Gurri’s Avalanche Has No Blueprint

Martin Gurri’s column arrives like the Category 5 hurricane he invokes. The post-Cold War rules-based order was never rules or order, he argues. It was a polite fiction masking American decline and elite self-preservation. Trump has torn the fiction away. The world will never be the same.
That thesis is partly right. But the essay does two things at once, and the second is more interesting than the first. Gurri is not merely describing a shift in world politics. He is prosecuting a status war, and understanding it as such reveals both what he gets right and what he leaves dangerously unexamined.
Gurri sets up two rival coalitions with surgical clarity. On one side stand the transnational grandees of the rules-based order: UN secretaries-general, EU presidents, Davos regulars, Obama-era foreign policy veterans. Their prestige derives from what Stephen Turner would call rituals of competence. Consultations, proclamations, joint statements, and the specialized dialect of de-escalation, process, and international law. These are not primarily tools for solving problems. They are membership badges. To speak the language is to belong. To demand outcomes is to be gauche.
Opposing them is the coalition Gurri champions: Trump, Milei, Bukele, and the broader populist-nationalist network that prizes decisiveness, disruption, and measurable results over procedural theater. Gurri’s rhetorical strategy is deliberate. He reframes deliberation as paralysis, restraint as cowardice, and multilateralism as a euphemism for free-riding. The British Navy reduced to 63 ships, most in dry dock. Von der Leyen prioritizing her weekend over a regional emergency. Starmer’s Diego Garcia reversal dictated by domestic Muslim vote calculations. Carney’s support offered with regret. These are not policy failures in Gurri’s telling. They are public unmaskings. The old elite’s expertise exposed as performance, their authority as illusion.
Turner’s analysis of expertise supplies the deeper diagnosis Gurri only half-articulates. The rules-based class did not possess transferable, scientific knowledge of global systems. What they possessed was tacit, environment-specific know-how: habits of slow-motion crisis management, institutional continuity, and negotiated ambiguity. Those habits were adapted to a world of frozen conflicts and deferred consequences. The Oslo peace process that produced the Second Intifada. The JCPOA that bought Iran time to boast about eleven bombs. When Trump introduces rapid escalation, targeted pressure, and regime-level stakes, the old routines become not merely ineffective but incomprehensible. The elites are de-skilled in real time. Their Zoom calls and joint statements are the muscle memory of a vanished environment.
Gurri is therefore right that something irreversible has occurred. The interpretive monopoly is broken. Legitimacy is no longer conferred by fidelity to process. It is now contested between process-based and outcome-based claims, and that contest will not be resolved by proclamation.
But here Turner’s caution, underplayed by Gurri, demands a hearing. The new coalition is not immune to the fragility of expertise. It excels at breaking systems and forcing outcomes under uncertainty. It is far less practiced at the harder task: reproducing stable coordination once the old scaffolding is gone. Scouring the swamp and declaring a world open for business assumes that American preponderance plus willpower can manage what follows. Turner would warn that the knowledge required to stabilize second-order effects, new alliance architectures, long-term reconstruction, the tacit norms that prevent entropy from hardening into permanent disorder, is itself fragile and easily overestimated. A revolution in who counts as an expert changes who gets believed. It does not automatically confer better knowledge on the believers.
Gurri’s own earlier work, The Revolt of the Public (2018), supplies the cultural backdrop his column assumes but does not state. The digital age empowered networked publics to challenge elite narrative control. Trump’s second-term foreign policy is that revolt projected onto the global stage: a populist vanguard rejecting the priestly class that presumed to manage history on its behalf. The Iran war, in this reading, is not merely a military campaign. It is the moment the priestly class’s claim to superior wisdom gets empirically tested in public view, with consequences that cannot be papered over by a Monday crisis meeting.
The honest question Gurri leaves hanging is whether the shift from process legitimacy to outcome legitimacy improves the quality of decisions or merely accelerates the cycle of illusion. Both coalitions operate with partial maps. The old guard overestimated its ability to manage stability through deliberate paralysis. The new coalition may overestimate its ability to control what instability produces. Gurri celebrates the avalanche. Turner would remind us that avalanches do not consult blueprints.
The rituals of the rules-based order have been desacralized. What replaces them will be decided not in Brussels or Davos but by who can actually navigate the high-entropy environment now unfolding. If the Trump-aligned coalition delivers a world that reflects American power without descending into wider chaos, its status claim will harden into new orthodoxy. If not, the public, now permanently awake to elite failure in both its old and new forms, will not be patient with the new priests any more than it was with the old.
Gurri has sounded the trumpet. The rest requires watching, analytically sober, as consequences become the judge. Neither coalition holds a monopoly on wisdom. Both are improvising. The only certainty is that the public, having tasted revolt once, will not easily accept new fictions as a substitute for results.