Rule by Decree of the Eurocrats: Democracy Has Ended.

## The rupture, not a transition: diagnosing the end of a comfortable fiction What emerges from the conversation is a stark diagnosis: the world is no longer able to hide behind the convenient fiction of a benevolent, enforceable “rules-based order.” The claim that past arrangements—where a dominant power provided stability and others accepted unequal terms in return—were merely imperfect but workable has collapsed into an admission that those arrangements were instruments of advantage, not shared law. The discussion frames this as a rupture rather than a gradual transition: elites across allied capitals are beginning to admit that the bargain—tolerate structural inequality in return for security and market access—has been weaponized against its former beneficiaries. That admission forces a choice: double down on a brittle, hypocritical status quo, or rethink alliances, strategy, and the underlying logics of international order. The conversation treats this realization as both belated and consequential. It is belated because many critics have long argued that the system’s stability relied on asymmetric power, selective enforcement, and an informal exemption for the dominant state. It is consequential because once the instruments of interdependence—tariffs, finance, supply chains, standards—are turned into tools of coercion among erstwhile allies, the incentives that propped up the old order evaporate. The public unraveling of this bargain at elite forums signals a political moment in which “mutual benefit” can no longer paper over structural domination. ## Hypocrisy versus law: why a rules-based rhetoric collapses A recurring theme in the discussion is the distinction between a written, adjudicated international law and a malleable “rules-based order” enforced selectively by power. The conversation insists that law, with its texts, precedents, and procedures, allows—at least in theory—for contestation, interpretation, and judicial settlement. A “rules-based order” as practiced, however, becomes a rhetorical shield behind which discretionary decision-making hides. That shield loses credibility when the purported guardians of the rules openly flout them, or when they apply them only when national interests align. This is not simply moral finger-pointing; it has practical consequences. When a state recognizes exceptions for itself while holding others to standards, it destroys the reciprocity that underpins cooperative behavior. The result is not only hypocrisy but strategic incoherence: partners can no longer rely on shared expectations, and the predictable patterns of reassurance and deterrence fray. The conversation therefore reads recent elite statements—where loyalty to joint rules is professed even as unilateral prerogatives are asserted—as a cognitive rupture. Officials can no longer credibly claim both universal principles and exceptional privileges without creating political backlash and strategic recalibration among allies. ## Weaponizing interdependence: tariffs, finance, and supply chains as instruments of coercion Another sustained line of analysis focuses on the transformation of economic integration from a stabilizing force into an instrument of coercion. The conversation highlights how tools that used to bind states into mutually reinforcing networks—open markets, cross-border finance, integrated supply chains—have been repurposed as levers of pressure. Tariffs, sanctions, control over financial messaging systems, and targeted restrictions on critical inputs are no longer side effects of competition; they are explicit policy options to punish recalcitrant allies, extract concessions, or shape geopolitical allegiance. This weaponization has two paradoxical effects. First, it undermines the very economic interdependence that made such coercion effective: by raising the costs of interaction, it accelerates diversification and localization, reducing the coercer’s leverage over time. Second, it invites reciprocal measures, turning market governance into an arena of tit-for-tat escalation that damages growth, consumer welfare, and trust. The conversation points to a new logic of “sanction-lite” policies—tariffs or regulatory barriers that are calibrated to hurt partners without provoking full-blown conflict—as a symptom of an international economy sliding toward strategic decoupling rather than cooperative integration. The important implication is that states will increasingly invest in resilience and redundancy: alternative supply chains, regional trade blocs, and financial infrastructures independent of adversarial control. That strategy of hedging accelerates fragmentation and creates spheres of economic gravity that correspond to geopolitical blocs, undermining the cosmopolitan dream of interconnected markets as a force for peace. ## Contradictions