After Liberalism, Is a Sustainable Transition Still Possible?

Good morning, and welcome to the summer edition — longer than the usual Sunday note, because the question underneath it deserves the room. For most of the postwar era, international governance ran on an unspoken bargain: nations gave up a measure of sovereignty in exchange for predictability. Treaties, courts, and multilateral bodies weren’t just moral commitments — they were supposed to be cheaper than the alternative, because breaking them cost you diplomatically and economically. That bargain is unwinding in real time, on every continent, and climate governance ran on exactly the same bargain. This edition exists to answer one question straight: with that bargain gone, does the sustainable transition still happen?

Start with what “the bargain is gone” looks like in practice this year, and it isn’t confined to one country or one bloc. The U.S. captured Venezuela’s Maduro in January without Security Council authorization; five weeks later the U.S. and Israel struck Iran mid-negotiation, killing its Supreme Leader. Neither state waited for permission from a body designed to require it — and both targets sit on some of the largest energy reserves on the planet. It’s the same logic, older than this year, that has driven Russia’s actions in Georgia and Ukraine and China’s in the South China Sea: international law binds whoever lacks the power to ignore it. What’s new in 2026 is how openly that logic has moved from the periphery of the postwar order to its center. The rest of this issue works through what that same logic, applied to climate governance rather than to regime change, actually produces — and it produces different things depending on which continent you’re standing on.

“Is a sustainable transition still possible” isn’t a single question with a single answer — it splits cleanly into three, and the evidence below says something different about each one.