The Gaza War has offered another punctuation of this. Different parts of the world were simply determined by their own balance of power systems that, because they usually held up well, were mistaken for a rules-based order that was in fact nowhere in evidence. As the Catholic University professor Jakub Grygiel put it: “An Earth-spanning security space governed by global rules…doesn’t exist.” Instead there are only “regional equilibria” with their own military dynamics “driven by local historical competitions.”[7]