in political narrative: propaganda, cognitive dissonance, and governance by decree The conversation also interrogates the psychological and rhetorical mechanisms that allow inconsistent narratives to persist. A striking observation is how elites promote mutually incompatible claims—“this policy is both indispensable and unnecessary,” or “this adversary is both too weak to matter and an existential threat”—and still expect public acquiescence. That technique is not an incoherent mistake but a deliberate governance strategy: by demanding that citizens accept contradictions, elites test the boundaries of consent and normalise a politics of decree. This phenomenon surfaced, in the discussion, through examples where public health messaging, strategic threat assessments, and foreign policy rationales blend absolutist moral language with pragmatic exceptions. The consequence is two-fold. Domestically, it erodes trust: citizens who notice logical inconsistencies may either radicalize against institutions or withdraw into private skepticism. Internationally, it makes diplomatic signaling less credible: if an ally’s threat assessment can swing from existential to trivial without explanation, partners cannot reliably infer intentions from rhetoric. The conversation suggests that the capacity of states to govern by decree—declaring priorities and expecting compliance without transparent adjudication—will persist where coercive capacity is strong. But its durability depends on whether the domestic audience keeps accepting frictional contradictions as the price of security and prosperity. If not, the same contradictions that allowed elite convenience may provoke political instability. ## The European dilemma: hedging, autonomy, and the limits of alliance faith Europe, in the conversation’s reading, stands at the epicenter of a difficult strategic reckoning. For decades, many European states accepted an asymmetrical relationship with the dominant power in return for defense guarantees and economic integration. That bargain now feels both unreliable and costly. The conversation highlights an emerging mood in which European leaders publicly discuss strategic autonomy, hedge their security bets, and question unconditional alignment. This dilemma exposes uncomfortable choices. First, Europe can deepen military and technological cooperation with the dominant ally in search of reassurance—but that option risks drawing Europe further into competitive dynamics it seeks to avoid. Second, Europe can invest in genuine autonomy: building defense capabilities, diversifying economic dependencies, and constructing European-led institutions. That path is costly and politically contested. Third, Europe might pursue a pragmatic hedging posture—retain core security ties while pragmatically engaging non-Western powers for trade and technology. The conversation identifies hedging as both realistic and fraught: it invites criticism from purist allies and may produce inconsistent policies that look like strategic drift. Underlying this debate is the normative question of legitimacy. If Europeans claim to support a

End Of Hegemony In Davos: Live Stream With Michael Rossi Join me for a live-streatm with Prof. Michael Rossi for a breakdown of the Davos (WEF) madness, where we saw several Western leaders announcing the end of the US-led global order. #Pascal And I believe we are live. Welcome, everybody, to our first live stream in four years on neutrality studies. My name is Pascal Lottaz, and I am joined today by my friend and colleague, Professor Michael Rossi, who's teaching political science all over the place in the United States at the moment. Michael, welcome. #Michael Rossi Pascal, always a pleasure. I'm glad we're doing this live—sort of an impromptu conversation we're having a little late here on the New York side. It's about 9:30 p.m. What is it, about 9:30 a.m. Japan time? #Pascal Yeah. No, no, it's actually 11:30 in Japan—very, very reasonable. Thank you for doing this in New York's late evening, and for the rest of the United States, I believe it's a little bit earlier. You know, managing the time zones is chaos. #Michael Rossi Yes, yes, it's sub-zero here in New York. We're about to get another whopping amount of snow this coming weekend—nothing like Kamchatka that we saw in Russia. But yes, always glad, always a pleasure to be here. And we've got a lot to talk about. #Pascal We've got a lot to talk about. And just as an aside, thank you very much to everyone watching from Norway, and thanks for your comments in the chat. So, Michael, we want to discuss what happened in Davos. A lot was said there. I think the first thing that caught my attention this week was how the Prime Minister of Canada—what’s his name again? Mark Carney? Carney—actually said out loud what the game is all about. I don’t know if you can see this very well, but let me just try to play it for a second. -- 1 of 22 -- #Mark Carney Yeah. