The Iran conflict epitomizes the “rupture” that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described so eloquently in his address at Davos. The comfortable assumptions that shaped the past three decades – that economic interdependence would prevent conflict, that global governance would deepen over time, and that technological progress would expand freedom – are rapidly losing credibility.

In their place stands a harsher truth: the instruments designed to bind the world together have been repurposed as tools of intimidation. Indeed, the very vocabulary of cooperation has been emptied of meaning, first through overuse and today through mendacity and bad faith. Too often, “diplomacy” is reduced to pressure politics – threats dressed up as engagement, backroom deals, or photo opportunities.

In both Davos and Munich, the subtext was that crisis management is becoming less hierarchical. Great powers may still dominate when it comes to establishing deterrence, but as hegemonic players embrace disruption and violate international law with abandon, the tasks of de-escalation and mediation are increasingly being shouldered by middle powers operating through flexible, overlapping diplomatic networks.

These states are learning to act in concert not by forming a single formal bloc, but by building issue-based coalitions that can move faster than great-power rivalries would allow. Middle powers can coordinate sanctions and humanitarian corridors, broker prisoner exchanges, open discreet backchannels, and keep multilateral institutions functioning when the largest players pull back or engage in sabotage. When confrontations between the strongest states threaten the potential for compromise, it is often middle powers that create the narrow openings through which diplomacy can proceed.

But for any middle-power framework to endure, it must be built on a foundation of democratic trust, with all participants playing by the same rules. During periods of rupture, autocratic states often present themselves as “indispensable” to global stability. They may step up to help manage international crises in the short term, even as their leaders exploit the same circumstances to entrench their rule at home. But autocrats can never serve as credible stewards of a new rules-based order, because they do not treat rules as binding. Everything is transactional.

The Iran conflict illustrates both what happens when such openings are too weak and why legitimacy matters as much as capabilities. In the new geopolitics, great powers tend to take matters into their own hands, acting through coercion first and diplomacy second. But when authority at home rests more on coercion than consent, external stability becomes brittle: policy turns reactive, deterrence becomes improvised, and a state’s room for maneuver depends less on durable commitments than on shifting balances of power. The result is not a renewed order, but a landscape shaped by faits accomplis, with everyone else forced to adjust after the fact.