The Great Rewiring
How Ukraine's war is unraveling the old world order and hastily stitching together a new one.
By Robert Muggah and Mark Medish
The world is sliding into an age of managed disorder, and Ukraine is where the new geometry comes into view. What began as Russia’s bid to subdue a neighbor is now a stress test of the international system from its deterrents to its supply chains. The longer the war grinds on, the clearer a pattern emerges: geopolitical power is dispersing, geoeconomic flows are rerouting, and the multilateral system that took shape after 1945 is losing its binding force. Ukraine did not cause these changes. It is the accelerant.
A stabilizer that also destabilizes
For three decades after the Cold War, the U.S. was the system’s anchor. Its unmatched military, deep capital markets, and web of alliances underwrote what many called a rules-based order. That idea was never universally accepted, and it is now decisively contested. America retains formidable hard and soft power, but its role has become paradoxical - both stabilizer and destabilizer. Washington deters aggression, sanctions violators, and backstops allies but it also wages tariff wars, forces selective decoupling, and sends mixed signals about its security commitments.
This ambiguity is not just a communication problem. It reflects structural shifts at home such as polarization, fiscal constraints, industrial-policy priorities. It is also a result of strategic shifts abroad, where the China challenge dominates long-range planning. In practical terms, that means pressing European allies harder on defense spending and industrial capacity and treating Ukraine not as the central front of a global struggle but as an acute crisis to be contained. The oscillation between reassurance and conditionality keeps adversaries guessing but also keeps allies hedging.
A three-body problem
The reason the Ukraine war is so hard to solve is that it faces a strategic triangle: Russia, the United States, and itself. Europe is the orbiting moon and all of them exert pull, absorb shocks, but are not always able to set the system’s course. Kyiv has its own political will; it will not trade sovereignty for a paper peace, and it resists both Moscow’s coercion and Washington’s occasional arm-twisting. Moscow wants recognition of a sphere of influence and a demilitarized buffer it can dominate. Washington seeks to contain Russian revisionism without sliding into direct NATO–Russia war. Europe aims to help Ukraine prevail while keeping escalation in check and its own economies humming.
This triangular geometry keeps equilibrium elusive. When aid slows, Ukraine improvises with drones and domestic production and when Russia’s factories surge, the front shifts a few kilometers at punishing cost. Europe increases shells and air defenses, yet still depends on American enablers and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Each actor influences the others’ calculations, and none can fully control outcomes. In physics, three-body problems rarely settle; they are managed. Ukraine is learning the same lesson in geopolitics.
A war that reorganizes economies
Sanctions were intended to throttle Russia’s ability to wage war. They have raised costs, disrupted technology imports, and pushed the Kremlin into a crude war economy. But they have not produced collapse. Energy flows re-routed. Europe cut dependence but India and China absorbed discounted barrels. Meanwhile, insurers, shippers, and refiners adapted. The Chinese and Russian “shadow fleets” are a visible symbol of a deeper shift: a willingness by many states and firms to arbitrate between legal risk, price incentives, and political pressure. This is not the frictionless globalization of the 1990s. It is transactional globalization with parallel circuits.
The result is geoeconomic reconfiguration. Trade maps are being redrawn around enforcement chokepoints. Payment channels have diversified to reduce sanctions exposure. Critical minerals and advanced chips have become tools of statecraft as much as engines of growth. Ukraine sits inside this reconfiguration. Its agriculture adapted by opening a national maritime corridor and expanding Danube routes. Its metallurgy and energy sectors, battered but alive, are being rewired toward U.S. and European markets. Its defense industry is scaling drones and demining gear at war speed. But capital will only come at scale if there is a credible security backstop, which explains why Kyiv has pursued long-horizon compacts with G7 partners.
Trump’s hemispheric lens
Donald Trump’s ascendancy within Republican politics adds velocity to these changes. He speaks in terms of spheres of influence and insists allies prove “burden-sharing” before counting on U.S. guarantees. He prizes leverage and disruption over institution-building and regards the Western Hemisphere as his principal arena rather than Europe or the Indo-Pacific as a whole. That approach does not negate U.S. power; it reframes it. Alliances become contingent contracts rather than enduring covenants. Multilateral bodies become instruments when useful and obstacles when not. Even if future administrations soften the rhetoric, this transactional reflex is likely to endure because it rests on domestic political incentives neither party can ignore.
