The recent United States–Israeli strikes on Iran may prove to be more than another episode in the long history of Middle Eastern conflict. The attacks on Iranian nuclear and military facilities triggered retaliatory missile exchanges, disrupted shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and prompted warnings from the United Nations that the region could slide towards wider war.

Yet the crisis carries a broader significance: it reflects a global recalibration of power that is steadily eroding the political and intellectual order built after 1945.

Diplomatic reactions to the strikes revealed a familiar alignment. Washington and Tel Aviv acted in close coordination, while Iran received political backing from Russia and China, both of which criticised the escalation. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, warned that continued attacks could destabilise the region, and UN Secretary-General António Guterres cautioned that the conflict risked undermining international peace and security.

In a wider context, these statements signal the re-emergence of geopolitical blocs. The United States and its partners increasingly operate within one strategic orbit, while China, Russia, and Iran form another centre of resistance to Western influence. Countries such as India attempt to navigate between these poles, maintaining ties with Washington while preserving relations with Moscow and Tehran. The resulting landscape resembles an older international system organised less by universal rules than by alliances and balances of power.

To understand why these patterns are reappearing, one must look at the intellectual foundations of the post-war order.

For nearly eight decades, Western political thought promoted the idea that liberal democracy, globalisation, and international law represented the natural direction of human progress. Governments, universities, and international institutions assumed that societies would gradually converge on a model shaped by Western experience.

Social scientists provided the theoretical framework for this belief. Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and Seymour Martin Lipset advanced versions of modernisation theory, arguing that societies would evolve from traditional structures to industrial capitalism and democratic governance.

Secularisation theory, associated with Max Weber and later Peter Berger, predicted that religion would retreat from public life as societies modernised. In international relations, liberal institutionalists such as Robert Keohane argued that cooperation through global institutions could moderate conflict between states.

These ideas did not remain academic. They were embedded in the institutions governing the global economy. The United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) translated them into development programmes promoting democratic governance, gender equality, women’s education, and civil society across the Global South.

The world now emerging demands closer attention to economic capability, technological power, energy routes, strategic geography, and the balance of power between rival centres of influence

The world now emerging demands closer attention to economic capability, technological power, energy routes, strategic geography, and the balance of power between rival centres of influence

For several decades, this system appeared self-reinforcing. Economic growth in parts of the developing world seemed to confirm modernisation theory. The collapse of the Soviet Union strengthened confidence in liberal democracy. In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that ideological evolution had culminated in the liberal democratic state.

The twenty-first century has steadily eroded that confidence.

The rise of China represents the most significant challenge. The world’s second-largest economy has achieved rapid industrialisation, technological expansion, and poverty reduction under a political system very different from Western liberal democracy. China’s trajectory demonstrates that economic development does not necessarily produce democratic convergence.

At the same time, globalisation has generated tensions within Western societies. Industrial displacement, rising inequality, and political polarisation have encouraged renewed emphasis on sovereignty, economic security, and strategic competition. In academic debates, realist scholars such as John Mearsheimer have regained prominence by arguing that rivalry between major powers — rather than liberal institutions — remains the central force in international politics.

Recent developments in the United States illustrate this shift. The administration of President Donald Trump has suspended or restructured significant portions of foreign aid, including elements of USAID’s development portfolio. Programmes supporting women’s education, health, and governance reforms in countries such as Pakistan have been curtailed, highlighting how initiatives once presented as universal commitments depend on political sponsorship.

Washington has also reduced funding for several university research programmes associated with diversity, global governance, and social policy. Thousands of academic grants have reportedly been cancelled or frozen across American universities, including institutions such as Columbia, Harvard, and Northwestern. The Pentagon, under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, has indicated that it may reconsider certain partnerships with elite universities.

Political rhetoric has shifted alongside policy. United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently described the transatlantic relationship between America and Europe as rooted in a shared Christian civilisational heritage — language rarely heard in Western diplomacy during the late twentieth century.

Debates over gender identity have also intensified. Early in 2025, the Trump administration issued executive actions stating that the federal government would recognise only two biological sexes. In Europe, Czech Deputy Prime Minister Petr Macinka has likewise argued that there are “only two genders”.

Perhaps the most telling change is the gradual withdrawal of financial support from the institutions that once produced and spread liberal ideas. Cuts to development aid, reductions in university funding, and the restructuring of international programmes suggest that Western governments themselves are reassessing the ideological infrastructure of the post-war order.

This link between power and ideas is not accidental. Political economist Robert Cox famously observed that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose”. During the decades of Western economic dominance after 1945, liberal social theories supported a global order that facilitated capitalist expansion and geopolitical stability. As economic power diffuses, those theories lose some of their authority.

The emerging international landscape is therefore likely to be more plural and more contested than the world imagined at the height of post-war liberal optimism. Power will increasingly be organised through regional alliances, strategic corridors, technological competition, and civilisational narratives rather than through universal institutions alone.

This does not mean democracy, human rights, or gender equality will disappear. Many societies will continue to defend and advance them. What is changing is their claim to inevitability. They no longer appear as the single path of global development but as one model among several competing visions of modernity.

Understanding this transition requires a different analytical lens. For much of the post-war period, scholars interpreted world politics through institutions, international law, and so-called universal norms. The world now emerging demands closer attention to economic capability, technological power, energy routes, strategic geography, and the balance of power between rival centres of influence.

In that sense, the conflict surrounding Iran may come to be remembered as more than a regional confrontation. It may mark one of the early crises of a new geopolitical era, one in which the intellectual certainties of the twentieth century yield to a far older organising principle of international relations: the politics of power.

© The Friday Times