”, being the US and China was mooted in 2005. The further erosion of the Great Powers idea, and the further confirmation of the start of these new alignments, resulted from the global financial crisis of 2008. The geopolitical world tilted on its axis, with the creation of new and important power balances between North and South, and East and West. In 2010, China became the second largest economy in the world. India and, at least as far as energy supply was concerned, Russia, became serious actors in this drama, for a variety of reasons.
The growing divisions and realignments were exacerbated and brought to the fore by the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. Feelings of distrust, abandonment and divided loyalties were dragged out into the open, confirmed and given apparent evidence in how some of the bigger countries handled the crisis. In early February 2022 China and Russia announced their “partnership without limits”, and a few weeks later Russia invaded Ukraine. For any doubters still around at that stage, the public death of the rules-based order, and the roaring back to life of the blunt truths of geopolitical realism, established the reality of a range of new, more predatory, great powers.
Wars such as the Russia – Ukraine war forced and hastened these power alignments and reconfigurations. Neutrality became a more and more difficult fig leaf to hide behind. The eagerness and willingness to resolve geopolitical differences by violence and war, by open aggression and the near disdain of diplomatic solutions, became established seemingly in a heartbeat. The United Nations, as the world’s court and policeman, had only the barest semblance of effective power left, as a result of a variety of external and self-inflicted wounds.
The October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel served as a further example of geopolitical enforced polarization, with the enduring horrors of that conflict forcing commitments and further exposing the limits of geopolitical neutrality. Great power competition was on its way. This even started to extend into space, as the importance of space became more pronounced, with the Starlink assistance in the Ukraine war, and the PRC’s Lunar Exploration Program serving as striking examples.
This set much of the new battlegrounds around which the new great powers were to align, such as computer chips and related natural resources required to build all the components needed to make these achievements possible. Various tech companies became, in a very real way, multi-national corporations with the financial and influencing reach that dwarfed the abilities of conventional countries. What started out as battles in cyberspace found its practical application in conventional geopolitical rivalries in the real world. Artificial intelligence and the race for supremacy in that sphere became its own battlefield, in conformity with Vladimir Putin’s prediction that whoever rules artificial intelligence battlegrounds will rule the world.
The start of the second Trump administration early in 2025 placed enough sudden pressure on these realignments to force a resettling of alliances. Surreal public attacks and threats aimed at Canada, Greenland and other traditional US allies, open support of Russian war efforts in Ukraine, support for Israel that sometimes, in the public mind, bordered on excessive partisanship, and domestic and geopolitical policies and expressions thereof by the Trump administration forced a re-assessment of the ways of the geopolitical world on several fronts. Globalization, with all its confident plans and pronouncements, was clearly dead, as a concept and as a viable practice. Make America Great Again, and its countless spin-offs in other countries, were clearly anti-globalist.
The invincible rules-based order, together with its pillars of liberalism and even democracy itself, took on a lot of water, and these seismic forced the death of the old political gods, and the birth and rise of the new ones, an overlapping process still not completed. The old political gods that were dead or dying were ideas, people and places. The US empire, with itself as sole hegemon, the ruler of all it surveyed, is in death throes in that form. Much of this is the result of policy misdirection, strategic mistakes and its own decisions to limit and contract some of its unsustainable involvement in world affairs.
Regional and spheres of influence focus have become the more realistic aims of the US and many of the other rising power blocs. The dying of the old US giant has also been accelerated by glaring errors such as the burning of various alliance bridges, and the ill-advised attack on Iran in 2026. But not just the old concept and expectations of the US died in this process. Gone too are some of the important machinery that made the world work the way it did. The United Nations in its present format is at best a ceremonial organization that tries its best to retain some form of authority and influence, a process that is not going well. Rules-based order, a range of diplomatic protocols and best practices, the functional respect for certain foundational assumptions and a priori certainties are gone, replaced with the hammers of political realism. Conflict management, as one of the revered tools of political dispute resolution, has had to revisit much of its own geopolitical assumptions and best practices.
The protocols of certainty and predictability, such as the concept of pacta sunt servanda, have been replaced with might-is-right rationalizations. Artificial intelligence and the dynamics of what is convincingly referred to as the Cold War 2.0 complete the perfect storm of chaos and uncertainty, of winds of change that swept away the way the world worked. These were all seemingly eternal truths, gods of certainty and stability, to be revered as such, and to serve as the foundations for the building of the world as before. Now, those foundations, those gods of certainty, are all gone.
South Africa’s position and challenges
South Africa operates in this brave new world, and like everyone else has no choice but to engage with those changes. It is of great concern that we enter these troubled waters while our own internal stability and growth needs so much attention and focus. But these two categories need not be seen as polar opposites, or mutually destructive versions of reality.