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon—tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. #Pascal Isn't this extremely rich—coming from a Canadian prime minister? But Michael, your thoughts? #Michael Rossi Well, it's great—too bad it's 20 years too late. I mean, I think most of these Davos forums kind of come and go over the years. One thing I have to give credit to my country's current administration for is that they make these routine conferences—whether it's Davos, the Munich Security Conference, or the G7—interesting, because they say the most outlandishly provocative things, just bold-faced realizations of where we are in the world today. So, you know, Carney’s statement—I have to give him credit. I absolutely need to give him credit. He’s not calling out the United States, but he’s clearly making a reference to it. But the thing I took away from all of that, aside from its honesty, is how selective this rules-based order happens to be. And it’s not something that was ruptured under Trump; it’s just that Trump made it so blatantly front and center that it’s hard for people within Borrell’s “beautiful garden” to ignore it at this point. #Pascal Yeah. And you know what? What struck me about this is that he basically said, “Oh, we knew the system was unfair. We knew that we were hypocrites, but it served a purpose.” And, you know, the rest is that the U.S. was providing global goods—stability, interconnection, business. So we took it that it wasn’t quite fair, but it was fine. But now, now that it’s being unfair to us—now that they’re turning the weapons against us—well, now it’s not working anymore. And we must give him credit: finally, somebody actually says it. On the other hand, it’s like, OK, so, you know, bombing Iraq was fine, attacking Iran is fine, invading Venezuela is fine, the Ukraine proxy was fine. We know it’s not fair, but the global goods were for us. #Michael Rossi Oh, let’s not forget turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Oh, the general side. -- 2 of 22 -- #Pascal Yeah, the general side. #Michael Rossi Don't mention that. You don't want to get on the wrong side of this thing, Pascal. Or how about this one? We don’t want Denmark’s territorial integrity to be violated, but we absolutely recognize Kosovo as an independent state outside of UN Security Council resolutions. So yeah, I mean, what this points to is something that Mearsheimer, in his work *The Great Delusion*, published in 2014, talked about. And that is: liberalism, as both a theory and a philosophy of international relations, works if and only if two things are present. Number one, everybody participating agrees to play by the rules of the game. Right. And number two, that the laws, the empirical thought, the philosophical foundations of liberalism are applied across the board—not selectively. Not selectively, because if you do, then congratulations, you’re cosplaying as a realist. And this is the reason why Mearsheimer has been taking his “I told you so” victory lap for the last ten years. So the Economic Forum was really, in my opinion—and feel free to agree or disagree with me—but it seemed to have been a wake-up call for everyone in the NATO alliance, sans the United States, about where they find themselves. And so, for the last couple of weeks—months, let’s say the last year or so—Europe, and by extension Canada, has come to the realization that the old transatlantic order is no longer, you know, to be trusted. We’re not going back to the status quo. I think even, you know, Chancellor Merz said, we cannot just simply expect the United States to be our permanent ally or something like that, right? He said, you know, the old ways are done. Okay, where do we go from here? And unfortunately, I’ve been on multiple channels. I’ve spoken with, you know, Piotr Kurzyn and James Kerlinzy about this— about, you know, whither Europe. Where is Europe going? Does Europe have a place in all of this? The problem we find is that you can talk about the sanctity of the rules-based order—and look, I get it, I absolutely understand the importance of international law for stability and security—but as you just pointed out, it’s only when Europe’s own security is put into a dilemma that they start to talk about it. Otherwise, we can absolutely worry that what happens outside the gated community is just, well, that’s just the world in and of itself. And so now we’re trying to figure out: where do we go, and what do we do? #Pascal Yeah, that’s the entire accusation of hypocrisy, which is absolutely true. Hypocrisy is to keep speaking in the language of international law—or even, as they recently shifted, to the “rules-based order”—but then, on the other hand, to just break those rules at will whenever you want. That’s also the big