I mentioned a while ago that I was working on a paper on the not-at-all scary little topic of “the future of the rules-based international order”, having been commissioned by NATO to write it. Well, it was finally published online in early November last year, having been submitted just before Easter (ie early April). The full reference with link is given below. Here I want to describe something of the background to the paper as well as the process of getting it to print, which took about 18 months from the initial email canvassing the idea to the final version appearing on the internet. Much of this post was written late last year and only very recently completed.
The backstory to this is that I was asked to help out on the Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 conducted by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, just on three years ago (NATO ACT 2023). This led to being asked to travel to Washington DC in June 2023 to present at a symposium intended to bring together military planners, intelligence analysts, and foresight/futures analysts (Voros 2023). It was here that I “updated my priors” (to speak Bayesian for a moment) regarding the relationship between intelligence analysts and futures analysts. For some time up to then I had considered them siblings (even earlier, I had thought them merely cousins); but the Washington Symposium convinced me that they are, in fact, fraternal twins. And I said as much in my presentation at the followup conference in Helsinki the following year—the first NATO Allied Foresight Conference (Voros 2024). This comment has since generated some followup interest and research (Stucki 2026).
As part of the Helsinki presentation, I showed a diagram of the Viable System Model (Espejo 1999; Hayward 2004; Hoverstadt 2008), for which “System 4” is the “outside-and-then” Intelligence function, as opposed to the “inside-and-now” Control function, System 3. When speaking about this during our teaching in the Master of Strategic Foresight, Peter Hayward and I would joking call System 4 the “4-sight system”. The only difference I see between these activities—conventional intelligence and foresight—is the time horizon of the “then”-ness they are interested in, in this outside-and-then perspective: more proximal for conventional intelligence analysis, and more distal for foresight analysis. But that is a fuzzy and indistinct crossover zone with no clear boundary, a discussion that is something for another place.
After contributing to the SFA23, I was asked by the-then Branch Head of Strategic Foresight at ACT to think about the challenges for (global) governance that might be emerging, out to the year 2045, with the indication that there was a program of thematic research papers being considered, of which this topic was one that was on the table. This led to my initial immersion into the field of International Relations, as governance at the global level tends to sit in this broad area. I cooked up a simple general model of what constitutes “governance”, as a process applicable at multiple levels, and sent along some initial thoughts and writing on the topic, which seems to have been received quite favourably.
Nothing much more happened on this front for a while—ACT people were busy spreading the word on the SFA23 and taking it out to relevant parts of NATO. One of the major, if not the core, dynamics in the SFA23 is the “international order in transition”. So, when I heard back formally from NATO ACT again, it was an email in April 2024, this time with the mooted topic being “the future of the rules-based international order”. After gulping at the sheer expansion of scale of the new proposed task, compared to the earlier one, I of course said yes, and started working out what they wanted and how I might go about delivering it. There was an initial brief which I was invited to adapt and submit as the project proposal. Then came the prep for the Helsinki conference, and the idea was to meet and discuss the structure and format of the proposed paper with the Action Officer assigned to help me through the process of getting this done while we were both there, in person. As it turned out, he was not able to make it to Helsinki, so the discussion was delayed a bit more.
Coinciding with the Helsinki conference was the news that several key positions within NATO relevant to the structure within which the proposed project was situated were changing. Of course, the biggest news was that Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg would be handing over to Mark Rutte. But the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, who heads up the part of NATO’s military side tasked with working out how to fight, and therefore deter, the next war, was also changing. The Strategic Foresight Branch sits in this part of NATO. Add to this, the Branch Head of Strategic Foresight, who had recruited me to the SFA23 and given me the task of being the “bad cop” in my double-act with Andy Hines in Helsinki (he was the “good cop” talking about the need for foresight), was being recalled by his country’s Defence Minister to head up a defence innovation research institute. So, major changes were happening in the NATO organisational structure which could impact the go/no-go decision on the thematic paper project. As anyone knows who has ever been in an organisation when major personnel changes happen, existing proposed projects are usually put on hold and re-evaluated against the direction set by the new decision-maker(s). This meant the project start time was delayed from, initially, July to August to October to November.
By early November, I was beginning to surmise that it probably wasn’t going to go ahead at all, thinking that the new leadership may have had other plans or priorities for researching the future strategic environment, and would choose to undertake and implement those instead. So, I went ahead and did another of my trips to Canberra to teach at the Australian Defence College, something I’d been doing since 2019 (and remotely during the worst of Covid in 2020 and some of 2021). Therefore, it was a little bit of (but not entirely) a surprise when I got an email in mid November while in Canberra saying that, yes, it is going ahead, after all, and by-the-way with a start date of 31st December 2024. I can only assume that the project funding had been approved and very clearly earmarked for a 2024 start date.
As you might imagine, being asked to write a paper on the future of the rules-based international order, immediately after the re-election of Donald Trump to the Whitehouse, meant that I needed to build in some ability to research materials and write about something while waiting to see what he would decide to do and in which direction he would seek to move the United States in particular, and the NATO Alliance more generally. This was not entirely a mystery, in broad overview, since he had made his views on much of the international system, including NATO, abundantly clear during his first term. And there was of course Project 2025 which everyone was expecting to become the primary blueprint for “Trump 2.0”. So I mostly researched and wrote some initial text concerning the deeper historical background (what eventually became Appendix A) during the first part of January. By then there was plenty of stuff emerging in the commentariat about: possible future directions; how allies and others might be treated; whether tariffs were coming; and, of course—a topic of keen interest to those who had commissioned this work—what could end up happening to NATO itself. But as the scale, scope and, above all, speed, of Trump’s re-making of the international order began to unfold, it was necessary to readjust some of the text, the research pathways, and indeed some of the sources, since pretty much each new day brought some new major shift in direction that somehow needed to be taken into account, so that the paper would not be out of date before the electrons had even finished fluorescing on a reader’s screen.
