The Triangle of Power: A Review

Alexander Stubb, The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order (Columbia Global Reports / Biteback Publishing, January 2026, 216 pp.)

There is something almost paradoxical about a sitting head of state publishing a book of serious international relations theory. Political memoirs are common enough; policy manifestos, dime a dozen. But The Triangle of Power is neither. Finnish President Alexander Stubb — former foreign minister, prime minister, finance minister, MEP, and Professor and Director of the School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Florence — has written what is genuinely a work of political science, grounded in first-hand experience at the highest levels of diplomacy, and aimed at a fundamental question: what kind of world order comes after the one that is currently falling apart?

The short answer he offers is: we don’t know yet, and the next few years will decide it. The longer answer is the book.

The Framework

Stubb’s central argument is that the post-1945 liberal world order — already fraying after the Cold War — is now in an accelerating unravelling. The rules-based international system is giving way not to a new order but to an interregnum: a phase of weaponised interdependence, broken trust, and the systematic erosion of the norms and institutions that made collective security possible. What replaces it will be shaped by three forces he calls the Global West (the United States, Europe, Japan and their allies), the Global East (China, Russia and aligned autocracies), and the Global South (the broad arc of middle and smaller powers across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East).

The book’s most important conceptual distinction is between multilateralism and multipolarity — terms that are often used interchangeably but which Stubb argues point in fundamentally opposite directions. Multilateralism is rules-based cooperation, anchored in shared institutions and norms, where even large states are constrained by agreed frameworks. Multipolarity is an oligopoly of power: a world of transactional deals, shifting alliances, and great-power bargaining conducted over the heads of smaller states. For Stubb, multilateralism produces order; multipolarity produces disorder — and, critically, it marginalises everyone who lacks raw power to impose their will. For a country like Finland — or Estonia — this is not an abstract distinction. It is existential.

The book frames the choice ahead as a binary between what Stubb calls the “logic of Yalta” (spheres of influence, great-power division of the world) and the “logic of Helsinki” (cooperative multilateralism, sovereign equality, shared rules). The Global West, he argues, despite the disruption of Trump’s unilateralism, remains structurally committed to some version of the Helsinki logic. The Global East tilts toward Yalta. And the Global South — holding roughly 85% of the world’s population, growing economic weight, and the deciding votes in any future institutional architecture — has not yet chosen sides. That choice, Stubb argues, will determine the shape of the coming century.

His prescription is what he calls values-based realism: a foreign policy that holds fast to liberal values — freedom, fundamental rights, rule of law — while engaging “humbly and respectfully with those who do not share them.” It is a self-conscious middle path between naïve idealism and cynical realpolitik, rooted in Finland’s Cold War tradition of survival under pressure. The book’s opening injunction — “Stay calm. Be a Finn. Take an ice bath, visit a sauna, and reflect” — is disarmingly light, but the philosophy it represents is hard-earned.

The Reform Proposal

The book’s most concrete and controversial proposal concerns the UN Security Council. Stubb argues that the UNSC, whose permanent membership still reflects the power distribution of 1945, is the single most important institutional bottleneck in global governance — and that without reforming it, no meaningful multilateral order is possible.

His proposal is more radical than most reviewers have conveyed. He calls for: five new permanent members (one from South America, two from Africa, two from Asia), plus five additional non-permanent members, bringing the total Council to 20; the abolition of the single-state veto; and — most pointed of all — the suspension of any permanent member’s voting rights for as long as it is actively breaching the UN Charter.

That last provision is not abstract. It is a direct indictment of Russia’s conduct since 2022, and its logic extends to any P5 member that uses military force in violation of the Charter while simultaneously wielding a veto to prevent the Council from responding. Stubb is making a normative argument dressed as an institutional one: a body in which a Charter-breaching state can veto the consequences of its own breach is not a security council — it is a protection racket.

What Makes the Book Exceptional

Stubb’s rare combination of scholarly depth and practitioner breadth is what distinguishes this book from the crowded field of post-liberal-order analysis. Most IR theorists write about power from the outside; most practitioners write memoirs. Stubb does something harder: he uses lived experience to test and illustrate theoretical propositions. The exchange of terse text messages with Sergei Lavrov hours after Russia’s 2022 invasion; the Davos session in which a Global South delegate told a room of Westerners, “You all just don’t get it, do you?”; the golf round with Trump followed by meetings at Mar-a-Lago — these are not name-dropping. They are primary sources.

