Political Vaporware
The monopoly on force is over. What gets built next?
International politics has simplified, even as the world has grown more complex.
The supreme weapon of modern warfare is now a five-hundred-dollar quadcopter built from Chinese batteries and Chinese motors. Ukraine produces more than eight million of them a year; Russia survives by learning to do the same; NATO's 2025 Hedgehog exercise was lost to a Ukrainian drone team of ten in half a morning. Economist Noah Smith calls the FPV drone the iPhone of warfare. Cost is the architecture. A military built on five-million-dollar tanks cannot outproduce a basement factory in Dnipro, much less Shenzhen.
Hegemonic monopoly on force depended on a hegemon who could build the decisive weapon and wield it well. Iran has proved that hegemon no longer can.
So the territorial-acquisition logic that the twentieth century's end-of-history virtuous-liberal institutions were built to retire is back on the table. The United States sloppily attacks Venezuela, Iran, and maybe Cuba next; threatens to annex Greenland and uses the threat as leverage against allies. China's plan for Taiwan no longer requires a fleet; it requires shipping containers, drones, and a coastline. Both moves were hypothetically forbidden inside the long peace of the post-world war, post-cold war era. That order is now plainly unraveling.
In the mood for peace
At the chokepoints, the same logic produces extraction. In early May, Iran institutionalized a toll authority over the Strait of Hormuz: the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, with a domain and an email address (info@PGSA.ir), formalizing what had until that week been provocation.
When the hegemon cannot guarantee freedom of navigation, or chooses not to, the regional power monetizes the gap. It does not need to win the kinetic argument. It needs to establish a tax (definitely not a toll, just a service fee). Six weeks later the tax came off as fast as it went on. A June ceasefire reopened the strait toll-free for sixty days; days after that, the Guard Corps declared it closed again over the fighting in Lebanon, while fifty-five ships transited anyway and Tehran's own foreign ministry called the traffic normal. The toll, the war, the deal, the re-closure.
Pull these together. The shape is a security architecture built around mood: held in place by one actor's discretion, demonstrated unreliable against allies, industrially overtaken by adversaries, conceded at the chokepoints by default.
Shikha Dalmia from the UnPopulist has a useful provocation here: stop fetishizing a “rules-based order” as if the phrase itself can stabilize the world. “World police” was always a slur; Iraq made it stick. Yet the rules-based order has always required exactly that role: someone to guarantee shipping lanes, deter atrocities, defend elections from interference. The order needs a policeman it can no longer trust. Dalmia's answer is to distribute the work. Talk instead about a principles-based order upheld by many liberal democracies.
Good. But anyone preaching “principles” today has a credibility problem. Ethical elites, religious folk, and Western Christians in particular have lost the moral high ground, and the culture war with it. The hypocrisy has reached the point where the agnostic commonly rebuts the far-right “Christian” by quoting the teachings of Christ back at him—tacitly accepting Jesus’ apparent moral authority.
Covenantal liberalism
Allow me to do the same. Ethical principles are all well and good, but actual historical Christianity has access to something more foundational than mere shadowy principles that shape-shift in the hands of CEOs and politicians.
Principles without institutions become slogans. Institutions without principles become procedural theater. What nations require is covenant: moral commitments that bind and endure. Call it covenantal liberalism, with its foundation recognizing metaphysical human worth. The warrant for human dignity has to be anchored where it can actually hold: in the historic position of the Imago Dei, the claim that humans are made in the image of God, not in a generic secular humanism that has to keep reproving its premises.
This is my case for why those who call themselves Christians—and those who don’t call themselves Christians but are otherwise against war crimes—should champion that order, improve its wiring, and keep it from drifting into either empire or entropy.
The Imago Dei makes dignity a purposeful national export rather than an internal affair. A civilization that secures the good of strangers aligns more closely with the Sermon on the Mount than one that treats outsiders as raw material for its own appetites. How should nations covenant together? Recognize:
Power as stewardship. Nations answer for what they do with coercion (Amos; Romans 13). Authority does not erase accountability; it intensifies it.
Pluralism under God. Pentecost does not erase languages. It sanctifies communication across them. Difference is design, not defect.
Peace as a positive good. “Swords into plowshares” (Mic 4:3) is not decorative language. It describes public outcomes. It implies investment, restraint, and the refusal to make violence the default instrument of policy.
If you want fewer wars, more fairness, and space for the Gospel to be preached without a permit, you want a world where liberty, rule of law, and accountable power are normal, and where would-be Caesars face organized refusal.
Choose covenant
“Principles” sounds better than “rules.” It feels less coercive. It leaves room for agency. It also sounds optimistic and unverifiable.
If your principles never cash out in treaties, courts, verification regimes, and predictable consequences, you have not built a system. You have advocated for political vaporware, an aesthetic moodboard.
