You can’t have foreign policy without national borders. No borders means highly fluid, constantly shifting power groups with lots of unfinished business elsewhere. Long-term commitments become impossible because nobody knows which influence group will scream the loudest 15 minutes from now.
Once you can’t make any commitments beyond the next couple of weeks, nobody – including your own population – takes you seriously anymore. You start behaving in a schizoid manner, erasing today everything you did yesterday. (Afghanistan, Israel, Ukraine – examples abound).
We have a whole system of state institutions and international relations set up for a world of nation-states. We have nothing set up for fluid borderless blobs of dog-eat-dog groupings with no shared worldview, culture, or even language.

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