Failing Sideways, Even Backwards

Scope Collapse Without Coordination

In well-run software systems, “failing forward” is a disciplined practice. An incident occurs, assumptions break, and teams ship imperfect fixes under pressure. The system degrades but survives. Crucially, this only works because there is coordination: shared event logs, a common incident definition, and agreement—however grudging—that the goal is continued operation.

The post-COVID international system lacks those conditions. What we are living through is not coordinated failure-forward, but uncoordinated failure sideways—and in some places, failure backwards.

COVID was the initiating shock, but not the sole incident. It functioned like a concurrency bug that exposed how tightly coupled the system had become. Supply chains, public health, labor mobility, energy markets, and information flows all deadlocked at once. The system did not crash cleanly. It fragmented.

In response, actors patched locally. States closed borders. Hoarded supplies. Subsidized industries. Weaponized trade. Expanded emergency powers. Each patch made sense within its own domain. None were coordinated at the system level. The result was not recovery but architectural drift.

In software, this is where things usually get dangerous: teams hotfix different services against different assumptions, without a shared spec. Interfaces degrade. Latency spikes. Eventually, subsystems start working at cross purposes.

That is where we are now.

What gets called “stability” in 2026 is not convergence or harmony. It is managed survivability under conflict. Resilience has replaced efficiency not because it is better, but because trust—the cheap lubricant of the old system—has evaporated. Redundancy is paid for in higher costs, slower growth, and hardened borders. These are not bugs; they are accepted tradeoffs.

But even that framing assumes a shared desire for system health. Increasingly, that assumption does not hold.

Some actors are not trying to stabilize the same system. They are contesting which system should exist at all.

Ukraine is not just a regional war; it is a direct write to the security layer of the international order, one that overwrote prior assumptions about borders, deterrence, and escalation control. Gaza is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe; it is a legitimacy sinkhole that fractures alliances and corrodes norms in real time. These are not incidents being debugged; they are conflicts being fought.

In that context, “failing forward” breaks down as a metaphor. You cannot coordinate a patch when teams are actively trying to crash each other’s services.

This is why scope collapse has become permanent.

Every actor is running a different root-cause analysis.
For some, the bug is globalization itself.
For others, it is deterrence failure.
For others still, it is colonial legacy, demographic pressure, or elite capture.

Each diagnosis implies a different fix, and those fixes are often mutually destructive. Tariffs reduce dependency but raise inflation. Border controls reduce arrivals but increase irregular migration and humanitarian stress. Sanctions degrade regimes but entangle courts, creditors, and civilians. Military action restores deterrence for some while shattering legitimacy for others.

No one is wrong in isolation. Everyone is incompatible in aggregate.

This is where the shift from polity to problem becomes systemically dangerous. Once a state or region is framed primarily as a generator of risk—migration, narcotics, debt, rival-power access—negotiation is reclassified as weakness and management as responsibility. Sovereignty becomes conditional. Legal, financial, and military tools collapse into a single control surface.

From a systems perspective, this is not optimization. It is shortcutting. It works locally and fails globally.

The reappearance of doctrines that emphasize spheres, neighborhoods, and managerial authority is not nostalgia. It is an admission that coordination has failed and that unilateral control is being substituted where multilateral negotiation no longer functions. This does not restore order; it redistributes instability.

And because this is happening asymmetrically, the system is not failing evenly. Some domains are failing backwards.

Trade flows still exist, but under higher friction and uncertainty than before. Borders that once flexed now snap shut reflexively. Legal norms that once constrained action are treated as optional overlays. These are regressions, not adaptations, even if they are justified as necessary.

The most misleading question, then, is “How do we get back?”

Back to what?
Cheap trust?
Porous borders?
Rules that everyone followed because they mostly benefited everyone?

Those assumptions no longer compile. Too many irreversible writes have already hit the ledger.

The more honest question is whether a system can stabilize without shared coordination—or whether what we are calling “stability” is merely the absence of immediate catastrophe.

In engineering, running permanently in incident-response mode is a known anti-pattern. It burns teams out, accumulates technical debt, and normalizes degraded performance. Eventually, failure stops being surprising and starts being expected.

That is the danger here.

We are not post-incident. We are post-innocence. And we are operating without an incident commander, without a shared scope, and without agreement on which failures are acceptable—or who gets to absorb them.

Some actors are failing forward. Others are failing sideways. Others are deliberately pushing parts of the system backwards to regain control or advantage.

The system is still running.
That does not mean it is healing.

And without coordination, “failing forward” is no longer a path to robustness. It is just motion—sometimes progress, sometimes regression—without a shared destination.