International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1] from Ljubljana, regularly publishes in-depth analyses of political and security developments in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the wider international arena. In his article, “Who Do You Govern For? Manifesto of an Ordinary Person in a World Where States Defend Themselves While People Are Lost,” Dr. Cătălin Balog, an analyst and trainer with extensive expertise in intelligence, information security, and strategic communication, introduces the “ordinary-person test” as a framework for assessing political legitimacy and evaluating whether states and their leaders protect human security, freedom, dignity, and fairness. The article argues that governance should ultimately be judged by the impact of political decisions, economic policies, military strategies, and international alliances on the well-being, rights, and future prospects of ordinary people.
This article starts from a deliberately simple question applied to an increasingly complex world: who do states and their leaders govern for? From Romania to the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Gaza, Iran, the United States, China, Venezuela, Greenland, and even Sudan, the analysis shifts the centre of gravity from the state’s declared success to the consequences experienced by the ordinary person. Drawing on the concept of human security, the crisis of trust in institutions, the vulnerabilities generated by interdependence, and theories concerning the decline of complex political organisations, the article proposes an “ordinary-person test” as an instrument for evaluating governance. The test follows four essential dimensions: protection, the individual’s real capacity to shape his or her own life, fairness in the distribution of costs and benefits, and the system’s capacity to correct its mistakes. The manifesto argues that the state, power, the economy, the military, and alliances are not ends in themselves, but instruments whose existence is justified only insofar as they protect people’s lives, freedom, dignity, and future. The final question therefore becomes a fundamental test of legitimacy: after all the strategies, reforms, sacrifices, wars, and proclaimed victories, are the people for whom the state claims to exist actually better off or worse off?
KEYWORDS: human security; governance; state; power; citizen; legitimacy; strategic autonomy; interdependence; capacity for correction; ordinary-person test.
Motto: “Human development is the end; economic growth a means.”
UNDP, 1996
There is a question governments ask in public far too rarely before announcing a new reform, a new tax, a new rearmament programme, a new sanction, a new military operation, or yet another “historic victory”: after all this, will the ordinary person be better off or worse off? The question is not, first and foremost, about the state, the party, the president, the sovereign rating, GDP, the stock market, the defence industry, or the alliance, but about the person in whose name all of these claim to exist. That is precisely why it is an almost indecently simple question for our age, in which every major public decision arrives wrapped in strategies, acronyms, indicators, and justifications. Yet its simplicity is also what makes it dangerous: it shifts the centre of gravity from the intention of the ruler to the consequence experienced by the governed and forces power to measure its success not by what it declares, but by what it produces.
In 1994, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) proposed shifting the centre of the security concept from territory to people and from armaments to development; in 2012, the United Nations General Assembly established a common understanding of “human security” as a people-centred approach designed to address threats to survival, livelihoods, and dignity. Three decades later, the balance sheet is paradoxical: the Human Development Report 2025 warned that, excluding the exceptional crisis years of 2020-2021, projected global human-development progress for 2024 was the slowest since 1990, while the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found in 2026 that only 40% of respondents across the countries surveyed reported high or moderately high trust in their national government, and only 31% believed that the political system allowed people like them to have a genuine say in government decisions (UNDP 1994, 2025; UN General Assembly 2012; OECD 2026).
This crisis of trust coexists with an extraordinary capacity of states to mobilise resources. At the end of 2025, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, roughly one person in seventy, while the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated global military expenditure at USD 2.887 trillion, the highest level ever recorded and the eleventh consecutive year of growth. The juxtaposition does not prove a simple causal relationship between armament, conflict, and stalled development, and military security sometimes remains the condition without which other forms of security cannot exist; it does, however, show how risky it is to confuse greater state capacity with an automatic improvement in people’s lives. Humanity can become simultaneously more powerful in its instruments and weaker in its sense that those instruments are working for it (UNHCR 2026; SIPRI 2026a).
This is therefore not merely a crisis of democracy, nor simply a succession of wars, recessions, or unfortunate leaders. It is a deeper crisis in the relationship between HUMAN BEING, POWER, and STATE: between the person who bears the consequence, the person who takes the decision, and the institution in whose name the decision is justified. If this rupture is shared by regimes and societies so different from one another, then the problem is no longer merely Romanian, American, Chinese, Russian, or Eastern; it becomes one of the central political questions of our age.
Let us start from ground level, where high politics can be seen most clearly, and let us start in Bucharest, not because Romania is the centre of this crisis, but because it is the nearest window from which we can observe it. In an apartment block, a person does not experience the budget deficit as a percentage of GDP; he or she experiences it in the price of food, the energy bill, the mortgage payment, the medicines paid for out of pocket, and the public service paid for twice, once through taxes and once again in the private sector because the first payment did not buy the service that had been promised.
Romania is an almost textbook case of the distance between the progress of society and the capacity of the state. Over the past two decades, Romania has experienced genuine economic convergence, massive investment, and a substantial rise in material living standards, yet in July 2026 it had the highest harmonised inflation rate in the European Union (EU), 8.2%, compared with an EU average of 3%. The budget deficit had reached 9.3% of GDP in 2024 and, although it fell to 7.9% in 2025, the correction relied to a significant extent on two fiscal-consolidation packages and broad freezes on public-sector wages and pensions. At the same time, the European Commission shows that Romania has the largest VAT and corporate-income-tax compliance gaps in the EU, at approximately 30% and 44% respectively. The risk of poverty or social exclusion remains around 28%, exceeding 32% among children, which means that the problem is not merely how much the economy produces, but how effectively the state converts the resources created by society into economic security and services for people (European Commission 2026a; Eurostat 2026).
