How the old world order is collapsing

One of the most evocative cartoons I’ve seen in recent weeks was in an obscure London publication. It showed a wheelbarrow carrying a broken-down replica of the United Nations’ famous New York headquarters hurtling down a steep hill while a hooded figure watching it from the side mutters: “Psst, there goes the world order!” It brilliantly summed up the state of the world as we approach the new year amid deepening pessimism about the future.

While the killing fields of Gaza and Ukraine have become the defining features of a darkening international landscape, there are potential flashpoints practically in every part of the world waiting to explode.

In fact, there is hardly any region of the globe from Europe to Asia, from Africa to Latin America which can be described as wholly conflict-free while the ‘international community’—the UN and its 193 member countries—looks on as passive spectators.

After the Middle East, South-East Asia has become the biggest hotspot of international rivalry amid growing tensions in the South China Sea, the looming threat of a US-China confrontation over Taiwan, and the perpetually fraught situation in the Korean peninsula. All fuelled by a new Cold War which is likely to get ‘hotter’ under Donald Trump after he takes over the US presidency in January.

Lately, the rhetoric on both sides has become harsher. Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin lowered the thresh old governing the country’s nuclear doctrine in response to what Moscow sees as escalation by Western countries backing Ukraine in the 33-month-old war pitting it against Russia.

Even if the Trump–Putin bromance helps to induce a thaw in US–Russia relations, the wider tensions in international relations will remain.

Things could get even worse because of Trump’s confrontational approach towards China, Europe, Canada, Iran and much of Latin America over immigration, trade tariffs and climate change. Yet, far from trying to defuse the conflicts, some leading members of the UN are actively fanning the flames of hate and division by becoming partisans in the cause, supporting one side or the other rather than acting as peace-brokers.

Both the Israel–Palestine conflict and the Russia–Ukraine war may have been long over (indeed, may not even have started) had the UN been allowed to play its professed role as the keeper of international peace. What we are really witnessing is a systematic collapse of the post-World War rulebased world order designed to help resolve conflicts through peaceful means.

After the traumas of the two World Wars, the world had agreed that there were to be no more genocides, no more collective punishments, no more disproportionate use of force even in self-defence. And thus, the United Nations was set up to act as the conscience keeper of its member-states and the wider world. The five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, China, Russia, Britain and France) were vested with a special responsibility to ensure strict execution of the UN charter and its goal to maintain world peace, protect human rights and promote rule of law.

In the event, the five have reduced the UNSC to a parody of itself— using it and its various agencies to promote their own strategic interests, making nonsense of their assigned role as neutral umpires.

Over the years, America in particular has repeatedly used its veto power to frustrate UN efforts to resolve conflicts peacefully.

Washington and its allies have often bluffed their way through to secure their interests. Remember how they tricked the UN into authorising an illegal invasion of Iraq on the basis of what was later proved to be fake intelligence that Saddam Hussain had nuclear weapons and planned to use them against the West?

Vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that don’t serve their goals and undermining bodies like the UNESCO, WHO, UNHCR and WTO when they’re unable to bend them to their wishes has become standard practice. In fact, no multilateral institution has managed to escape the corrosive effect of divisive diplomatic power play. These include the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank which have an important role to play in making globalisation work better by promoting international economic cooperation.

In its analysis of America’s role in weakening international institutions, the European Centre for International Political Economy stated that US response to any perceived threat to its predominance was ‘jeopardising the world order’. The paralysis of the WTO and America’s withdrawal from the WHO are, it noted, ‘the most visible examples, but not the only ones.’

The latest casualty is the International Criminal Court (ICC) following its indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant over allegations of ‘war crimes’. America has rejected the verdict accusing the court of antisemitism. Yet, last year, the same Biden administration had expressed support for the ICC’s arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin over its actions in Ukraine and urged member states to comply with their obligations under the court.

No serious discussion on the current state of affairs will be complete without a reference to Gaza and Ukraine as illustrative of the way in which rival superpowers are undermining the post-War world order.

In Gaza, nowhere is safe from relentless Israeli bombing. The Palestinians have stopped counting their dead amid a constant struggle to save themselves from the next bomb. Reduced to rubble by Tel Aviv’s ruthless military machine, it now resembles the land of the living dead while the so-called ‘international community’ looks on in what must count as one of the most shameful demonstrations of diplomatic and moral impotence.

Meanwhile, Ukraine—armed to the teeth by its Western allies—is locked in an existential battle for its sovereignty ever since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, starting what has been described as the biggest conflict in Europe since the WWII. Russia controls around one-fifth of Ukrainian territory and there is growing pressure on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to find a way out amid fears of a wider conflict possibly involving nuclear weapons if Russia is provoked further.

In the Middle East, nobody is even talking about peace. The much-hyped ceasefire deal between Israel and Hezbollah is struggling to hold amid continuing violations by both sides. The last time the international community came together was in 1992 when the UN and NATO actively intervened to end civil war in Bosnia.

It has all gone downhill since.

In 2020, speaking on the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the United Nations, Secretary-General António Guterres reminded member-states that “fragmentation and polarisation, without effective mechanisms of multilateral governance [a] 100 years ago led to the WWI, followed by the second.” If the point was to remind the powers that be that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, it seems to have fallen on stone deaf ears.