Even when the underlying reality changes, the status quo has a strong grip. People are deeply creatures of habit. It's also difficult for the emerging understanding to overcome the barrier of becoming "common knowledge" and, prior to that, people will follow old patterns because they assume that it's expected.

High-salience events create new common knowledge and so lead to larger changes in behaviour than might otherwise be justified. For example, the '56 Suez crisis was a high-salience event that communicated that world power had shifted from Europe to the US. Its impact was much greater than a narrow analysis would convey.

The Russo-Ukrainian war and today's events are also high-salience, and they communicate that there aren't any rules any longer.

One consequence is that, in the absence of Pax(ish) Americana, the only effective defense is a nuclear one. This was well understood: a lot of the motivation for creating the post-WWII system was to create an alternative to nuclear weapons. But Libya gave up its program and Gaddafi ended up dead. Ukraine gave up its weapons and got invaded. Venezuela didn't have them.

It'll take a while for this to play out, but I suspect keeping it in mind will help with understanding the news over the next decade or so.