The publication of Aspenia international 2/2025 marks the close of the journal’s thirtieth year. Entitled “The fog of war”, this issue considers whether we are living through a brief phase of tumult or rather witnessing a profound change which may lead to even more conflict. Authoritarian measures have always proved more easily enforced in times of crisis, and today’s crises are real and numerous. The hope had been that economic interdependence would guarantee peace, but perhaps it has only increased our sense of vulnerability. Wars – both the sort that are fought with guns and bombs and the sort that are fought with tariffs and sanctions – abound. The previous world order is crumbling, but we have yet to define a new one. For this reason and others, many commentators and analysts would have us believe that the world is experiencing a return to empires. This question is one of crucial importance for international life today, and various authors argue here that the current crisis in the globalization process has sparked a new drive to exercise direct control over land and resources. Our conclusion, however, is that the neo-imperial rhetoric being adopted for different reasons by today’s major nation states is failing to translate into reality. Despite declared ambitions, the structural conditions that made empires possible in the past are simply not there. Empires continue to cast long shadows, and the vocabulary of imperialism remains useful in analyzing the ambitions of power, the cracks in the international system, and the clashes between universalism and sovereignty. “Empires” extend from the global influence of the world’s major nation states to the immaterial dominance of Big Tech companies. And yet, it is more a temptation than an achievement. When all is said and done, empire today is an operational fiction. It is a powerful fiction, but a fiction nonetheless – one that feeds on shadows rather than on reality.