'We have to learn to navigate through wolf world'

Marc Saxer is a political analyst and author who has lived and worked in Asia for two decades. He recently published Geopolitical Conflict in the Wolf World: Great Power Competition and the Illiberal Revolt against the Liberal Order. Ritu Raj Subedi, Modnath Dhakal and Arpana Adhikari caught up with Saxer to talk about his book, changing world order and international cooperation while he was in Kathmandu to launch the book. Excerpts:

The very term 'Wolf World' in the name of your book gives an impression of a dreadful picture of the global system. What kind of world is it actually? Could you briefly describe it?

The 'wolf world' is actually an analogy presented in a book by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century during the English Civil War. Referring to the violence, anarchy, and upheaval then, he famously said, when the law of the jungle rules, a man is another man's wolf. I'm using this quote because I believe that after the end of the American-led world order. What is being called the liberal world order is actually a world in disorder.

This is backed by numbers as well. The Peace Research Institute of Oslo has measured that in 2025 there was more violent conflict and interstate war since World War II. So, you see that after the end of Pax Americana, violence is really flaring up all over the world. We have two major wars in Europe and the Middle East, and we have a situation where the rules of the game are eroding very fast. Great powers are ridiculing the rules, let alone disobeying them. That creates a new disorder in the world. The title of the book alludes to this danger. As you said, it's dreadful; it's not a good world that is emerging. But what the book does is actually exploring ways how to manoeuvre it, how to navigate it, and how to overcome it.

The Pax Americana is fading, with the world moving into a chaotic multipolar world order. Are you still nostalgic for Pax Americana?

I've been in Asia for 20 years, especially in this part of the world. What people tell me is, there's never been a liberal world order. This has always been a 'wolf world'. I understand that criticism has a lot to do with the double standards of the West, and also with the situation elsewhere. The world was indeed always a violent place. But as I said, it is getting increasingly more violent everywhere, and the trend will continue. So, I'm not nostalgic for Pax Americana, but I would say that a world that has some order, has some rules of the game, is a world that is more stable and therefore is less violent than an anarchical world.

The liberal order is cracking under the weight of its own internal structural contradictions, like that of the collapse of communism in the early 1990s. Wasn't it inevitable?

It is a twin crisis of liberalism. There is a mutual-reinforcing cycle where you see, on the one hand, that whatever you may want to call the liberal world order is collapsing. And this has implications for the hegemony of liberal thought within our liberal democracies. And this process is really reinforcing. This is not something that happened overnight. The collapse or the erosion of the liberal world order has a lot to do with the re-emergence of great powers, including China and India. So, this historical anomaly that the United States was so powerful, what you call the unipolar moment, is over. And you see that the United States is structurally overstretched militarily, financially, and politically.

Militarily, because there are three main primary theatres of geopolitical conflict where the US hegemony is simultaneously challenged. That is by Russia and Europe, by Iran and the Middle East, and by China and East Asia, which is still peaceful. For all the great powers, there is a zero-sum game between these theatres. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine. It lost Syria in the Middle East. The US is bogged down in the Persian Gulf. On the very contrary, you see the US is actually pulling out its navy from the South China Sea. It's pulling out its missile defence from the Korean Peninsula. It's pulling out paratroopers from Japan in order to sustain its war effort. So, that means it's militarily overstretched. The US is going towards US$39 trillion in debt. It has lost its AAA rating. So, the issue of the world reserve currency now has question marks over its fiscal sustainability.

An illiberal government in the White House has declared the very order that the United States has founded and guaranteed for 80 years obsolete. So, Trump is directly attacking not only liberal institutions in the US, but also liberal institutions on the global level. The USA has dismantled the liberal mission, which is promoting democracy and human rights, and is attacking directly free trade and the liberal international economic order. And it is defunding multilateralism, the United Nations, treaties like the Climate Treaty, COP, etc. So, the liberal hegemon is declaring the order that it founded and led for 80 years obsolete. What Francis Fukuyama called the end of history is basically the idea that somehow, at some point, all of us will develop into illiberal democracy.

You are prescribing a new social contract for the survival of liberalism. But your recipe also appears fragile in the wolf world. Who will be the real parties to this new global deal?

We have to be a bit careful if we talk about the West or if we talk about any other countries like Nepal while assigning the categories. However, I am of the strong view that the social contract is also obsolete in Europe. Basically, the economic model that was sustaining the German economy, the French economy, the Swedish economy, and even the US economy is no longer working. And you basically have to change almost every paradigm from defence policy to foreign, energy, industrial, fiscal, education, and migration policies.

