Power, Incentives, and the Collapse of Our Favorite Political Illusions
The Illusion Breaks
When, at the beginning of 2026, American special forces reportedly stormed the presidential palace in Caracas and spirited away the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, the global commentariat nearly fainted on cue. The spectacle was received with the sort of horror usually reserved for vandalism at a cathedral. Sovereignty had been violated. A nation had imposed its will upon another. The diplomatic priesthood clutched its pearls and whispered darkly about a return to nineteenth-century gunboat politics.
How dare they?
The indignation was theatrical, but it served a purpose. The fiction of inviolable sovereignty had to be defended, because the entire polite structure of modern geopolitics depends on everyone pretending that it exists.
What we had conveniently forgotten is that this principle—like so many elegant principles in international affairs—is not written into the fabric of the universe. It does not descend from the heavens on tablets of stone. It is a story we told ourselves, and like all stories it worked beautifully as long as conditions were favorable. Prosperity and relative safety allowed us to believe that power had somehow become obsolete.
But illusions age poorly once scarcity returns.
They age even worse once danger returns.
And they shatter entirely the moment power decides to stop pretending.
Geopolitics Without Costume
After the Cold War ended, the Western world was seized by a wave of almost religious euphoria. The great ideological struggle that had defined generations had finally concluded. The Soviet Union had dissolved like a badly written subplot, and the planet appeared ready to settle into what many believed to be its natural state: peaceful cooperation among nations bound together by trade, diplomacy, and the gentle persuasion of shared prosperity.
The globe would become a village.
Borders would soften.
Markets would bind former enemies into profitable friendships.
Even rivals would become partners, because surely no rational actor would jeopardize the riches produced by global trade.
It was a beautiful illusion.
So beautiful, in fact, that Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the arrival of the “end of history.” Liberal democracy and market capitalism had won the ideological contest, and the remaining centuries would merely involve administrative housekeeping.
History, it turns out, was not amused.
The capture of Maduro—however one interprets it—reminds us of something embarrassingly simple: global order has always been rooted in power. We may dress it in elegant theories and surround it with diplomatic ritual, but at its core the system remains brutally straightforward.
Great powers behave like great powers.
They always have.
They always will.
The notion that all nations are equal is a modern invention, born largely from the hopeful decades that followed the Cold War. With the bipolar structure gone, it became fashionable to imagine that a genuinely multilateral order had emerged. No superpowers to intimidate others. No rigid blocs dividing the planet.
Even China appeared willing to play along as it integrated into global markets, becoming the world’s factory while politely nodding along to Western rhetoric about rules and norms. Many believed that trade would eventually transform China into a compliant participant in the so-called international order.
The “rules-based order,” as it came to be known, was elevated into the central myth of the age. Everyone would follow the same rules. Everyone would resolve disputes through institutions. Everyone would behave like mature members of a well-governed club.
In reality, the arrangement worked somewhat differently.
Western democracies were expected to adhere to the rules with almost theological devotion, even when those rules were occasionally used against them. Meanwhile, states less constrained by democratic norms enjoyed considerably more flexibility. They could bend the system creatively without suffering the same internal backlash.
The rules-based order, in other words, functioned largely as diplomatic veneer.
The nineteenth-century British statesman Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston expressed the underlying reality with refreshing bluntness: nations have no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.
Those interests can be suppressed for a time—especially when prosperity makes restraint affordable—but they never disappear. And when great powers restrain themselves for too long, smaller states often begin to behave as though the hierarchy has vanished entirely.
They dance on the noses of the giants.
After all, if all nations are equal, what is the risk?
Yet the giants never truly disappear.
Smaller countries frequently attempt to leverage international institutions, legal mechanisms, and public opinion to influence stronger actors. Sometimes this works. Often it creates pressure.
But great powers retain the ultimate ability to enforce their interests directly. The extraction of Maduro—again, whatever one thinks of it politically—illustrates this point with uncomfortable clarity.
Power never retired.
It merely wore a costume.
International Law and Other Elegant Fictions
When I attended law school, anything with the word “international” attached to it carried a certain glamour.
International contracts.
International finance.
International arbitration.
International settlements.
The prefix transformed otherwise mundane subjects into intellectual haute cuisine. Students flocked to these courses as though they were portals into the future.
Even then, however, something about the concept rang faintly hollow.
How exactly can there be binding international rules when the most powerful states possess the ability to ignore them? More importantly, how can those rules remain credible when everyone knows that they will be ignored the moment vital interests are at stake?