If South Africa gets, and maintains, its geopolitical positioning in this new world right, it could go a long way in resolving its internal problems. Getting the geopolitical challenges sufficiently wrong will make the internal challenges all but unbearable. The framework, probably that of geopolitical multipolarity and non-alignment, will need work, a nuanced re-imaging of old concepts for new applications, and then the roadmap itself will need to be applied constantly, skilfully and with great care and patience. I predict that this period of transition and upheaval will, of necessity, be one of realignment and a shaping of worldviews.
That is important, because I also believe that there will be a phase after that, where those alliances start a more outward expansion, and where errors could rather permanently place smaller states in near-servile roles in the service of the new great powers. As much as a significant section of South African internal power-groups still base their worldview on the dictates of the old political gods, and as much as that transition will have to be carefully managed, those frameworks and trajectories will no longer serve South Africa’s best interests.
A blind, unquestioning loyalty to “the West”, to classical liberalism, or even to “Western values” has become indefensible across a spectrum of reasons. Even the very cornerstones of many of those axioms, such as capitalism and democracy itself, will need creative revision and reimagining, and rather extensive revitalization for the challenges of the new world. It is, of course, equally destructive and indefensible for the South African government to remain wedded to some of the old ghosts of their own ideological pasts. The destruction brought by the old imagining of socialism, Marxism and rule by selected elites need no further illustration, and in this new world we have already learned the expensive lessons that internal policies and mistakes have global consequences. Political realism does not respect boundaries or sovereignty, for that matter.
In this new world, no country will get far with isolationist policies of any kind. Isolationism is not the flipside of the globalist coin. Those alliances, the creation of new value propositions, and interest-based configurations of power will be the middle powers’ (such as South Africa) only chance of survival and prosperity among the great powers and their battles for supremacy. Even there, in assessing what a middle power can bring to those equations, the old rules and possibilities have changed in significant respects. South Africa will have to choose, craft and maintain these relationships with great skill, based on our own best interests. Realism makes this both possible and inevitable.
How we calculate those best interests has changed in important respects, and we wait to see if the South African government can adapt quickly and effectively enough to become the highly skilled, conflict competent leaders that these new power alignments demand. We explore these existential challenges in my upcoming book Tightrope: South African lessons for middle powers in a multipolar world.
Conclusion
None of these proverbial deaths have been sudden, and some of these powers and influences are in their death throes, in that form. It can safely be predicted that the old concept of the US will not go gentle into that good night. The new US, when it finds its feet, will still be a great power, a powerful dynamic on the global stage and in the strategies determining and shaping South African best interests.
The present realignments will continue for a number of years to come, with an increased clarification of roles and alignments. True neutrality, true “non-alignment” will not be feasible or advisable, and the popular non-aligned position will need to be revised, understood and executed in very specific ways. The new gods now are still finding their feet, and the great powers and alignments set in motion will continue to mill the unaware, the unwilling and the unskilled between them.
The stakes are high, the timeframes are urgent, and much of these power displays feel new and original. In certain respects they are just that, but in others they still run along predictable lines of human conflict engagement. Living in the times of the twilight of the old gods is as petrifying as it is inspiring. With new risks and threats come new opportunities, a chance to rewrite past mistakes, to set countries and people on new trajectories, good or bad. So many of the new conflict dynamics are only barely visible, if at all, through the mists of this uncertain, volatile times. As we have seen in recent years, a single event, a 9/11 attack, a pandemic, a particular voting result, can steer anticipated trajectories degrees off course.
In the death of the old political gods lie the lessons for the new gods, if we know what to look out for. What can be built on these old foundations, what do we see when stand on the shoulders of those old giants?
Summary of main sources, references and suggested reading
1. The Return of the Great Powers, by Brendan Simms, Basic Books (2026)
2. For articles dealing with the conflict strategies and tactics discussed, including those dealing with various Cold War 2.0 aspects, the AI “arms race” and so on, see our blog index at Conflict Conversations
(Andre Vlok can be contacted at andre@conflict1.co.za for any further information.)
(c) Andre Vlok July 2026
* Author’s note on the use of artificial intelligence in writing this article
I learned to draft, argue and write in the hard school of litigation. I enjoy and value the very human process of creating ideas, of testing my own knowledge and thoughts. It is a process that I need, for answering some of my professional and even personal questions, it is cathartic and inspiring. Other than the most basic research assistance I do not use any AI in the creation of my written work, this article included. It is a matter of pride, of preference, and of mental health. Whether that is a wise choice, I will leave to the reader to decide.