This summer, a world where rules don’t matter much any more is catching fire – literally, politically and metaphorically. Everything is changing and we can only guess at what might have happened by the time next year’s heatwaves are brewing.
In the Middle East, the world’s most turbulent region, every warning light is red and every alarm bell sounding. The consequences of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Iran will be felt for years, just as the aftershocks of George W Bush and Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 are still felt now. Conflicts connect in the Middle East, linked by a confusion of fault lines. Many lead back to the heart of the region’s troubles, the fight between Israelis and Palestinians over the land between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean. It began more than a century ago, but the crisis since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 is as consequential and dangerous as any time since 1948. That was the year of Israel’s independence and the Palestinian “catastrophe” – their word for defeat, dispossession and the destruction of their society. If ideologues at the centre of Israeli government continue to enable Jewish settlers to drive out Palestinians in the West Bank, another explosion of violence may follow.
In Europe, the world’s most rapidly warming continent, a 40°C summer and weeks without rain are driving wildfires, most fiercely in Spain, France and Greece. Italy has put its 27 biggest cities on its highest heat alert, meaning everyone, including young and fit people, face potential threats to their health. In Rome, public cooling centres included cinemas offering free screenings with air conditioning on full blast. The scheme was called Il Grande Freddo or “The Big Chill”, named after the classic 1980s film, a tragicomedy about the loss of youth and hope.
The full spectrum of challenges facing governments – and voters – increasingly creates fragmentation, not solidarity. The European Union did not rally around Spain when around 60,000 people breached its border with Morocco to charge into the exclave of Ceuta. Migration is such a toxic issue that Spain was isolated, in case the contagion spread, even though Ceuta is not part of the EU’s free-movement Schengen area and the sudden arrival of so many young men looked as if it might be some kind of organised, hybrid warfare. That impression deepened when most quietly went back to Morocco in the following days.
The forces generating movements of refugees and economic migrants are proving to be more powerful than the capacity of European politicians to deal with them. Climate change is one. So is demography: women in poor countries generally have more babies than women in rich countries.
War is the most urgent, as it evolves even faster than the climate is heating up. You have to be at least 50 years old to remember how it felt during the Cold War to live in a world in which defence rested on the threat of mutually assured destruction. Even the acronym for a cataclysmic nuclear war, MAD, was starkly threatening. For a few years after 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, it felt as if we had dodged the deadliest bullet ever created. That relief has long gone. It is even possible to feel a strange nostalgia for the strategic certainties of a world in which the superpowers, constantly aware that wrong moves risked mutual annihilation, trod more carefully and went to war through proxies.
Managing conflict was always hard, but it is much more complicated now that warfare no longer requires the possession of tank armies and squadrons of aircraft. Cheap, deadly drones, mass-produced ballistic missiles and cyber-warfare are democratising the power to fight. The US and Russia – the countries with the biggest nuclear weapons arsenals on the planet – are enmeshed in unwinnable wars, facing strategic defeats because their hubristic leaders bet on quick victories that turned into reckless gambles. America is running low on multimillion-dollar interceptor missiles because so many have been used to shoot down Iranian drones that can be built for the price of a decent second-hand car.
Russia has been on fire too. Huge wildfires in Siberia have destroyed tens of thousands of acres of forest. The permafrost is melting, allowing a pest called the Siberian silk moth to move into previously pristine forests that used to be too cold for them. The moths kill conifers by stripping away their needles. Dead and dying pine, fur and spruce explode like roman candles when they catch fire. But the columns of smoke that matter most to the Kremlin are coming from oil refineries and warehouses attacked by Ukrainian drones.
The idea that summer is the silly season was always an invention of newspapers deprived of domestic politics (and football, before it became a year-round leviathan). In the first week of August in 1990, when heatwaves were still a surprise, Britain was scorching. The BBC’s Nine O’Clock News had pictures of children splashing in packed outdoor pools, sweltering penguins at Bristol Zoo standing under a shower and firemen in Shropshire hosing down hot and bothered prize pigs. Moorland was on fire in North Yorkshire and 100 square miles of the Peak District were closed to walkers in case they started wildfires. On 3 August 1990, a weather station in Leicestershire recorded 37°C, then Britain’s highest temperature since 1911. (The current record is 40.3°C, set in 2022.)
But that evening, the weather did not make the lead on BBC News. The day before, on 2 August, Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, had sent his army across the border into Kuwait. His soldiers set about looting the country’s riches. A few weeks after the invasion began, Western newspapers reported that Iraqi soldiers had also stolen incubators from a maternity hospital in Kuwait City, throwing the babies out and leaving them to die. Some time later, Human Rights Watch proved the allegations were false, comparing them with untrue accounts of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies in the First World War. It turned out to be a disinformation campaign orchestrated by a big American PR company. The Iraqi occupation of Kuwait was brutal enough without making up stories about it.
