Will Europe be a leader in the new world order?

Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China are testing the waning influence of the US. The power vacuum will be filled by someone, and that’s dangerous for a divided EU, says Mark Leonard           

THE most frightening periods in history have often been interregnums — moments between the death of one king and the rise of the next.

Disorder, war, and even disease can flood into the vacuum, when, as Antonio Gramsci put it in his Prison Notebooks, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.