Power politics in the age of AI

The global order is entering a harder-edged phase of realism, in which power increasingly rests on the ability to compel rather than the authority to persuade. Across regions, calculations of immediate advantage are steadily displacing commitments to principles and institutions, and concern for the human consequences of power.Foreign policy is increasingly reduced to immediate instruments of pressure — sanctions, energy access, technological dominance, financial coercion, and military deterrence — while the long-term ethical consequences receive diminishing attention.

This shift is visible across multiple theatres. In Venezuela, recent developments around political power and the country’s oil sector have been viewed by some as a strategic success after years of collapse. Yet the country’s political and economic future remains uncertain, and the episode raises a deeper question that extends beyond Venezuela: when external power reshapes, or seeks to reshape, the internal order of a sovereign state, what ethical framework governs the process, and where are the limits of acceptable intervention?

A similar dynamic is visible in Cuba. Faced with severe economic distress, tightening sanctions, fuel shortages, and internal strain, the country appears acutely vulnerable. Whether or not political transformation follows, the pattern is clear: economic coercion, strategic isolation, and control over financial lifelines are becoming central instruments of 21st century statecraft.

The humanitarian consequences of these tools remain far less debated than their strategic utility.The same logic is evident elsewhere. From the war of attrition in Ukraine to tensions involving Iran and the wider West Asia, from technological containment strategies to the weaponisation of supply chains, international relations are becoming increasingly transactional and technologically driven.

States continue to pursue interests, as they always have, but the norms of restraint and accountability that once moderated power are weakening, and with them any sustained concern for its human consequences.The practice of realpolitik is not new. Great powers have always acted strategically.

What is changing is the weakening of restraint and the growing detachment of power from any broader ethical purpose.Moral purpose of powerFor much of the 20th century, despite its contradictions, the United States provided both strategic leadership and a normative framework for international order. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points introduced the principle of national self-determination into diplomacy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms extended the idea that peace depends not only on military balance, but on freedom of speech, worship, want, and fear.These principles were imperfectly applied, yet they established a key proposition: power, to remain legitimate, requires a moral purpose beyond domination.

That proposition found its modern expression in figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Gandhi’s confrontation with imperial power demonstrated the political force of non-violent moral resistance, while South Africa’s democratic transition under Mandela showed that reconciliation could coexist with political transformation, and that restraint could itself become a form of strategic strength. Their authority rested not on material power, but on ethical legitimacy.

Today, however, the international system is drifting away from that tradition at the very moment when technological change makes ethical guardrails more necessary than ever.Artificial intelligence is entering core domains of state power — surveillance, cyber operations, autonomous weapons systems, strategic analysis, and target selection. As machine-learning systems begin to influence lethal decisions, the risk is not only technical error but moral detachment.

Human judgment, empathy, and proportionality risk being displaced by algorithmic efficiency. Warfare risks becoming more automated, precise, and psychologically distant from its consequences.This is no longer theoretical.

It is the normalisation of systems in which accountability is diffused and moral responsibility obscured behind technological complexity.At the same time, institutions that historically shaped public morality are weakening. Organised religion commands less authority among younger generations.

Political institutions are increasingly mistrusted. Ideological certainties have fractured.Narrow opportunismYet this does not mean that societies have ceased to search for justice and meaning.

Climate movements, digital rights campaigns, and youth-led mobilisation across societies suggest that ethical concerns remain powerful. What is being rejected is not morality itself, but the selective invocation of universal values alongside narrow geopolitical opportunism.This widening gap between technological power and moral responsibility is becoming one of the defining challenges of the century.

This tension is increasingly visible in the Ind