Translating these figures into the language of the ordinary person is harsh, but it must be done precisely: after years in which the state collected poorly, spent beyond its means, postponed reforms, and tolerated losses and inefficiencies, fiscal consolidation tends to fall more quickly on visible and easily administered tax bases than on areas where compliance remains chronically weak. The salaried employee, pensioner, consumer, sole proprietor, limited-liability company, and small or medium-sized enterprise that follow the rules thus become, if not the only targets, often the first targets of adjustment. The problem is not that the deficit should not be corrected; the problem is that a correction perceived as unfair turns economic necessity into a new loss of legitimacy.
The OECD found that in Romania only 30% reported high or moderately high trust in government, 25% in Parliament, and 18% in political parties. Corruption was among the dominant concerns. Here, perhaps, lies the essence of the Romanian case: Romanian society has progressed faster than the Romanian state. The citizen adapted, emigrated, returned, learned, built businesses, worked for global companies, used technology, and became European in practice far faster than the administration governing him or her, regardless of which political parties were in power.
There is also a Romanian irony here that we too easily consign to the ceremonial register. The Constitution states that human dignity and citizens’ rights and freedoms are supreme values, that national sovereignty belongs to the Romanian people and, a few articles later, that the national anthem is “Deșteaptă-te, române!” (“Awaken Thee, Romanian!”). The law establishing National Anthem Day calls it a symbol of the unity of the Romanian Revolution of 1848. We do not need to impose on the anthem’s verses a meaning they do not possess in order to notice a disturbingly contemporary coincidence: the Constitution says sovereignty belongs to the people, while the anthem warns them to wake up. We shall return to this obligation, because in Romania the question “who do you govern for?” has an equally uncomfortable mirror: how do we allow ourselves to be governed? (Constitution of Romania, Arts. 1, 2 and 12; Law No. 99/1998).
We cross the Prut. In the Republic of Moldova, the ordinary person lives in a state simultaneously caught between reform, emigration, energy vulnerability, and geopolitical pressure. The World Bank still describes widespread poverty, especially in rural areas, a shrinking population, labour shortages, and structural dependencies; in 2025 the population fell by approximately 1.8%, while remittances continued to account for roughly one tenth of GDP. EU accession offers an anchor for reform and development, but for the Moldovan citizen the European promise remains credible only if it turns into income, services, functioning institutions, and, above all, the chance not to be forced to build a life in another country (World Bank 2026).
In Ukraine, in Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Odesa, the question becomes almost obscene, because people are no longer comparing percentages but lives. In July 2026, the UN confirmed 437 civilians killed and 2,610 injured, the highest monthly civilian death toll since May 2022 and the highest total number of civilian casualties since March 2022. Drone and missile attacks increasingly strike urban centres far from the front. For the Ukrainian citizen, sovereignty is not an empty concept: occupation can mean repression, deportation, loss of freedom, property, and identity. But sacrifice cannot be treated as an unlimited resource either. The question any responsible leadership must accept is this: what exactly are we saving for people through the sacrifice we ask of them? (OHCHR 2026).
In Russia, in Moscow, the picture is different, but a human being remains a human being. Russia is not Ukraine, and responsibility for starting the war is not symmetrical. Applying the same human test does not mean equating political and legal responsibilities; it means refusing the idea that the Russian citizen becomes an abstraction simply because his or her state is the aggressor. In the summer of 2026, the Levada Center found that 57% of Russians described the political situation as tense and 13% as critical, while 62% favoured moving towards peace negotiations even as a majority continued to support the actions of the armed forces. The material cost is structural as well: SIPRI’s analysis of Russia’s budget for the fifth year of war estimated planned military expenditure for 2026 at approximately 14.9 trillion roubles, equivalent to 6.3% of GDP, after 7.5% of GDP in 2025, in an economy where fiscal and monetary pressures have become increasingly visible. The ordinary person can simultaneously support the state, adapt, and grow weary of its costs; this is not a contradiction, but social life as it actually exists (Levada Center 2026; Cooper 2026).
In Gaza, the question “who is security for?” becomes devastating. In August 2026, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that most of the population remained displaced and that 90% of people faced moderate or high water insecurity, with frequent and unpredictable disruptions to safe and reliable supply. The fact that Hamas perpetrated the massacre and hostage-taking of 7 October 2023, and Israel’s right to protect its population, cannot automatically turn every subsequent human cost into an acceptable cost; Israeli security and Palestinian security cancel each other out only within a politics incapable of imagining anything other than victory through domination (OCHA 2026).
In Israel, the ordinary person lives through the other side of the same tragedy: attacks, hostages, mobilisation, years of war, and a deeply polarised society. At the beginning of July 2026, only 38% of Israelis believed that the security situation was better than before the war with Iran, while surveys indicated very low trust in the government, even though trust in the military remained far higher. A state can win battles and lose trust. It can strike the adversary and leave the citizen with the feeling that the war will never end (Israel Democracy Institute 2026; INSS 2026).
In Iran, the ordinary person pays simultaneously for the authoritarianism of his or her own leadership, external sanctions, and war. In July 2026, Reuters reported inflation of 66% and food-price increases of 128%, amid deteriorating infrastructure, blockade, and American economic pressure. The regime may speak of strategic resilience, Washington of “maximum pressure,” and Israel of security, but the family that gives up meat because it can no longer afford it experiences none of these formulas, only their direct consequences (Reuters, 17 August 2026).
In the United States, the centre of the Western order, the test is almost experimental. Donald Trump returned to the White House promising peace, lower costs, and “America First,” yet in August 2026 Reuters/Ipsos measured his approval at 33%, the lowest point of his presidency, while support for military action against Iran had fallen to 31%. Annual inflation stood at 3.4%, energy was 14.7% more expensive than a year earlier, and average real hourly earnings were slightly lower than in July 2025. Only 34% of Americans still said that the “American Dream,” understood as the belief that hard work enables social advancement, was working, while 51% believed that this promise had once been true but no longer was (Reuters/Ipsos, 24 August 2026; BLS 2026; AP-NORC 2026).
