Afrasianet - Hassan Nafaa - The current international order is collapsing, and the time has come to let it collapse and to seek to establish a new international order that is governed according to different philosophical and moral foundations and rules.
The United States is a nascent country that is only two and a half centuries old, but it is unlike any of the countries that have emerged throughout the ages, especially if we look at it through the prism of its all-encompassing power components. If we take military expenditures as an indicator, its budget exceeds the sum of the budgets of the next ten countries in the ranking.
Because President Trump believes that this budget, as large as it is, is not commensurate with the place that the United States deserves in the international system, he has decided to increase it to $1.5 trillion starting next year, a figure equal to the total spending of nearly half of the countries of the "Global South" combined.
If we turn to the rest of the indicators of comprehensive power, with their hard, soft, and smart components, it will be clear that the United States still occupies a position at the forefront of the ladder of power in the contemporary international system, which makes it the country most capable of influencing its course negatively and positively, but this does not necessarily mean that it will still be able to maintain its position of leadership for a long time, or that it is the most worthy of leading the international system, especially at the legal and moral levels.
Prior to World War I, the United States was a rising power looking to exert some influence over its immediate geographic neighborhood, which explains the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which aimed to prevent European countries from interfering in the affairs of the Americas and helped make the Northern Hemisphere a exclusive sphere of influence for the United States.
When the latter was forced to participate in World War I, President Wilson believed that the time had come to establish a global organization for the management of international relations, based on a system of collective security under which member states pledged mutual guarantees and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.
Because the idea was widely welcomed by the countries participating in the Versailles Conference, Wilson was given the chairmanship of the committee that drafted the League of Nations Covenant, but the strength of the isolationist movement prevented him from being able to persuade Congress to ratify peace treaties, preventing the United States from becoming a member of the first world organization in human history that sought to achieve international peace and security, weakening and then collapsing less than two decades after its founding.
The world war resulted in radical changes in the international balance of power. The Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) were defeated, the major allied and victorious powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain, and France) were able to establish a new system of collective security run by a council in which they would occupy permanent seats and have veto over its decisions, and because the balances resulting from the war did not last long, because the Allied countries were divided into two conflicting camps, one US-led capitalist and the other Union-led socialist The Soviet system of collective security was disrupted before it could complete the mechanisms stipulated in the UN Charter, and a cold war broke out between them, which was managed through two main tools: a balance of nuclear terror, whose presence helped to enforce respect for military red lines, on the one hand, and a veto, whose use in the Security Council helped to enforce respect for political red lines.
Because the Western camp won four-fifths of the permanent seats in the Security Council, its political balance prevailed, and therefore it did not need to use its veto extravagantly, unlike the Soviet Union, which at the beginning of the Cold War had no choice but to resort to a veto intensive to protect reconciliation, especially since until 1971, the government of Taiwan officially enjoyed the status of the legitimate representative of the State of China in the United Nations, and when this crooked situation was corrected, the People's Republic of China had defected from the Eastern Camp!
Official statistics of the vote in the Security Council indicate that the United States did not resort to exercising the right of veto throughout the period from the establishment of the United Nations in 1945 until the mid-1960s, while the Soviet Union used it 26 times during the same period of time, which allowed the United States to exploit this situation in the media, by claiming that the Soviet Union was pursuing a policy that was contrary to the purposes of the United Nations and became a serious obstacle to the ability of the international organization to perform its functions and impose respect for international law on all.
From that date onwards, the United States became the most veto-wielding country, and then in later stages, especially during the period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the only country capable of using the veto in a unipolar international order, for purposes that were completely contrary to the purposes for which the veto was enacted, but also for purposes that were completely contrary to the letter and spirit of the UN Charter.
It used it on June 4, 2025, against a draft resolution calling for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian access, and then on September 18, 2025, when it used it against a draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, despite the approval of all other states, which means that it used a procedural right to enable a rogue state to escape punishment and continue its crimes.
It should be noted here that the excessive use of the veto power to protect a state that occupies the territory of others, practices policies of apartheid and forced displacement, and commits crimes against humanity, is not the only witness to the United States' violation of international legitimacy and its defiance of the will of the international community.
It has refused to grant Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an entry visa to address the current session of the General Assembly, which opened its work last Tuesday (22/9/2026). This constituted a grave violation of the text of Article 105, paragraph 5, of the Charter of the United Nations, which guarantees the privileges and immunities of representatives of Member States to enable them to exercise their functions independently, and a flagrant violation of the text of Article 13 of the Headquarters Convention, signed in 1947, which obliges the United States to grant visas to representatives of States "free of charge and as soon as possible."
In the face of this egregious breach, the UN General Assembly found no alternative but to vote on a resolution allowing the Palestinian president to deliver his speech remotely, which was approved by a majority of 152 countries, with only 3 countries rejecting it, the United States, Israel, and Uruguay, and 4 countries abstaining, reflecting the isolation of the United States.
The irony here is that the latter did not hesitate to grant Netanyahu, who is wanted to appear before the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a visa that would enable him not only to enter the United States, but also to address the international community from the podium of the United Nations itself, which represents the height of defiance and defiance.
The actions of the United States, especially under the administration of President Trump, demonstrate that the most powerful country in the contemporary world is not only deliberately insulting the international community, but also seeks to demolish international institutions that it does not like, whether they belong to the United Nations system or not, as is evident from its position on both the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), one of the branches established in 1949 by a resolution of the General Assembly, more than three quarters of a century ago, and the International Criminal Court, an independent international institution established by the Rome Statute that entered into force in 2002. As far as UNRWA is concerned, the United States stopped funding it under President Trump, which was a green light that encouraged the Zionist entity to kill hundreds of its employees and demolish dozens of its buildings and offices scattered in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
As for the International Criminal Court, in February 2025, Trump issued an executive order entitled "Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court", allowing him to freeze the funds of judges and employees who participated in the preparation of the arrest warrant issued against the current president of the entity's ministers and its former defense minister, and prevent them from entering the United States, which means that the latter is keen to tighten the noose on the institution of justice, by placing obstacles that prevent it from performing its legal function, instead of tightening the noose on the perpetrators of genocide and forced displacement, which sheds a bright light on the moral degeneration that the United States has reached under Trump.
When the greatest power in the contemporary world, which has made the greatest effort to establish the current international order, which hosts the headquarters of the United Nations, and which possesses the most influential and influential tools on the international stage, becomes the same one accused of undermining the legal and moral foundations and rules on which this system is based, especially if the motive behind its deviant behavior is related to aiding and rescuing an expansionist entity accused of committing war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, we are facing the paradox that the current international order is collapsing, and that the time has come to let it collapse, and to seek to establish a new international order that is governed according to different philosophical and moral foundations and rules.
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Hassan Nafaa - Professor of Political Science at Cairo University.