The potential for this type of “shifting sands” strategic environment meant that an overarching framework was necessary that could accommodate whatever the future would ultimately throw at us (and it was already throwing some disconcerting curve-balls at that early stage). However, as it happened, by mid-2024, most simulations of the coming US presidential election I had seen were having Trump win around 55-60% of the time. So the need for agile flexibility in the framework was already part of the roughed-out early design. Indeed, the Three Horizons had already been chosen as part of that framework on the basis that it specifically includes a ‘transition’ zone (Horizon 2, H2) between a prior past system (Horizon 1, H1) and new emerging future system (Horizon 3, H3). It was pretty clear from the initial scoping of the project back in April-June of 2024 that the Post-Cold War international order was the old H1, and that we were by now some way into moving through the (“often turbulent”) dynamics of H2. This meant scoping out what possible future H3 “images” were competing for primacy, the explicit examination of such images being a key part of the Futures Triangle view of how the eventual lived future comes to be—namely, some combination of the weight of the past, the push of the present and the pull of the future (Inayatullah 2023). The then-current blossoming uncertainties in early 2025 could therefore simply, at least in part, be folded into the analytical view taken, since the H2 zone is already to be considered “turbulent”. Expecting turbulence tends to help you weather it a bit more effectively than not expecting it, or worse, imagining that it won’t happen at all. The ancient Stoics knew this two millennia ago, which is why they undertook the practice of praemeditatio malorum, the premeditation on adversity (Pigliucci 2017, 151).
I won’t spend too much more time on the details of the paper here, both since I wrote it in such a way as to lay out this framework very clearly so that readers are equipped with the tools they need to undertake their own investigation, and since you can go ahead and read it and see for yourself. But the paper states explicitly that, while it seeks to lay out an overall analytical framework to examine this fairly vast topic, the preliminary conclusions it draws are merely a ‘first-cut’ view of the future of the RBIO as seen from the perspective of early 2025. It is fully to be expected, by design, that the initial conclusions drawn would be revisited in new analyses to be undertaken at some later stage, in some future iteration of an examination of the strategic environment. So, it was in this way that the paper was intended to be useful beyond what might have been a very short half-life—in the short term, for the initial conclusions it draws and strategic-directional insights it might give on the presently-emerging dynamics of the international system; but also in the longer term, by providing a framework through which future repeat analyses could be undertaken, with any ‘delta’ change (as it were) between earlier and newer analyses able to be quite straightforwardly compared and contrasted.
The delays introduced by the turmoil of the approach to international relations of the second Trump presidency meant that the paper (not surprisingly!) slipped its initial proposed submission date. Several conversations with the Action Officer over this time helped iron out much of the uncertainty around how to proceed in such a volatile contextual environment, as well as to what degree of detail it should be taken. To their credit NATO ACT recognised that this paper, attempting to scope out the future of the world, was being written at the very time that the world was literally changing around us daily, almost literally before our very eyes. But, only so much slack can be cut in such projects, so it was finally submitted just before Easter 2025 (ie early April) essentially a year after the initial email suggesting the project. There then ensued several rounds of review by the strategic analyst reviewers within ACT, running to many pages of detailed feedback. Suffice it to say that the futurist analytical view I was tasked to give was then necessarily tempered by the practical reality of the paper having to come out into a fairly volatile international political environment, not to mention with a NATO imprimatur stamped upon it, albeit at (in theory) slightly “arm’s length”. This required some rather more careful diplomatic language than that with which I had submitted it. That said, amongst the comments suggesting some of the pointier language be toned down, there were also several requests for further clarification of method and approach, and these most assuredly helped the paper become a much better one than the one that was initially submitted.
After these reviews were concluded in August, it then went into the production process. I was then sent proofs to mark up and correct, and it ultimately came out in early November, as noted above. The complete citation information is given here:
Voros, Joseph. 2025. “The Future of the Rules-Based International Order.” OPEN Publications, Thematic Papers, vol. 10, no.6. https://openpublications.org/2025.
The image at the top of the post is taken from the foresight radar that Futures Platform created based on the paper. I had joined the Content Advisory Board of Futures Platform at around the same time as the paper project was being set up, namely late 2024. So, it is now possible to both read the paper as it was published in late 2025, as well as take a look at how the very skilled futurists at Futures Platform have interpreted that text and re-imagined it as a foresight radar, something that can only add to the potential to ‘grok’ what was, and remains, a pretty broad and, at times, somewhat overwhelming topic.
The large ‘gap’ at the top/front of the radar was put in deliberately to convey the idea that “unthought futures” (which can and usually do catch us out) are often right there in front of us, and yet we still don’t see them. I wanted to play with that idea so that the form of the radar—with that incongruous ‘gap’—prompts the viewer to immediately consider these Unthought Futures (and what that sector name means) front and centre before wandering off towards the other more familiar (and somewhat better-understood and -mapped) sectors of the radar. This sneaky little “dark pattern” could be considered a special kind of “stealth” futures that Andy Hines (2000, 2003) had written about all those years ago… After all, most of the job of the futurist is to help shift people’s thinking; given the resistance that many if not most people have to changing their minds, this is perhaps generally best done as sneakily as possible… 😁
The paper ultimately led to my being asked to present on this topic at the 2nd NATO Allied Foresight conference in Rome in October, and the TechDef25 conference in Budapest in December, 2025, but that is something for the next blog post…
References
The Voroscope 