This is the litmus test of every “great leader”: not how great he says he has made the country, but how many of the country’s people feel that their lives have become better. Applied to China, the same question does not erase technological, industrial, or infrastructural achievements; it requires us to examine their social costs and benefits.
In China, the party-state can point to technological achievements, infrastructure, industry, and a global power unquestionably greater than it possessed a generation ago. Yet the ordinary person also lives on the less spectacular reverse side of the miracle: a prolonged property crisis, family wealth tied to homes that have lost value, millions of unfinished apartments, and a difficult labour market for young people. In July 2026, urban youth unemployment reached 17.9%, an eleven-month high. A great power can climb the rankings of the international system while part of its own younger generation lowers its expectations (Reuters, 19 August 2026).
In Venezuela, the United States captured Nicolás Maduro in a spectacular military operation in January 2026. The removal of an authoritarian leader may be welcomed by those who contest his legitimacy and regime, but the human test remains the same: after the operation changed the leader, did it also change the institutions, security, incomes, justice, or the prospects of millions of emigrants returning? A few weeks after the operation, Reuters captured precisely this ambivalence, a mixture of hope and scepticism fed by the recognition that removing one person does not, by itself, change the mechanisms of everyday life (Reuters 2026).
In Greenland, a citizen of an island with a little over 50,000 inhabitants could watch in 2026 as the world’s most powerful country publicly discussed acquiring his territory, while the American president linked tariff pressure on European allies to that ambition.
In Canada, a NATO ally, Five Eyes partner, and one of the economies most deeply integrated with the United States, 50% tariffs on certain goods triggered dollar-for-dollar retaliation. For people there, the lesson is no longer merely about trade, but about the nature of alliances when an asymmetry of power becomes a bargaining instrument (Reuters, 18 January and 25 August 2026).
Yet if we move the map beyond our familiar space, the problem becomes even harder to reduce to great-power rivalry. At the end of 2025, Sudan had approximately 9.1 million internally displaced people, the largest such population in the world. For the person in Khartoum or Darfur, failure does not fit the convenient formula “who won geopolitically?”, because the collapse of security means, before anything else, losing one’s home, community, and ability to decide where one’s children will grow up. A manifesto that claims to speak about human beings cannot afford to count only the wars that dominate Western screens (UNHCR 2026).
Across all these places we encounter, in essence, the same human being, with a different nationality and, when he or she belongs to a state capable of providing protection, a passport that confers a different degree of legal, consular, and political protection in the international environment; sometimes not even that. A passport does not make a person more or less human, but it can radically change his or her chances when crossing a border, seeking protection, being detained, evacuated, or caught in a war. Citizen, refugee, internally displaced person, stateless person, member of a minority, soldier, taxpayer, parent, or child, the human being remains caught in very different political systems, wars, and economies, yet is forced to pay in money, time, freedom, fear, or life for decisions over which he or she often has little control. That is why the question remains the same wherever we move the map: WHO DO YOU GOVERN FOR?
This journey is not a ranking of suffering, nor an attempt to equate regimes, wars, or responsibilities that are profoundly different. Aggressor and victim do not become morally or legally identical merely because both have citizens who suffer, just as an imperfect democracy does not become equivalent to a dictatorship merely because both can govern badly. The comparison pursues only one purpose: to translate grand strategy into human consequence and to test whether the same question can be asked of everyone without changing the standard with the flag.
States are not charities, and governments do not act in a moral or economic vacuum: Russia, China, the United States, European states, and the institutions of the European Union pursue combinations of security, influence, prosperity, prestige, access, and autonomy, even though their internal interests are never perfectly unified. Sometimes these interests coincide with those of their partners and sometimes they do not, just as an alliance can be genuine and useful without eliminating the possibility that dependencies created within it may, when necessary, become levers of influence or coercion.
There is, however, a further and more serious layer to this problem than the mere negotiation of interests: what happens when power begins to pressure the institutions that are supposed to limit power? The International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are neither mediation nor arbitration bodies, but courts with distinct mandates: the former adjudicates individual criminal responsibility for the gravest international crimes, while the latter settles legal disputes between states and issues advisory opinions. Their authority ultimately depends, however, on state cooperation. In August 2026, the Trump administration expanded sanctions against ICC leadership and personnel, continuing the policy initiated by the February 2025 presidential order; Washington contests the Court’s exercise of jurisdiction in cases involving nationals of states that are not parties to the Rome Statute, particularly the United States and Israel. The legal dispute is real, but sanctioning judges and prosecutors moves the confrontation onto another plane, that of political and financial coercion. When a great power invokes a rules-based order while attempting to penalise the institution applying rules it contests, the issue is no longer jurisdiction alone, but the credibility of the order itself (ICC 1998; ICJ 2026; White House 2025; Reuters, 18 and 26 August 2026).
Romanians have a saying that can be read as a folk theory of international relations: “God protect me from my friends; from my enemies I can protect myself.” Not because the friend automatically becomes an enemy, but because a declared adversary activates your defences, while an ally to whom you have transferred vital functions may acquire leverage over you precisely through trust.
A second Romanian saying perfectly complements the first: “Brother is brother, but cheese still costs money.” No molecule of gas becomes altruistic because it comes from an ally. No microchip receives a moral certificate according to the flag over the factory. No weapons system ceases to create dependency merely because the supplier is a strategic partner.
In the specialist literature, Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman called this mechanism “weaponized interdependence”: global networks built for economic efficiency can be transformed into instruments of surveillance, exclusion, and coercion by states that control central nodes. The concept was demonstrated for financial and digital systems, but its logic is broader. Energy, technology, logistics, military maintenance, satellites, payments, the cloud, standards, and markets become levers when dependency is asymmetric (Farrell & Newman 2019).
