Institutions are bypassed not because they have failed, but because they are inconvenient to leaders who prefer to negotiate leader-to-leader, unencumbered by process. Canadian PM Mark Carney said as much at Davos in January.
On September 2, barely a day after a US strike killed civilians at a wedding in the Iranian coastal city of Sirik, President Donald Trump posted a question to his own social media platform. Now that the United States controlled the Strait of Hormuz, he wrote, should the waterway be renamed Trump Strait? The Strait carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil. The war that supposedly delivered it to American control has, by that point, been running for months, with no ceasefire, no negotiated settlement, and a rising civilian toll on both sides.
None of that made it into the post. What made it into the post was the name.
It is worth taking the moment at face value rather than mocking it, because it says something true about how power currently likes to present itself. Renaming a strait after yourself is not a policy. It is a signature. And it is exactly the kind of act that a certain grammar of global politics has turned to be personalist, transactional, built for the feed rather than the ledger, the world notices first.
WHOSE COMMON SENSE?
That grammar has its own logic, and it is worth naming precisely. Antonio Gramsci’s insight was that hegemony is not secured only by force; it is secured by controlling what a society comes to treat as natural, obvious, worth its attention. Applying that here to asking for a strait named after a president fits the frame perfectly, because it has a protagonist, a boast, a headline that writes itself.
A flooded valley in Nepal, a reinsurance market repricing risk, a teenager’s slowly changing relationship with her own thinking, none of these have a protagonist. None of them perform. So they recede from the world’s attention roughly in proportion to how much they actually matter, which is to say, inverse proportion to how loudly they are shouting.
NAMING THE DISORDER?
Call what results progressive unrealism, or, less charitably, the gangland order, it is not realism as strategic restraint, but realism curdled into personalism. Alliances are treated as favours extended or withdrawn at will. Institutions are bypassed not because they have failed, but because they are inconvenient to leaders who prefer to negotiate leader-to-leader, unencumbered by process. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said as much at Davos in January, pronouncing the old rulesbased international order dead and unlikely to return.
He was less quoted, though, for the argument he made next, that middle powers acting in concert have more leverage than middle powers competing individually for a hegemon’s favour. Buried in the funeral oration for the old order was a case for a new one. That case deserves more attention than the eulogy did.
THREE CRISES NO STRONGMAN CAN PERFORM
Look past the theatre, and a pattern emerges. The crises piling up beneath the noise are precisely the ones no single actor, however powerful, can solve by acting alone.
Begin with the environment, because Nepal already makes the case, and makes it more starkly with each week that passes. What began in late August as a glacial-lake outburst flood on the Nepal-Tibet border has, by the government’s own latest count, killed over 1,100 people in Nepal alone, with close to 4,000 still missing and roughly 1.6 million people affected across the region; Chinese authorities have separately confirmed further deaths and hundreds missing on their side of the border. Nepal’s cabinet has declared disaster zones for three months and shifted its official focus from search to rehabilitation.
What is easy to miss, amid those numbers, is how much quiet cooperation they forced into being almost immediately: Nepali and Chinese authorities exchanging information across a live, cross-border emergency; the United Nations and the Red Cross mobilising alongside national agencies; offers of searchand-rescue assistance arriving from governments, including Washington, that spend the rest of their time on precisely the kind of unilateral posturing this disaster had no use for. A glacial collapse does not negotiate bilaterally. It forces the coordination that personalist politics prefers to avoid.
Turn to the economy, and the pattern holds. The IMF’s own 2026 projections mark global growth down to roughly 3%, explicitly citing the war in the Middle East and the resulting disruption to Hormuz shipping as the drag. It is a rare moment of a technocratic institution naming geopolitical unilateralism itself, rather than an ordinary business cycle, as the source of the slowdown.
The Strait tells its own story in numbers: PortWatch, the tracking platform run jointly by the IMF and Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, recorded just six transits through Hormuz on August 30 as against a pre-crisis baseline of roughly 85 a day. A waterway can be renamed in an afternoon. Rebuilding the traffic, the insurance confidence, and the trade relationships it carried will take years, and none of that work can be done by a social media post.
Then education, where the crisis is quieter still but no less structural. A growing body of research including MIT’s widely discussed study on “cognitive debt” among AI-assisted writers, a 2025 study of over 600 participants linking heavy AI use to measurably lower critical-thinking scores, and this year’s International AI Safety Report flagging the same pattern across age groups globally. They suggest that ungoverned reliance on generative tools may be quietly eroding exactly the metacognitive habits education exists to build. The tools themselves are not the villain. Used well, they remain a genuine aid to learning.
The absence is institutional with no regulatory or pedagogical framework that has caught up with what a classroom now actually looks like. India’s own approach to data governance under its Digital Personal Data Protection framework, and the early, still-forming conversations around AI use in Indian classrooms, represent exactly the kind of anticipatory institutionbuilding this moment calls for elsewhere in treating the problem as a governance question to be answered now, before it hardens into a generational one to be diagnosed later.
THE PIVOT DISORDER CANNOT AVOID
Each of these three crises is already generating the very coordination the gangland order pretends to have made obsolete. A flood forces cross-border protocol regardless of politics. An energy-driven slowdown forces central banks back toward synchronised, rulesbased signalling, however reluctantly. Even artificial intelligence, the most recent and least governed of the three, is producing convergent regulatory instinct in Europe, in American state legislatures, in India, precisely because no single government can manage a borderless technology alone.
Disorder has not dissolved the demand for institutions. It has simply moved that demand off the stage where it is fashionable to ignore it, and onto the ground where it cannot be avoided.
A VERDICT, NOT A LAMENT
What the three E’s actually demand, stated plainly, is clear. A flooded valley in Rasuwa is still being cleared by hands that do not care much whose administration currently holds power in Washington or Beijing. A reinsurance market that has to price a war neither underwriter voted for. A sixteen-year-old, somewhere, whose capacity to think for herself is being shaped right now by tools no institution has yet agreed how to govern. None of these will wait for a strongman’s attention span, and none of them will be solved by one.
They are already being handled, however imperfectly, by the unglamorous, coordinated, rules-based work that never trends. That remains the only kind of order actually equal to problems this size.
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Commodore (Dr) Johnson Odakkal is a maritime scholar, strategic affairs analyst, and Indian Navy veteran. He is an expert faculty and IBDP Examiner in Global Politics and Theory of Knowledge and an Adjunct Faculty of Maritime and Strategic Studies at Naval War College, Goa.