Fake news. Wildfires. An illegal invasion. War crimes. Perhaps our world hasn’t changed so much after all. But compare Donald Trump’s war on Iran with the way that the first President Bush responded to the invasion of Kuwait. He declared that the invasion would not stand. The US needed Middle Eastern oil, and George HW Bush was a man who believed that allies were not freeloaders but useful friends who made America stronger.
He was an archetype of the era – now referred to mostly in the past tense – characterised by the “rules-based international order”. The rules were built around the UN system of institutions, resolutions, treaties and norms formulated after 1945 and intended to prevent a return to the chaos that followed the First World War and the horrors of the second. They were far from perfect. Western powers directed them much more vigorously at their enemies than their friends. (That has not changed, as millions around the world noticed when they compared the response of the US and most of its Western allies to Russia’s war in Ukraine with Israel’s war in Gaza.)
Bush Senior was not naive. He knew that the rules his predecessors in the White House had helped write strengthened the US. Even so, in 1990, Bush was much better placed to act unilaterally than Trump has been this year. For the first time – the moment didn’t last long – the US had no rivals. The Soviet Union, its main enemy, was in its death spiral. China was just starting its rise to global power.
But at a moment when an American political scientist concluded history had ended with the triumph of liberal democracy, Bush was prepared to acknowledge that the rules of international behaviour imposed limits. He did not see that as a weakness, believing that America could remove Iraq from Kuwait much more effectively at the head of a coalition.
In August 1990, Bush opened his bulging contacts file and in quick time assembled the backing for harsh sanctions on Iraq, a massive deployment of troops and planes to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and then a war that in January-February 1991 removed Iraqi troops from Kuwait. It was all authorised by UN Security Council resolutions that made the sanctions and then the war legal.
In 2003, his son George W Bush, in alliance with Tony Blair, tried and failed to get the Security Council’s authorisation for invasion and regime change in Iraq. They went to war without it. In 2026, Trump, too, has not bothered with international legality. His partner in the Iran war, Netanyahu, has variously accused the UN of being a “swamp of antisemitic bile” and the “flat-Earth society”.
The resolutions passed after the invasion of Kuwait did not authorise regime change in Iraq. On 28 February 1991, I was in Baghdad, woken up that morning by gunfire that first I assumed, groggily at dawn, was the arrival of the Americans and their allies. I was wrong. On the president’s orders, General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander, had signed a ceasefire with his Iraqi counterpart. The racket outside my window came from hotel guards and thugs from Saddam’s secret police emptying their guns into the air in celebration. Bush was condemned for sparing the regime and for ordering his force to stand aside as Saddam’s men crushed uprisings by Iraqi Shias and Kurds that he had urged them to start. That sense of unfinished business helped propel his son into Iraq in 2003.
In 1990 and 1991, the system worked. Bush Senior recognised the constraints not only of international legality but of the limits of American power. The war was legal, with a beginning, a middle and an end, though like all wars it was appalling and brutal – and at times criminal. In Baghdad on 13 February 1991, I watched the broken and burnt bodies of more than 400 Iraqi civilians – women, children and old men – being extracted from the ruins of an air-raid shelter that the US claimed, wrongly, had been a command centre. The war’s aftermath was terrible too, during a decade of crude sanctions in the 1990s when millions of innocent Iraqis suffered and hundreds of thousands of their children died, while Saddam Hussein and his cronies held on to power.
But it is fair to say that after the invasion of Kuwait the international system, for all its flaws, did what its designers had intended. The core of the UN charter’s rules on the use of force – that it is legal in self-defence or when authorised by the Security Council – functioned because none of the other four permanent members vetoed Bush’s resolutions.
It all happened at a specific, unique moment in time, when the world was changing fast, as it is today. When I was reporting on the build-up to the war with Iraq in 1990, crowds in Berlin were celebrating the formal reunification of Germany. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Western Christendom’s Christmas Day in 1991. It was ironic that the rules written to regulate the world after the defeat of Nazism worked best just as the postwar order was expiring.
These rules still exist today, but they are ignored and discredited. When world leaders gather at the UN General Assembly in New York in September there will be calls for them to be dusted off and repaired. If the big powers could agree to do that, if they meant it and made it happen, the world would be a safer place. Don’t hold your breath.
For a while after the Kuwait war, America and its allies believed that they had won the future as well as the Cold War. Bush Senior declared there would be a new world order. Nato started its expansion eastwards, ignoring the warnings of George Kennan, the American diplomat who enunciated the doctrine of containment to fence in the USSR after 1945. He wrote in the New York Times in 1996 that “expanding Nato would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.”