The European Union learned this lesson brutally in its relationship with Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine, energy dependence on Moscow could no longer be treated as a simple commercial relationship, because Russia demonstrated that it could turn energy into an instrument of pressure; the EU reduced the share of Russian gas in its imports from 45% in 2021 to 12% in 2025, a genuine reduction in strategic vulnerability. But diversification also produced a new structure of dependencies: in 2025, the United States supplied 26.4% of total EU gas imports and almost 58% of European liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports, while American suppliers accounted for 58% of major-arms imports by European NATO members in 2021-2025. The European Commission itself launched a Technological Sovereignty Package in June 2026 precisely because the EU remains heavily dependent on external suppliers for essential digital technologies, from semiconductors to the cloud and artificial intelligence (European Commission 2026b, 2026c; Council of the EU 2026; SIPRI 2026b). Sometimes the new dependency is safer than the old one and may be strategically justified, but security is measured not only by the identity of the supplier, but by the ability to say no without your system grinding to a halt; strategic autonomy therefore does not mean autarky, but optionality: the ability to change supplier, absorb a shock, preserve reserves, capabilities and redundancies, and buy time to react.
Donald Trump made this truth impossible to conceal, not because he invented economic coercion or because the United States is the only actor that practises it, but because he turned into an almost everyday method of negotiation, including with allies, instruments Washington had used long before him, from sanctions and financial control to access to technology, but which previous administrations had more often tried to present as exceptions justified by the order the United States defended.
Greenland was the moment of revelation. When an American president links the threat of tariffs against allies to acceptance of a claim over another ally’s territory, the difference between “economic statecraft” and coercion becomes semantic. The European Union even discussed activating the Anti-Coercion Instrument, designed precisely for situations in which a power attempts to force a political decision through economic leverage. The episode led states such as Iceland to reconsider the relationship between sovereignty, security, and the predictability of the United States (Reuters, 18 January 2026).
Canada offers the same lesson in an even harder-to-ignore form. We are not talking about a European ally that “has not paid enough into NATO,” but about the continental neighbour of the United States, a deeply integrated economic partner and a member of Five Eyes. When the relationship between such states can descend to 50% tariffs and equivalent retaliation, the idea that alliance eliminates interest becomes naive.
It would, however, be an equally convenient mirror-image error to conclude that, because the United States instrumentalises its power, Russia and China become innocent by contrast. Moscow has used energy, disinformation, military force, and the vulnerabilities of its neighbours, while Beijing uses markets, supply chains, raw materials, standards, and economic access to increase its influence. The serious question is not the identification of a morally pure actor, an almost useless category in analysing power relations, but the level of dependency a society can afford without losing its freedom of decision.
From this perspective, the European Union’s most valuable “commodity” is not simply its money, but its strategic orientation. The United States wants a Union strong enough to bear greater defence costs, but connected closely enough to the American system that a significant portion of those costs feeds American industry, energy, and technology. China wants the European market, access, technology, and a Union that does not automatically follow Washington. Russia wants sanctions reduced, support for Ukraine limited, influence over the security architecture, and the reopening of economic flows.
All of them naturally pursue an interest; that is precisely why the real question is what the European Union wants and what it is prepared to pay for it. The answer becomes uncomfortable because the EU possesses enormous potential power but struggles to convert it into effective power. It has almost 450 million people, one of the world’s largest economies, sophisticated industry, capital, universities, technology, and global companies. If we broaden the perspective from the Union to strategic Europe, the European space also includes two nuclear powers, France and the United Kingdom. What the Union lacks is not the raw material of power, but coherent decision-making: fragmented national interests, bureaucratisation, slow procurement, external dependencies, and the outsourcing of security prevent resources from becoming action.
The European Union therefore faces a choice harder than the comfortable formula of “more integration”: either it develops sufficient federal functions where separate sovereignty produces impotence, especially in defence, energy, critical infrastructure, industrial policy, certain components of foreign policy, and intelligence, or it risks remaining a very wealthy market administered by sophisticated institutions but strategically oriented by decisions taken elsewhere.
A union can therefore survive institutionally and die geopolitically, and this may be the most European form of decline: the institutions continue to function, procedures are observed, strategies multiply, yet the power to turn resources into decisions and decisions into effects evaporates.
The same diagnosis is reproduced, at a different scale, within the European Union: member states unable to convert their resources into administrative, industrial, and strategic capacity become dependent not only on external powers, but also on decisions taken at the European centre and on more capable states within the Union. Romania is a relevant example: EU membership multiplies resources, access, and protection, but it cannot substitute for national capacity to formulate priorities, negotiate, and execute. A strategically weak Union cannot indefinitely rescue member states that choose to remain administratively weak.
Turning Donald Trump into the cause of all the world’s problems would be a convenient error, because it would absolve the systems that produced him and confuse the accelerator with the engine. He is a spectacular case study of a broader dynamic, not its universal explanation. The relative decline of American dominance, China’s rise, Russia’s strategic resentment, European military dependence, energy vulnerability, Western social fractures, the crisis of political representation, the contestation of globalisation, American debt, and military overstretch all existed before Trump returned to the White House. On 19 August 2026, U.S. federal public debt had exceeded USD 40 trillion, while the United States was attempting simultaneously to manage Europe and Ukraine, the Middle East, Iran, Israel, the Korean Peninsula, the Indo-Pacific, and competition with China. Trump did not create these tensions, but he shortened their reaction time and accelerated the moment when their contradictions became visible (Reuters, 19 August 2026).
In this sense, the comparison with Odoacer[2] is useful only if we refuse the caricature. He did not descend on Rome from outside the system to destroy, in a single blow, what remained of the Western Roman Empire; he had already been integrated into its military and political structures. The deposition in 476 of Romulus Augustus, known to history as Romulus Augustulus, did not cause the collapse of the Roman West, but became the symbolic marker of a process of degradation, fragmentation, and transformation that had begun long before. The metaphor therefore becomes more interesting, not weaker: sometimes rupture is accelerated from within by people whom the system itself has absorbed, produced, or elevated. Trump is incomparably more “inside” than Odoacer, having been democratically elected and installed at the centre of the American order, but precisely for that reason he can function, in the ironic sense of the Romanian expression, as “the right man at the right time,” not necessarily to save the system, but to force its contradictions to surface simultaneously (Heather 2005).
