Thinking all of that can be controlled would fall under hubris IMO. The powers have done nothing but stoke resistance and rebellion against their hierarchies, or perhaps I'm just taking the bait...?

Also there's a big part of this that is intentional sabotage and manipulation by a wide network of chaos-creators that mostly seem to lead back to Putin. When a former-KGB kleptocrat steals and controls everything in the world's largest country and becomes effectively probably one of the world's richest men, and then starts playing 4d chess with all the world's other richest men, I guess it turns out you can probably cause a lot of chaos and quite possibly completely destroy the international global order.

I'm willing to bet that is one of Putin's goals, but it's not his only goal, and just because he's evidently accomplished it with gusto still doesn't mean Putin is actually capable of accomplishing all his other goals of building or being part of any sort of new world order, because this chaos only destroys and tears things down. He's got destruction down to a science, and I'm sure he thinks he can leverage that to create what he wants in the world, but he's failed at that and will continue to fail. But he has proven he can fuck things up pretty badly for the rest of us, whether we want to admit it or not, so, personally I'm willing to give him credit where credit is due.

The real question is, are we going to accept that what came before is irretrievably broken, and if we are willing to do that, what are we going to build in its place? Because with chaos comes opportunity, but those opportunities are few and limited. The chaos will continue, and the chaos can worsen. Significantly. If we're going to turn this around, we have to be smart about it. There are a lot of paths that lead to very bad places, and only a few that have good endings. And you'd better believe that Putin and other forces of chaos are still going be trying to sabotage those too, even more aggressively as they realize their own dreams will never come to fruition.

I think we've got to start by rooting out all the elements of corruption that have allowed this to happen, or else anything we try to build in its place will be built on quicksand. What exactly those are? I have a bunch of opinions, but that's where the debate will start to happen, and I think we're going to need to start having those conversations before we can really address this. We need to establish our philosophical foundations and values, agree that we all value human life, that we value all lived human experiences, and that all humans are created equal, and I think we can go from there to try to define and refine exactly what those things mean and how we're going to implement those values into building a civilization that we actually want to live in and that other people want to live in too, where we can all agree on these things and find ways to pursue equality and happiness for all.

True. I guess a lot of it is also the fallout of Citizens United.