A Fascinating Forecast from Finland's President Three forces shape an emerging new world Just a pleasant fiction? A best-before date for values-based realism? No revolution required Three scenarios

Alexander Stubb, currently the president of Finland, starts this book by describing how, three days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he texted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
"Please, please stop this madness," Stubb typed into his phone. "You are the only one who can stop him."
Lavrov texted back, sarcastically asking if Stubb meant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or then-president of the U.S. Joe Biden.
The next exchanges, Stubb tells us, got him nowhere. "I quit after the sixth fruitless message," he recalls in his book, The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order.
"I feel angry and disappointed. More than that, I feel the tectonic plates of history shifting."
Stubb then briefly describes playing golf in Florida with Donald Trump and spending seven hours discussing world issues. Stubb tried to persuade Trump that Putin couldn't be trusted and Ukraine must win the war.
He's still unsure whether he's been any more effective than he'd been with Lavrov.
"His presidency," Stubb writes, "will change the way we conduct diplomacy across the Atlantic. More than that: it will accelerate the transition from the existing international order to something new."
As a writer, I admire Stubb's splendid hook. It's clearly written and full of fascinating gossip about people deciding, as Stubb puts it, "about life and death." What kind of guy can text Sergey Lavrov and lobby Donald Trump for seven hours? And then know that those anecdotes perfectly set the theme and style of a book on global geopolitics?
Stubb originally wanted to be a pro golfer, but a university course in political science turned him to international politics and diplomacy.
He's been a member of the European Parliament, Finland's minister of foreign affairs, of European affairs and trade and of finance. From 2014 to 2015, he was Finland's prime minister. He's also served as vice-president of the European Investment Bank and director and professor at the European University Institute's school of transnational governance. He was elected president of Finland in 2024.
Somehow Stubb also found time to write 16 books, hundreds of English-language columns for Finnair's in-flight magazine and articles for the Financial Times.
In The Triangle of Power, Stubb sets out to prove that the bipolar world of the Cold War, the struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, is gone. So is the world that emerged from the collapse of the Soviets. He believes an entirely new world order is possible, and even it will be transient.
Stubb argues that Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, marked the end of the post-Cold War era, over 30 years in which, he says, "The U.S. was the undisputed superpower. The markets and freedom won. The West won. The liberal world order — with its rules, norms and institutions — won."
But it was a short-lived victory. Stubb says, "In the first decade of this century, the world started drifting toward disorder." China's power began to grow. The economic crash of 2008 made global markets seem like a very shaky world order.
And the old bipolar world of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, competing for advantage in what we called the "Third World," was gone forever. We are now, Stubb argues, in "an interregnum, an in-between period where disruption rules."
We face a choice between two systems, multilateralism and multipolarity. He defines the first as "a system of global cooperation based on international institutions and common rules…. Its key principles apply equally to all countries, irrespective of size."
That's not true of multipolarity, Stubb writes. "A multipolar world runs on several, often competing nodes of power, or poles.… The concern is that a multipolar world leaves small and medium-sized countries out — bigger countries make deals over their heads. Whereas multilateralism leads to order, multipolarity leads toward disorder and conflict."
Multipolarity is clearly preferred by U.S. President Trump, president of Russia Vladim...