If we reduce their styles of power, inevitably schematically, to games, Putin plays chess, Xi Jinping plays go, Trump plays poker, while Ursula von der Leyen too often ends up as the croupier merely running the European table.[3] Yet with Trump back in the White House, Washington sometimes gives the impression that it has traded even poker for bambilici, a Romanian shorthand here for slapdash, unserious play: it opens gaming tables almost simultaneously in Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, the Korean Peninsula, and the Indo-Pacific, while every new stake consumes resources, credibility, and strategic time. The formula may sound malicious, but the problem is serious. The unpredictability of an adversary is a risk; the unpredictability of the centre of the system is a risk multiplier, because the President of the United States commands a combination of military, financial, technological, and institutional power that the leaders of North Korea or Iran cannot project on the same global scale, while Russia and China operate under constraints and costs of their own. In the non-conspiratorial sense of the expression, Trump can thus function as a “useful idiot” for the systemic adversaries of the United States, especially China and, to a different degree, Russia: not because he is executing their agenda, but because eroding trust among allies, shifting resources between theatres, and turning guarantees into transactions can produce effects that Beijing and Moscow would otherwise obtain only at far greater cost.
Joseph Tainter observed that complex societies solve problems by adding complexity: institutions, specialisations, rules, structures, technologies. But complexity has costs, and the marginal return on investment in solutions can decline. At some point, the system demands ever more resources simply to maintain itself and produces ever less additional benefit. Paul Kennedy, in another register, formulated the danger of “imperial overstretch”: strategic commitments can grow faster than the economic base required to sustain them. Centuries earlier, Ibn Khaldun placed social cohesion at the centre of the political cycle: power erodes when elites separate themselves from the social base that produced them and the solidarity required to sustain the system weakens (Tainter 1995; Kennedy 1987; Ibn Khaldun).
The same intuition appears, in different forms, in political traditions far removed from one another. In classical Chinese thought, the theory of the “Mandate of Heaven” could legitimise the replacement of a dynasty when bad government and moral decay rendered the ruler unworthy of the mandate; in the Persian tradition of “mirrors for princes,” justice, restraint, taxation, the welfare of subjects, and control of officials were treated as questions of governmental survival, not as decorative virtues. The Romanian proverbs invoked here belong to a different, popular and much later register, but they condense the same healthy distrust of power, alliances, and promises. The point is not a supposed “eternal wisdom” of one people or another, but the fact that very different societies have repeatedly learned the same lesson: legitimacy erodes when rulers impose costs on people that they can no longer justify through order, justice, and a credible future (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2022; Encyclopaedia Iranica 1998-2026).
There is no single theory of imperial collapse. Rome did not fall for one reason. The Spanish, Dutch, and British empires and the Soviet Union had different mechanisms of rise and decline. Some lost wars; others won them. Britain emerged victorious from the Second World War and yet the post-war order consolidated the shift in the centre of power towards the United States. You can therefore win the war and lose the world that follows it.
For that reason, perhaps the present world is not simply passing through “the decline of the West” and “the rise of China,” nor through a banal rotation in which one tired empire hands the baton to another. Perhaps we are witnessing something more complicated: a simultaneous crisis of large complex political organisations, each at a different stage and driven by different causes, but all confronting the same fundamental problem, the capacity to convert accumulated power into security, freedom, prosperity, and meaning for the people who bear the system’s costs. The crisis is aggravated by an acute shortage of leaders capable of thinking beyond their term of office, their ego, the polls, and the next headline.
The United States faces the problem of overstretch, debt, polarisation, and the transformation of alliances into transactions. The European Union faces the problem of converting prosperity into strategic capacity. Russia faces the problem of transforming geopolitical force into sustainable prosperity for its own population. China faces the problem of converting economic and technological performance, together with political control, into sustainable legitimacy in an ageing society where young people are encountering new limits. Iran faces the problem of a regime demanding strategic sacrifice from an economically exhausted population. Israel and Palestinian society are trapped in a cycle in which each new “security solution” creates the conditions for the next crisis.
In this light, the decisive question is not which flag will dominate the next world order, but whether large systems will still be able to convert power into legitimacy before their populations withdraw, actively or passively, the cooperation on which those systems depend. Empires and states do not live on armies, currencies, technology, and borders alone; they also live on people’s willingness to pay taxes, obey rules, serve, invest, have children, stay, and believe that present sacrifice is purchasing a recognisable future. When this conversion breaks down, decline begins before the map changes.
Romania has the advantage of not being an empire and the disadvantage of importing the costs of larger systems without participating proportionately in defining their rules. It is a member of the EU and NATO and is dependent on external markets, capital, technology, and alliances, which means that the question “who do you govern for?” must be asked in Bucharest with even greater insistence. Does the state govern for the citizen, the party, the administrative apparatus, the creditor, the European obligation, the American ally, the macroeconomic indicator, “stability,” or simply survival until the next election? The answer must neither be assumed nor inferred from official discourse, but measured through the real distribution of costs, benefits, and accountability.
There should be a simple criterion for every government and every leader, not as a substitute for GDP, productivity, the balance of payments, military resilience, international law, or strategic analysis, but as an obligation to relate all of them to the purpose for which they should exist. The “ordinary person” is not a statistical average here, nor an imaginary majority permitted to sacrifice the minority; it is the concrete person on whom policy has consequences, including the vulnerable person, the dissident, the member of a minority, the person who did not vote for the government, the refugee, the internally displaced person, the stateless person, and the person beyond the border who had no opportunity to choose the leadership whose decisions alter his or her life.
