Rebalancing the World Order: Alexander Stubb on the South, Technology and Values-Based Realism

As the recording opens, Stubb delivers a blunt diagnosis: democracies have not coped with social media and modern technology and are losing that contest for now. He moves quickly to a second one; large technology companies are in many ways more powerful than states , which makes a once-theoretical question legitimate: is Anthropic or Facebook more powerful than Norway and Finland. It is less a provocation than a problem of scale — institutions designed centuries ago for slow negotiation now have to respond at the speed of platforms whose market values outrun national budgets.

A break like 1918, 1945 and 1989: why the order is being remade

Opposite him sits host Nicolai Tangen , chief executive of Norway's sovereign wealth fund and the steady voice of In Good Company. His guest Alexander Stubb leads a country of 5.5 million people, sharing a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia , voted the world's happiest for nine years in a row. As Finland's president he carries foreign policy, security and the role of commander-in-chief , and when Europe needs a channel to the White House, his phone is one that rings. The conversation draws on a book he published this year about how the old world fell apart and who will decide what comes next.

The book's core claim is straightforward: the world order is experiencing a rupture comparable to 1918, 1945 and 1989 . The expansion of a Western-led liberal order after the Cold War has ended, and two paths now compete — a multilateral, rules-based institutional order built on cooperation versus a multipolar, transactional order of chaos and conflict . Stubb is clear that the deciding actor is neither Washington nor Beijing; the Global South will decide , which is why he says he would rename his triangle the rectangle of power if he rewrote the title.

Why the South? Stubb offers three scales: population, economy and technology . Western dominance as an encompassing hegemony is over, but neither is Eastern dominance on the cards. India is now the most populous country, the Gulf states generate extraordinary prosperity, Africa's heavyweights Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt cannot be sidelined, and in Latin America Brazil and Argentina are back in the equation. His small-country preference is idealistic in the best sense: a multilateral system anchored in a reformed United Nations that finally gives the South agency inside it.

The South's choice and China's long game

That point becomes concrete in Africa. Stubb reports what African leaders told him: Europeans arrive wagging a finger, while the Chinese arrive with capital . His own image is starker: a Western leader lands at an airport built by the Chinese, drives down a highway built by the Chinese, and then holds a press conference in a hotel built by the Chinese to say you should not cooperate with the Chinese . The remedy he proposes is a shift in tone: a more dignified and humble foreign policy , less sermon, more concrete cooperation.

What did the West get wrong then? Not ill intent, Stubb answers, but captivity to identity . We are all prisoners of our own identities, he says — Scandinavians, Europeans, a generation whose professional lives were shaped inside a post-Cold War lens. That lens carried the quiet hubris that history had ended and the West would lead everyone along . Add a new U.S. administration that is markedly cooler on multilateralism, and the lens narrows further. The corrective, he argues, is to understand survival in this new world requires change, not insistence.

In the book's updated map a fourth power already sits at the table: the technology bloc . With former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney , Stubb describes a formation built on compute, data and artificial intelligence . He refines the phrase: not a separate pole so much as a new layer added to the balance between South, East, West and North . Technology is changing how we work and how the economy functions, how politics communicates, how war is fought, and how science reshapes what it means to be human. The keyword is access : whoever commands compute and energy — electricity, more precisely — sets the terms , which is why Stubb argues for a win-win design rather than a zero-sum transaction, not simply U.S. versus China.

The rectangle of power: technology as the fourth corner

Why have democracies adapted so badly? Stubb gives a history lesson. Modern democracy, as imagined by Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Hobbes in the 17th and 18th centuries, was built to be slow, cumbersome, negotiated and time-rich . Even the U.S. Constitution was drafted in secret as a compromise . Today everything demands an instant reaction. It is no accident the book's working title was democracy in a digital age versus its authoritarian alternative ; unable to cope with social media, democracies are losing that struggle and companies overshadow states.

That overshadowing is visible in markets as well; some firms' capitalizations exceed those of countries. The question Stubb repeats is therefore not rhetorical: is a leading frontier-model company truly more powerful than Finland. Political science struggles to answer because the definition of power has shifted; sovereignty is no longer measured only by territory and armies, but by control of data, chips and compute .