The world is at another moment of transformation; we see it everywhere. The political and economic turmoil that drives people towards rich countries where increasingly they are not welcome. Climate change that is doing much more damage than simply ruining holidays in Europe’s burning tourist hotspots. The power of asymmetric warfare to confound the superpowers. In the Oval Office sits a president driven by vanity and instinct, and surrounded by a court of advisers who know better than to question his decisions or challenge him with inconvenient truths.
Iran has demonstrated the vulnerability of the world economy to the weaponisation of geography. Blocking the Strait of Hormuz put a chokehold on the global economy. Americans who already feel hard up are spending more on petrol and might take their revenge on the president at the midterm elections in November. Worldwide, the longer trade is paralysed; more people will go hungry as farmers lack fertiliser. Global supply chains are more interdependent, and vulnerable, than they were even at the turn of the century. The world’s other chokepoints await the next big crises. The Strait of Malacca, which connects the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, is less than two miles wide at its narrowest point. One fifth of world trade, estimated at $2.45trn by one think tank, passes through the Taiwan Strait every year. It is around 100 miles wide, but if China ever took military action against Taiwan, it would be the main theatre of war.
Economic disruption is bad enough on its own. But it also feeds in to a world of suspicion and populist politics that is sharpening fears of war between the great powers. It seemed unthinkable in the Cold War, impossible in the West’s warm glow after the fall of the USSR, but stopping one happening might be the biggest challenge any leader will face in the second quarter of this century.
After Vladimir Putin threatened “consequences that you have never faced in your history” to anyone who intervened against his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Joe Biden posted on X that “a direct confrontation between Nato and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.” Putin has reprised versions of his warning since then. It is largely seen as a bluff, and has not stopped Western military aid to Ukraine, but it slowed it down. With the Kremlin under unprecedented pressure now that Ukrainian drones are striking deep inside Russia, some strategists are discussing whether his threats are less of a bluff than some assume.
Biden’s response was one that might be expected from a leader born during the Second World War and shaped by the bipolar Cold War. But the 21st century has become much more complicated than the old world of two superpowers. China is watching Trump’s every move as he flails in Iran without breaking the Islamic Republic or reopening the Strait of Hormuz. India is on the rise, with a space programme and nuclear weapons. The EU has not been able to turn its economic power into geopolitical clout, but Poland and Germany are rearming fast, and France has nuclear weapons that, unlike Britain’s, do not depend on the Americans.
In his book The Coming Storm, the Yale historian Odd Arne Westad detects dangerous parallels with the years that led to war in 1914, as great powers competed against each other in a time of populism and nationalism, as well as resentment that globalisation had failed many and enriched only a few. More modestly, I am preparing a series on the subject for the BBC. There is no shortage of material. Whether there is enough time, will and alarm among leaders – and the citizens of their countries – to make great-power war unthinkable once again is another matter.
Jeremy Bowen is the international editor of BBC News
[Further reading: The Kemi-naissance is bullshit]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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Subscribe here to commentWhen I need to understand what is going on in the world and how we got there I read and listen to Jeremy Bowen and John Gray. Superb. Worth the subscription for their articles alone.
There never was a rules based order. It could not prevent the Arabs from attacking Israel in 1948, the Korean War, the suppression of the Hungarian rebellion, the Six Day War, the Vietnam War, the 2nd Central African War, the Russian war in Afghanistan, the India -Pakistan war, the Iran-Iraq war etc. It is as it always was; the strong do what they can , the weak suffer what they must. The only thing that prevents utter disaster is Games Theory; military adventures are dangerous for those who start them.
The strait of Hormuz soon to be a tolled controlled channel. Other straits to follow. Soon merchant vessels will require military escorts to protect them from state sponsored pirates.
Freedom of navigation was some sort of tacitly agreed international rule.
You assume too much of the ‘rules based international order’ and maybe also assume things can not get worse, which they can.
Brilliant (and sobering) analysis.
Bowen is a very knowledgeable and lucid writer on the dismal topics he outlines, therefore I was surprised to come across an inaccuracy where he states that Britain’s nuclear weapons ‘depend on the Americans’. Apparently, the UK maintains its own sovereign stockpile of approximately 225 to 260 Trident II strategic nuclear warheads (according to the Arms Control Association). It only means something for rules-based journalism though, otherwise perhaps no big deal in context.
The software to fire UK nuclear missiles which are purchased from the US is controlled by the US military and the US President. The stockpile of warheads is useless without this delivery system which is US controlled.