The Great Unraveling: Strategic Adaptation or Systemic Collapse in the International Order?
By Hesham Sultan Ijaz
What we are witnessing today is not the quiet decay of an aging international system, nor an accidental drift into disorder. It is something far more deliberate—and far more dangerous. The post–1945 international order is being dismantled in plain sight by its principal architect, the United States, with Israel functioning as both beneficiary and forward instrument of this transformation. The language of “rules,” “values,” and “norms” remains rhetorically intact, but in practice those rules now operate selectively, instrumentally, and conditionally. Power has ceased to be constrained by law; law is being reshaped to serve power.
This is not a failure of the system. It is a strategic choice. At the heart of this choice lies American economic dominance. The global order was never sustained by moral authority alone; it was enforced by the dollar, global liquidity, access to U.S. markets, and control over financial infrastructure. Today, these same instruments are no longer primarily stabilizing forces. They have become tools of coercion deployed with increasing frequency and decreasing restraint. Sanctions are imposed outside multilateral authorization. Secondary sanctions compel third-party compliance. Access to financial systems is turned into a political privilege rather than a neutral public good. Compliance is extracted not through legitimacy, but through fear of exclusion.
This is not incidental behavior. It reflects a shift in strategic doctrine: the United States no longer sees itself as the custodian of a neutral system, but as the ultimate arbiter of who may operate within it. In this framework, multilateral institutions are tolerated only insofar as they reinforce American preferences. When they do not, they are bypassed, undermined, or delegitimized. The system is not being exited—it is being hollowed out.
Israel’s role in this process is pivotal. The war in Gaza has laid bare the extent to which international law has become optional when core allies are involved. Civilian casualties, humanitarian collapse, and credible allegations of war crimes have not produced accountability; they have produced diplomatic shields, vetoes, and open threats against international legal institutions. When the International Criminal Court moved beyond symbolism and attempted to operationalize its mandate, the response was swift and revealing: rejection of jurisdiction, denunciation of legitimacy, and political pressure to neutralize enforcement.
The message could not be clearer. International law is enforceable only against the weak, the isolated, and the strategically expendable. Against protected actors, it becomes a moral suggestion rather than a binding constraint. This is not erosion through neglect; it is selective demolition. Entire pillars of the legal order are being knocked out because they interfere with immediate strategic objectives.
The consequences extend far beyond the Middle East. Every time a veto overrides overwhelming global consensus, every time accountability is blocked by power, every time institutions are punished for attempting independence, the credibility of the entire system deteriorates. For much of the Global South, this is no longer hypocrisy—it is structural exposure. The claim that the international order is “rules-based” rather than “power-based” has lost its plausibility. What remains is a hierarchy enforced through economic leverage and military protection.
Alliance politics have been similarly transformed. Security commitments are no longer framed as moral or strategic obligations, but as transactions subject to renegotiation. Burden-sharing has become a mechanism not just for extracting resources, but for normalizing conditionality. Allies are reminded—explicitly and implicitly—that protection is not guaranteed, permanence is illusory, and loyalty must be continually demonstrated. This may produce short-term compliance, but it corrodes trust. Alliances built on uncertainty do not deter effectively; they encourage hedging, duplication, and strategic drift.
The economic consequences are even more corrosive. By weaponizing interdependence, the United States has accelerated global efforts to reduce exposure to its financial system. States are not abandoning the dollar because they reject American leadership; they are doing so because dependence has become a liability. Parallel payment systems, currency diversification, regional trade blocs, and strategic autonomy initiatives are no longer fringe ideas. They are rational responses to a system where economic integration carries existential political risk.
This is the central paradox of controlled demolition: every act of coercion weakens the very structures that make coercion effective. Power is being exercised in ways that degrade its own foundations.
Supporters of this strategy argue that disorder can be managed—that rivals can be contained, allies disciplined, and institutions reshaped without systemic collapse. This confidence is misplaced. China and Russia are not merely reacting; they are actively constructing alternative frameworks designed to bypass American leverage altogether. What is emerging is not a new order, but a fractured landscape of competing systems, overlapping rules, and declining enforcement capacity. Competitive deregulation—where all major powers weaken constraints without agreeing on replacements—is becoming the default condition of global politics.
Crucially, this strategy is being pursued at a moment of internal weakness. Domestic polarization in the United States has eroded the political capacity for long-term stewardship. Fiscal pressures and social fragmentation make consensus-based leadership difficult to sustain. In this context, coercion appears efficient, legality appears cumbersome, and institutions appear expendable. Controlled demolition becomes attractive precisely because reconstruction seems politically impossible.
Yet history offers little comfort to those who believe demolition can remain controlled. If current trajectories continue, the international system of the early 2030s will be defined by three destabilizing features. First, international law will survive largely as rhetoric, applied selectively and ignored routinely, stripping conflict management mechanisms of credibility. Second, economic fragmentation will accelerate, producing parallel financial and trade systems that reduce global efficiency while increasing geopolitical risk. Third, crisis escalation will become more likely, not less, as weakened institutions fail to contain regional conflicts before they spill across borders.
In such an environment, deterrence will rest less on rules and more on raw power, miscalculation will become systemic rather than exceptional, and smaller states will face increasing pressure to choose sides in conflicts not of their making. The greatest irony will be this: in dismantling constraints to preserve freedom of action, the system’s dominant power may find itself operating in a world far less controllable than the one it chose to break.
The postwar order will not survive this decade. The open question is whether what replaces it will be negotiated, however imperfectly—or imposed through cascading crises that no amount of economic or military dominance can fully contain. The danger is no longer abstract. The unraveling is underway, and the window for shaping what comes next is rapidly closing.
A public service message
