‘The Jungle is Back’
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Anti-ICE signs during protest in San Diego. Photo: Micah Fong
For much of the 20th century, international relations lived on a powerful hope, that the raw struggle for power could be disciplined, fenced in, and gradually civilised. Late US President Woodrow Wilson gave this hope its most enduring metaphor. The world, he believed, need not remain a jungle governed by brute force; through law, institutions, and collective security, it could be transformed into something closer to a zoo, although still dangerous, still hierarchical, but regulated, predictable, and constrained by rules. That vision never fully described reality, but it shaped behaviour by shaping expectations. Today, that hope has quietly expired.
What we are witnessing is not simply a rise in conflict or a breakdown of diplomacy. International politics has always been violent, selective, and unequal. What is different today is the disappearance of restraint as a governing norm. Power no longer feels obliged to justify itself convincingly. Institutions still speak, but they no longer command. Law remains present, but increasingly as language rather than limit. The jungle is back, not as rhetoric, but as structure.
This return did not begin with any single event. Yet recent developments make the shift difficult to ignore. Israel’s sustained and widening military actions, from the prolonged devastation of Gaza, to repeated strikes in southern Lebanon, to covert and overt operations linked to Iran, and even escalatory signalling toward Gulf actors, such as Qatar, illustrate how geographical restraint has collapsed alongside political caution.
The United States’ direct military strikes against alleged Iranian nuclear sites, its earlier interventionist posture toward Venezuela, and its unusually open endorsement of civilian protests against the Iranian government further blur the line between diplomacy, coercion, and regime pressure. These actions are no longer framed as exceptional; these are justified as routine instruments of “security management.” Security is once again understood primarily in terms of capability, not commitment; deterrence, not diplomacy.
This moment vindicates an old but uncomfortable insight. As German-American political scientist Hans Morgenthau once warned, international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. For decades, liberal internationalism sought to soften this struggle through institutions and norms. It did not eliminate power politics, but it placed a moral and procedural tax on its use. That tax is now being steadily dismantled.
The contemporary revival of explicitly nationalist rhetoric, captured vividly in the MAGA refrain that “the jungle is back” does not merely describe this shift; it celebrates it.
Consider the condition of global institutions. The United Nations was never meant to abolish great-power rivalry; it was designed to manage it. Its effectiveness rested on a fragile assumption: that major powers, despite competition, shared an interest in preserving minimum restraints. That assumption is increasingly untenable.
In 2025 and 2026, repeated emergency UN sessions on Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and Ukraine produced familiar outcomes, such as statements, condemnations, draft resolutions, followed by paralysis. The spectacle remains, but the authority has thinned.This is not institutional failure in the dramatic sense; it is institutional hollowing. The UN today functions less as a site of decision and more as a platform for narrative positioning. Law is invoked selectively, sovereignty defended conditionally. When enforcement depends on power alignment rather than principle, legality becomes rhetorical.
The United States’ withdrawal or distancing from several international commitments and forums reinforces this pattern: institutions are treated as optional instruments, not binding constraints. Institutions survive procedurally, but their constraining capacity erodes substantively.
The consequences are visible across regions. In West Asia, the expansion of strike zones and pre-emptive doctrines has blurred the line between deterrence and habitual escalation. Military action is no longer exceptional; it is normalised as routine security governance. In South Asia, balancing behaviour has become more explicit, with threats and counter-threats treated as legitimate instruments of stability rather than failures of diplomacy. In Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine continues to demonstrate how assurances collapse when confronted by force, reinforcing a harsh lesson about vulnerability in an anarchic system.
These developments differ in context and legality, but they converge in effect. Together, they confirm what American political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued decades ago: in anarchy, there is no automatic harmony. Order emerges not from goodwill, but from power configurations. When those configurations shift, norms adjust, or collapse.
Domestic political incentives accelerate this trend. Leaders operate within media and electoral ecosystems that reward visible resolve and punish hesitation. Strength must be performed. Restraint struggles to compete with spectacle. In such conditions, legality becomes an obstacle to be managed rather than a framework to be respected.
Precision warfare, remote technologies, cyber tools, and surveillance dominance further reduce the perceived cost of using force. Violence appears controllable, escalation manageable. History suggests otherwise, but political temptation often outweighs historical caution.
For middle powers and states of the Global South, this transformation is particularly destabilising. They are urged to uphold a “rules-based order” whose rules appear elastic and whose enforcement is asymmetrical. Strategic autonomy becomes harder to sustain when sovereignty itself seems negotiable, respected for some, suspended for others. Hedging, diversification, and quiet deterrence replace normative alignment. As historian E.H. Carr famously observed, the utopia of one is the ideology of the other. Today’s order increasingly reflects the ideology of the powerful, thinly disguised as universality.
Perhaps, the most corrosive consequence lies in the lesson being learned across capitals. States without credible deterrents watch how guarantees fail, how institutional assurances evaporate, and how violations are absorbed without decisive cost. States with hard power, by contrast, enjoy insulation, even when norms are openly breached. The implication is uncomfortable but unmistakable: survival flows from capability. This does not automatically translate into proliferation, but it reshapes strategic imagination. When law cannot be relied upon, self-help regains legitimacy.
The danger, however, is cumulative rather than immediate. No single act destroys international order. What weakens it is repetition without consequence. Each violation that passes lowers the threshold for the next. Over time, exception becomes routine, and routine becomes common sense. Once that happens, reversal becomes extraordinarily difficult. Norms do not collapse dramatically; they erode quietly, through practice.
This is why framing the present moment as mere disorder misses the point. What we are witnessing is a reordering, that is less constrained by institutions, more openly hierarchical, and increasingly comfortable with coercion. The jungle was never fully eliminated, but it was partially fenced. Those fences are now being dismantled, not always violently, but decisively.
Woodrow Wilson’s ‘zoo’ mattered not because it described reality accurately, but because it disciplined ambition. It imposed limits on imagination as much as on behaviour. Today, that imaginative restraint has weakened. Power is no longer something to be apologised for; it is something to be displayed. Institutions remain, but they follow power rather than guide it.
The task ahead is not to romanticise a liberal order that never fully existed, nor to celebrate realism as moral clarity. It is to recognise, soberly, that international politics has entered a phase where restraint must be rebuilt under far harsher conditions. Ignoring the jungle does not civilise it; pretending the zoo still functions does not make it so. The jungle is back, not because the world has changed its nature, but because it has stopped pretending otherwise.
Dr. Zahoor Ahmad Mir is an Assistant Professor in the Social Science Department, Akal University, Bhatinda, Punjab. He writes on geopolitics, security, International Relations. mirzahoor81.m@gmail.com
Dr. Firdoos Ahmad Reshi is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in Cluster University, Srinagar. J&K. reshidous88@gmail.com. The views are personal.
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