In its simplest form, the test follows four dimensions that cannot be separated without falsifying the result: protection, meaning life and physical security; the capability to live a life one has reason to choose, meaning freedom, health, education, income, and real opportunities, in the tradition of human development and the capability approach; equity, meaning the distribution of costs, benefits, and risks; and correctability, meaning the existence of mechanisms through which a wrong decision can be challenged, stopped, and repaired. A policy may pass the first threshold and fail badly on the other three: it may protect the border while destroying freedom, increase GDP while concentrating the benefit, or provide order without any right of correction. Development, in Amartya Sen’s sense, is therefore not merely the accumulation of resources, but the expansion of people’s real freedoms to live lives they have reason to value (Sen 1999; UNDP 2025).
Before every major decision, power should be able to answer publicly a few elementary questions: how many people will be physically safer; how many will be able to live better; who pays the cost; who receives the benefit; who was not consulted; what happens to the most vulnerable; what are we sacrificing from the future for present comfort; what are we sacrificing from the present for a promised future; what happens if the policy fails; who is accountable for failure; and, above all, can we reverse the decision before the error becomes irreversible?
This is the “ordinary-person test,” and applying it changes the meaning of security: the state no longer appears as the ultimate end, but as an instrument through which people organise their protection and cooperation, just as the military, the border, the economy, the alliance, and power are themselves instruments. The order of reference must therefore begin with HUMAN BEING → SECURITY → STATE, not with a state that first defines its own needs and then asks people to adapt to them. This order does not weaken the state, because an incapable state can protect no one; it changes the criterion of success, forcing institutional capacity back towards people’s survival, freedom, livelihoods, and dignity (UN General Assembly 2012).
The test is therefore not a utilitarian arithmetic in which a slight improvement for 60% justifies the loss of fundamental rights for the remaining 40%. Rights, dignity, and non-discrimination constitute a threshold below which “aggregate benefit” cannot purchase legitimacy, while distribution matters as much as the average: who gains, who pays, who is exposed, and who can leave the game. The average can lie, and statistics can cosmetically smooth an indecent distribution beyond recognition; that is precisely why the test cannot stop at the average.
To say this is not to trivialise sovereignty. Borders matter precisely because changing them by force can destroy people’s rights. The state matters because its absence can mean anarchy, occupation, repression, or external domination. But neither the border nor the state can automatically be granted the status of a supreme value before which the human being becomes an expendable item.
From this follows the question that strategic studies sometimes avoid precisely because it is brutally concrete: what use is a “saved” state if the people for whom it was saved are dead, gone, impoverished, or deprived of a future? The question is uncomfortable for Ukraine and Russia, for Israel and the Palestinian leadership, for Iran and the United States, for China in relation to Taiwan and, ultimately, for every state that asks its citizens to accept sacrifices presented as historic.
There is no universal pacifist answer. Sometimes resistance is the only way a person can preserve freedom. At other times, continuing a war can produce more destruction than compromise. That is precisely why the answer must be demonstrated, not assumed. A leader must justify sacrifice by what it saves for people, not only by what it preserves on the map.
The same rule must be applied to the economy. A country can have a larger GDP and citizens who are more anxious, more indebted, and less secure. A “successful reform” can look immaculate in a government presentation and devastating in a family budget. An energy transition can be necessary and still badly designed. A defence policy can be indispensable and still be captured by industrial interests. Good intentions are not enough; outcomes must be followed.
Here lies perhaps the fundamental defect of modern governance: costs are individualised, while justifications are collectivised. We are told that “we must” for security, deficit reduction, transition, alliance, or competitiveness, but the collective formulation conceals the concrete distribution of sacrifice because it does not say who, in fact, that “we” is, who pays for that “must,” who is shielded from the cost, who can pass it on, and who cannot. A public policy is not fully evaluated until these answers are visible.
Hope, that charming seductress that deceives us all, is not public policy, just as optimism is not strategy and history does not guarantee that good systems repair themselves. There is, however, a criterion more useful than hope: the capacity for correction. All systems, all leaders, all intelligence services, and all governments make mistakes; the difference between a resilient system and one on a trajectory of degradation is not the absence of error, but the speed with which error can be recognised, contained, stopped, and repaired.
Democracy is valuable not because the voter is always right, but because it provides peaceful mechanisms through which a ruler can be replaced. The press is useful not because it never makes mistakes, but because it can expose the mistakes of power. Justice is vital not because judges are infallible, but because power must encounter limits. The opposition, civil society, the university, audit, parliamentary oversight, and even protest are feedback systems.
And when government begins to treat feedback as aggression, when an institution defends itself before correcting the problem, when a leader confuses criticism with treason, when a party occupies the mechanisms of oversight, when expertise becomes a justification for opacity, the system loses its capacity for self-correction.
Authoritarian regimes cannot eliminate feedback completely either, but they can make it narrower, more costly, and easier to falsify. They receive signals through the economy, administration, elites, services, latent protest, migration, fertility, consumption, and social compliance, but their specific risk is to confuse silence with consent and obedience with legitimacy. Democracies possess the institutional advantage of open criticism, but can lose it when polarisation turns every piece of information into a factional weapon; autocracies can rapidly execute a correction ordered from above, yet may discover too late that the problem no one dared report had already become systemic. A healthy system is not one in which the ruler never makes mistakes, but one in which the truth about the mistake can reach the ruler before catastrophe does.
In this respect, the United States and Romania meet again, despite the enormous differences between them. In the United States, a presidential approval rating of 33% in the August 2026 Reuters/Ipsos poll does not automatically mean the system is collapsing and can, on the contrary, be read as evidence that electoral and opinion mechanisms continue to register the gap between promise and everyday experience. Systemic risk arises when polarisation prevents facts from crossing from one political community into another and elections cease to correct performance, becoming almost exclusively identity wars (Reuters/Ipsos 2026).
