I don’t know if the Iran war will end anytime soon. But here are two things that have most certainly ended — the idea of America and the relevance of the United Nations. Never before has the UN seemed as redundant, powerless and defunct as it does today. And never has the US looked as much of a parody as it does now.
I say this as someone whose childhood and post graduation years — two major formative phases — were shaped by and in New York. If there was any sense of belonging I felt outside of my own country, it was in New York, where my parents lived and worked for a sizeable time, and where I have returned to in every possible break I get. So much so that there is a bench memorial to my father in Central Park in the city that has had a profound imprint on our family’s living memories.
Donald Trump has single-handedly reduced one of the greatest countries of the world — a country connected to the aspirational dreams of millions of Indians — to an ugly caricature.
There has been, in his second term as President, a normalisation of the unimaginable — the threat to wipe out civilisations, abusing your adversary and referring to them by the most offensive slurs, dismantling global systems of trade and communication just because you can, and unleashing a reckless war for which the rest of the world is paying the price.
Of course, the people of a nation are not the same as their governments. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued in his landmark Davos speech, the story of an international order based on rules has always been “partially false … the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.” And sure, the American assumptions about unilateralism did not begin with Trump. But that Trump has been able run a bulldozer over diplomacy, civility, fair play and minimal decency without immediate consequences at home is nothing short of astounding.
Polls show that the Iran war is unpopular, including within the Republican base. But given how roundly insulated the American public is from anything outside of the country’s borders, I have my doubts about how emotionally invested they are in forcing Trump’s hand. In short, unless he’s impeached, he will get away with wrecking havoc on the global economy, taking lives and dragging the entire world into his singularly created mess.
It’s staggering that just one man can have this much world-altering power with no checks at home or abroad. American exceptionalism — the idea that distinctly American values define the “free world” and are universally applicable — died a long time back. Now, it’s the actual reverse. That an American president can inflict damage on the entire world because of pure recklessness, while nation-States and multilateral forums look on helplessly, tells you that the so-called global order was already broken.
No single entity has been as irrelevant as the UN. The very foundation of the UN Security Council, the most powerful body within the UN, is rooted in a version of imperialism. How can the world in 2026 persist with a 1945 decision that allowed five countries a veto on all global decision-making?
Here’s the key responsibility of the UNSC (with five permanent and 10 non-permanent, rotating members), as spelt out in Article 24 of the United Nations Charter: “In order to ensure prompt and effective action by the United Nations, its Members confer on the Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security…” Reading it out loud brings home how farcical this mandate is given that at least three of the five permanent members have not hesitated, to varying degrees, in starting military conflicts to pursue their own expansionist ambitions.
Trump, for instance, is already talking about turning his attention to the next “conquest”. And quite frankly, given how the Americans have behaved vis-à-vis Iran, bombing the nation in the middle of negotiations in February, why would the Chinese not take this moment to make a move on Taiwan? Mercifully, Xi Jinping has taken the route, so far, of dialogue, meeting this week with Taiwan’s leader of opposition and calling Taiwan a “shared homeland”.
But, as assassinations of adversaries becomes acceptable State policy, the UNSC has utterly failed to maintain the international peace it was tasked with. Besides, why should just five nations hold the keys to the vault, just because that was the decision taken 80 years ago?
Even among these so-called Big Five, the failure to genuinely stand up to Trump is there for all to see. Keir Starmer, for instance, has said multiple times that the Iran war is not the UK’s war. So why were Americans allowed to use England’s bases for military operations against Iran? Technically, the use of these bases is for defensive missions. But when the US has clearly spoken of the intent to blow up bridges and power plants, who believes that these operations are defensive?
The truth is the world is already in a new version of the Cold War where the most brutal, unfiltered, and ugly form of the might-is-right dictum is being played out. And multilateralism has failed.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal
