The post-Cold War era is long gone. Historian Niall Ferguson argued as early as 2018 that the United States and China were locked in ‘Cold War II’. The following year, former Trump administration officials Elbridge Colby and Wess Mitchell observed that the United States had entered an age of ‘great-power competition’. In 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken observed that the post-Cold War order had dissolved. During those fateful years, the world’s main revisionist powers – the People’s Republic of China, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and the Islamic Republic of Iran – began a concerted assault on the American-led order in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

The principal salvoes of this revisionist offensive have been well-chronicled: China’s sabre-rattling against Taiwan and other neighbours; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and Iran’s assault against Israel since the 7 October terrorist attack. One can also point to the activities of weaker revisionist powers such as North Korea – which menaces South Korea and has dispatched troops to Russia – and geopolitical swing states such as Turkey, which has expanded its influence from Syria to Somalia. The adventurism of the powers that philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy identified as the ‘five kings’ – China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Sunni Islamism – is an established fact of international life.

For years, the world’s status quo powers – namely, the United States and its European, Asian, and Middle Eastern allies – were on the defensive against the revisionists’ thrusts. Ukraine absorbed Russia’s 2022 invasion and, with support from the United States and Europe, has laboured to expel Russian troops from its territory ever since. Israel suffered the deadliest attack against Jews since the Holocaust on 7 October 2023, and scrambled to defend itself against not only Hamas but also Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other members of Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance‘. The following April, Israel, the United States, and their European and Arab allies co-operated in shooting down an unprecedented Iranian missile and drone attack against the Jewish state.

Since last summer, however, the status quo powers have taken the offensive. Ukraine launched an invasion of Russia’s Kursk oblast, embarrassing the Kremlin. Even with the help of thousands of North Korean troops, half a year on, Russia has failed to dislodge the Ukrainians from Kursk. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues sinking Russian assets in the Black Sea. Most notably, after gaining approval from Washington, London, and Paris, Kyiv has also started using long-range missiles provided by these western powers to strike targets deep inside Russia.

In the Middle East, Israel has also pushed back against Tehran and its satrapies following years of Iranian threats to eliminate the Jewish state and an Iranian campaign after 7 October to realise that objective. After absorbing missile attacks from Iran’s proxy Hezbollah for 11 months after 7 October, between September and November Israel orchestrated a stunning campaign against the terrorist group, decapitating its leadership, destroying much of its gargantuan missile arsenal, crippling its fighters through pager and walkie-talkie operations, and mounting a ground invasion into southern Lebanon.

After Hezbollah’s defeat emboldened the Syrian opposition next-door, which then overthrew the Assad regime, Israel launched a limited ground operation into the demilitarised zone between Israel and Syria to secure strategic territory. It also conducted wide-ranging strikes against Syrian strategic weapons to prevent them from falling into the new Syrian regime’s hands. Meanwhile, Israel mounted a historic aerial campaign against Iran in October, which destroyed its air defences and set back its ballistic missile programme.

More recently, the paradigmatic status quo power, the United States, also appears ready to flex its muscles to roll back the revisionist axis. In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has expressed his interest in obtaining Greenland from Denmark, re-taking control over the Panama Canal, and even annexing Canada. Trump has declined to rule out using military force to wrestle Greenland or the Panama Canal from their current owners. In the case of Canada, he has clarified that military force will not be used. In the case of both Greenland and the Panama Canal, Trump has cited the expansion of Russian or Chinese influence in the territories as pivotal factors propelling his broadsides.

The current cycle is likely to continue. A revisionist power will punch, and a status quo power will counterpunch. The international order will bend and bend, until it eventually breaks, and a new one emerges in its place. What that new order’s boundaries, balance of power, and dominant ideologies will be are not yet apparent, just as the contours of the post-Cold War order were not yet apparent to the great powers during the late Cold War. In the meantime, however, western policymakers should embrace the following principles as they brace themselves for tumultuous times.

Any policymakers still clinging to the orthodoxies of the post-Cold War era – including the End of History, globalisation, or Wandel durch Handel – must jettison these ideologies and confront the reality that we now live in a world of Machtpolitik. While such ideologies described a quarter century of recent history, they are not suited to our turbulent moment. These concepts might again become useful, but only if the West emerges from this age of conflict with sufficient strength and confidence to offer them as concepts to colour a postwar order.

States should strive towards military and economic self-sufficiency. In the United States, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have grasped this. Jerusalem has, too, exemplified by new deals for the domestic production of key munitions. Europe, however, which can realistically achieve self-sufficiency only at the continental level, is further behind. Fortunately, European policymakers are moving in the right direction, as exemplified by the Draghi report on European competitiveness. All Western states should double-down on and accelerate this strategy.

Western states should activate the patriotic potential of their individual countries to increase national unity in a competitive world. Across Eurasia, from China to Turkey, many states have spent the last decade positioning themselves as civilisation-states, heirs to proud, ancient cultures whose time in the sun has arrived. In the democratic world, both the United States and Israel have tapped into their countries’ respective patriotisms to rouse their populations in the showdown against the revisionists. European powers, while steering clear of the horrors lurking in many of their countries’ histories, will need to at least gesture towards this approach to fortify and inspire their populations for what may lie ahead.

Overall, by adhering to these principles, western states may yet navigate the treacherous shoals of our age of unravelling and emerge on the other side intact.