For Europe, the implication is bracing. The continent can no longer outsource its security assumptions to Washington’s strategic patience. The response has already begun. EU members have sped-up defense spending, efforts to expand shell output and missile defense, and a proliferation of “minilateral” formats such as the U.K.-led Joint Expeditionary Force, the European Sky Shield Initiative, and tighter Nordic-Baltic coordination. These are not replacements for NATO but instead hedges inside it, born of the recognition that collective defense is only as credible as its day-to-day logistics, stockpiles, and industrial base.
Hybrid risks leave the tabletop
If the old order is eroding, the new threat surface makes it plain. “Hybrid” risks, once the stuff of tabletop exercises, now shape daily operations. The sabotage of pipelines and subsea cables, GPS jamming, cyber intrusions against logistics hubs, and drone maneuvers have expanded. The target set is vast: seabed infrastructure, ports and railheads, satellite links, hospitals, elections.
These attacks are calibrated to fall below thresholds that would trigger full-fledged retaliation, but they exact political and economic costs that compound over time. Deterring them requires not just forces but redundancy and interoperability from spares, dark fiber, and alternate routes to legal frameworks that let agencies and allies share data quickly when something breaks under the sea or goes dark in the cloud.
And beneath the surface of the Ukraine war lies a quiet but escalating danger: the erosion of nuclear restraint. Moscow’s frequent nuclear signaling and its deployment of tactical warheads in Belarus have weakened taboos without crossing thresholds. Washington and NATO respond with deliberate ambiguity, balancing deterrence against escalation risk. Meanwhile, China’s rapid arsenal expansion compounds uncertainty, as arms-control frameworks collapse and New START nears expiry in early 2026. Verification mechanisms have frayed, and dialogue is scarce.
Middle powers and multi-alignment
The diffusion of power is not only about the U.S., Europe, China or Russia. Middle powers - Brazil, India, Türkiye, the Gulf states, South Africa - are practicing what diplomats now call “multi-alignment”. They seek advantage issue by issue rather than binding themselves to one camp. India buys discounted Russian oil while courting Western investment and tech transfers. Brazil expands trade with China while floating mediation ideas with Beijing and talking climate finance with Washington and Brussels. The Gulf hosts prisoners’ exchanges and cease-fire talks while maintaining OPEC+ discipline. Türkiye brokers Black Sea grain shipments while playing hardball on NATO accessions.
This is not fence-sitting. It is bargaining in a world of weaker enforcement and deeper uncertainty. For Ukraine, it means a broader marketplace of potential mediators and suppliers, but also a tougher environment in which to build sustained coalitions. For Russia, it means enough partners to muddle through, though at a discount and with growing reliance on a single large buyer to the east. For the U.S. and Europe, it means fewer automatic votes and more diplomacy that mixes values with visible, bankable benefits.
China’s long game
China’s role is central. It is the pacing economic competitor for the U.S. and the indispensable buyer for Russia. Beijing has so far balanced material support in dual-use exports, purchases of energy and commodities with care to avoid the most punishing secondary sanctions. More broadly, China is using this period to press advantages across infrastructure finance, standards-setting for emerging technologies, and regional trade. Its message to the Global South is straightforward: we can fund, build, and buy. The message to the West is equally clear: strategic pressure will bring countermoves in supply chains and diplomacy that you may not like.
The Ukraine war sharpens that competition. Precision munitions, electronic warfare, and commercial space imaging have become laboratories for the next conflictm, and for export. Both Washington and Beijing are watching how cheaply autonomy can be fielded and countered, how quickly software cycles can adapt to adversary tactics, and how hard it is to defend critical infrastructure that is mostly privately owned. The risk is not only military escalation; it is technological lock-in, where rival ecosystems of chips, models, and standards complicate crisis management because the two systems literally do not talk to each other.