International law functions only under very specific conditions. It requires the presence of a hegemonic power willing to enforce the system—and willing to absorb the costs of doing so.
For decades, that role was played largely by the United States.
The arrangement worked tolerably well while the benefits of maintaining the system outweighed the costs. But this balance was never guaranteed to last indefinitely. Eventually the hegemon begins to question why it should continue underwriting an order that increasingly constrains its own interests.
When that moment arrives, the system does not collapse.
It simply resets.
What we are witnessing today is not the breakdown of global order but its gradual reversion toward something more historically familiar: a hierarchy shaped by power rather than maintained by polite fiction.
Democracy and the Arithmetic of Predation
Curiously, the same human appetite for comforting abstractions that shaped the international system also permeates domestic politics.
Democracy, for example, is commonly summarized by the phrase: “the will of the majority while respecting the rights of the minority.”
It sounds noble.
It also happens to be misleading on both counts.
To begin with, parliamentary majorities rarely represent actual majorities of the population. Consider my own country, Austria. The current government consists of a coalition of three parties, none of which received the highest number of votes in the last election. The party that did win the largest share sits in opposition.
Technically, one could argue that the combined votes of the governing parties represent a majority. Yet their political programs diverge so dramatically that it is doubtful they would secure even a simple majority if presented to voters as a unified platform.
The coalition exists not because the electorate demanded it, but because political incentives aligned that way.
In practice, many democracies are governed by such coalitions of convenience.
Majorities, it turns out, are frequently assembled after the election.
But the second half of the democratic formula—the protection of minorities—also deserves scrutiny.
One might recall the famous remark by Barack Obama: “I have a pen and a phone.” It was his response to legislative gridlock, but it revealed something deeper about modern governance. Executive authority increasingly serves as a shortcut around inconvenient democratic processes.
During the COVID crisis, Austria imposed a series of drastic restrictions on civil liberties. Many of the most severe measures were later ruled unconstitutional by the Austrian Constitutional Court.
But constitutional review takes time.
By the time the court intervenes, the executive orders have already produced their full effect.
In one particularly revealing moment, a member of parliament from the governing coalition openly admitted that policymakers knew certain measures would not survive judicial scrutiny. They implemented them anyway.
When one decree was struck down, another appeared with slightly altered wording, triggering a new legal challenge that would take months to resolve.
In the meantime, the restrictions remained in force.
The rules had not technically been broken.
They had merely been bent—enthusiastically, but still within the outer limits of plausibility.
This, we are assured, is democracy.
The Majority and Its Appetite
Majorities—however they are assembled—possess enormous power. In principle, a slim 51 percent coalition can impose its will on the remaining 49 percent with very few practical constraints.
History offers sobering illustrations of how far this dynamic can go. When Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, he did so under the banner of democratic legitimacy. The regime that followed became one of the most monstrous political systems ever constructed.
Some of humanity’s worst atrocities were not orchestrated by solitary tyrants ruling against their populations. They were carried out with enthusiastic support from majorities convinced that they were acting in their own interest.
Which raises an awkward question: how do such majorities form in the first place?
The comforting narrative claims that every citizen participates equally in shaping the political future. Everyone has a vote. Everyone has a voice.
But not everyone carries the same burden.
The voters cheering the loudest for radical policies are often not the ones sustaining the economic machinery that keeps a country functioning. They are not necessarily the taxpayers financing the system. Nor are they always the individuals sacrificing present comfort for long-term stability.
People rarely behave responsibly when they have no skin in the game.
In societies where genuine entrepreneurship is treated with suspicion—where productive risk-takers are overshadowed by bureaucratic and corporate structures—those who actually worry about the long-term health of the system tend to be a minority.
And minorities, by definition, rarely steer policy.
The majority, meanwhile, wants everything and wants it immediately. Politicians eager to collect votes are delighted to oblige.
Long-term consequences can be someone else’s problem.
The majority receives what it demands.
The minority does not.
Despite the lofty rhetoric, democracies rarely exhibit much genuine respect for minorities—unless those minorities can successfully portray themselves as victims in the political marketplace. Those who quietly carry responsibility rarely achieve comparable visibility.
Having majority support does not imply moral superiority.
In fact, history suggests the opposite.
Majorities can be astonishingly brutal. Their decisions are driven less by ethics than by incentives and emotions. The historical record overflows with examples.
At its core, democracy is not the mystical “will of the people.”
It is a counting mechanism.
