*The Common Good Is Not Guaranteed*
by Cristina Di Silvio
“The real danger is not that the world becomes evil,
but that the good ceases to be considered necessary.”
Zygmunt Bauman
In 2026, the first year of the Trump administration can no longer be dismissed as a historical accident or a temporary populist deviation. It instead marks the moment when the international order ceased to automatically safeguard the common good, exposing a long-overlooked truth: global stability is not a structural given, but a repeatedly renewed political choice. That initial governing cycle marked a threshold. Not the collapse of the liberal order, but its unveiling. The international system continued to function, yet without the symbolic guarantee that the global common good, understood as a set of shared rules, cooperative expectations, and systemic responsibilities, remained its organizing principle. This transformation did not occur through a frontal rupture of multilateral institutions. It unfolded more subtly, and therefore more effectively, through a redefinition of leadership. Power was no longer framed as the capacity to ensure systemic stability, but as a negotiable asset, a lever of pressure, a transactional resource. Language preceded practice, legitimizing it. Within this framework, global public goods, collective security, open markets, climate cooperation, institutional predictability, were not formally rejected. They were reclassified. From foundational pillars of order to optional variables, subordinated to immediate utility and sovereign convenience. It is within this reclassification that the fragility of the common good becomes apparent. In complex systems, however, fragility does not imply collapse. On the contrary, it activates deep adaptive dynamics. The global common good persists not through structural rigidity, but through functional resilience. When weakened at the center, it re-emerges at the margins: networks of cooperation, selective agreements, informal practices sustained by actors who continue to operate even in the absence of an ordering leadership. This resilience comes at a cost. Systems under stress redistribute instability, generate asymmetries, and normalize uncertainty. The common good does not disappear, but becomes more fragile, more expensive to sustain, and more vulnerable to instrumentalization. To entrust its survival to systemic inertia alone is to abandon politics. The first year of the Trump era made clear that the global common good is not self-sustaining. It requires strategic intentionality, long-term vision, and a conscious management of ambiguity. When these conditions erode, the system does not implode; it enters a phase of controlled entropy, in which rules survive more by habit than by conviction. From a geopolitical standpoint, the most significant effect was not a power vacuum, but the erosion of trust as the immaterial infrastructure of international order. Long-standing U.S. allies began operating in a context of less automatic guarantees, while revisionist actors progressively tested the limits of a system increasingly shaped by strategic ambiguity rather than normative deterrence. Fragility and resilience thus manifested not through open crisis, but through the normalization of uncertainty. At the same time, an ongoing transformation accelerated: the shift from regulated multilateralism to a proliferation of asymmetric, personalized bilateral relationships, often detached from stable institutional frameworks. In this configuration, the common good continues to circulate in political discourse, but loses its ordering function. It becomes an object of contingent negotiation rather than a shared premise. Yet precisely in this exposed condition, it reveals an adaptive capacity that prevents its dissolution. Viewed from 2026, the first year of the Trump administration appears as a geopolitical laboratory. It did not create the fragility of the global common good, but rendered it visible, legitimate, and actionable. It demonstrated that the liberal international order was not sustained by structural automatism, but by a repeatedly enacted political choice whose reversibility had been widely underestimated. The lesson for contemporary analysis is unequivocal: international stability is not a natural condition, but a contingent construction. When the central power redefines its role in strictly functional terms, the system enters a grey zone in which the global common good is neither guaranteed nor abolished, but permanently exposed. It is within this condition of permanent exposure that the fate of today’s international order is decided: an order in which the common good has not vanished, but must be consciously chosen, supported, and defended, each time, by actors fully aware that its resilience is not free and that its fragility is not an anomaly, but its structural condition.
