# Mark Leonard, "Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail" (Polity Press, 2026) Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/mark-leonard-surviving-chaos-geopolitics-when-the-rules-fail-polity-press-2026 Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/mark-leonard-surviving-chaos-geopolitics-when-the-rules-fail-polity-press-2026.md Podcast: [New Books in American Studies](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748) Published: 2026-08-22T08:00:00+00:00 Episode link: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK8302262141.mp3 Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK8302262141.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/episodes/mark-leonard-surviving-chaos-geopolitics-when-the-rules-fail-polity-press-2026 Duration seconds: 3888 ## Resource "Expansive visions. Universal institutions. Ideas of progress. It was on the back of these that the West surged ahead and built a global order. I was born into that world. But my children have entered a world of Un-order." We live in an explosive world. Trump is blowing up political order. Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of Europe. At a time when every crisis bleeds into the next — from pandemics and wars to climate shocks and AI revolutions — the old rules of global order are collapsing. Mark Leonard reveals how geopolitics is being rewritten in an age of "Un-Order," where no one agrees on the rules, and even the concept of order itself is up for debate. Drawing on years of conversations with leaders and thinkers from Beijing to Washington, Leonard argues that we are witnessing a new divide in international politics between the grand "architects" who try to build a stable global system and the nimble "artisans" who adapt, improvise, and survive amidst disruption. China, he shows, has embraced the "artisan's" mindset while Europe and the West cling to the fading certainties of the "architects". Part analysis, part manifesto, ⁠Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail⁠ (Polity Press, 2026) offers a bold new framework for understanding power in the twenty-first century — and a call for leaders to stop defending yesterday's world and start learning how to thrive in tomorrow's. Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank. Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-st… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/episodes/mark-leonard-surviving-chaos-geopolitics-when-the-rules-fail-polity-press-2026/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-american-studies-1045748/mark-leonard-surviving-chaos-geopolitics-when-the-rules-fail-polity-press-2026.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.