difference between the rules-based order and international law. International law is actually -- 3 of 22 -- written down. We have proper sources and whatnot, we have a proper understanding, and we have hundreds of years of development. And we know, more or less, what these rules are. And they’re contested, you know, just like any law—like any national law. You have disagreements about what the law says, and then you go to court and whatnot. So you have contested norms, but you have them. The rules-based order is, of course, one in which the United States constantly makes rules for everybody else, orders people to follow them, and then exempts itself from all of it. And Europe has been going along with that—and Canada as well—for the longest time, again because it was a beneficial fiction for them. This humanitarian glove over the United States’ iron fist, as Ronald Reagan said in the 1980s, right? But now it’s coming apart. It’s falling apart quickly. And, you know, it’s almost comical to see how the Europeans are realizing this, because while all of this is happening, you’ve also had now Mr. Merz, the chancellor of Germany, on that stage in Davos. I don’ t have the clip, but you’ve probably seen it, where he says, like, “We will defend Greenland from Russia.” #Michael Rossi Excuse me? Excuse me? I'm going to presume—I think you and I can agree on one thing. Friedrich Merz does one thing really, really, really well: look bad. He proved that Olaf Scholz was not the worst that Germany can provide. That's a feat. I mean, that's a feat in and of itself. That is an accomplishment. I have to give Merz this: you’d think we’d reached... #Pascal Okay, let's be honest. Olaf Scholz was the one who stood next to Biden when Biden said, you know, if Russia attacks Ukraine, then we're going to—well, Nord Stream’s going to be passé, right? It’s going to be gone. And he just stood there and took it, just like, blah. That was Olaf Scholz. And now we have Mr. Merz, who’s like, well, you know, the only one who actually has a claim on Greenland is the United States. But I’m just going to say we’re going to protect it from Russia. I mean, you could just as well stand there and say, “I will protect Greenland from Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea will not get its hands on Greenland.” That would make as much sense as saying we’ll protect it from Russia. #Michael Rossi I mean, you know, if somehow Papua New Guinea manages to pull off a successful amphibious landing and extend the Papua New Guinean Empire into Greenland—man, 2026 is going to be very interesting. Yeah. Look, let’s, let’s, you know, point out what a lot of this stuff is. Some people might regard it as just complete throwaway talk, but there’s a deeply entrenched sense of Russophobia -- 4 of 22 -- that’s permeating much of the European leadership. And I think we need to explain what that is. Russophobia isn’t just “I hate Russia” or “Europe good, Russia bad.” It’s this knee-jerk, almost automatic scapegoating—everything wrong gets attributed to Russia. And, you know, I’m drawing from Glenn Diesen’s work, *Russophobia*, which is an excellent study of all this. The narratives are often self-contradictory. Because on one level, you look at Russia—or the non‑West, or outside the European gated community—and the people are seen as not as civilized, not as intelligent. They’re incapable, they’re incompetent. You remember Ursula, in the first couple of months of the war in Ukraine, saying that the Russians were stealing washing machine parts to use for interchangeable components. You know, Russia’s on its last legs. And yet, at the same time, Russia is a threat to Western civilization—that if we don’t stop Russia in Ukraine, they’re going to take the Baltics, then Poland, then Germany, and then Kazakhstan. And, you know, before we know it, we’re going to be—so, you know, it’s like you need to pick one narrative and stick with it. Either Russia is this barbaric, Asiatic, incompetent horde, or they’re a threat to Western civilization. We have something very similar here in the United States. And it makes no sense except to those who honestly believe it. You know, on one level—and this is particularly true with the MAGA crowd—you have the “Don’t Tread on Me” Republicans, you have the “Don’t Tread on Me” libertarians, right? It’s “my guns, my freedom, my liberty.” And yet they’ll absolutely say, “Obey the law, do what the cops tell you, obey the security sector, and you won’t get shot.” So you’ve got the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on one side of the bumper and the thin blue line on the other. And you think, you’ve got to pick one. #Pascal What does that tell us? I mean, there’s a bigger phenomenon behind this, right? This contradictory political messaging. And we’ve seen it, in my view, most often—most ardently—during corona. You know, do you