That shift leads to the next dilemma: will artificial intelligence equalize or amplify injustice ? Stubb says both futures remain open and depend on choices over the coming years. The most volatile mix is biology meeting technology ; genome sequencing and DNA manipulation could create different kinds of human beings. He cites Yuval Noah Harari's warning about a useless class ; in the contest between capitalism and communism, the working class remained useful even to capital — what if that usefulness disappears? The social contract between market promise and state capacity would then rest on what foundation. Apart from a handful like Demis Hassabis , who works on frontier AI control and good governance , he finds big-tech leaders worryingly thin on societal consequence.

Slow democracy, fast tech giants

On solutions Stubb aligns with Bill Gates's call for a domestic and international framework but makes it more tangible: the kind of frontier AI governance Hassabis and peers are developing. He notes regulation will always be one to three years behind , and that lag leaves apocalyptic risks — especially catastrophic cyber attacks — insufficiently covered. He would start in the United States, then Europe and China, and finally lift the result into the United Nations as the universal body. The purpose is singular: to domesticate this technological revolution in the service of preserving humanity.

Can Washington and Beijing actually cooperate once AI is embedded in weapons, cars, batteries and research? Stubb says yes, out of necessity . A balance of power already exists around critical minerals, compute capacity, chip power and company ecosystems , plus the choice of open versus closed systems . Dialogue cannot be only capital-to-capital; companies must be in the room, and so must Europe, the Global South and the rest of the world . Europe once became a regulatory superpower by setting trade standards ; it now needs to do the same for AI regulation , otherwise rules in a turbulent domain will never stick.

Here Stubb names his own formula: values-based realism . The values side will be familiar to any Nordic audience — democracy, freedom, rule of law, human rights, fundamental rights, international institutions, equality and justice . The realism side accepts that not everyone shares those values, even if he believes human rights are universal . Problems such as climate, artificial intelligence, energy, development and the environment cannot be solved by Helsinki and Oslo alone; producing compromise without compromising one's own values is the art. In his phrasing, you do not need to trade away principles to get results, but you do need to realize results require building compromise .

Values-based realism and three possible balances

That need explains the messy world of ad hoc coalitions . Stubb draws a sharp line between diplomacy and business: diplomacy seeks win-win and compromise , business often runs on zero-sum transactions . The world will not run on transactions but on solutions. He sketches three possible balances for the new order: first, a chaotic transactional world where conflicts multiply — Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan — and unholy alliances held together by interest rather than values proliferate; second, a multipolar but loosely ruled world anchored in pure state sovereignty with little compromise; third, regional integrations — EU, ASEAN, Mercosur, African Union — converging around a reformed United Nations . The reform's core is the Security Council : add at least one Latin American seat, two African seats and one Asian seat to the five veto-wielding permanents.

When the focus turns inward, Finland's happiness puzzle surfaces. Stubb starts from Maslow's hierarchy : basic needs are largely met as in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland. On top sits a shared understanding of equality and justice , which is then institutionalized as a welfare state, open economy and strong safety net . Education matters deeply; a civilized population that reads, follows and understands gives life meaning, closeness to nature completes it. Nine years at the top of the happiness ranking grew from that mix, though Finns do not walk the streets smiling all day, he notes. Measurement remains subjective, but the best method is still the simplest: ask people how happy they are on a scale from 1 to 10 .

Asked what most threatens that happiness, Stubb is unequivocal: polarization and inequality . The starkest case is the United States , today the most polarized liberal democracy. Identity, immigration and skin colour drive divisions, fed by the sense that globalization's promise that everyone would do well did not deliver ; when free trade or international institutions feel as if they no longer deliver for my needs , politics hardens. The antidote he proposes is dialogue, equal opportunity, and the sense that we are working for each other ; without that sense, division hardens, and no country — not Norway, not Finland — lives in a utopia.

