The Thesis Generating Its Own Antithesis
I watched the rules-based international order collapse from Kyiv in February 2022, when Russian missiles began landing on the city where I had grown up. Grace watched it collapse from Beirut, where a political class propped up by the regional order's contradictions had already destroyed a country through thirty years of corruption, culminating in the August 2020 explosion that leveled half the city's port. We are not theorizing about geopolitical fragmentation. We are living inside it.
The post-World War II international order -- the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the European Union, the network of treaties and norms and institutions that structured global governance for seven decades -- was a genuine achievement. It was the thesis. It produced the longest period of great-power peace in modern history. It enabled decolonization, however imperfectly. It created frameworks for economic cooperation that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. It established, for the first time in history, a set of nominally universal human rights standards. These achievements are real, and any honest analysis must begin by acknowledging them.
But Hegel's pattern is relentless. Every thesis generates its own antithesis. The liberal international order produced peace among great powers while enabling proxy wars that devastated the periphery -- Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and the constellation of conflicts across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East that were "managed" rather than resolved by the order's institutions. It produced economic growth while enabling inequality of staggering proportions -- both within nations and between them. It promoted human rights while maintaining strategic alliances with regimes that violated those rights systematically, creating a hypocrisy visible to everyone except those who benefited from it. It globalized culture while homogenizing it, producing both genuine cross-cultural exchange and legitimate resentment at the erasure of local traditions and identities.
The antithesis has arrived. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is an explicit rejection of the post-Cold War settlement. China's assertion of regional hegemony challenges the American-dominated Pacific order. The BRICS expansion -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and now Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE -- represents an attempt to construct alternative institutional infrastructure. The rise of nationalist movements across Europe, the Americas, and Asia signals a grassroots rejection of the cosmopolitan assumptions embedded in the order's design. The Global South's refusal to align with Western positions on Ukraine, on sanctions, on the terms of climate action, reflects not irrationality but the accumulated weight of the order's contradictions finally becoming unignorable.
This is the dialectical process operating at civilizational scale. The order that produced unprecedented stability has generated the conditions for its own dissolution. The question this chapter addresses is whether the dissolution will produce a genuine synthesis -- a new order that preserves the achievements of the old while addressing its failures -- or a collapse into fragmentation, great-power conflict, and the destruction of the cooperative infrastructure that, despite its flaws, has prevented the worst.
Diagnosis: The Normie/Psycho/Schizo Framework Applied
The normie position on the international order is institutionalist. The institutions work, they need reform not replacement, the answer to the order's failures is more of the order -- more multilateralism, more treaties, more international cooperation, more faith in the institutions that, whatever their imperfections, have maintained peace and enabled prosperity. This is the position of the foreign policy establishment in Washington, Brussels, and the capitals of the countries that designed and benefited most from the existing architecture. It is not wrong in its premises -- the institutions genuinely did produce valuable goods -- but it is incapable of seeing the structural reasons why the institutions are losing legitimacy, because seeing those reasons would require confronting the normie position's own complicity in the contradictions that generated the antithesis.
The normie position cannot explain why the Global South does not rally to defend the "rules-based order" against Russian aggression, because it cannot see that the rules were applied asymmetrically -- enforced against weak states, waived for powerful ones -- and that this asymmetry is not a bug to be fixed but a feature of the order's design. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 without Security Council authorization, violating the same sovereignty norms it now invokes against Russia, the "rules-based order" did not sanction the United States. The lesson was absorbed by the rest of the world: the rules are for some, not for all. The normie position treats this as an unfortunate exception. The causal analysis reveals it as the system operating according to its actual rules, not its stated ones.
The psycho class operates within and across the geopolitical order. The order's institutions -- the UN Security Council, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO -- were designed with governance structures that concentrated power in the hands of the states that created them. The veto power of the P5 on the Security Council is the paradigmatic example: a mechanism that ensures that no enforcement action can be taken against any of the five most powerful states, regardless of their behavior. This is not an oversight. It is the psycho-class logic built into the order's foundations: the appearance of universal governance (all states are represented) concealing the reality of oligarchic control (five states have absolute veto power).
Within individual nations, the psycho-class capture of geopolitical narratives follows the pattern I described in Chapter 2. In Russia, the Putin regime has captured Russian Orthodox theology to justify imperial expansion -- the "Russian World" concept, the claim of civilizational mission, the explicit framing of the invasion of Ukraine as a holy war. This is the antichrist structure (Chapter 18) operating at the level of geopolitics: the appearance of spiritual mission concealing territorial predation. In the United States, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about has captured the democratic process to sustain defense spending that enriches contractors regardless of whether it produces security. In China, the Communist Party has captured the legitimate grievances of the "century of humiliation" to legitimize an authoritarian domestic system that serves the interests of the party elite, not the Chinese people.
The psycho class does not care about the order. It cares about control. The "rules-based order" was useful to Western psycho-class interests when it sustained Western dominance. It is being challenged by non-Western psycho-class interests that want to restructure the order to sustain their own dominance. The competition between these interests is presented as a clash of civilizations, a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, a struggle for the soul of the international system. The causal reality is more prosaic: it is a competition for extractive control of the institutions through which global wealth and power flow.
The schizo position sees through both the institutionalist defense of the order and the nationalist/revisionist attack on it. It sees that the order was real in its achievements and genuine in its contradictions, that the revisionist powers are right about the order's hypocrisy and wrong about the alternative they propose, and that the entire debate is being conducted at Level 1 -- who is correlating with what narrative -- rather than Level 2 -- what causal mechanisms actually produce peace, prosperity, and justice.
Lived Testimony: Ukraine and Lebanon
I include personal testimony not because my experience is unique but because it is data. The framework demands concrete instances, not merely abstract analysis.
Ukraine's position in the current geopolitical upheaval is clarifying because it strips away the abstractions. Ukraine did everything the rules-based order asked. It gave up the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, receiving security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom in return. It pursued democratic reform, however imperfectly. It sought integration with European institutions. It played by the rules.
The rules did not protect it. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the international response was sanctions -- economic measures that imposed costs on Russia without reversing the annexation. When Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, the international response was more sanctions, arms deliveries, and rhetorical support -- substantial, genuinely costly to the supporting nations, but operating within a framework that explicitly excluded the one measure that would have been decisive: direct military intervention by the states that had provided the security assurances that Ukraine relied upon when it disarmed.
The causal analysis is unflattering to the order's defenders. Ukraine disarmed because of the order's assurances. Ukraine was invaded because it was disarmed. The assurances were not honored at the level that would have prevented the invasion. The causal chain -- disarmament in reliance on institutional guarantees --> vulnerability --> invasion --> institutional response short of the guarantee's implied commitment -- reveals the order's structural limitation: it provides incentives for compliance (disarm, integrate, follow the rules) without providing the enforcement that makes compliance rational.
Grace's Lebanon tells a complementary story. Lebanon was a cosmopolitan society -- a place where eighteen recognized religious communities coexisted within a constitutional framework that, for all its flaws, represented a genuine attempt at pluralist governance. The confessional system allocated power across communities. Beirut was a financial center, a cultural capital, a place where East and West met in a way that the rules-based order's architects would have celebrated.
The system was destroyed not by its enemies but by its own contradictions, amplified by the geopolitical order's interventions. The civil war (1975-1990) was a proxy conflict: Israel, Syria, Iran, the PLO, and various Western powers all operated on Lebanese territory, pursuing their own interests while Lebanese civilians paid the price. The post-war settlement (the Taif Agreement) froze a system of sectarian power-sharing that incentivized corruption, because political power was allocated by community affiliation rather than competence, creating an environment in which the psycho class within each community could extract rents without accountability.
The October 2019 revolution -- Lebanon's generation-defining protest movement -- was the prophetic function erupting. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all sects took to the streets, rejecting the sectarian system and demanding a politics based on citizenship rather than community affiliation. The system's response was the August 2020 Beirut explosion -- not deliberately, but structurally. The ammonium nitrate that destroyed the port had been sitting in a warehouse for six years, its presence known to every relevant authority, its removal blocked by the same corruption and negligence that the protesters were denouncing. The explosion was not an attack. It was the physical manifestation of institutional rot -- the system's structural violence becoming kinetic.
Both stories -- Ukraine and Lebanon -- demonstrate the same structural failure. The rules-based order provided frameworks (the Budapest Memorandum, the Taif Agreement) that created the appearance of security and governance without the causal mechanisms to enforce them. The appearance was at Level 1 -- correlational, surface-level, enough to satisfy normie trust. The causal reality was at Level 2 -- the mechanisms were absent, the enforcement was conditional, the guarantees were contingent on great-power interests rather than universal principles.
The Streets vs. the Elites: Gen Z as Prophetic Function
Something is happening at the generational level that the existing geopolitical frameworks cannot account for.
In 2024, Gen Z protesters took to the streets across the globe: Bangladesh's student movement toppled the government. Nepal's youth demanded accountability. Kenya's Gen Z protested against tax hikes and corruption. Bulgaria's anti-corruption protests intensified. These movements share a common feature: they are not organized by existing political parties, they are not aligned with existing ideological blocs, and they are not demanding a seat at the existing table. They are questioning the table's legitimacy.
