After the Iran War: A New World Order, but Not a New System
The US-Israeli war on Iran has stopped—perhaps for now—and what emerges are the contours of a new world order. However, this will not be a new world system. The difference between the two is critical to understanding this conflict and what follows.
In the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa—later adapted into a brilliant film by Visconti—the young Tancredi Falconeri expresses to his uncle, the Prince of Salina, how the aristocracy must face the changes being brought about by the revolution led by Garibaldi: “If we want things to remain the same, everything must change.”
This could be the essence of the rapid developments we see in the geopolitical arena today. Borders are being contested. Resources rearranged. Currencies adapted. But the result of these changes will not significantly alter the world system, only its ordering. Before continuing, I think it’s necessary to expand upon what I mean by these two concepts and how they differ.
The World System is the backbone upon which our culture is built. I understand culture as the living praxis of a society. The backbone of modern societies is the financial system, its energy sources, and the nation-state power arrangement.
There are other important elements, such as digital technologies—whose exponential growth is tied to the financial system and energy sources—that are incorporating themselves into this backbone, and which, in turn, might render obsolete the current form of the financial system and the nation-state. But we are not quite there yet.
I consider this to be a system because these three elements were developed in unison and are interdependent. Of course, this did not happen in an ideological vacuum. But it is arguable whether philosophy was responding to this development or driving it. Perhaps they “arose together,” to use a Taoist concept. This would mean that the ideas that fueled its development are inseparable from the system itself.
If this is a system, then it has spread and is at work in almost every corner of the world. It does not work everywhere without friction, but other than perhaps a handful of semiautonomous communities, I don’t think there is any place in which fiat currency and the same energy sources are not used. The nation-state is the most contested and the least crucial element. The system only needs a state, not the nation.
In this definition, the world order is the international political field that emerges out of this world system. That is, how different nation-states, or simply states, arrange themselves to deal with each other. These states, being based on what has today become an abstract concept—the nation—have limitations that the financial system does not. This, and the control of energy resources, create tensions within the system that lead to conflicts and to the succession of different world orders.
The transition to a multipolar world order seems now inevitable. The unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran is proving to be a catalyst for many of the forces that were in motion for at least the last two decades. The rise of new centers of military power, the subjective application of international law, the struggle for energy, and the transition away from a dollar-based economy have all been accelerated by this war.
The emergence of a multipolar world order, understood as an order with several centers of influence dealing with each other on equal terms—at least supposedly—seems to be a point of agreement among many competing narratives.
It is the discourse that emerges from the members of the BRICS organization. Leading that discourse are the Russians, but they are not alone in it. Alexander Dugin’s concept of civilizational poles is a more elegant, philosophical way of proposing the same. There are other public commentators, more geopolitically minded, like Pepe Escobar or Arnaud Bertrand, who defend multipolarity.
But this is not only a discourse found on the margins of power. Hrvoje Moric shows in a well-researched article that some form of multipolarity has been present in Russian institutional discourse for a long time, even during the Soviet era. The same has been the case in Chinese state institutions, especially recently.
What might be more surprising—and Moric goes to great lengths to demonstrate this with sufficient documentation—is that a transition from a unipolar world dominated by the U.S. to a multipolar world has also been part of mainstream Western thinking for a while.
For example, Moric quotes an article from the Council on Foreign Relations’ publication, Foreign Affairs, in 1973, which clearly states: “So there remain the practical alternatives of a multipolar balance of power or a pluralism of unaligned states. We are asking, then, whether the United States can live in a situation of general unalignment which its own conduct would materially help to establish.”
The apparent agreement among different political stances and the historical presence in their discourse regarding the need to move to a multipolar world order leads some commentators, like Moric himself or James Corbett from the Corbett Report, to conclude that there must be some general plan or understanding—however abstract—for it.
They argue that the purpose of this multipolar world order is to be a step toward a global form of governance based on regional powers. They quote, among many others, Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative proposed at the 2025 SCO summit. Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus are members of the SCO. This initiative is in line with others from the U.N. and Davos.
Other commentators, such as Simon Dixon, hold a similar view of a planned transition, albeit from a different angle. They argue that what he calls the “Financial-Industrial Complex,” which is not nation-bound, is pushing this move in order to continue generating financial profit. According to him, the Iran war is a step towards the reconstruction and stabilization of the Middle East and its emergence as an important regional pole in a future stablecoin-denominated financial system.
However, Alexander Dugin would disagree with this. Civilizational poles are the basis for his concept of a multipolar world order. These civilizational poles are, according to him, sociopolitical entities that emerge after the failure of the nation-state—a Western European political model which is not automatically valid everywhere else.
These poles are sovereign, and the basis of their legitimacy is that they encompass the lands and people that are inheritors of a particular civilizational tradition, such as China, India, or the “Islamic World.” They are not, in any way, a preliminary step toward global governance; rather, he posits them as its antithesis.
Others, like the Council on Foreign Relations, Pepe Escobar, Arnaud Bertrand, or the Chinese institutional discourse, see multipolarity as the logical step after the end of U.S. hegemony—however, each with a particular undertone. The CFR, considered a transatlantic think tank, would be more inclined to agree with the concept of global governance, while Escobar emphasizes the end of empire, and China a pragmatic approach to stability and trade.
It would seem that there is a general understanding that the unipolar world is over, and that the time of a multipolar world has come. Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tacitly agreed in an interview that unipolarity was actually an abnormal phenomenon. The Iran war has only pushed further what was already happening.
The question then is: is it a planned transition with certain spheres of power plotting for it, or is it the natural step after the end of an abnormal unipolarity?
Here is where my proposed definition of a world system and world order becomes relevant. I would say that it is both. If we look at the question through the lens of the World System, then we necessarily see a continuation. If we look at it from the perspective of world order, we might see some clear breaks and distinctions.