The Finnish vantage point matters, too. Stubb is not borrowing pragmatic realism from a textbook — he is deploying a national tradition forged by 1,340 km of border with Russia, wartime territorial losses, and seven decades of operating in the grey zone between East and West. That tradition is one that Estonia knows well. The book’s credibility rests in part on the fact that its author’s country has lived the consequences of getting this wrong.

The West’s internal fracture

The book’s most significant analytical weakness is its treatment of the Global West as a coherent actor. Stubb acknowledges Trump’s disruption but frames it as a “momentary” phenomenon — a perturbation within a West that remains fundamentally committed to multilateralism. This is a debatable premise, and events since the book’s publication have not been kind to it. Timothy Garton Ash — one of Stubb’s own endorsers — has since stated publicly that there is no coherent geopolitical West left. The Greenland episode, the tariffs on NATO allies including Finland, the posture toward Ukraine: these are not aberrations from a stable Western consensus. They may be the new baseline.

Stubb’s optimism here may reflect his own strategic position — he has invested considerable political capital in “golf diplomacy” with Trump — but it leaves the book’s central prescription resting on a foundation it does not fully interrogate.

The religion variable

More surprising, given Stubb’s academic background, is the near-total absence of religion as an analytical variable. The Irish Times reviewer Michael Sanfey noted the blind spot in passing; it deserves a more sustained examination, because it operates at three distinct levels.

In the Global East, religious identity is not incidental to political structure — it is the structure. Russia’s war in Ukraine is inseparable from the Orthodox-civilisational ideology propagated by Patriarch Kirill and the “Russian world” doctrine. Iran’s foreign policy is theocratic by constitutional design. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s expanding footprint across Central Asia maps, imperfectly but meaningfully, onto Islamic governance traditions that secular institutional frameworks struggle to engage.

In the Global South, the picture is even more complex. Islam structures law, legitimacy, and political identity across most of Africa and the Middle East and large parts of South and Southeast Asia. Hindu nationalism is reshaping India’s foreign policy identity in ways that resist Stubb’s interest-based framing. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation represents a cross-regional bloc whose solidarity is explicitly religious, not geopolitical. Pentecostal and Evangelical Christianity is transforming political culture across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America in ways that are still poorly understood in European foreign policy circles. These are not footnotes to Stubb’s Global South — they are much of it.

But the most uncomfortable dimension of this blind spot is closer to home. Stubb’s “values-based realism” implicitly assumes a broadly secular West: a West whose shared liberal values are grounded in Enlightenment reason, not religious tradition. This was already a simplification, but it is becoming harder to sustain. The current US administration has moved further than any predecessor toward an explicitly Christian-nationalist political programme — in its judicial philosophy, its executive appointments, its foreign policy framing in the Middle East, and in the cultural politics that shape its domestic coalition. Within the EU, Hungary and Poland have institutionalised versions of the same tendency. These are not peripheral phenomena. They represent a structural fracture within Stubb’s Global West that his framework does not name.

This matters for a reason beyond description: the separation of church and state is not merely a preference of secular liberals. It is a precondition for the kind of values-based multilateralism that Stubb is advocating. A West that abandons internal secularism cannot credibly practise external pluralism. If liberal states cannot maintain the distinction between religious conviction and public law within their own borders, they lose the normative standing on which Stubb’s entire prescription depends.

There is, finally, a recursive problem in Stubb’s own argument. His “values-based realism” calls for engaging humbly with those who do not share Western values. But if he takes that call seriously, he cannot simultaneously assume that the separation of church and state is universally transferable, or treat its absence elsewhere as merely a developmental lag. Much of the world does not experience religion as something that can be decoupled from governance — and saying so is not to endorse theocracy, but to acknowledge the empirical reality that any serious engagement with the Global South must confront. Stubb’s silence on the variable is not neutral: it embeds an unexamined secular-liberal assumption that quietly undermines the internal consistency of the framework he is trying to build.

