"The twin convictions of no war and no empire, the load-bearing walls of the long peace, are fast buckling." [load-bearing walls]
The article's central structural claim is that the normative foundations—not just institutions—of the long peace are collapsing, directly supporting the signal that erosion of these norms is enabling renewed aggression and imperial behavior.
Reasoning from this article
The article argues that the US invasion of Iraq (2003), Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war against Iran represent sequential violations of the anti-aggression norm by major powers, while post-Cold War humanitarian interventions eroded the anti-empire norm. This is a structural dynamic: once norm-violating behavior by hegemons goes unpunished, the normative constraint loses deterrent force for all actors, creating a permissive environment for further violations regardless of which specific states are involved.