Notes on the self-disintegration of the global security system

Even after the hasty integration of Eastern Europe into Euro-Atlantic institutions, neither the “new” nor the “old” Europe is satisfied, writes Grigorios Vassilconstandakis.

Grigorios Vassiloconstandakis is Ambassador (ret.) at Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Hellenic Republic; geopolitical and political risk analyst, and negotiation expert.

The disintegration of the global bipolar system of collective security began with the sudden collapse of one of its poles, namely the Soviet bloc, during the last decade of the previous century.

For more than thirty years, the member states of NATO, that is the other systemic pole, complacently conjured away (except for the United States) the death throes of the Alliance. Today, with the transatlantic partner having finally realized the lack of leadership and relevance on the part of the European pole of the once-mighty—yet always asymmetrical—Atlantic Alliance, only the transformation of NATO into a unipolar bloc of American-centric hegemony might perhaps grant it a breath of life.

In a multipolar world, new security challenges are not geographically confined, as they succeed in one another depending on the underlying cause associated with their outbreak. At times they are smoothed out within the framework of regional balances; or they evolve into permanent crises. An example of “stabilization” is the—probably temporary—regional “settlement” following France’s withdrawal from sub-Saharan Africa. An example of transformation into a permanent crisis is the war in Ukraine. Both cases—at least from a geopolitical standpoint—are the by-products of a power gap. In the Sahel, this vacuum stems from the collapse of the colonial order, while in Donbas the intra-Soviet disintegration is being tested yet again since 1989—a process which, alas, has not yet been completed, nor will it be by any potential resolution of the Ukrainian issue.

The pursuit of energy security, the replacement of Marxist worldview by radical Islam doctrines, the remnants of the colonial and imperialist status quo, and the struggle for the containment of the US debt constitute the four underlying causes of structural disturbances to global security in today’s post-bipolar world.

The situation in the broader Middle East is the quintessential paradigm—the mirror in which the reflections of all four aforementioned causes of regional, and at times global, destabilization are refracted. The geopolitical reality there literally symbolizes the asynchronous platform upon which these forces—disruptive of geopolitical equilibrium—jostle over time, with erratic timing, simultaneously or individually.

From our European perspective, amid post-Cold War euphoria, we devoted ourselves to building conditions for the rapid integration of our post-Soviet eastern partners, focusing on economistic choices, without a parallel restructuring of defense and diplomatic strategy. Was it done knowingly that our common home “from the Atlantic to the Urals” was never built—yet neither was our vital space fortified as a fortress?

Even after the hasty integration of Eastern Europe into Euro-Atlantic institutions, neither the “new” nor the “old” Europe is satisfied. This is because, in the early years of this century—long before Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine—Europe acquiesced to the destabilizing division of the unified geopolitical space of Eurasia without securing geostrategic self-sufficiency. Without balancing the long-evident distancing of the transatlantic partner.

On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, like an uncoordinated orchestra without a conductor, with its society as divided as it was in the 1930s, the United States flirts with war scenarios while producing and exporting inflationary pressures in order to rein in its towering—yet still manageable, thanks to uninterrupted growth—debt. At the same time, American energy self-sufficiency and the war in Ukraine have mortally wounded the old, secure energy routes of Eurasia, rendering Europe’s energy supply almost monopolistically dependent on exorbitantly priced American LNG, within the framework of a global web of anti-Russian sanctions—convenient more for the violators than for their intended targets.

The “pathological” expansion of global debt, combined with the negative economic consequences of the lockdown, will sustain asymmetric inflationary pressures for at least a decade, primarily at the expense of the weak European pole—until the costs of the massive US energy investments of the 2010s, aimed at achieving the long-desired self-sufficiency in fossil hydrocarbons, are compensated. At the same time, Europe inexplicably rushes toward full decarbonization of its energy mix, generating an additional “internal” inflation. Yet without first resolving the problem of effective storage and management of energy produced from renewable sources, energy insecurity multiplies and costs rise excessively.

Yet those same United States would surely have responded positively to a joint transformation with Europe of the aging alliance into a tool for managing global challenges—particularly the “peaceful” advance of China, which will soon become economically and strategically irresistible. For they too would have understood the necessity of partnership amid the storm of unregulated globalization—before the exclusivity of the West’s absolute technological superiority is lost.

Instead, we have returned to 1949—this time with a “debunked” NATO against a reluctant United States. And the comparative advantage of European economic development, lacking an autonomous leadership narrative, evaporates into constrained choices about being on the “right side of History”—a stance which Europe itself has proven unable to support strategically.

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Caption: A protester holds a banner showing pictures of (L-R) Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donal Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Chinese President Xi Jinping during a demonstration of the collective ‘Strike WEF’ before the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Kueblis, Switzerland, 17 January 2026. EPA/MICHAEL BUHOLZER