Whoever can assemble the largest coalition—often through promises, subsidies, or emotional mobilization—gains control of the machinery.
Voting does not equal consent.
It equals arithmetic.
Secession and the Myth of Eternal Union
If one examines a map of Europe from roughly 150 years ago, the continent appears strikingly different. There were far fewer independent states.
The nation-state, now treated as the natural unit of political organization, was once a relatively marginal concept. Many populations lived within sprawling empires whose borders encompassed multiple ethnicities, languages, and traditions.
Why did these arrangements persist?
Because independence was expensive.
Empires offered protection, access to markets, administrative careers, and economic opportunity. Remaining within the structure was often the rational choice even for groups that might have preferred sovereignty.
The logic has softened since the nineteenth century, but it has not disappeared. The formation of the European Union reflects similar incentives. Member states benefit from economic integration, shared regulations, and political leverage on the global stage.
Politicians also appreciate the convenient ability to blame unpopular decisions on “Brussels.”
Every system develops such blame-shifting mechanisms.
Within countries, regions blame the capital. Districts blame the regional government. In Europe, the EU provides a convenient additional layer.
Occasionally, however, parts of the structure decide they would rather leave.
The departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union—better known as Brexit—demonstrated that membership is not always permanent.
Smaller examples exist as well. In Austria, the westernmost province of Vorarlberg occasionally flirts with the idea of secession. The movement is neither powerful nor particularly serious, but it resurfaces from time to time, sparking debate.
Personally, I would not oppose such ambitions.
If a region genuinely wishes to leave, I would wave politely and wish them good luck.
There would be only one condition.
All benefits associated with membership would vanish alongside the membership itself.
Independence is not a mood.
It is a balance sheet.
Self-determination carries meaning only when paired with responsibility.
The same logic applies elsewhere. If Greenland prefers complete autonomy from Denmark, it must also accept the financial and administrative consequences. If Scotland wishes to depart the United Kingdom, the same principle applies.
Political unions exist because they provide advantages.
If those advantages disappear—or if members believe they can do better alone—the glue inevitably weakens.
Even the historic union between Scotland and England was not purely romantic. It was driven largely by economic incentives. Before the union, Scotland occupied the periphery of European commerce. Afterwards, it gained access to an expanding imperial system with global markets.
Opportunity reshaped identity.
We observe similar dynamics in the remnants of the French colonial empire. Many overseas territories show limited enthusiasm for full independence because they understand the trade-off involved.
Obscurity often accompanies sovereignty.
If a population is willing to pay that price, then independence is perfectly legitimate.
But it must be paid in full.
Countries are not families.
Their components are not bound by blood.
They are bound by incentives.
When those incentives fade, the structure eventually dissolves.
The Return of Gravity
Recent events—the Greenland debates, the Maduro extraction, tensions involving Iran, and countless other episodes dominating the news cycle—create the impression that the world is descending into chaos.
The atmosphere feels unstable.
People sense that something fundamental is changing.
It can seem as though we are moving from a relatively orderly world into a geopolitical madhouse where nothing follows recognizable rules.
But this perception misunderstands what is happening.
We are not witnessing the collapse of reality.
We are witnessing the collapse of illusions.
For several decades the global system was cushioned by prosperity, stability, and a series of comforting abstractions. Legal theories, diplomatic rituals, and optimistic narratives allowed us to believe that power had been domesticated.
Those anesthetics are wearing off.
The underlying mechanics of politics—power, incentives, responsibility—are becoming visible again.
This feels shocking only because we spent so long pretending otherwise.
Power never disappeared.
It merely hid behind polite language.
It lied.
It cheated.
It played along with the fiction because the fiction was temporarily useful.
But like a splinter lodged in the collective mind, reality eventually forces itself back into awareness.
The orderly world we believed we inhabited resembled a kind of geopolitical stage set—a carefully constructed façade not unlike the famous villages attributed to Grigory Potemkin.
Behind the painted scenery, the old forces continued operating.
Now the façade is fading.
Smaller states and ambitious leaders may soon discover that the carefree environment of the post-Cold-War decades has ended. Consequences—both good and bad—are returning to international life.
And political unions, whether domestic or global, remain temporary arrangements.
They endure only as long as the participants find them useful.
When usefulness declines, decay begins.
Eventually the structure falls apart and something new emerges.
In the end, the only constants are power, incentives, and responsibility.
Gravity, after all, never truly disappears.
For a while we simply pretended it had.
