The aspiration gap has turned everyone into losers, especially graduates

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Son of immigrants from Russia and Uganda, raised in Sweden. Dual degrees in law and economics. Worked in London across i-banking and tech. Very thankful to the Swedish welfare state for making my educ...

For decades, the international system rested on a fragile but powerful idea: that even the strongest states would accept some constraints on how power could be used.

PART I of a two-part seriesFor decades, the rules-based international order was imperfect, unevenly enforced, and often hypocritical.But it still mattered.Not because powerful states always followed the rules, but because they felt compelled to justify themselves in relation to them.That pretence constrained behaviour.It created reputational, diplomatic, and economic costs for open defiance. And it gave weaker states something to appeal to other than raw power.What we are witnessing now is not simply selective enforcement.It is something more consequential:a growing willingness to reject shared constraint altogether.This first carousel explores why the rules mattered even when they were violated, and why abandoning them is not a neutral correction, but a structural shift.📌 Part II examines what happens when the most powerful actor stops assuming restraint, and how others rationally respond.⸻References• Margaret Thatcher, interview with The Jewish Chronicle, June 1981• The Economist (Lexington), “The Radical Honesty of Donald Trump”, Jan 2026• James O’Brien, LBC broadcasts and interviews on international law and power• General principles of post-1945 international order and NATO doctrine