In Romania, the problem is older and more diffuse because there is no single leader concentrating the entire crisis, but rather a succession of governments, coalitions, abandoned reforms, politicised institutions, and decisions whose costs accumulate until their author becomes difficult to identify. The result is a dangerous combination of power concentrated enough to take decisions and responsibility diffuse enough for no one to be held accountable, a form of degradation perhaps more insidious than the cult of a single leader precisely because it gives society no single figure onto whom blame and correction can be projected.
For Romania, the ordinary-person test has a peculiarity of almost uncomfortable beauty: the national anthem does not begin by praising the state, the ruler, or power, but with an imperative addressed to the Romanian. “Deșteaptă-te” means “wake up.” It assumes that sleep is possible, that freedom can be lost not only through occupation or dictatorship, but also through habit, resignation, excessive delegation of responsibility, and reflexive acceptance of the formula “nothing will change anyway.” And the fact that, within the same constitutional architecture, national sovereignty belongs to the Romanian people while the anthem is “Deșteaptă-te, române!” permits a civic reading that ceremony often conceals: between elections, sovereignty is not put into storage, nor is it permanently transferred to those who temporarily exercise it in our name (Constitution of Romania, Arts. 2 and 12; Law No. 99/1998).
“Deșteaptă-te, române!” (“Wake up, Romanian!”) is not an order addressed to Parliament, the Government, or the President, but an exhortation addressed to the people, to every citizen.
This sentence also changes the nature of the indictment in this article. It is too convenient to turn the citizen into an innocent victim and power into an alien body that has landed on society. In a dictatorship, the distance between those who command and those who bear the consequences can be almost total; in a democracy, even an imperfect one, rulers are selected, legitimised, tolerated, sanctioned, or reconfirmed through mechanisms in which society participates, sometimes actively and sometimes through absence. The Constitution is explicit: national sovereignty belongs to the Romanian people and is exercised through its representative bodies, constituted through free, periodic, and fair elections, as well as by referendum. If sovereignty is ours, we cannot claim that responsibility for how it is used always belongs exclusively to others (Constitution of Romania, Art. 2).
This does not absolve those who govern and does not create a false symmetry between citizen and power. A voter does not sign the budget, classify information, award public contracts, appoint institutional leadership, or send soldiers into a military operation; precisely because the decision-maker possesses greater power, his or her responsibility must be greater. But a difference in responsibility cannot be turned into an absence of civic responsibility. Democracy is not a service through which, once every four years, we deposit a ballot and then outsource the entire care of the republic to a political class we will declare, after the next disappointment, completely alien to us.
Here begins the part we would rather not discuss... We demand meritocracy, but sometimes look for “a connection” when the rule inconveniences us; we condemn clientelism, but become more indulgent when the beneficiary is “one of ours”; we demand efficient public services, but tolerate tax evasion as a form of cleverness; we defend judicial independence when justice reaches the opposing camp and suddenly discover “abuse” when it reaches the camp we prefer; we denounce propaganda, but share without verification the information that confirms what we already wanted to believe. None of these are exclusively Romanian sins, nor do they describe all Romanians, but they are enough to feed precisely the mechanisms we later denounce as “the system.” Mature awakening does not mean permanent anger, but memory and consistency: the same standard for the same act regardless of who benefits, and the use of voting, the press, justice, the university, associations, and protest as feedback mechanisms rather than rituals.
A society that fails to preserve its political memory can be governed indefinitely by relaunching the same promise under a different name. At different historical moments, Romania has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for mobilisation when pressure became unbearable; the harder problem is not exceptional awakening, but turning it into everyday vigilance, into a reflex of critical thinking. A republic cannot function healthily if it needs heroes in every crisis, just as a state is not well administered if the citizen must become an expert in constitutional law, public procurement, energy, geopolitics, and taxation merely to defend himself or herself from the institutions that are supposed to work on his or her behalf.
Romania’s problem is not that the Romanian does not know how to wake up, but that he peeks sideways to see whether his neighbour has woken up too, so that he will not be left standing alone; and when the danger appears to have passed, the temptation to fall asleep again is almost as strong.
Thus, the question “who do you govern for?” must stand face to face with the question “how do we allow ourselves to be governed?” The first forces rulers to justify power through results for people; the second forces citizens not to confuse freedom with passivity or sovereignty with delegation without oversight. One without the other produces either authoritarianism or the convenient populism of a society that demands everything from the state while accepting no responsibility for the quality of the state it reproduces. In Romania, “Deșteaptă-te, române!” can therefore be read not only as the anthem of a historical awakening, but as an informal constitutional warning: power is exercised in your name, and your sleep is one of its resources.
We do not ask you to be saints, nor to eliminate war, national interest, or the unavoidable costs of politics, whether your power comes from the ballot box, the party, a dynasty, a uniform, or a revolution that has meanwhile turned into a regime. We know that security, energy, technology, defence, and independence have costs and that sometimes even peace has a price. We ask you, however, for something less grandiose and harder to falsify: tell the truth about the costs, demonstrate the benefits for the person you ask to pay them, and accept that there are rights which no majority, strategy, or victory can legitimately turn into bargaining chips.
Do not turn every failure into a new justification for more power, more taxes, more secrecy, and less accountability, and do not ask people to trust institutions that refuse to be judged by results. Do not confuse the interest of the state with the interest of the government, or the interest of the government with your own; do not ask the next generation to pay the debt with which you purchase today’s political comfort, the soldier to die for an objective his family cannot understand, or the taxpayer to finance an “autonomy” that proves to be merely a more expensive dependency. And do not forget the people beyond your borders: modern power strikes through sanctions, war, technology, currency, climate, trade, and algorithms at people who did not vote for you, cannot remove you, and are often not even represented at the table where you decide their lives. Say what you know, what you do not know, and where uncertainty exists, because respect for the human being also begins with acknowledging the limits of your own knowledge.