But biblical covenant is instructive and counterintuitive. Commands lead to case law, case law leads to enforcement, and enforcement is what makes the covenant real. Justice adjudicates; it is not sentiment. The twenty-first-century equivalent is simple to describe and hard to build. It begins with principles: human dignity, non-aggression, consent of the governed, economic openness, minority protections. Those principles have to harden into rules, which means treaty text, deadlines, inspections, transparent standards, and escalation ladders for violations. And the rules have to carry enforcement: sanctions with due process, asset freezes aimed at elites rather than children, and defensive commitments that require multilateral assent before force.
That is covenantal liberalism. Moral telos, direction, with institutional muscle, anchored in the only warrant that finally holds.
A lone liberal hegemon can be better than the alternatives, but time turns even benevolent hierarchies cynical, and concentration invites idolatry and drift more than malice ever does (2 Chr 26:16). The corruption of the faithful by proximity to power is its own long argument, one I take up elsewhere. Here the design implication is enough: Citizens and politicians should prefer systems that assume sin over systems that assume maturity.
Three commitments follow.
Subsidiarity: solve problems at the lowest competent level, so that regional security and trade compacts can scale justice without concentrating everything in one capital. Sphere sovereignty: states, markets, churches, and families each hold bounded authority, and a system that swallows every sphere does not become efficient, it becomes total. Accountable multipolarity: let several liberal democracies anchor their regions, interlock their commitments, and cross-audit one another, because we want referees, not emperors. Balance of power once meant rotating powder kegs waiting on a spark. Balance of covenant means plural guardians, shared constraints, and reciprocal checks.
A friendly critique of Dalmia
Four of her moves are worth keeping. She names sovereigntism correctly: beneath the isolationism sits a moral theory of might. She treats multipolar confederation as antifragile, so that if one anchor state destabilizes, the others still hold. She states the economic truth without flinching, since weak economies do not deter predators and peace flows downstream of growth. And she insists on democratic hygiene first: do not sermonize abroad what you excuse at home.
Three upgrades Christians should insist on. First, scaffolding instead of slogans. A principles-based order has to cash out in courts with jurisdiction, compliance systems, verified data, and enforcement that triggers without improvisation. Covenant, not vibes.
Second, consent of the governed, because multipolarity goes sideways the moment regional leadership curdles into regional domination; every compact needs opt-out clauses, minority protections, and recourse beyond the nearest strongman.
Third, trade that is actually just. Openness can reduce conflict and lift prosperity, but we have to watch who pays the transition costs: build on-ramps for least-developed countries, exclude forced labor, and treat debt relief as justice rather than a creditor's bargaining chip.
What the covenantal order looks like
Alliances
Constraining coercion begins with defensive alliances that actually constrain force. NATO Article 5 as written is the wrong template: automatic enough to commit allies, vague enough to invite Russian probing of the threshold.
The model is closer to the UN Charter's Chapter VII, anchored to jus ad bellum criteria from Aquinas and Grotius and requiring multilateral assent before any kinetic step. Friction without paralysis.
Arms control
Limitation treaties without verification are theater. See the JCPOA before its verification regime was hollowed out, or New START after Russia's 2023 suspension.
The next generation has to make verification independent of trust. Open-source sensor networks, blockchain-recorded inspections, satellite imagery any signatory can audit. Adversaries can lie to a small inspectorate. They cannot lie to the constellation.
Hybrid coercion
Election interference, infrastructure attack, large-scale disinformation. The enforcement, when it comes, is targeted, lawful, reversible. Freeze yachts, not baby formula. Build off-ramps. Punishment is the cost of enforcement, not its goal.
Commerce
Where the order most quietly does its work, and where it most easily corrupts. The WTO architecture has been hollowed for a decade by the dispute-settlement crisis and by both Washington's and Beijing's habit of stretching “national security” until it covers any politically useful tariff.
Covenantal liberalism needs tariff discipline anchored to actual security criteria, not to electoral calendars.
Citizens and politicians should prefer systems that assume sin over systems that assume maturity.
Supply-chain transparency
The EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism shows the shape: origin verification, forced-labor flags, penalties that hit elites and importing oligopolies before they hit ordinary citizens.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act shows what it looks like when one country tries the same alone. The Magnitsky model is right: target the people who profit, not the people who can be starved.
Mobility
Regulated work and study corridors, especially between rich economies and least-developed ones, honor the sojourner (Lev 19:34) and break the cycle that turns talent into emigration and emigration into resentment. Just trade has to be both just and trade.
Openness reduces conflict and lifts prosperity, but only if the on-ramps to growth are wide enough for least-developed countries to climb, if debt relief is framed as justice rather than as a creditor's bargaining chip, and if IMF conditions are not used as instruments of coercion.
Courts
Protecting persons is where covenantal liberalism either fulfills its theological warrant or reveals itself as branding. The model is regional courts with actual teeth: time-boxed rulings, published compliance metrics, automatic consequences for refusal.
