For three decades after the Cold War, many governments behaved as if the “rules-based order” were a durable infrastructure: imperfect, selective, often hypocritical – but still an infrastructure. It set expectations about trade, borders, sanctions, alliance commitments, and the legitimacy of institutions. That baseline is eroding, and not only because revisionist powers reject it. It is eroding because an increasing number of leaders – across regime types – treat rules as constraints for others and instruments for themselves.
Miras Zhiyenbayev.
Even in how mainstream institutions define the “rules-based international order,” there is an admission embedded in the definition: the point of rules is governance “not simply dictated by who is most powerful.” That aspiration sounds less like a description today than a protest slogan.
The global governance problem is not just that rules are contested. It is that politics is becoming personalized: promises are made “leader-to-leader,” enforcement becomes conditional, and institutions are used to bless outcomes rather than shape them. When diplomacy becomes a theater of personality, the world stops being led by policies and starts being led by sentiments—status, grudges, vanity, improvisation.
And this is not a niche concern. Democracy monitors increasingly warn that democratic institutions are being strained from within, including by leaders who win elections and then override checks on their own power. This is the political ecosystem in which power politics returns: not as a clean reversion to 19th-century geopolitics, but as a 21st-century blend of coercion, transactionalism, and leader-centric diplomacy.
Strongman logics are no longer “somewhere else”
For years, Western commentary treated strongman politics as an export problem: a pathology of non-democratic systems. That is no longer analytically useful. The more important divide today is not “autocracy vs democracy” but “institutional politics vs personalist politics.”
Personalist politics has a recognizable grammar:
● Rules become bargaining chips rather than constraints.
● Commitments become reversible depending on who is in office.
● Loyalty becomes the currency of alliance management, even where shared interests should suffice.
● Status becomes a strategic objective, not just a psychological need.
The international order is not merely material; it is social and hierarchical. Stigma and perceived “outsider” status generate shame, resentment, and hyper-sensitivity to recognition and rank, which then shapes foreign policy behaviour. In a world sliding toward bargaining among leaders, status anxieties become combustible because personalist leaders can translate them into national missions: “restore greatness,” “undo humiliation,” “make them respect us.”
That dynamic is not exclusive to historically “stigmatized” states. Populist leaders in established democracies can weaponize similar emotions domestically – resentment at elites, anger at constraints, nostalgia for uncomplicated primacy – and project them outward as a foreign policy of blunt deals. The result is a widening zone of volatility: the same international dispute can be framed one year as law, the next year as loyalty, and the next year as revenge.
The middle-power squeeze
The return of power politics is often described as “multipolarity,” as if more poles automatically mean more agency for everyone. In practice, a bargaining order can be more hierarchical, not less: it elevates brokers and demotes those who are negotiated about.
Middle powers have enjoyed a period of rising influence precisely because they learned to operate in the seams of the system: building minilateral coalitions, leveraging connectivity, using economic statecraft, and extracting concessions from competing great powers without formally choosing sides. The post-Pax Americana transition is not a moment for middle powers to wait passively; it is a moment to shape the next equilibrium.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: a rules-based order is supposed to reduce the role of charisma. A negotiated order does the opposite. It rewards those who can frame issues, mobilize coalitions, and force themselves into the room.
Ukraine’s experience illustrates this double-edged logic. Much of Kyiv’s ability to rally and sustain international support, especially early on, depended on proactive leadership that constantly translated battlefield realities into diplomatic urgency. This is the “hidden opportunity”: when diplomacy becomes more personalized, states with clear narratives and capable leadership can convert attention into commitments.
But that same logic is available to opportunists.
If stigma and status anxiety shape behaviour, then a world of leader-centric bargaining is a world where leaders can turn personal insecurities into national gambits. “Small power minds” can chase big-power theatre – seeking symbolic wins, photo-op validation, and revenge narratives – while ignoring the downstream costs for their societies and regions.
A non-Western worldview is rising
One of the biggest intellectual mistakes in Western debates is to treat “non-Western agency” as synonymous with “anti-Western ideology.” Middle powers across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America increasingly demand voice, autonomy, and respect – sometimes through institutions, sometimes around them. That does not automatically mean rejection of liberalism or democracy. It can mean rejection of monopoly: the idea that only one center gets to define legitimacy.
A negotiated order puts plural worldviews on the map. The question is whether they translate into principled pluralism – or cynical transactionalism. Nowhere is the tension sharper than in strategic resources – critical minerals, supply chains, energy transition inputs, and connectivity corridors.
My recent GCSP analysis frames the “new resource frontier” as a core arena of competition and leverage, with major implications for states that sit on resources, routes, or refining capacity. In a rules-based environment, resource governance can be disciplined by transparency norms and multilateral regimes. In a bargaining order, resources become chips for leader-to-leader dealmaking: exemptions, side-payments, security swaps, political endorsements.
This magnifies middle-power importance – but also raises the danger of middle powers being treated as terrain rather than actors.
A negotiated order does not automatically empower middle powers. It empowers coherent middle powers: those able to translate autonomy into strategy and strategy into coalitions.
The temptation in this environment is opportunism – joining a great-power clash “for a ride,” hoping to get something free. That is precisely how smaller states historically lose sovereignty: not by conquest alone, but by becoming dependent on bargains they did not design.
Responsible leadership, in contrast, treats middle-power agency as a stabilizing function. It aims to dampen collisions, not monetize them. That means:
- building coalitions that make it harder for any single leader’s mood to rewrite the rules overnight;
- making interdependence a restraint on conflict rather than a weapon;
- investing in “inclusive order” reforms that give middle and smaller states more institutional voice, rather than accepting a world split into informal directorates.
This is not naive multilateralism. It is a survival strategy in a world where personalist diplomacy increases the risk of miscalculation.
Power politics never disappeared. What is changing is the style of power: from institutions to individuals, from procedures to personalities, from predictable rivalry to improvisational bargaining.
In that environment, the fate of middle powers becomes a diagnostic: if they retain agency, the world may evolve toward a negotiated order with shared constraints. If they are reduced to bargaining chips, then the strongman era will harden into something worse than multipolarity: a hierarchy of brokers and bystanders.The peril is obvious: being negotiated about. The possibility is also clear: forcing the world to negotiate with you – through leadership, coalition-building, and narrative discipline.
The next order will not be saved by nostalgia for the old one. It will be shaped by those states that can combine agency with restraint – strong enough to matter, responsible enough not to burn the system down.
The author is Miras Zhiyenbayev, the advisor to the Chairman of the Board for International Affairs and Initiatives at Maqsut Narikbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan and Executive Fellow at Geneva Center for Security Policy.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Astana Times.
