Alexander Stubb has held an impressive array of high political offices in his native Finland, culminating in his election as president in February 2024. Immediately prior to that he served as director of the School for Transnational Governance in Florence. With a PhD from the London School of Economics, he seems ideally placed to bridge the divide between academia and the “real world”. All the more surprising, then, that his latest book – The Triangle of Power – is somewhat disappointing.
Reminiscent of Julius Caesar on ancient Gaul, Stubb divides the world into three parts – the Global West, the Global East and the Global South. However, a growing number of scholars now believes that the Global West is a thing of the past. One of the eminent people who provided glowing blurbs for Stubb’s book – Timothy Garton Ash – has recently declared that there is no coherent geopolitical West acting in the world anymore – courtesy of the mayhem wrought by Trump 2.0.
On January 17th, Trump announced tariffs on eight Nato allies, including Finland, for having had the temerity to send token troop contingents to Greenland, which Trump saw as flouting his obsessive desire to take possession of that territory for the US. Even if Trump backed down on this at Davos, it was still an extraordinary thing to have done. It seems that Stubb’s “golfing diplomacy” – he played a round of golf with Trump last March – has not yet paid off.
Stubb played an important role in bringing about Finland’s membership of Nato in 2023. Perhaps Nato is too close to Stubb’s heart. He writes that “no matter how inflamed the transatlantic relationship becomes, I do not believe that the core of it, Nato, will be weakened.” The Greenland issue has surely done precisely that.
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A blind spot in Stubb’s overall analysis is the almost non-existent role attributed to religion. On Twitter (now X) in October 2022 he was strongly critical of Pope Francis for attempting to promote peace in Ukraine. Yet in April 2025 Stubb was prominent among the mourners at Francis’s funeral. Well, at least it provided another opportunity to hobnob with his golfing buddy Trump.
The book is worth reading, however, not least for interesting observations on UN Security Council reform.
Michael Sanfey is a researcher at the Institute of Political Studies, UCP Lisbon