From happiness and NATO to hybrid war and Europe

Finland's constitutional architecture provides an unexpected edge in this tense world. The president handles foreign, security and military affairs as commander-in-chief , the prime minister handles domestic affairs and the EU . Stubb stresses the president does not constitutionally meddle at home, but retains a megaphone as a value leader ; he does not decide the budget, which road gets built or which hospital is funded, but can set the bar on values, ethics and well-being. The decisive factor is the tie between president and prime minister . Having served as prime minister himself, he knows the choreography — this week, for instance, coordinating by phone on the Arctic summit in Rovaniemi . He jokes the reality is plain: the president is the chairman of the board, the prime minister is the chief executive , and pressure naturally sits with the latter.

Defence and Europe tie past to future. Finland did not join NATO after the Cold War , though Stubb was among the few who advocated it; joining the European Union instead secured Western integration. The deeper lesson came from the Winter War and the Continuation War of 1939-1944 : the potential for aggression from a large neighbour was never forgotten, so even outside NATO a strong and independent defence was kept — 64 F-18 fighters soon after the Cold War, conscription maintained, artillery bought on the secondary market . That left Finland so NATO-compatible that after applying on 17 May 2022, signing the Accession Protocol on 5 July and becoming the 31st ally on 4 April 2023 , it completed the fastest accession in alliance history. Today NATO is not in crisis but in transition : NATO 1.0 Cold War deterrence, NATO 2.0 peacekeeping in Kosovo and Afghanistan, now a phase where Europe carries more conventional burden as budgets move from 2% to 5% of GDP and defence industry booms . Hybrid warfare has become permanent: severed cables, drones closing airports, airspace violations, GPS jamming, cyber attacks and sabotage produce intimidation beneath the Article 5 threshold . For Ukraine Stubb expects a defence victory — as Finland defined in 1944, a small country that preserves its existence after a big neighbour denies its sovereignty has already won. On return from Kyiv he found Ukraine militarily, politically and financially stronger than at any point in the war , Russia's losses heavier on the battlefield and in the economy, and fuel queues and rationing after refinery strikes pushing more than half of Russians to say they want the war to end — yet the war will end only when the regime feels popular pressure, so a cold winter still lies ahead . On European leadership he points to the institutional layer of Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa plus Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz, Giorgia Meloni, Donald Tusk and, from outside, Keir Starmer . He has never seen Europe more united — Brexit united the 27, the Commission led on Covid vaccine procurement and distribution, and the war in Ukraine plus the energy crunch rallied the flag , with American pressure from the West adding geopolitical glue; his quip that he would rather see Canada as the 28th EU member than the 51st U.S. state captures the mood, alongside a vision of a 40-member geopolitical Europe and the realism that the closest path for the United Kingdom is to be brought as near as possible after amputating its leg with no medical reason . In closing, he describes President Trump as one of the most consequential American presidents , whose effectiveness Europeans underestimate; engagement — on NATO, Ukraine, and the 11 icebreakers (four built in Finland, seven in the United States) and joint Arctic training with thousands of U.S. troops — matters more than commentary. He links that pragmatism to a small-country tradition from Kekkonen's sauna to Niinistö's ice hockey with Putin, now golf as the new sauna , arguing power for Finland comes from influence, which comes from information, which comes from networks, which come from personal relationships . The ethic traces to his 91-year-old father, a former NHL talent scout in Europe for four decades , soon the subject of a book titled How Can I Help . His routine is curatorial — Financial Times, Economist, New York Times, Foreign Affairs and fact books, a 1+1+1 rule (one hour book, one hour exercise, one hour phone) he admits he breaks on the phone — and athletic — short-course triathlon at 58 alongside pilates and yoga , with a wry nod to Christian Blumenfelt . His biggest personal failure, he says, was taking attacks during his year as party chairman and near-two years as prime minister too personally , before learning to separate institution from person. His hidden talent is banana pancakes — two eggs, one banana, oats, olive oil , sparingly for cholesterol. And his advice to the young is four words inherited from his parents — dream, believe, work hard, succeed — where success is not running the fund or holding the presidency but living a meaningful life each day by helping others , staying curious, flexible and ready for many careers.