Commercial Ties with Authoritarian Regimes in a Changing Global Order: The Need for a Refined Ethical Approach

In an era of profound geopolitical fragmentation, rising authoritarianism and an increasingly multipolar global order, political and economic decision-makers face a growing moral dilemma: how to reconcile economic interests with commitments to international law, human rights, and democratic values. In this paper I examine the ethical dilemma raised by commercial ties with authoritarian regimes in the context of a rapidly changing economic and political landscape. Drawing on moral philosophy, international political theory, and business ethics, I analyze how existing ethical approaches evaluate such relationships. I argue that prevailing binary frameworks, such as democratic versus authoritarian regimes or legal versus political norms, increasingly fail to capture the normative and strategic complexity of today’s multipolar world. Instead, I propose a convergence approach, emphasizing the prioritization of norm violations that challenge the very foundations of an already eroding global normative order, including wars of aggression and gross violations of international humanitarian law.