This is the anomaly-reporting phase of Kuhn's framework applied to global governance. The existing paradigm -- the post-Cold War settlement, the liberal democratic consensus, the neoliberal economic model -- is generating anomalies faster than it can explain them. Youth unemployment coexisting with labor shortages. Economic growth coexisting with declining living standards. Democratic elections coexisting with public perception that elections change nothing. These anomalies are not being resolved within the paradigm. They are accumulating.
The Gen Z protesters are performing the prophetic function I described in Chapter 3 -- seeing through the institutional camouflage that the older generation still accepts. They have grown up with social media, which means they have access to information that previous generations did not have, but also that they have been exposed to the full incoherence of the system in a way that previous generations were not. They can see the gap between institutional rhetoric and institutional reality in real time, and they are refusing to accept the explanations that normalize the gap.
The existing geopolitical frameworks -- realism, liberalism, constructivism -- cannot account for this phenomenon because they all treat the state as the primary actor. The Gen Z protests are non-state, transnational, and organized through digital infrastructure that operates outside state control. They are, in the language of this manuscript, a distributed prophetic function -- consciousness breaking through systemic determinism simultaneously in multiple locations, connected not by institutional coordination but by shared perception.
Whether this prophetic function will produce a genuine paradigm shift or be captured and neutralized -- co-opted by existing political parties, channeled into consumer activism, metabolized by the system it challenges -- remains to be seen. Chapter 16's cyclical analysis suggests both outcomes are possible: the prophetic moment can produce genuine transformation (Pentecost) or be captured and inverted (samsaric turn). The cycle depends on whether the prophetic function can build institutional infrastructure fast enough to survive the system's immune response.
The Paradigm Shift: From Hierarchy to Republic
The paradigm that needs to shift is the assumption that global governance requires hierarchical institutional authority -- that order can only be maintained by concentrating power in the hands of a few states and the institutions they control.
The alternative is not anarchy. It is not the naive assumption that the absence of hierarchy produces peace. It is the republican model I described in Chapter 20: distributed authority with shared epistemic standards.
The Republic of AI Agents provides the structural template. Philosopher-kings (sovereign political communities) generate hypotheses about how to address shared challenges. Merchants (data-gathering and intelligence networks) provide the empirical basis for evaluating those hypotheses. Warriors (implementation agents) test the hypotheses through controlled deployment. The knowledge graph provides the shared epistemic infrastructure -- the common ground of facts, causal models, and evidence that enables disagreement to be productive rather than destructive.
The key insight is that shared epistemic infrastructure does not require shared political authority. The Republic of Letters (Chapter 19) operated across political boundaries, linking thinkers in rival states through a shared commitment to knowledge. The scientific community operates similarly: scientists in China, the United States, Russia, and Europe collaborate not because they share political loyalties but because they share epistemic standards. The collapse of the rules-based order is, in part, a collapse of shared epistemic standards -- the ability to agree on facts, to distinguish evidence from propaganda, to maintain the common ground that makes negotiation possible.
The Republic of AI Agents could provide a layer of epistemic infrastructure that operates independently of state authority. Hypothesis registration with falsification criteria creates a shared standard of evidence that no single state controls. Causal models specified in formal notation are not subject to the narrative manipulation that characterizes geopolitical discourse. Prediction markets -- the Polymarket analysis of Track C -- provide a mechanism for aggregating distributed information about geopolitical developments without relying on state intelligence agencies whose analyses are shaped by bureaucratic incentives.
This is not a utopian proposal. It is a specific architectural pattern -- distributed nodes, shared protocols, transparent evidence, formal falsification -- applied to the problem of global epistemic infrastructure. It will not prevent great-power competition. It will not eliminate the psycho-class capture of state institutions. But it could provide a substrate of shared knowledge that makes cooperation possible even when political alignment is absent -- the way the scientific community continues to function across geopolitical divides because its epistemic infrastructure is independent of any single state's authority.
Concrete Application: Sanctions Enforcement and Causal ML
My work with the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) Institute on sanctions enforcement provides a concrete example of how the framework applies.
Economic sanctions are the rules-based order's primary enforcement mechanism -- the alternative to military force for states that violate international norms. The problem is that sanctions are a correlational instrument applied to a causal problem. Sanctions target entities (individuals, companies, ships) that are associated with sanctions-violating behavior. The causal structure of sanctions evasion -- the networks, intermediaries, shell companies, and transshipment routes through which sanctioned goods and money flow -- is far more complex than the entity-level targeting can capture.
The causal ML approach treats sanctions evasion as a causal discovery problem. Given trade data, shipping data, financial data, and corporate ownership data, what is the causal structure of the evasion network? Which entities are intermediaries (mediators in the causal graph) rather than end-users? Which trade routes show signs of rerouting (a causal intervention by the evader on the shipping variable to circumvent the sanction on the destination variable)? Which financial flows show patterns consistent with layering (a sequence of transactions designed to obscure the causal connection between the sanctioned entity and the ultimate beneficiary)?
