Central Asia in the Wolf World

Marc Saxer talks to Vlast about his new book

“The end of a world order signals the beginning of an age of uncertainty. Decisions with long-term consequences must be made when no one can predict what the world will look like even a year from now.”

With these words Marc Saxer introduces his new book, Geopolitical Conflict in the Wolf World: Great Power Competition and the Illiberal Revolt Against the Liberal Order, published with Bloomsbury, which he is presenting in a tour across Asia.

Saxer is an author, strategist, and political analyst living and working in Asia for more than 20 years. He sat down with Vlast in Almaty to discuss both his argument and the potential repercussions for Central Asia.

Where did you get the idea for the book?

We can start with the title, which could sound ominous, right? In fact, it’s a quote from Thomas Hobbes. As he wrote in the 17th century, when order collapses and the mighty prey on the weak and the law of the jungle rules, man is wolf to man, homo homini lupus est. What struck me is that there are a lot of parallels between that world and the one that we see emerging today.

We see the end of unipolarity, an erosion of US hegemony, and the end of Pax Romana. We see the return of great power rivalry and an escalation of geopolitical conflict.

If you take, for instance, the numbers of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, in 2025, there were more violent conflicts as well as more interstate wars than at any point since World War II. Saying that this is the end of Pax Americana is not just an opinion.

We are walking into a world where order is crumbling, where great powers break international law, even ridicule human rights, actually undermine, defund international organizations. It is a more anarchical world. It is a disorderly world, and I call this the wolf world.

The analysis put forward in the book is therefore not just at the international level, but it tries to also look at the domestic dimension. This is how the second part of the title–the illiberal revolt against the liberal order–came to be.

In the book you talk about a crisis of liberalism. Can you explain where you see the crisis originating from?

The liberal heavens are collapsing, the liberal international order is becoming obsolete. Very interestingly we have these illiberal revolts prominently in western liberal democracies. The Trump’s, the Modi’s, the Bolsonaro’s, the Netanyahu’s are actually attacking liberal elements of liberal democracy. And I it's a mutual reinforcing cycle, which I call the twin crisis of liberalism.

Interestingly, within these illiberal forms of politics we also find calls for peace. For example, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to stop the war in Ukraine.

What we are seeing is that greater, middle, and smaller powers become more transactional, interest driven. Most of these interests are material, geopolitical, and geoeconomic. I do not see a systemic rivalry or an ideological battle. I think these are narratives that originate in the US. And they do not have a lot of traction here in the region or, frankly, much explanatory power.

On the one hand, we are having a discourse that understands this illiberal revolt as an assault on democracy, but I’m not entirely sure if that is what’s happening. For example, what kind of institutions is the Trump administration attacking? That’s the court system, rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and so on, right? When you compare it to the rest of the world, from Thailand to Brazil, from Israel to India, you can trace similarities. Illiberal forces attack liberal institutions, not necessarily democratic institutions.

Once you make that differentiation, and define democracy as the rule of the majority, the rule of the people, then you may even argue that some of the illiberal forces are abiding by this. You see high election turnout in most of these illiberal countries.

So, in countries where illiberal forces are attacking liberal institutions, this creates more competition?

In a certain way, democracy is being revitalized, but liberalism is under attack. We might actually see a divorce between liberalism and democracy.

We are living a populist moment. The common person on the street would tell you they have three main problems: one, that things will probably get worse; two, that they are not being told the whole truth about the extent of the problems; and three, that they will be the ones paying the price. With welfare cuts and young people being sent to war all around the world, these issues are being felt directly. And illiberal forces are thriving in this fertile soil.

There is huge anger and frustration with the policies that have been implemented by the liberal establishment over the last 30 years. So this is actually the fallout of three decades of neoliberalism.

It wasn’t any natural law that forced us to offshore our entire manufacturing sectors, or that forced us not to invest in our infrastructure, our health system, or in our education. Every day, people see that a lot of things are not functioning properly anymore, with their economies crumbling and their social welfare under threat. This makes them very angry, making it easier for an illiberal counter-revolt.

Meanwhile, whereas illiberal forces have taken power in the US, other countries, like Kazakhstan, have tried to cozy up to Trump.

It happened all over the world. As countries saw that Trump was putting a new agenda on the table, they wanted to be on the good side of it. It’s very transactional, look at the issue with tariffs, for example. Sometimes countries try playing for time, sometimes playing for favor.

Is this the way so-called “middle powers” end up behaving?

“Middle power” is a very fashionable term at the moment. We have an intensification of great power rivalry, especially between the US and China, which means that a lot of global challenges cannot be tackled via multilateral institutions, which are paralyzed. And the question is: How do you navigate this wolf world without getting hurt?

Smaller and middle powers usually do not want to choose sides, but rather keep their options open and have as much room for maneuver as possible.

But how much space for maneuver do you actually have? If we look at technologies, the Pax Silica and the Chinese strategy are exclusionary. For smaller and middle powers, it is very difficult to basically play on both sides. This is the same when it comes to critical minerals, rare earths. What happens if you end up on the sharp end of a great power?

What role do you see for Central Asia in this wolf world?

The wolf world creates a new chessboard with three primary theaters of geopolitical conflict. These are defined by major challengers to US hegemony. That is: Russia in Europe, Iran in the Middle East, and China in East Asia.

Central Asia is in the middle between all of these three theaters. That brings challenges, but also opportunities. If we look at disrupted connectivity, for example, I think Central Asia stands to profit.

Central Asian economies rely on commodity exports, which has its pros and cons. As development models go, it does not necessarily have much to do with the global crisis of cheap labor, but it does bring in the challenge of climbing up the global value chain. But what if the ladder has been kicked away? And, now the question is: What kind of development model is going to work in this world?

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