The Korea Times
BERLIN—The U.S.-Israeli strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and launched the United States’ most consequential Middle Eastern adventure since the Iraq War caught many in Europe off guard. Confronted with a series of cascading crises — from a 1970s-style oil shock to a transatlantic rupture threatening Europe’s security architecture—many analysts have reached the same conclusion: the conflict represents a breakdown of the multilateral system and heralds an era of global disorder. Yet this interpretation misses something more profound. The Iran war shows what geopolitics looks like when the very idea of order has collapsed, a state of affairs I call “Un-Order.” The distinction matters. Disorder is what happens when established rules are deliberately broken. To describe a situation as disordered is, paradoxically, to affirm that shared norms still exist, even as they are violated. Un-order, by contrast, emerges when those norms are overtaken by events and there is no longer a shared understanding of right and wrong, or even of the truth itself
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