If you place a frog in boiling water, it will jump right out. But if you put it in cool water, and gradually turn up the heat, it will stay put until it’s cooked. I’m not sure that this metaphor is a perfect science, (I haven’t tried boiling live frogs…) but it seems a pretty apt description of current political news cycles.

On the 3rd of January – the BBC reports ‘Trump says US will ‘run’ Venezuela and ‘fix oil infrastructure’. On the 10th of January – CNN announce ‘US will take Greenland the ‘hard way’ if it can’t do it the ‘easy way’. Yesterday, at Davos Trump talked about Gaza as a ‘beautiful piece of property’, while Jared Kushner outlined plans for a ‘New Gaza’ rich with coastal tourism. Each announcement is alarming – exposing Trumps’ disregard for international-order and blind ambition for profit – yet each is absorbed with remarkable speed, quickly displaced by the next escalation.

What is unsettling is not only the content of these statements, but how rapidly they are normalised. The boundary of what we seem to think is acceptable for political leaders to say and do has quietly shifted. Words that were once dismissed as outrageous and unthinkable, are now being witnessed in real-world events.

Psychology helps explain how we’ve reached this point. Habituation explains how the human mind adjusts to changing contexts. Repetition drains the force of shock, and with time – what was once unimaginable is considered normal. This capacity has always helped humans survive instability, but now there’s a risk that this acclimatisation is stopping us from seeing or acting with the clarity and urgency the moment demands.

Additionally, cognitive dissonance helps explain why these headlines are so quickly dismissed and discarded. We find it uncomfortable to absorb information that contradicts our core beliefs, and here, we don’t want to accept the evidence that the post-war rules-based international order is deteriorating. Fearful of an uncertain and unstable future, we disregard and dismiss the mounting evidence – blindly believing that the guardrails will hold.

Another explanation – is that things hadn’t actually moved on as much we’d hoped or believed. That in fact – what we are seeing with Trump now is not new, but just a more brazen and apparent iteration of what we have seen for centuries. Indeed, while we like to believe that we learned lessons from the 20th Century, that imperialism and naked power politics were relics of a darker past – recent history suggests otherwise.

Palestine was a litmus test. While after the second world war, the international community vowed ‘never again’ – we’ve watched a genocide unfold in full view. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and later full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, has been met with condemnation and military support, but not troops or direct confrontation. Further, we can draw clear lines between colonial resource extraction and contemporary corporate imperialism. In many ways, the rule of money and military might has been consistent.

Indeed, when the president speaks openly about running Venezuela, owning Gaza and taking Greenland – we see the see that behind the façade of peacekeeping lies what Jan-Werner Müller describes as mafia state politics. We see Trump’s hunger for power, his bullying nature and disregard for international law and collaboration. This is not corruption in the form of hidden bribes, it is rigged public procurement, it is power exercised openly for private gain.

Ultimately, language matters – because it shapes realities. When Trump speaks of running countries for the benefit of corporations and claiming natural resources – he’s not misspeaking – he is articulating a dangerous intention that we need to do everything we can to resist. If we live in a world where might rules and sovereignty is conditional, we risk descending into chaos and undermining the progress made over the past century. If we quietly accept that powerful states can abduct leaders, bomb capitals or seize resources with impunity it establishes precedents that extend far beyond any single case. To Taiwan. To Ukraine. To Palestine. If power determines what is legal, then legality ceases to function as protection. While some – longing for change, and anxious about present uncertainty – may be drawn to his bold and brazen manner, we cannot overlook the people who live-out the violences of these words.

History shows us that world orders do not collapse all at once; they decay through precedent, through selective enforcement, through the quiet acceptance of what once would have been intolerable. Perhaps we can see Trump’s candour not only as a threat, but an opportunity – a wakeup call. By discarding the language of restraint, he has made visible the logic operating beneath the surface: that force, wealth, and strategic value determine whose lives, borders, and laws matter. Seeing this clearly matters because it is only by honestly understanding the present order that we can forge a better path for the future.

The question now, is – will we realise the rising temperature in time to jump out of the boiling pot. In this moment, we need to be bold, to reject the idea that military and monetary might rule; to uphold the systems built to keep the peace.