One does not need much imagination to realize that the world we have known over the past three decades will not return. Not merely because the “international balance” has changed, but because the very idea of order itself has changed, from a system that claimed the existence of shared rules, interests, and values, to a scene in which power imposes the rules and then changes them whenever it wishes.
اضافة اعلان
In Davos, the Prime Minister of Canada stated simply what many avoid saying, the old order has definitively departed. He warned of the most dangerous feature of the current global moment “Performing sovereignty while accepting subordination”. This phrase does not describe Canada or Europe alone; it is the title of a new historical phase, in which sovereignty is revealed as a discourse for domestic consumption, while realities are managed through equations of coercion, blackmail, and balances of interest.
Weeks earlier, the U.S. National Security Strategy made clear, beyond any doubt, elements that reflect a desire to reshape America’s role in the world, particularly by reducing broad and unlimited commitments. From this perspective came its recent withdrawal from dozens of international organizations.
If we are looking for a blatant piece of evidence that encapsulates this transformation, we need only contemplate the incident of abducting the president of Venezuela and forcibly transferring him outside his country. This is not merely an aggression in violation of international law; it is a political declaration. When the United States, which proclaims itself a superpower, can seize a head of state from his capital, what is abducted is not only a person, but the very concept of the sovereign state itself.
What is more alarming is that this model is not limited to Venezuela. Rather, it sends a deterrent message to every leader, particularly in the Global South, who attempts to set limits on the greed of big companies, or to negotiate from a position of parity, or to refuse the reduction of his country’s wealth to a market opportunity for profit managed from abroad.
Here emerges the most sensitive link: the organic relationship between U.S. political decision-making and the interests of major corporations. For many years, proponents of liberalism in its various versions declared that it rests on market rules, human rights, and the rule of law. Yet reality reveals something simpler and harsher: when the interests of a powerful state converge with those of giant capital, principles become a language of embellishment; and when they conflict with those interests, principles turn into a burden that must be circumvented or redefined.
This is not a conspiracy theory, but a reading of what has accumulated over decades. Selectivity and double standards are not incidental features in the application of international law; they are part of the mechanism of global governance since the end of the Cold War. International law, including human rights, is invoked when it serves to pressure opponents, and marginalized when it embarrasses an ally. Slogans of civilian protection are raised in specific place, while humanitarian catastrophes are allowed to spiral elsewhere reaching the level of genocide and ethnic cleansing, as has been happening in Palestine for nearly eighty years, and as manifested most starkly over the past two years when the “Israel” destroyed Gaza and committed the most heinous forms of genocide, with explicit support from the United States and shameful complicity from major Western states, striking international law and a few day ago destroyed the headquarters of the UN agency (UNRWA) without the bare minimum of international objection.
Because we are sons of the Middle East, we know this before others. We were not content with the order that preceded the Cold War, nor with what followed it. Under the earlier order, the region was governed by the logic of mandates, partition, and the drawing of political and geographical maps according to the interests of the major powers. The establishment of a settler-colonial entity in Palestine, called “Israel,” was supported, bringing Jewish communities from different parts of the world at the expense of the Palestinian people, the majority of whom were forcibly displaced between 1946 and 1948 through a wide-scale process of ethnic cleansing. Those who remained were subjected to direct occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, while an apartheid system was imposed on those who remained on their land in historic Palestine, which was given the name “Israel.”
These are not isolated historical details, but rather early indicators that “international justice” was never equally available, and that the logic of power was, in practice, superior to the logic of right.
In the transitional phase following the end of the Cold War, matters became even more severe. There was a soft language about a “rules-based international order,” yet the rules were suspended whenever the interests of the dominant power, the United States, so required. It suffices to recall Afghanistan and Iraq, countries whose social and institutional structures were destroyed, whose direct occupation by the United States turned into long years of chaos and human cost, after which societies were left alone to bear the price of collapse. The outcome was neither “democracy” nor “stability,” but security vacuums, deep divisions, and the erosion of public trust in the very idea of the state.
What is dangerous now is that the new historical phase represents an explicit disagreement with the idea of shared interests, values, and rules, and even an open questioning of the relevance of the United Nations, coupled with a readiness to bypass the international institutions built after the Second World War. There is an attempt to establish alternative frameworks managed by a single grip, with the “Board of Peace” launched recently in Davos being one of its initial bodies. This is a declaration that the old world order is no longer a reference point. It can be said that if the previous phase was characterized, as some strategic thinkers described it, by “disguised unilateralism,” then we are now facing “declared unilateralism,” unembarrassed in its use of imperial definitions, whoever is with us is a friend; whoever opposes us is punished; and whoever stands in the way of our interests has their status reshaped by force, or through economic or military coercion.
In this context, Western dependence on the United States appears even more blatant. For decades, Europe presented itself as the guardian of values and the guarantor of rules, yet in practice it often followed United States, or hesitated and then joined, or objected rhetorically while complying in practice. Ironically, this European awakening did not begin until European interests themselves were threatened, trade, energy, supply chains, and competitiveness, followed by threats to seize “Greenland,” and earlier, threats to take control of the United States’ northern neighbor, “Canada.” Only then did discomfort surface, and voices began to speak of European sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Yet, in essence, this remains a toothless uprising so far, because the structural dependencies, security, financial, and technological are still profound.
As for China, along with Russia to varying degrees, they are responding to this transformation with what strategists call “calculated strategic calm,” characterized by minimal noise and a maximum effort to build alternatives slowly. This reflects a cold pragmatism that avoids direct confrontation before the tools of maneuver are fully in place. This calm, regardless of differing moral or political assessments of it, reveals an important strategic insight, the world is no longer an arena of rhetoric, but an arena of long-term arrangements, in which corridors, markets, and alliances are constructed, and crises are managed as opportunities for repositioning.
Therefore, the question now is not whether we want the return of the old order, because it will not return, and because it was never just to us in the first place. Nor is the question whether we wait for the West to “wake up” in defense of values, since many of these “values” were selective from the outset and only became problematic when Western interests themselves were harmed. The real question is: how do we deal with a world moving toward greater international authoritarianism, where sovereignty is abducted, rules are violated, and international law, including human rights principles is managed as a bargaining file rather than as an obligation?
The answer does not lie in submitting to the stronger power or acceptance its logic, but in building a minimum level of unity grounded in shared values and principles that protect the rights of peoples and states bearing the costs of this global authoritarianism. Yes, this may require rational and carefully standardized compromises to reach a unified position, but such compromises remain far less costly than fragmentation and division, which ultimately open the door to a dangerous logic: if confrontation is impossible, then alignment with those who impose their rules by force becomes the default option.