The Veto Problem — and a Provocation

Stubb is admirably clear-eyed about the resistance his UNSC reform proposal will face. He writes, in effect: unsurprisingly, those who hold the veto do not want to give it up — but unless they accept the need to rebalance power, they will forfeit the chance to shape what comes next. It is a good line. It is also, in institutional terms, insufficient.

The mechanism for Charter amendment is Article 108, which requires ratification by all five permanent members. This means the P5 must consent to any reform that reduces their own power. There is no procedural route to Stubb’s proposal that does not require the veto-holders to vote themselves out of their veto. The pressure of moral argument, however well-made, has not historically been sufficient to persuade great powers to surrender structural advantages. The Soviet Union did not reform itself out of existence; it collapsed.

This raises a question the book asks but does not fully answer: what would it actually take to force the necessary change?

History offers one answer. The League of Nations was not reformed — it was replaced. As early as 1943, the Allied powers began planning a successor body; by April 1946 the League had formally dissolved, transferring its assets and functions to the new United Nations. The institutional replacement happened because a world war had destroyed the old order and a new distribution of power made a new founding possible. Absent a comparable shock, reform from within has consistently failed.

The policy literature offers a second answer. Since at least 2004, when Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay first proposed a Concert of Democracies as an alternative international organisation, scholars and policymakers have argued that the way to break UNSC paralysis is not to reform the existing institution but to build a parallel one — a body of democratic states capable of authorising collective action when the Security Council is blocked by authoritarian vetoes. More radical versions of this proposal explicitly envisage the new body eventually superseding the Security Council as the primary authority for international collective action. This has never been institutionalised, but the intellectual architecture exists.

China has, in its own way, demonstrated the viability of the parallel-institution strategy: rather than reforming Western-led bodies, Beijing has built alternatives — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the BRICS New Development Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — as substitutes that extend its own normative and financial reach. The logic could, in principle, run in the other direction.

Which brings me to a provocation Stubb does not venture but his argument implies: could the remaining 188 UN member states — those without a permanent veto — credibly threaten to establish a successor institution, and use that threat to force the P5 to the table? Not a Concert of Democracies, which would immediately be read as a Western power play and lose the Global South, but a genuinely inclusive multilateral body designed from scratch on the principles Stubb articulates: representative composition, no single-state veto, Charter-breaching suspension. The 188 would not need to actually exit the UN — the credible threat of doing so might be enough. The UN depends on the participation of its members for its legitimacy; a walkout by the majority would be fatal to it.

The precedent cuts both ways. The League’s collapse required a world war to trigger. The UN’s replacement, if it comes, will require a political will to act collectively that currently does not exist. But political will is not fixed. It is built, often quickly, when the cost of inaction becomes visceral enough. Ukraine has already demonstrated that the Security Council cannot function when a permanent member is the aggressor. The next such crisis — whether in Taiwan, the Arctic, or somewhere else entirely — may make the argument undeniable.

Verdict

The Triangle of Power is a serious book by a serious statesman at a serious moment, and it deserves to be read as such. Its framework is analytically useful, its prescriptions are defensible, and its core insight — that the Global South will determine the shape of the coming order, and that the West has not yet understood this — is both correct and underappreciated in European foreign policy circles. The values-based realism formula has already demonstrated political traction, adopted by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and debated across European chancelleries.

Its weaknesses are real but do not invalidate the project. The West is more fractured than Stubb allows, the Global South is less coherent than his framework requires, and religion — as civilisational force, as structural determinant of governance, and as a live fault line within Western liberalism itself — is conspicuously absent from an analysis that claims to engage seriously with global diversity.

The UNSC reform proposal is the book’s most original and most vulnerable contribution. It is logically impeccable and institutionally nearly impossible. But making the argument clearly and loudly is not futile: it names the problem correctly, establishes the normative standard against which the P5’s resistance will be judged, and — perhaps most importantly — starts to make the unthinkable thinkable. If the existing institution cannot be reformed, it will eventually be replaced. The question Stubb’s book implicitly raises, without quite answering, is whether the world can afford to wait for the shock that makes replacement possible.

Recommended, with the caveats noted. Read it alongside Joni Askola’s sharper, shorter counterpoint in the Kyiv Post — “The Illusion of Value-Based Realism” — for a sense of what the book looks like from the perspective of those for whom accommodation is not an option.