BERLIN—The U.S.-Israeli strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and launched the United States’ most consequential Middle Eastern adventure since the Iraq War caught many in Europe off guard. Confronted with a series of cascading crises — from a 1970s-style oil shock to a transatlantic rupture threatening Europe’s security architecture—many analysts have reached the same conclusion: the conflict represents a breakdown of the multilateral system and heralds an era of global disorder.
Yet this interpretation misses something more profound. The Iran war shows what geopolitics looks like when the very idea of order has collapsed, a state of affairs I call “Un-Order.”
The distinction matters. Disorder is what happens when established rules are deliberately broken. To describe a situation as disordered is, paradoxically, to affirm that shared norms still exist, even as they are violated. Un-order, by contrast, emerges when those norms are overtaken by events and there is no longer a shared understanding of right and wrong, or even of the truth itself. In their place remains a deeper, irreducible uncertainty.
Rather than being governed by shared rules, the international system is now beset by episodic bursts of coercion and retaliation. The Iran war is a case in point: the February 28 strike that killed Khamenei and triggered the current round of regional escalation took place while negotiations were still underway, evoking the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese negotiators were still in Washington for talks with the US.
Worse still, international law and institutions have proven largely ineffective in preventing the U.S., Israel, and Iran from openly flouting core norms against the assassination or kidnapping of political leaders, attacks on civilian infrastructure, and even the long-standing taboo against wars of aggression.
Crucially, the war’s principal actors do not seem to be aware that they are breaking rules at all. When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin produced reams of legal justifications for the invasion—an implicit acknowledgment that a crime was being committed. By contrast, when US President Donald Trump threatened to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, or when Secretary of “War” (Defense) Pete Hegseth declared that the military would show “no quarter, no mercy,” there was little indication that either man knew or cared that they were advocating the commission of war crimes.
No institutional architecture can function when major actors stop playing by the rules. That is the essence of the distinction between disorder and un-order: one involves breaking rules; the other means that no agreed-upon rules exist.
The new age of un-order cannot be attributed to Trump alone, even though his theatricality has come to embody it. He is better understood as a symptom, rather than its primary cause, of a world that has lost its organizing principles. The deeper forces driving this transformation are structural: economic disruptions, climate change, technological advances, and demographic shifts, all converging on the foundations of the existing global order.
As a result, crises are becoming more complex, less predictable, and potentially catastrophic. Rather than simply spreading, they often bleed into one another. In a hyperconnected world, contagion, tipping points, and extreme volatility become the norm. The Oxford economist Ian Goldin has termed this dynamic the “butterfly defect,” using the familiar image of a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world and setting off a tornado on the other to illustrate the destructive potential of global interdependence.
A milder version of this dynamic played out during the COVID-19 pandemic, which rapidly triggered a global economic crisis as supply chains seized up and vaccine nationalism deepened geopolitical tensions. Dramatic change often comes from the cumulative impact of smaller disruptions.
Source: Korea Times News