Above all, accept a rule that power hates: if the policy does not work, change the policy; if the minister cannot do the job, change the minister; if the government cannot do the job, change the government; and if the leader cannot do the job, the leader must leave. Power is not private property but a temporary mandate, and a good leader is not one without whom the state cannot function, because such a leader has constructed his own indispensability, but one who leaves behind a system capable of functioning better after he is gone.
There is a paradox in our age: leaders speak more and more about the future while citizens live more and more in uncertainty about tomorrow. States plan for 2030, 2040, or 2050, but a person has only one life; for a twenty-year-old, 2050 is the future, while for a seventy-year-old pensioner it may be a promise he or she will most likely never live to see.
Wise governance must reconcile two times: the historical time of society and the biological time of human life. If it permanently sacrifices the present for an abstract future, it produces resentment and distrust. If it permanently sacrifices the future for electoral comfort, it produces debt, degradation, and bankruptcy.
For that reason, no generation has the right to purchase its present comfort by mortgaging the freedom and prosperity of the next generation. The rule applies to public debt, the environment, war, pensions, resources, infrastructure, and education.
Building the future for people means accepting that the human being is not a human resource of the state; rather, the state is the institutional resource of human beings. The reversal may sound philosophical, but it is intensely practical: a good state is one in which the citizen can afford, from time to time, to forget that the state exists because the water flows, the hospital treats, the school educates, the police protect, justice judges, the military deters, taxes are bearable, rules are predictable, energy arrives, contracts are honoured, and the government does not ask the citizen every day to “understand the geopolitical context” in order to accept yet another price increase and yet another failure.
A good leader need not be the father of the nation, a providential saviour, or the permanent star of the screen. He or she should be the temporary administrator of a mechanism that also works without them.
Perhaps we are not living through the Apocalypse, but through something more prosaic and, for that very reason, more dangerous: the end of the illusion that ever larger, more complex, and more interdependent systems will automatically produce better lives. They automatically produce nothing, because between the capacity of the system and human well-being there is always political decision, the distribution of costs, and the quality of institutions.
Globalisation has created wealth and vulnerability at the same time; technology has expanded freedom and the capacity for control; alliances have produced security but also dependency; and states have built order together with apparatuses that sometimes come to serve themselves. Democracy made representation possible without preventing the emergence of political classes that may forget whom they represent, just as empires were able to produce stability until the moment when the cost of maintaining them exceeded the perceived benefit and decomposition began.
Trump is not the cause of this world. He is one of its accelerators. He may remain in history not as the man who produced the relative decline of American power, but as the leader who, attempting to reverse it through transactionalism, coercion, and demonstrations of force, compelled allies and adversaries to prepare for a world in which the United States is no longer automatically treated as the indispensable and predictable centre of the system.
Russia is not the sole cause, China is not the solution, the European Union is not innocent, Iran is not merely a victim, Israel cannot be reduced either to victim or aggressor, Palestine cannot be reduced to Hamas, Ukraine cannot be reduced to a buffer territory, and Romania cannot continue to explain every failure through the external crisis, the legacy of the previous government, or a European obligation. Responsibilities, powers, and regimes differ, and facts must not be artificially balanced; that is precisely why the test applied should remain the same, without confusing the identity of the test with the identity of guilt.
For every society, this final test has two directions, and neither is comfortable: rulers must be held to account for the power they exercise, while citizens, where they have the freedom to do so, must be asked not to confuse fatigue with powerlessness, cynicism with lucidity, or resignation with realism. In Romania, this obligation has a formula we repeat so often that we risk no longer hearing it: the anthem does not say “wait for someone to wake you up”; it says “Wake up.” In other languages and traditions, the call takes different words, but the problem is the same: no system corrects itself indefinitely without people demanding that it do so.
After all the sacrifices you have asked of us, after all the taxes we have paid, after all the wars fought in our name, after all the reforms we have endured, after all the crises you have asked us to understand, after all the sanctions, alliances, procurements, strategies, doctrines, and victories you have claimed as your own, one question remains, of a simplicity that no propaganda apparatus and no strategic presentation should be able to evade: are we, the ordinary people, better off or worse off? If we are better off, demonstrate it through results; if we are worse off, explain why the sacrifice is necessary, how long it will last, who bears it, and who is accountable if you were wrong. And if even this answer cannot be given, the question remains that power should never be allowed to evade: WHO DO YOU GOVERN FOR?
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About the author:
Col. (ret.) Dr. Cătălin Balog is an analyst and trainer with experience in intelligence, information security and strategic communication. Doctor of Military Sciences, with a thesis dedicated to the management of security risks in cyberspace, he worked for over two decades in structures of the Ministry of National Defense. Currently, he is an associate professor at the University of Bucharest, where he teaches courses on information management. In particular, he is concerned with the analysis of contemporary social and political mechanisms, with a focus on the relationship between ideology, technology and the simulation of democracy.
The article presents the stance of the author and does not necessarily reflect the stance of IFIMES.
Ljubljana/Bucharest, 23 October 2026
[1] IFIMES – International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has Special Consultative status at ECOSOC/UN, New York, since 2018 and it’s publisher of the international scientific journal “European Perspectives”, link: https://www.europeanperspectives.org/en
[2] Odoacer (c. 433-493), a military commander of Germanic origin already operating within the political-military structures of the Western Roman Empire, deposed Romulus Augustus, known as Romulus Augustulus, in 476. The year 476 is conventionally used as a marker for the end of the Western Roman Empire, although the transformation and decay of imperial structures had begun long before. Odoacer did not “destroy Rome”; he became the figure symbolically associated with the moment when a long process of institutional disintegration became impossible to ignore. See Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Oxford University Press, 2005.
[3] See Cătălin Balog, “Spectacol sau realitate? Lovirea Moscovei – între disperare strategică și echilibru prin forță (Partea a II-a),” Financial Intelligence, 26 August 2025; republished in English by IFIMES as “Show or Reality?: Hitting Moscow – Between Strategic Desperation and Balance by Force (Part II).”
