The Power of the Powerless, Volume 1

“The acme of the art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” »
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Chapter III

“Foreign policy is the continuation of domestic policy by other means.” »

— Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 1979
“The weak suffer what they must; the strong do what they can.” »
— Thucydides, Melian Dialogue, History of the Peloponnesian War, V, 89

“No state can remain hegemonic when the costs of imposing its order outweigh the benefits of maintaining it.” »

— Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, 1981
The book's central argument

This book is built around a single, weighty thesis: that the international order that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union – which, for analytical convenience, we refer to as the post-Cold War liberal order – came to an end, in structural terms, in the first quarter of 2026. It should be noted that “end” does not mean “disappearance.” The post-Cold War order did not dissolve overnight, nor was it replaced by a perfectly clear new order. What effectively came to an end was its capacity for self-reproduction, that is, its ability to absorb internal and external shocks without its fundamental rules being publicly suspended or circumvented by major powers. 0F[1]

On its own, this thesis might seem trivial or, at the very least, insufficiently original. For over two decades, a broad academic current, encompassing authors as diverse as John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, Randall Schweller, Amitav Acharya, and Hew Strachan, has been heralding the end of American unipolarity and the emergence of a multipolar order. However, what sets the analysis proposed here apart from previous interpretations is not the observation of the end; rather, it is the attempt to identify, with analytical rigor, the specific ways in which international power is exercised today—and, in particular, the systemic place that the phenomenon we refer to as the power of the powerless occupies within this new power economy.

[1]The concept of self-reproduction applied to international systems owes its most sophisticated formulation to Niklas Luhmann (1984), Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, and to the reinterpretation, from the perspective of international relations, by Mathias Albert and Lars-Erik Cederman in New Systems Theories of World Politics (2010).

This expression, which brings to mind Václav Havel's reflections on civic resistance in single-party regimes, is here redefined in the context of strategic theory. We define the power of the powerless as the organized set of capabilities through which states, pseudo-state organizations, or non-state actors, technologically inferior to a conventional superpower, are able to: (i) reliably prevent the effective use of that superpower's conventional superiority; (ii) impose unacceptable economic, political, or reputational costs on it during politically relevant periods; and (iii) thereby extract political outcomes that are disproportionate to the material power differential.

This definition, which will be refined in Chapter 1 and operationalized in the empirical chapters, contains three points that require immediate attention. First, the power of the powerless is not to be confused with the mere ability to inflict harm: a terrorist group can kill many innocent people and yet not reshape the international order. What characterizes it is the structured capacity to shape the strategic decisions of superior actors. Second, it is an essentially relational power: it exists only in relation to a symmetrical adversary, with a conventional apparatus and cost-sensitive public opinion. Third, it is fundamentally a paralyzing, non-productive power: it paralyzes the adversary without itself producing a stable alternative order. From this paralyzing nature stems, as will be seen below, the very fragility of the interregnum.