Well - when someone asks, “So what do we say if China launches a special operation to seize Taiwan’s president, or Russia tries to do the same with Zelensky?” - the honest answer is this: we say exactly what we’ve always said - just without the comforting illusions. We try to prevent it; and if we can’t, we say plainly that we do not accept what has happened. As Richard Haass observed nearly a decade ago, paraphrasing Voltaire, “the fading liberal world order is neither liberal nor worldwide nor orderly.” That was not polemic but diagnosis. During the Cold War’s so-called “freedom crusade,” regime change was a routine instrument of U.S. statecraft, particularly in Latin America: Few examples: 👉 Guatemala (1954 code-named PBSuccess) – the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz. 👉Chile (1973) - the coup against Salvador Allende. 👉Argentina (1976 “U.S. “discreetly” advised the Argentine’s military more than a month before the actual coup that Washington would recognize the new regime, and that then CIA director George H.W. Bush briefed President Gerald Ford on a "possible" coup in Argentina almost two weeks before the military deposed Isabel Peron.”) 👉Panama (1989 - codenamed Operation “Just Cause”) - U.S. forces captured Manuel Noriega, officially over narcotics trafficking, in reality to reassert control and block political moves threatening U.S. interests around the Canal. And then there is Cuba (1961) - the Bay of Pigs invasion - where regime change was attempted and failed. Havana remains a standing reminder that even superpowers do not always get their way. Russia, meanwhile, already attempted a classic decapitation strike against Ukraine in 2022, aiming to kill or capture President Zelensky in the opening days of the invasion- and has continued targeting Ukraine’s leadership ever since. The ambition was familiar; the execution was not. Moscow wanted a swift special operation and instead delivered a case study in strategic incompetence. So no - this is not the end of the world order. It is the return of the world we once called “liberal,” but prefer to remember selectively. A world where norms are invoked when convenient, suspended when costly, and power ultimately arbitrates the edge cases. What feels shocking today is not that such operations exist. It is that others are now doing openly what the original custodians of the order once did confidently - and in what they considered “a righteous cause”. The difference is that we now live in an age of social media and political pornography, where every act of power is stripped of discretion, context, and ambiguity, and paraded in real time for moral outrage…