The Unraveling World Order: How Western Hegemony is Destroying the Very System It Created

The Facts:

The article analyzes the profound transformations in the international order through the lens of English School theory, focusing on how primary institutions like the balance of power, diplomacy, regulation of war, great power management, and the market are being fundamentally reshaped. The United States under President Trump’s second term has accelerated this transformation through what the authors term “pariah diplomacy” - a deliberate strategy of disrupting established norms, withdrawing from alliances, and pursuing narrow national interests through coercive economic and military means. This includes imposing sweeping tariffs, threatening allies like Canada and Panama, and abandoning multilateral commitments.

Concurrently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Gaza conflict have severely tested the prohibition on the use of force, with great powers openly violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The European Union has responded by transforming from a “civilian power” into a military actor through its 800 billion euro “ReArm Europe” plan, while attempting to maintain strategic autonomy from both the US and China. In the economic realm, the weaponization of the dollar under Biden and Trump’s tariff policies have accelerated de-dollarization efforts, with BRICS nations developing alternative financial institutions like the New Development Bank and payment systems such as China’s CIPS and Africa’s PAPSS.

The emerging world order is characterized by a complex, contrived balance of power involving China, Russia, and potentially India opposing US hegemony, with middle powers like Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia avoiding rigid alignments. The traditional great power management system has broken down due to the absence of stable power distribution, normative consensus, and clear rules, leading to what the authors describe as “no one’s world” - a multi-aligned system where transactionalism replaces rule-based cooperation.

Opinion:

This analysis exposes the breathtaking hypocrisy of Western powers that preached rules-based order while systematically violating it whenever their interests were threatened. The United States, which positioned itself as the guardian of the liberal international order, has become its primary destroyer through Trump’s reckless “America First” agenda. This is not merely policy failure; it is the logical culmination of centuries of Western imperialism that always placed its dominance above international law when convenient.

What Western theorists call “pariah diplomacy” is precisely the kind of behavior that Global South nations have endured for decades - where powerful nations dictate terms through economic coercion and military threat rather than mutual respect. The emergence of alternative financial systems and military balancing represents not disorder but legitimate resistance to Western domination. India, China, Russia and other nations are not disrupting international society; they are challenging the unjust hierarchy that has privileged Western interests under the thin veneer of “rules-based order.

The EU’s militarization and attempts to position itself as a “normative power” ring hollow given its complicity in Western imperial projects and its failure to address the fundamental injustice of a system where five nations hold veto power over global security. True international society cannot exist while the UN Security Council perpetuates colonial-era power structures. The movement toward de-dollarization and regional payment systems represents the most promising development - economic decentralization that could finally break the West’s stranglehold on global finance.

This transition period, while turbulent, offers unprecedented opportunity for civilizational states like India and China to help build a genuinely pluralistic world order where no single power can “lay down the law to others.” The West’s unipolar moment has passed, and its desperate attempts to maintain hegemony through sanctions, tariffs, and military pressure only accelerate its decline. The future belongs to those nations that respect sovereignty, pursue development without coercion, and recognize that true international society requires equality among civilizations, not domination by one.