Power without control: The erosion of enforceable order

When Francis Fukuyama wrote about the "end of history," he argued that liberal democracy had no serious ideological rival and that the major contests shaping the international system had largely been settled — pointing not to the end of conflict, but to a more stable and predictable order.

What followed was a global tutorial in the limits of power. The US could annihilate the Iraqi state in 2003, yet it could not convert overwhelming military force into the political outcome it sought. Its 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan showed 20 years of unmatched resources could not be translated into a durable, controlled end state. 

The Soviet Union's decade in Afghanistan had already revealed this asymmetry — nuclear parity and massive conventional strength meant little when a state lacked the ability to turn power into governance. And the 2026 US-Iran conflict is the contemporary case: immense military and economic leverage produced global disruption but failed to deliver a stable political outcome.

The defining feature of the current international system is not renewed ideological rivalry, but the erosion of enforceable order — a widening gap between power and control. Power is only the capacity to act; control is the capacity to achieve what you intend. States retain vast capabilities yet struggle to translate them into stable outcomes. Dominance persists, but its effects are less predictable and harder to sustain over time.

This gap is not new. But it is no longer episodic or confined to particular conflicts. It is becoming embedded in how the international system distributes leverage, organises interaction, and amplifies shocks.

Three forces drive this shift: the rise of chokepoint power, the strategic adaptation of middle powers, and a tightly coupled system prone to nonlinear escalation.

Chokepoint power and the fragmentation of control

Power in the modern international system is no longer measured by size alone. It increasingly derives from control over chokepoints — critical nodes in physical, financial and technological networks that are difficult to substitute.

Some chokepoints are geographic, such as the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of global energy flows. Others are institutional or infrastructural: dollar-clearing systems such as CHIPS, the SWIFT network, maritime insurance, and supply chains for rare earths and advanced technologies.

What makes these chokepoints distinctive is not just their importance, but their asymmetry. Control over them allows states to project influence far beyond their capabilities, often without direct force. Sanctions, export controls, and shipping disruptions can impose costs across the global system.

Many of these levers emerged from post-Cold War liberalisation and integration. Systems designed for efficiency have, over time, become instruments of strategic leverage. As more states exploit these vulnerabilities, power has become more diffuse and harder to manage.

Chokepoint power is not always crafted. Sometimes it is born from blunders. Superpowers push sanctions and coercion thinking they are tightening the screws; instead, they redraw the map in ways they did not intend. 

Iran is a textbook case. Washington went in allegedly to contain a nuclear program. It walked out having turned regional disruption into leverage that made the Strait of Hormuz a strategic instrument. A shipping lane that was never the center of the dispute became Iran's pressure point only after the war scrambled the region. Now the United States is contending with a vulnerability of its own making — a reminder that in a networked world, coercion can manufacture the very chokepoints it later fears.

Middle powers and the strategy of cost imposition

If chokepoints provide the structure, middle powers provide the agency.

States that cannot compete head-on with major powers have adapted by prioritising resilience and disruption over decisive victory. Their objective is not to win, but to impose costs, stretch adversaries, and complicate outcomes.

Iran's use of proxies, maritime pressure points, and calibrated escalation exemplifies this approach. So too do non-state actors such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, which disrupt shipping, raise insurance costs, and provoke disproportionate responses. Even in conventional conflicts, smaller actors leverage agility, decentralization, and technology to offset material disadvantages.

The logic is simple: the weak need not defeat the strong—they need only raise the cost of enforcement enough to induce hesitation or failure.

The implication extends far beyond Iran. Once dominant powers can no longer reliably enforce compliance, the strategic calculus of weaker states changes. Resistance becomes less about defeating stronger adversaries than about raising the costs of enforcement beyond what the stronger party is willing to bear—and this cost-imposition strategy directly accelerates the erosion of enforceability across the international system.

A system prone to nonlinear escalation

These developments, manageable in isolation, are embedded in a tightly coupled global system that amplifies instability.

In such systems, small disturbances can produce large and unpredictable effects. A single drone strike on energy infrastructure can move global markets. A localized maritime incident can disrupt supply chains. Financial restrictions in one domain can trigger cascading responses in others.

This is the logic of nonlinear dynamics: outcomes are not proportional to inputs, and feedback loops can accelerate escalation beyond any single actor's intentions.

The contemporary security environment reflects these dynamics. Retaliatory cycles act as positive feedback loops, where each response invites another, often at a higher level of intensity. At the same time, recurring patterns—proxy attacks, counterstrikes, temporary de-escalation, and renewed tension—create a system that is both volatile and recurring.

Recent empirical patterns reflect this tension. As the IMF has noted, most conflicts since World War II have occurred within states, while interstate conflicts remain relatively infrequent—though rising. This is not a contradiction of growing instability, but an expression of it. The system continues to suppress large-scale war, yet is becoming less effective at containing the pressures that generate it, allowing instability to build within states and spill back into interstate relations.

In this environment, misperception becomes especially dangerous. Signals are interpreted differently, and small errors in judgment can lead to large divergences in outcomes. What begins as a limited action can quickly expand into a broader confrontation, not because escalation is desired, but because it becomes difficult to control.

The erosion of enforceability

Layered onto a tightly coupled, nonlinear system is a strategic dilemma familiar from game theory, now operating in a more volatile setting. The current order resembles a many-sided prisoner's dilemma: each actor understands that mutual restraint would reduce risks, yet fears that unilateral restraint would invite exploitation or signal weakness.

The result is a pattern in which rational short-term decisions—deterrence, retaliation, signaling resolve—push the system toward outcomes no one seeks. Trust is low, communication imperfect, and the cost of miscalculation high. Under such conditions, maximalist positions become the default, not because they are optimal, but because they appear safer.

This dynamic is most visible in the fragmented conflicts that dominate the contemporary landscape, where multiple actors and weak coordination make escalation cycles difficult to arrest. The cumulative effect is not the disappearance of power, but the erosion of its effectiveness. Great powers remain dominant, yet struggle to translate that dominance into stable outcomes.

Disorder, in this sense, is not accidental. It is the emergent property of a system in which power is widely distributed, vulnerabilities are interconnected, and strategic interaction is shaped by uncertainty and mistrust. The link between strength and outcomes has frayed. Even the most powerful actors struggle to impose order, while smaller players shape events disproportionately.

The post-1945 order rested on the assumption that power could enforce rules and institutions could sustain cooperation. The emerging order is defined by something different: power remains concentrated, but enforceability has become contested. If the post-Cold War moment asked whether history had ended, the present asks whether order can still be enforced—and that may be the most consequential geopolitical shift of our time.