By Avilash Roul
With a leadership vacuum, world governance is in severe crisis. Under the UN watch, the US attacked, captured and abducted the Venezuelan President on the pretext of a drug trial in the US. If that’s not a blatant violation of the so-called rule-based order, the US intended, by military or otherwise, to annex Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO member. Consequently, NATO members in the EU have deployed their troops to defend the largest island against the President’s ambition.
Beyond these erratic and whimsical actions, the US has withdrawn from 66 international organisations (IOs), conventions, and treaties, including the India- and France-led International Solar Alliance (ISA). In a nutshell, the US, singularly, through its legitimately elected President, can hang the world upside down.
Is this the so-called liberal order that a handful of Western countries have been defending tooth and nail or pretending to do so? Or is this rule-based order an arrangement by the Western world, for the benefit of the Western world, but imposed upon the non-Western countries since the post-World War II era? Interestingly, the Kaisers (leaders) of highly ambitious emerging power centres of a multipolar world are keeping mum or maintaining their silence to avoid the wrath of a verbal illegal tariff hike from the US.
It is no exaggeration that the most powerful country in the world, the US, uses social media, especially ‘Truth Social’, to conduct its grand foreign policy. Most of the countries, allies or non-allies, are compelled to hook up to Truth Social with bated breath to know their assignments and missions with respect to world affairs, depending on the posting of the US President. In other words, public diplomacy has taken centre stage in the age of faster, smarter and concise communications, but not as unpredictable and uncertain as we have been witnessing in recent months in the US.
On the other hand, the argument put forward by Trump for the mass withdrawal from international organisations, conventions, and treaties that were earlier agreed upon through negotiations is now against the interests of the US. Unflinchingly, the scholars and commentators in the Global South are lamenting that the action would lead to the loss of the US’ leadership role, creating a destabilised, fragmented and riskier world.
The US has been the single largest donor and creator of such multilateral and regional institutions and agencies in the world that constitute the global structure. For the last eight decades, no power centres or regional blocs or emerging economies come close to dismantling such relative superiority of the US. When the US, or for that matter, any single country considers itself as indispensable for the survival of the prevailing global architecture, such an edifice has an inherent tendency to send frequent shock waves like the prevailing scenario.
We must acknowledge the fact that greater connectedness has a relative trauma, as the pandemic taught us recently. The present collective arrangement, which is highly dependent on both sides of the Atlantic, needs to be rearranged now through drastic changes by equal regional representations, irrespective of its economic strength.
Meanwhile, in Davos, the venue for the annual business jamboree — the World Economic Forum — becomes the venue for the signing of the ‘Board of Peace’ on Gaza, initiated by the US President for the reconstruction and rebuilding of the Palestinian resettlement. The Board of Peace (BOP) is touted by the proponent, while bypassing the UN, as the alternative to the UN.
Can this BOP replace the UN Peacebuilding Commission, a multilateral (31 members) advisory agency established in 2005 by the General Assembly and Security Council to collectively arrange resources and advise on integrated strategies for post-conflict peacebuilding and recovery? Very unlikely.
Many invited members are sceptical of the intent and purpose of this ad-hoc unilateral initiative of BOP. With the invitation letter to the world leaders to join the BOP, the draft Charter of the BOP is being shared as an attachment, showing its seriousness. None of the leaders who are joining the group or who are considering joining have either participated in drafting the Charter or deliberated its purpose and objectives.
If one closely examines, this BOP for Gaza was part of the US-initiated and UN Security Council-approved resolution in November 2025 that limits its function to Gaza and terminates by 2027. However, the draft Charter is considering the function of BOP in all conflict zones and beyond 2027. India, being an integral part of the UN Peacebuilding Commission for its contribution to peacekeeping, must not be coerced into joining this unilateral and ambiguous BOP.
Unquestionable unipolarity has a tremendous negative impact on global governance. The relevance of non-alignment or its hybrid format of multi-alignment or mini-alignment as an option for countries can’t be outrightly discarded. Meanwhile, the world is desperately feeling the absence of global statesmen like Woodrow Wilson, Jawaharlal Nehru, Abraham Lincoln, Dag Hammarskjöld, Sukarno, Olof Palme, Gro Brundtland, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama and many more.
At present, none seems to be qualified as a world statesman. Arguably, the rise of inward parochial nationalism brings the death of internationalism. At the end, leaders’ triumphalism may bring short-term dividends at home, but it has the potential in weakening collective actions in addressing global, regional and local problems.
The writer is an international advisor on climate change risk and transboundary rivers