In the last 30 years of German politics, nothing has happened that was more costly than 0.1 per cent of the GDP. All the political battles, all the political upheavals, governments are falling over 0.1 per cent of GDP. And now you want to redistribute 5 per cent of GDP. How do you finance that? You can either cut the welfare state and end the social transfers to the lower third of the population. You can tax the working middle class, or you can basically tax the rich. None of that is possible in the existing social contract, which means the social contract is obsolete. So, you see several political upheavals. Why there is a new prime minister in Great Britain every six months. Why is there such a fragile government in Germany? Why is there a possibility that France goes to the right wing? Because the social contract is obsolete. It no longer works. So, if you say what I'm suggesting is fragile, that's correct. But what I say is that the old social contract is over anyway, and we have to really think about what new social contract could actually work in this world.

The shift to the might-based international order from the rule-based one has wearied the nations and people alike. What will its implications be for peace and development?

Unfortunately, one of the major differences is that war as a means of politics, as Carl von Clausewitz said, is back. We see that in action everywhere. Coercion as a means of geoeconomics is back. We see that everywhere. So, basically, it's not only that there is no longer universally accepted rules, but also the unwritten rules of the game of change.

You cannot have export-led growth in a protectionist world. And you cannot do catch-up industrialisation if technology transfers are weaponised, if value chains are weaponised. And if industrial policy in every major economy, especially China, means that there is so much overcapacity that these industrial overcapacities would be dumped in your market, which would wipe out your domestic industries, and that actually means de-industrialisation. So, for a lot of countries in the region, development now is going backwards. And that means, in the wolf world, we have to learn how to manoeuvre between great powers not only if there is rivalry, but also when it comes to economic development.

Where do you get your energy, critical minerals and weapons if it's no longer possible to buy it on the world market? Geo-economics means that the main distribution mechanism is no longer a free market. Most of the countries in the region are saying that they want to hedge and balance. It sounds very good on paper, but if you need to do all the things that you need to do, you need to be aligned.

You have suggested Europe should focus on territorial defense, stabilisation of its neighbourhood, selective hedging among great powers and pursuit of strategic autonomy within a reformed EU. Can this idea be exported to other regions, such as SAARC and ASEAN?

Let’s start with Europe, because Europe is currently in a very vulnerable position for several reasons. First, the EU is a historically unique experiment, a kind of super-state built through treaties and law rather than as a traditional nation-state. It is, in a sense, a micro rule-based order. The question is whether such a rule-based order like Europe can survive in a wolf world where rules are increasingly being challenged.

Second, Europe has a war on its flank and there is growing doubt about the United States as a security guarantor.  The US has usually performed two functions. First, it secure Europe by keeping Russia out and second securing smaller European state against German hegemony. If the US withdraws as an offshore balancer, fears of German hegemony could return and potentially weaken the EU.

Third, Europe has lost ground economically and technically. I think Europe is in a very difficult situation and is vulnerable. Therefore, I would argue that Europe should focus on its own continent rather than distant regions where it has limited core interests. This strategy cannot simply be exported elsewhere. There is no other region as integrated as Europe. ASEAN comes closest, but it too faces internal divisions, with some members aligned with China and others with the US. And ASEAN has the principle to make decision unanimously. So that means both superpowers have veto power, which means that ASEAN could be paralyzed. So that means even ASEAN has big trouble and SAARC is not even close to that.

What should be the strategies of small nations like Nepal in the great power game?

Obviously, I’m not an expert on Nepal, but I can share what I have learned from other countries. If there is no consensus on a country’s overall geopolitical posture, external power will exploit it. If political camps orient towards different sides, the country can become a chessboard for great powers to divide and rule.

Domestic politics should be contested; that’s democracy. But when it comes to foreign policy, there should be some broad consensus, not on every policy but on the country’s overall orientation, whether to lean towards one side or the other, or remain neutral. Such consensus can help shield the country from external meddling.

Located between the two giants’ neighbours, Nepal faces difficulty in navigating geopolitical challenges. As a geopolitical expert, what would you like  to suggest for it to tackle problems in its neighbourhood as well as benefit from them?

Nepal’s greatest challenge is obviously being a landlocked country, with only two neighbours. It may be useful to look at Mongolia, which also has two large neighbours, Russia and China. Mongolia has developed a ‘third neighbour policy’ engaging countries such as the US, European states, Japan and South Korea, among others, to create more options and reduce its vulnerability. If you only have two borders, you cannot escape that reality. But engaging other countries gives you more options and having more options is certainly better than having none.

Published in The Rising Nepal on 20 August 2026.