The Unraveling World : Geopolitics Without Restraint

The rules-based international order was never eternal. It was a fleeting consensus, built on American primacy and liberal optimism after 1991. Today, that consensus lies in ruins. In The Unravelling World, Mohamed Nejib Gorgi delivers a masterful, unflinching autopsy of the post-Cold War illusion-and a clear-eyed roadmap for what comes next. From the resurgence of great-power rivalry and the weaponization of economic interdependence to the normalization of gray-zone conflict and the paralysis of multilateral institutions, Gorgi traces how the comforting fiction of perpetual peace through rules and institutions has given way to a harsher reality of transactional alliances, selective norms, and calibrated coercion.
Written with elegant precision and prophetic timing, the book reaches its climax in the dramatic events of February 28, 2026: the coordinated American-Israeli strikes that eliminated Iran's Supreme Leader and shattered its nuclear program. These strikes did not merely accelerate the unraveling-they dramatized it. In one night, decades of diplomacy, sanctions, and solemn invocations of international law were swept aside by raw power politics.
The retaliatory barrages, the first American casualties, the emergency sessions in Beijing and Moscow-all confirmed what this book has already diagnosed: the old order is not eroding. It has already collapsed. Blending rigorous theory with vivid contemporary analysis, The Unravelling World moves beyond nostalgia or despair. It asks the questions that matter now: How do nations protect sovereignty without isolation? How can alliances remain effective without becoming traps? And how can we build resilience in a world where interdependence has become the ultimate weapon?For policymakers, scholars, and every reader who senses that the ground beneath the global system has shifted, this is essential reading.
Not a lament for what was lost, but a compelling blueprint for what must be built. The pleasant fiction is over. The real world has begun. Discover the new grammar of power-before history writes the next chapter without you.