The standard approach to sanctions enforcement is correlational: flag entities whose trade patterns correlate with sanctions-violating patterns. The causal approach goes further: identify the causal mechanisms of evasion and target those mechanisms rather than individual entities. This is the difference between playing whack-a-mole (sanctioning one shell company, watching the flow reroute through another) and mapping the network (identifying the structural features that enable evasion and designing interventions that address the structure).
The Republic architecture maps onto this directly. Philosopher-kings (policy analysts, sanctions experts) specify hypotheses about evasion mechanisms. Merchant agents collect trade data, shipping data, financial data, and corporate ownership data from multiple sources. Warrior agents test the hypotheses by analyzing whether the predicted evasion patterns are detectable in the data. The knowledge graph stores the evolving understanding of evasion networks, with each node and edge backed by evidence and subject to falsification.
This is a small example. But it demonstrates the principle: causal methodology applied through the Republic architecture produces better outcomes than correlational methodology applied through traditional institutional channels. If the principle holds for sanctions enforcement, it holds for the broader challenge of global governance -- not because the Republic replaces state authority but because it provides epistemic infrastructure that makes state action more effective.
Falsifiable Predictions
Prediction 1: The institutional architecture of the post-WWII order -- the UN Security Council, the IMF/World Bank, the WTO -- will undergo fundamental structural reform or be replaced by alternative institutions within twenty years. The current structure, designed for a world of five great powers and decolonizing nations, will prove unable to accommodate the multipolar reality of the mid-twenty-first century.
Prediction 2: Gen Z-driven political movements will produce at least three changes of government or constitutional reform processes in countries where the existing political establishment is entrenched, within the next decade. These movements will be characterized by transnational coordination through digital infrastructure rather than traditional party organization.
Prediction 3: Causal ML applied to sanctions enforcement will demonstrate measurably higher detection rates and faster adaptation to evasion tactics than traditional entity-based approaches, within five years of deployment at scale.
Prediction 4: Countries that develop shared epistemic infrastructure -- transparent data repositories, formally specified causal models, open prediction markets -- will demonstrate more effective bilateral and multilateral cooperation than countries that rely on traditional diplomatic channels alone. The effect will be measurable in trade agreements, environmental cooperation, and conflict resolution outcomes.
Prediction 5: The energy transition (Chapter 28) will produce a geopolitical realignment in which the primary axis of great-power competition shifts from petrostate dynamics (control of oil production and trade routes) to electrostate dynamics (control of critical mineral supply chains and clean energy manufacturing). This shift will be substantially complete within fifteen years and will restructure alliance patterns in ways that the current "democracy vs. authoritarianism" framing cannot predict.
Each prediction is falsifiable, time-bound, and specifies observable outcomes. If the predictions fail, the framework is weakened. If they succeed, the framework gains empirical support. This is the only honest way to do geopolitical analysis after Popper.
The Synthesis That Has Not Yet Arrived
I do not know what the synthesis will look like. The dialectical framework (Chapter 10) tells me that a synthesis must emerge -- that the thesis (liberal international order) and antithesis (multipolar fragmentation) will eventually produce a new configuration that preserves the old order's achievements while addressing its failures. But the framework also tells me, following Popper, that the specific form of the synthesis is not predetermined. It must be built, not predicted.
What I do know is what the synthesis must include: genuine universality that is not Western cultural imperialism in disguise. Enforcement mechanisms that apply equally to powerful and weak states. Economic frameworks that produce shared prosperity rather than extraction. Epistemic infrastructure that enables agreement on facts without requiring agreement on values. Political structures that accommodate civilizational diversity without enabling authoritarian predation.
The Republic model -- distributed authority, shared epistemic standards, formal falsification, transparent governance -- is my proposal for the architectural principles of the synthesis. It will not be adopted because it is a good idea. Kuhn taught us that paradigm shifts require new communities, not just new ideas. The synthesis will emerge when the contradictions of the current system become unbearable enough to create the political demand for a new architecture, and when the alternative architecture has been demonstrated at sufficient scale to be credible.
This is why the work matters -- not the geopolitical analysis in this chapter, but the actual building of the Republic infrastructure in Track B. The theology provides the design philosophy. The knowledge graph provides the demonstration. The prediction market analysis provides the first proving ground. If these work -- if the epistemic infrastructure produces better knowledge, if the causal methodology produces better predictions, if the governance layer produces better accountability -- then the architecture is available when the demand arrives.
The prophetic function is not prediction. It is preparation.