Having spent almost twenty years inside the United Nations system, between Geneva, Africa, and New York. I saw things that worked. I also saw things that stagnated far longer than they should have. I was never ashamed of that work. I still am not.
For a country like Spain, seeking to strengthen its international weight without renouncing multilateralism, international law, or its European anchorage, this shift in the international order is far from being an abstract debate.
“The failure is the fault of the States that govern the system: all of them, without exception, with no excuses”
That is why, when someone tells me that the system has failed, I distrust the easy version of that story. Those who kept it running day by day were not the first to fail: I saw secretaries-general and their teams achieve more than what their means—financial and otherwise—allowed them to expect, even as they ended up learning to sidestep what the States left uncorrected. The failure is the fault of the States that govern the system: all of them, without exception, with no excuses. And I include myself here only at a much smaller scale: for years, like many others, I assumed that time would eventually fix what needed fixing. A Security Council designed in 1945 so that no great power could ever be compelled to act against its will. Reforms promised for decades and shelved as soon as they touched someone’s interests. A responsibility shared among 193 States until it was diluted so much that, in the end, it ceased to belong to any one in particular.
Whose fault is it, then? A little bit from everyone, which is another way of saying that it isn’t anyone’s, at least not enough to truly change anything.
The Turn
That void — the reform that never fully arrived — is what the United States has now decided to occupy on its own, openly. It doesn’t worry too much about how others react. It does what it wants to do, without spending much time justifying it. The Board of Peace is today the clearest sign of this: a small circle of invited States, a presidency that concentrates almost all real power. It is not the cause of anything. It is a symptom, but a useful one, because it shows with precision where this method leads when given space to operate.
“It is never stated in blunt terms, but it underlies everything: do as you are told, or pay a price that will not stay confined to the original matter”
One can see the same impulse in NATO. The complaint is not new: the sharing of defense burdens has been debated for decades without being fully resolved. What has changed is the method. More and more, the language is not of requesting but of conditioning. And that logic of conditionality has spread far beyond defense, into trade and tariffs, used increasingly as instruments of foreign policy. It is never stated in such blunt terms, but underlies everything: do what you are told, or pay a price that will not stay confined to the original matter.
The Powers
The United States is not the only one to benefit from this vacuum, which in itself proves that the trend goes beyond Washington. China and Russia have not needed to break any institution. They have simply occupied, each in their own way, the space left open by the crisis of multilateralism. Nevertheless, that comfort carries a deferred cost: the day they are confronted with the moment when the common rules no longer apply to them, rules that Beijing or Moscow might need someday, they will be exposed.
I’m No Longer Sure About the Signals
Let me say it plainly: at times I feel adrift in this new grammar of power. For twenty years I learned to read a Security Council statement: every word, every silence, every abstention meant something. Today, a simple post on social media can announce a shift in foreign policy with more weight than an official declaration, and I’m not sure I can decipher it in time or distinguish a real signal from a weather balloon or a simple mood.
“What strikes me most, as I watch all this unfold, is the speed with which the exception becomes the rule”
What strikes me most, as I watch all this unfold, is the speed with which the exception becomes the rule. A unilateral move occurs. The silence of those who should object becomes the expected response. And when criticism does appear, it is no longer answered on the diplomatic field: it is answered via the commercial route or by image, with a new tariff, a public insult aimed at a head of state or a direct communication meant to strike, not argue. None of this is entirely new. What is new is the frequency and the absence, until now, of a political cost high enough to deter the pattern before it repeats, episode after episode, each absorbed and forgotten before the next arrives.
The danger is not in the actor who does it. The danger lies in the precedent. Once such a method has proven effective at the top, with no lasting political cost for the user, nothing prevents it from being copied one notch lower. Any great power could tomorrow apply the same method to a smaller neighbor — at any scale, on any continent — provided the balance of power allows it and no one, anywhere, objects collectively. That is the real risk: not what one actor does today, but what everyone else learns from watching it: that it is now possible for them too.
“The real risk is not what a single actor does today, but what others learn from it: that it is now possible for them too”
And that is precisely what worries me looking ahead. Under this new logic, Europe, Asia, and Africa —each in their own way, each facing their own vulnerabilities and often confronted with their own dominant neighbor more than with a single global power— face the danger of losing more and more voice. Not because they have stopped trying to be heard, but because the game itself is closing in on those who already hold both levers that matter: power and money, tightening a little more with every cycle for everyone else.
What Has to Change
We had a slow, frustrating system, often defective because of the member states that composed it, never because of those who kept it running day to day; a system that sometimes prevented the powerful from getting what they wanted immediately. Now we are discovering that that slowness, poorly managed by the very states that should correct it, was also, in part, a protection for everyone else. None of this excuses the years of inaction that came before. Nor does it justify what has followed. The next American president will inherit a method that has already proven effective by its own criteria. And, depending on what voters decide, will be able to choose to soften it or push it even further. This is no longer a question Washington can answer alone.
“The answer cannot be to restore yesterday’s world, nor to indefinitely accept the law of the strongest”
The answer cannot be to restore yesterday’s world, nor to indefinitely accept the law of the strongest. We must build something swiftly, between these two extremes, before this new grammar, tried once, becomes simply the norm everywhere.
