Iran, Hungary, Ukraine: The World Is Running on Legacy Software
The old rules are gone. The new ones aren’t written yet. And no one in charge knows how to write them.
The old world order is dead. The new one hasn’t been written yet. And the people currently in charge — on both sides of the Atlantic — are structurally incapable of writing it.
That’s not a provocative opinion. It’s an analytical conclusion, and few people are better positioned to make it than Bianka Banova. Bulgarian-born, Switzerland-based, she runs the Waronomics Substack with what she calls Balkan candor and systems thinking — no institutional affiliations, no ideology to protect, and two decades of pattern recognition developed by someone who grew up watching history happen to her country.
In this conversation, she tells you things you won’t hear anywhere else.
Péter Magyar — the man who just crushed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — holds immigration positions stricter than Orbán’s. Yet within hours of the results, right-wing commentators from outside Hungary, with millions of followers — who couldn’t have found Hungary on a map the day before — declared it a civilizational catastrophe. They were, wittingly or not, running the Kremlin’s script.
The war in Iran is quietly reshaping the war in Ukraine in ways almost nobody is discussing. It’s strangling two of Russia’s most critical military suppliers at once, and tying China’s hands in ways that are starting to show up on the battlefield in both Ukraine and Iran..
And European reluctance on Iran isn’t weakness — it’s the predictable consequence of an American administration that spent over a year treating its closest allies as adversaries. You don’t get the alliance when you need it if you’ve spent 14 months dismantling it.
Running through all his is Banova’s core argument: a leadership class with no skin in the game, no time horizon worth the name, and no ability to think past the next election cycle. She’s seen this failure up close her entire life. She knows exactly what it looks like.
She’s cautiously optimistic. But she’s clear: The next 10 to 20 years are going to be hard.
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