FLEXIBLE REALISM

POWER, SURVIVAL, AND THE END OF THE LIBERAL WORLD ORDER

For decades, the world was told that history had ended. That open markets, global institutions, and shared values would replace rivalry, power politics, and national self-interest. That cooperation would triumph over competition. That stability was inevitable.

It didn’t happen.

Instead, the global order is fragmenting. Alliances are straining. Institutions are losing authority. Nations are rearming, reshoring industry, hardening borders, and recalculating loyalty through cold-eyed cost-benefit analysis.

Flexible Realism is a clear, unsettling examination of this transformation.

In this book, T J Donald explains the emergence of a new strategic worldview that is quietly replacing liberal internationalism. A worldview that treats survival, material power, and adaptability as the only reliable foundations of national security. One that rejects permanent alliances, moral universalism, and ideological crusades in favor of transactional relationships and strategic leverage.

This is not a book about what should happen.
It is a book about what is happening.

Drawing on history, political theory, and modern geopolitics, Flexible Realism explores why the post–Cold War order is breaking down and why nations are returning to interest-driven statecraft. Donald examines how economic globalization hollowed out industrial capacity, how moral foreign policy produced unintended disasters, and how global institutions became constraints rather than safeguards.

The book explores the core pillars of this emerging doctrine, including:

• Why national survival is replacing ideology as the central organizing principle of strategy
• How re-industrialization and economic power have become security priorities
• Why energy independence is viewed as strategic leverage, not environmental symbolism
• How mass migration is being reframed as a question of state continuity
• Why alliances are becoming conditional, temporary, and transactional
• How great-power competition is returning as a permanent condition, not a solvable dispute

Flexible Realism also confronts uncomfortable questions most books avoid. Can global stability exist without shared ideals? What happens when power replaces persuasion? Is this shift a dangerous regression, or a necessary correction after decades of strategic overreach?

Crucially, this book does not advocate. It explains.

Donald presents the arguments, the logic, and the consequences of this worldview with clarity and restraint, allowing readers to understand why governments are making decisions that appear shocking, ruthless, or contradictory through a moral lens, but coherent through a strategic one.

If you are trying to make sense of a world where treaties feel fragile, alliances feel conditional, and power feels unapologetic again, this book will change how you see international politics.

Flexible Realism is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the next era of global order before it fully arrives.