In the wake of the US military intervention in Venezuela and Donald Trump’s repeated threats towards Greenland, a wave of pessimism has swept the western world.

For countries wedded to a rules-based international order arbitrated by a mostly benevolent America, the emergence of what Trump has branded a “Donroe Doctrine” represents an existential crisis.

This is certainly true in New Zealand, which for 75 years has looked to the US as a security guarantor. What has been heralded as a new epoch of naked great-power politics will require what political theorists call a “realist” approach to a world of competing, self-interested powers.

When Winston Peters became foreign minister in 2024, he largely foreshadowed this, saying he would take “the world as it is” – a famous realist maxim.

But the problem with a realist outlook is that it can embed a pessimistic (even paranoid) view of world affairs. Through such a lens, for example, the threat of China can be exaggerated, along with what New Zealand needs to do to survive.

There is another way of looking at the world, however. The theory of “multiplexity” – pioneered by international relations scholar Amitav Acharya – offers such a vantage point.

Multiplexity stems from observing that the current international environment lacks a truly dominant global power, or........

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