The slow degradation of the rules-based order
All this hastens the erosion of multilateral cooperation. The U.N. Security Council is gridlocked on Ukraine and other high-salience conflicts. Global health proved brittle during Covid-19 and remains politicized. The WTO’s appellate function is crippled, and plurilateral trade deals cannot stand in for a global arbiter. Official development assistance is under pressure just as climate adaptation needs spike. None of these institutions is beyond repair, but the trend line is adverse. As confidence in universal rules wanes, states assemble bespoke “clubs” to get urgent things done, export controls for chips, price caps for oil, ad hoc maritime security patrols, reciprocal market-access deals tied to technologies of concern.
Call it the age of minilateralism: smaller coalitions that move faster because they ask less of their members. The upside is agility. The downside is legitimacy and coverage. The more the system fragments into overlapping regimes, the greater the gaps for spoilers to exploit, and the harder it becomes to mobilize resources at the necessary scale when a global public good is at stake.
Ukraine at the center of the reordering
It is tempting to narrate Ukraine solely in terms of trenches and town names, but the larger picture is systemic. The war is reweighting the hierarchy of power and preference. It is forcing Europe to relearn the economics of defense and mobilization. It is accelerating a North–South realignment as non-aligned states convert energy, food, and finance into bargaining chips. It is clarifying that twenty-first-century war is fought not just with brigades but with factories, software updates, and seabed surveys. And it is revealing the limits of sanctions when the target can pivot to large markets that do not share the coercer’s strategy.
For Kyiv, the lesson is sober. Innovation and courage are necessary but not sufficient without long-duration support and a security guarantee that can crowd in private capital for reconstruction. For Europe, the lesson is overdue: deterrence is a supply chain, not a speech. For Washington, the lesson is strategic: the credibility of alliances depends not only on budgets and carrier groups but on the absence of mixed messages that invite adversaries to test red lines.
The possible endings—and the work in between
A decisive end to the Ukraine-Russian war remains unlikely. More plausible are three imperfect outcomes. The first is a frozen conflict in which lines harden, strikes continue at low tempo, reconstruction proceeds where it can, and EU accession talks inch forward. The second is escalation and fragmentation, a mix of puncturing offensives, cyber and infrastructure harassment, and volatile politics in NATO states that complicate long-range planning. The third is a managed transition: a sequenced truce brokered by a mix of Western and non-Western mediators with bounded rearmament for Ukraine, phased sanctions relief, and intrusive verification. None restores the pre-2022 map. Each requires enforcement with teeth, not ambient hope.
The shared task in any scenario is to contain risk while shaping a livable order. That means predictable pipelines of munitions rather than punctuated “surges”; credible air- and missile-defense nets; and industrial policies that reward redundancy. It means protecting seabed and data infrastructure with real money and real coordination, not just communiqués. It means clarifying what triggers collective defense and what responses are on the table for hybrid attacks that fall below the line but above the nuisance threshold. And it means building coalitions that can actually deliver - regional where possible, global where necessary.
Managing disorder, not restoring an illusion
The post-Cold War bet was that globalization and institutions would tame power politics. The reality, revealed in Ukraine, is that power politics has tamed our institutions. The point is not to mourn a vanished order but to manage the one we have. A world of competing powers and multi-aligned middle states can still be governed - through rules where possible, through credible bargains where rules lack reach, and through resilience where neither is enough.
The Ukraine war has redrawn the mental map. It stripped away illusions about automatic deterrence and frictionless supply chains. It showed that hybrid campaigns can hurt free societies without triggering the responses for which we built our militaries. And it taught that allies and partners matter, not just in summit photos but in factories, ports, and fiber-optic splices.
If the twentieth century’s watchword was “containment,” the twenty-first may be “coordination”. Not the one-size-fits-all variety, but the kind that matches means to risks across clusters of states with enough shared interest to make promises stick. Ukraine’s fight, in that sense, is not only for territory. It is a fight over which habits - coercion and carve-up, or cooperation and constraint - will define the next chapter of world order.
Robert Muggah is a principal of SecDev, a digital intelligence company based in Ottawa, where he oversees the geopolitics and forecasting portfolio. He is also the co-founder of the Igarape Institute, advises venture capital and technology companies, and contributes to the annual Global Risk Report of WEF.
Mark Medish is vice chair of Panterra, a London-headquartered strategic advisory group. A former NSC Senior Director and US Treasury deputy assistant secretary, he has over 30 years of professional experience in policy, law, finance, development, and strategic communications.
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