The European Court of Human Rights at its best, with the failure modes of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights as the cautionary case.
Refugee burden-sharing
The current system, in which geography decides who absorbs displacement, is neither just nor sustainable. Greece and Jordan and Bangladesh cannot be the world's reception centers because their coasts happen to face the wrong way.
The covenant ties intake to capacity and GDP, weighted toward host-economy benefit and the sojourner clause that runs through the Pentateuch.
Religious liberty
The bellwether. A state that cannot tolerate worship has revealed something about its appetite for power, regardless of which faith it suppresses. Christians are often stronger when they have less power—the point of the suffering servant and the upside-down kingdom.
Scitech regulation
The same logic governs the digital and biotech frontiers. Cross-border data agreements that protect privacy. Keep children off the internet via parenting and culture—not Orwellian identification requirements.
AI and biotech guardrails that constrain autonomous lethal systems and require provenance for synthetic media.
Genomic ethics that treat persons as ends rather than datasets. The order that gets this right ends up looking less like a regulatory regime and more like a quiet floor under everyone's dignity, which is what the Imago Dei demands and what generic secular humanism cannot give.
FAQs for the secular-leaning
Isn't this just theocracy with extra steps? No. Establishment hands one church the levers; covenantal liberalism does the opposite, binding power so that no creed, including mine, gets to coerce conscience. The religious-liberty plank protects the atheist and the apostate as fiercely as the believer.
Doesn't secular humanism ground human rights just fine, without God? It grounds them until someone powerful asks why. Dignity treated as a convention survives exactly as long as the majority finds it convenient, which is to say not through the next emergency. Human dignity requires covenantal inviolability—not the convenience of breaking contracts when the person in question becomes an enemy. I am not asking you to convert. I am saying a floor under the human person holds better when it is not also up for a vote.
Isn't the liberal order just imperialism with good PR? Read the rap sheet and you will get no argument from me. But the alternative to a flawed order is not justice, it is the unregulated traffic of the strong, which the global south feels first and worst. Cheering the collapse costs you nothing; fixing the wiring is the harder solidarity.
Isn't free trade just neoliberalism that grinds the poor? It is, when openness is the whole sentence. That is why the covenant prices in who pays: on-ramps wide enough for the least-developed to climb, debt relief as justice rather than leverage, forced labor excluded, IMF conditions that are not coercion in a suit. Trade that is only trade is the problem.
FAQs for the religious-leaning
Isn't this just globalism with incense? No. Globalism as ideology flattens identities and concentrates power; covenantal liberalism pluralizes guardianship while universalizing dignity. It resists Babel's monoculture and aims for Pentecost's coordination.
Doesn't liberalism smuggle in a secular anthropology? It can. That is why the warrant for rights cannot be atomized autonomy; it has to be the Imago Dei revealed in Christ. Liberal institutions then become limited means to protect that worth, for believers and neighbors alike.
Prophecy says wars will come. Why try? Because obedience is not outcome-contingent. Jeremiah tells the exiles to seek the peace of the city (Jer 29:7) under pagan rule. Eschatology should produce courage, not fatalism.
Won't multipolarity invite chaos? Unstructured multipolarity does. Interlocked multipolarity, with courts and treaties and verification and transparency, reduces chaos by making accountability mutual.
A word to realists and romantics
To the realists: you are right. An order is only as credible as its enforcement. Build enforcement that punishes vice precisely and rewards repentance quickly. Mercy without clarity licenses abuse, and clarity without mercy calcifies the very conflict it meant to end. Covenant has to hold both.
To the romantics: you are right. People hunger for a story larger than GDP. The story is not progress. The story is reconciliation. God making peace by the blood of the cross, and teaching nations to unlearn war. Institutions will not save us, but they can keep us from making obedience harder than it already is.
It will not look like parades.
It will look like containers crossing seas on schedule. Like elections that proceed without intimidation. Like quiet court rulings that free prisoners of conscience. Like news cycles where nobody invades anybody this week. Like treaties updated slowly, painfully, and in time to matter.
It will feel like adulthood. Boring. That is the point.
The kingdom of God does not arrive in the material world by carrier group, but like spiritual yeast: invisible, slow, stepwise, inexorable, transformation from one substance, one type of people, into another.
The church has something indispensable to offer any liberal order: a moral reality that outlasts parties, personalities, and civilizations.
And a liberal order, properly chastened, can offer the church something crucial in return: space to preach, to serve, to disagree without fear, and to raise children without treating evacuation plans as normal education.
So no, a sole superpower should not anchor the world. A covenant should, guarded by a confederation of liberal democracies that know they are not God, and act accordingly.
Build it. Constrain it. Improve it. Keep it boring. Refuse the audition when Caesars call. Because they will.