The Fight For World Order
The Finnish President’s view from the fault line
Alexander Stubb stood out to me as the most important leader at this year’s World Economic Forum.
He is the President of Finland, a country with a long memory of power politics. He has served as Prime Minister, Finance Minister, and Foreign Minister, and he is also a political scientist, with a PhD in flexible integration, the study of how political systems adapt, fragment, and recombine under pressure. That background matters in the moment we are in.
At WEF, Stubb was operating at the fault line between order and rupture, multilateralism and transaction, values and power.
He understands the constraints leaders are now operating under.
He is sometimes described as a “Trump whisperer.” Stubb is clear that access does not equal control. Influence comes from persistence, credibility, and working every level of the system, not from a single relationship.
That clarity runs through his recent Foreign Affairs article, The West’s Last Chance, and his new book, The Triangle of Power. His argument is that the next five to ten years will shape what replaces the Cold War order and that the global South, not the West or East alone, will decide whether the next system leans toward cooperation or fragmentation.
But it was his WEF session where theory met contact.
From Theory to Operations
In Foreign Affairs, Stubb writes as a theorist of order.
At WEF, he operated as a crisis manager, coalition broker, and system translator.
He framed 2025–26 as a hinge moment on par with 1918, 1945, and 1989, then added the critical distinction:
This transition is not post-war.
We are mid-conflict, mid-fracture, mid-realignment.
That explains why no grand settlement is coming and why leaders are being forced to govern inside instability rather than resolve it.
Values-Based Realism, Reinterpreted
Values-based realism can sound like a doctrine.
At WEF, Stubb reframed it as an instrument.
What it is not:
moral purity
choosing values over interests
What it is:
preserving maneuver space during transition
acknowledging that climate, war, AI, and security cannot be solved with like-minded states alone
A similar logic surfaced elsewhere at WEF, including in Mark Carney’s special address.
Stubb applies values-based realism to geopolitics: how states preserve agency, legitimacy, and room to maneuver in a deal-driven world.
Carney applies the same realism to political economy: how countries remain governable when markets, supply chains, and financial systems no longer absorb shocks.
Different arenas. Same recognition of constraint.
Stubb even admitted (half-jokingly, half-seriously) that he did not expect to need this framework for dealing with the United States.
This is not a transition being managed.
It is a rupture being navigated.
“Dignified Foreign Policy”: Why This Is Not Soft Power
One of the most important ideas in the session was what Stubb calls dignified foreign policy.
In practice, this means:
respect without submission
private pressure over public humiliation
escalation to de-escalate, not escalation for signaling
The Greenland episode was the live case.
Stubb outlined three scenarios:
Good: a diplomatic off-ramp tied to Arctic security
Bad: escalation through tariff wars
Ugly: a declaration of military intervention
He was explicit that outcomes were being shaped by:
back-channel diplomacy
credible countermeasures
relentless coordination with NATO, EU leaders, and U.S. senators
This was stress-tested diplomacy, not etiquette.
In a world of daily curveballs, legitimacy comes from behavior under pressure — not speeches.
Ukraine and Narrative Warfare
Stubb directly challenged the narrative about who is losing the war in Ukraine, dismantling it point by point:
Russia failed its core strategic objectives
NATO expanded instead of shrinking
Europe remilitarized instead of retreating
Russian territorial gains have stalled
economic and manpower costs are compounding
Then the key line:
Russia cannot end the war because the war is too big for Putin to fail.
That is a systems trap, not a battlefield assessment. Ukraine is not a frozen conflict. It is a regime-lock dynamic with implications far beyond Eastern Europe.
Europe’s Strategic Pivot
When asked about European sovereignty, Stubb’s answer was not “Europe versus the United States.”
It was hedging and de-risking in multiple directions:
expanding partnerships with Mercosur
deepening ties with India
engaging non-EU Europe
Then he added the line that matters:
“We used to talk about de-risking from China. I don’t hear that too much anymore.”
That is a signal.
Europe is not choosing sides. It is re-balancing exposure, procedurally, not rhetorically. This is values-based realism in motion.
This is how middle powers operate when alignment becomes risky and dependence becomes leverage.
Not neutrality.
Not bloc politics.
Portfolio strategy.
The Real Takeaway
If the Foreign Affairs article is about what kind of order might survive, the WEF session was about how leaders behave while the order is unstable.
Stubb’s operating logic:
accept rupture
preserve agency
avoid humiliation politics
keep institutions alive by using them
treat legitimacy as a resource that depletes under stress
This is not idealism.
It is maintaining order under pressure.
