The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order

By Alexander Stubb

Biteback Publishing, 2026/206 pages

Reviewed by Colin Robertson

January 25, 2026

In what’s now being dubbed the Carney Doctrine, Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledges his debt to Finnish President Alexander Stubb’s ‘values-based realism’.

The phrase is drawn from Stubb’s new book The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order. Shaped by geography, history, and a commitment to internationalism, Stubb writes as a Finnish statesman: foreign minister, prime minister, and now president.

Stubb’s worldview developed mindful of Finland’s 832-mile border with Russia, its wartime territorial losses, including his father’s birthplace, and its long practice of survival under pressure. And yet, for the past eight years, the Finns have won the accolade of the world’s happiest people in the annual World Happiness Report.

Stubb’s opening injunction: “Stay calm. Be a Finn. Take an ice bath, visit a sauna, and reflect.” It’s his philosophy for navigating disorder without surrendering either realism or principle.

Set against the backdrop of pandemic, war in Ukraine, the return of Donald Trump and the embrace of ‘America First’, technological acceleration, and democratic backsliding, Stubb argues that we are at another hinge point comparable to 1918, 1945, or 1989.

“The next few years”, writes Stubb, “will decide the dynamics of the new international order for the rest of the century”, so like-minded powers need to act now to reform institutions and revitalize multilateralism.

For Stubb, the post-1945 order rested on a fragile but essential assumption: that states’ self-interest could be contained by global rules.

Multilateralism was not idealism but discipline, an effort to tame power through institutions. He invokes Jean Monnet’s maxim that “nothing is lasting without institutions” to underline the foundational belief that order requires structure.

Stubb acknowledges globalization’s material successes, especially after1989: global GDP quadrupled, trade expanded sixfold and over a billion people escaped extreme poverty, but he notes that uneven gains, rising inequality, and persistent power asymmetries eroded legitimacy.

“Growth”, he writes, “remains a relative term,” especially when the richest one percent control half of global wealth. The West’s failure, in his telling, is not malice but myopia.

In Stubb’s account, the post-9/11 West “pivoted on our highest message, making security more important than freedom,” undermining its own credibility. Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the limits of force-driven democratization and confirmed his blunt conclusion that “democratic change usually happens from within, rarely from outside, and never through force.”

These failures, compounded by the global financial crisis and Europe’s internal strains, hollowed out Western authority just as China’s confidence surged and Russia’s revisionism hardened.

Today, writes Stubb, we are in an “interregnum”: a phase of uncertainty marked by patchwork cooperation, weaponized interdependence, and the blurring of peace and war. Energy, currency, technology, and information have become tools of coercion. Trust — “the basis of the international system” — is broken.

Stubb distinguishes between multilateralism and multipolarity. Multilateralism, he argues, is rules-based cooperation anchored in institutions and shared norms. Multipolarity is “an oligopoly of power”, a world of shifting deals, transactional alliances, and great-power bargaining over the heads of smaller states.

For Stubb, multilateralism produces order; multipolarity leans toward disorder and conflict. A multipolar world, he warns, marginalizes small and medium-sized countries, leaving them exposed to the preferences of larger powers.

Capturing both his aspiration and his anxiety, he writes “a multipolar world runs on self-interest. A multilateral world makes the common interest a self-interest.” Global power, says Stubb, is no longer centred in a unified West but divided among the Global West, the Global East, and the Global South.

The Global West remains economically dominant with forty-plus nations accounting for roughly 15% of the world’s population but over half of global GDP. The countries are bound by shared values, institutions, and history, yet increasingly divided internally by populism, inequality, and distrust.

The Global East, led by China and supported by Russia and a dozen other autocracies, is state-centered, transactional, and increasingly assertive. Russia, says Stubb, practices zero-sum power politics rooted in historical narratives of order, hierarchy, and hegemony.

In a world sliding from order toward disorder, ‘The Triangle of Power’ is not a road map to certainty, but it is a valuable compass.

China, more pragmatic, seeks to “unseat the West from dominance” without destabilizing the system on which its prosperity depends. The China-Russia partnership, he argues, is one of convenience rather than depth.

Amid today’s upheaval, the Global South occupies the pivotal position. Comprising half of the world’s population but less than a quarter of global GDP, its 140 or so nations are internally diverse and politically fluid but it “holds the power to decide in which direction the pendulum will swing.”

The decisive arbiter of future order, Stubb argues, will be the Global South rather than the traditional liberal West. As he also wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs piece titled The West’s Last Chance previewing the book, this new role will be based on demographic trends, economic development, and the extraction and export of natural resources.

This realignment will reshape how states should think about alliances, cooperation, and values in foreign policy.

The most distinctive element of Stubb’s argument is his concept of “values-based realism.” Rooted in Finland’s Cold War experience, it stakes out a middle ground between naïve idealism and cynical realpolitik. Stubb rejects the caricature of “Finlandization” as anticipatory compliance, insisting instead on sovereignty without illusion.

“Values-based realism,” he writes, is “a set of universal values based on freedom, fundamental rights, and international rules, which take into account the realities of global diversity, culture, and history.”

It is not a doctrine but an instrument—temporary, adaptive, and situational. Its aim is to espouse liberal values while engaging respectfully with those who do not share them.

Reflecting the best traditions of middle-power diplomacy — principled without being preachy, pragmatic without being amoral — Stubb’s emphasis is on dignity. In a world increasingly allergic to moral lectures, his urging that “we lead by example not exhortation” is compelling.

Stubb remains committed to multilateral institutions, especially the United Nations. “The UN is the worst form of global governance, save all the others,” he quips, paraphrasing Winston Churchill. He recognizes its inefficiencies, sovereignty anxieties, and power imbalances — especially the veto-bound Security Council — but insists that dismantling multilateralism would lead only to chaos.

His reform agenda is cautious rather than radical. A stronger UN, he argues, requires a more balanced Security Council and greater inclusion of the Global South.

The deeper global problem, in Stubb’s telling, is distrust: among states, within societies, and between citizens and institutions. Populism thrives on the claim that international cooperation compromises sovereignty and serves elites.

His faith that dignity, dialogue, and institutional reform can restore legitimacy may underestimate the depth of structural resentment, particularly where economic insecurity, identity politics, and disinformation intersect.

The Triangle of Power is a serious book for a serious moment. It is well-informed and thoroughly  readable. Stubb acknowledges he does not have all the answers: Values-based realism is pragmatic but is probably more ethos than strategy. Institutional reform is easier to affirm than to execute. The triangle, while illuminating, risks flattening regional complexity.

But for middle powers, Stubb’s observation that multipolar disorder marginalizes those without raw power is well taken. Given the differing and often conflicting interests of the countries in the Global South, the argument that it should be treated as a co-author of any new order is problematic. But his central intuition is sound: “only global cooperation can contain competition and prevent broader conflict.”

In a world sliding from order toward disorder, The Triangle of Power is not a road map to certainty, but it is a valuable compass.

Contributing Writer Colin Robertson, a former career diplomat, is a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute in Ottawa and host of the CGAI’s Global Exchange podcast. He is Policy’s principal global affairs book reviewer.