How the Collapse of Global Order Threatens Humanity’s Most Critical Transition
Bill Friend • February 9, 2026
The erosion of international law is happening “before the eyes of the world, on our screens, live in 4K.” Those are not the words of an activist or a dissident. They are the words of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, describing the state of the institution he leads. The law of power, he has warned, is prevailing over the power of law.
He is right. And the timing could not be worse.
The post-World War II international order—built on the premise that sovereign nations would submit to shared rules enforced through shared institutions—is visibly fraying. Not in one place, not by one rogue actor, but simultaneously, across multiple regions, by the very powers that built the system. Russia invades Ukraine. Israel prosecutes a military campaign in Gaza shielded by American vetoes. The United States reportedly abducts a sitting head of state from Venezuela. China presses its claims in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. These are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern, and the pattern is accelerating.
This would be dangerous in any era. In this one, it may prove catastrophic. Because the challenges now bearing down on humanity—artificial intelligence, climate disruption, pandemic preparedness, nuclear proliferation, the governance of technologies that could reshape or end civilization—are inherently global. They cannot be solved by any single nation, however powerful. They require exactly the kind of coordinated, rules-based, multilateral response that the world is dismantling in real time.
We are tearing down the house at the precise moment we need to build an addition.
From Contained Defiance to Systemic Decay
For decades after 1945, the international system held—imperfectly, hypocritically, but recognizably. The UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against another state’s territorial integrity, enshrined in Article 2(4), became a strong norm. When violations occurred, they were typically covert, limited, conducted through proxies, or at least wrapped in the language of self-defense. Direct aggression against another state’s territory was rare. Even powerful states paid lip service to the framework, because the framework served their interests more often than it constrained them.
What has changed in recent years—accelerating sharply from 2022 onward and intensifying through 2025 and 2026—is not that individual nations defy international norms. That has always happened. What has changed is that multiple great powers are doing so simultaneously, openly, and with impunity. The defiance is no longer contained. It has become systemic.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the most flagrant violation of the Charter’s core prohibition since the end of the Cold War: an overt war of territorial conquest by a permanent member of the Security Council, sustained over years, with no mechanism of accountability in sight. Russia vetoes every resolution condemning its own actions. The system designed to prevent exactly this scenario has been rendered mute by its own architecture.
But Russia is not alone. Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, launched after the October 2023 attacks, has drawn widespread accusations of disproportionate force and violations of international humanitarian law—accusations shielded from Security Council action by the United States. The reported abduction of Venezuelan President Maduro by U.S. operatives in early 2026 was condemned across Latin America and the Global South as a brazen violation of sovereignty conducted without UN mandate or legal justification. American and allied strikes on Iranian facilities proceed under contested legal frameworks. Each of these cases, taken alone, might be absorbed by the system. Taken together, they reveal a pattern that is corrosive in a way that isolated violations are not.
Analysts have identified what might be called a contagion effect. When one great power breaches a foundational norm and faces no consequences, the deterrent value of that norm weakens for everyone else. The baseline of acceptable behavior shifts downward. What was once unthinkable becomes debatable, then precedented, then routine. The prohibition on forcible territorial change, the protection of civilians in armed conflict, the principle that sovereignty means something even for small states—these are not abstractions. They are the load-bearing walls of the international order. And they are cracking under simultaneous pressure from multiple directions.
The Paralysis at the Center
At the heart of this collapse sits the UN Security Council, the body specifically charged with maintaining international peace and security. It is paralyzed, and the paralysis is structural.
The veto power held by the five permanent members—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—was designed as a safeguard against the organization being used against the interests of the major powers. In practice, it has become a shield behind which those powers commit the very acts the Charter was written to prevent. Russia vetoes accountability for its invasion of Ukraine. The United States vetoes accountability for Israeli operations in Gaza. The mechanism intended to ensure great-power buy-in has become the mechanism that ensures great-power impunity.
The result is not merely gridlock on specific conflicts. It is a crisis of legitimacy for the entire institution. When the Security Council cannot act on the most visible, consequential breaches of the rules it exists to enforce, the rules themselves begin to feel decorative. States continue to invoke the language of international law—self-defense, humanitarian intervention, proportionality—but increasingly as rhetoric rather than constraint. The gap between what the system says and what the system does has become too wide to ignore.
Secretary-General Guterres has described the current reality with unusual bluntness: powerful actors treat multilateral solutions as irrelevant and their own power as sufficient justification for action. He has warned of imminent financial collapse, with the United States—historically the institution’s largest funder—withdrawing from dozens of UN-affiliated bodies, slashing contributions, and accumulating massive arrears. The UN’s own reform process involves drastic staff cuts of up to twenty percent in some areas and austerity measures that look less like renewal than managed decline.
The UN still functions in areas that do not threaten great-power interests: humanitarian aid delivery, peacekeeping in smaller conflicts, technical standard-setting in aviation, finance, and public health. These are not nothing. But they are not what the institution was built for. The UN was built to prevent the catastrophic breakdown of order among the powerful. On that count, it is failing in plain sight.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
When a central authority loses its ability to enforce norms, mediate disputes, or coordinate global responses, the void does not stay empty. Power does not disappear. It redistributes—often chaotically and unevenly.
What is filling the vacuum left by the UN’s retreat is not a single successor but a fractured landscape of competing arrangements, each with its own logic and its own dangers.
The most immediate tendency is toward transactional great-power politics: a world of bilateral deals, spheres of influence, and unilateral action. The United States asserts dominance in the Western Hemisphere. Russia claims prerogatives in its near abroad. China expands its reach across East Asia and the Belt and Road. This is less a new order than a return to an old one—nineteenth-century-style geopolitics, less ideological, more pragmatic and predatory, and fundamentally unstable. Smaller states are squeezed, coerced, or forced to choose sides.
A second pattern is multipolar fragmentation: no single hegemon or universal institution dominates, and instead a patchwork of issue-based coalitions, regional blocs, and ad hoc groupings emerges. BRICS expands. ASEAN asserts itself. Middle powers—India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia—gain agency by hedging between great powers and building lateral relationships. Some analysts see in this a “networked multipolarity” that could, if managed well, provide a kind of distributed stability. Others see a landscape where no one is responsible for anything and coordination on existential threats becomes nearly impossible.
A third possibility, and the darkest, is what some have called a “time of monsters”—a period where unchecked impunity spreads, regional wars multiply, non-state actors exploit the gaps, and the drift toward “might makes right” accelerates beyond recovery. This is not inevitable. But it is not implausible either, particularly if the current trajectory continues unchecked.
The most likely near-term reality is a hybrid of all three: remnants of the old UN-centered system persist in technical domains, but core security and norm enforcement shift to power-based arrangements and regional dominance. As Guterres himself has warned, global problems will not be solved by one power calling the shots or two powers carving the world into rival spheres. And yet that is precisely the direction in which momentum is carrying us.
The Worst Possible Timing
All of this would be alarming in a stable technological environment. We are not in a stable technological environment. We are in the most volatile period of technological change in human history, and it is accelerating.
In a companion essay, “The Silicon Fulcrum,” I argued that the convergence of semiconductor fragility, great-power AI competition, and the approaching thresholds of artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence has placed humanity on a knife’s edge. The argument bears summarizing here, because the collapse of international governance is not a separate crisis from the AI transition. It is the same crisis, viewed from a different angle.
Ninety percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors—the chips that train and run frontier AI models—are produced on a single island in the western Pacific, in the shadow of an increasingly aggressive military posture from Beijing. The United States and China are locked in an AI race that both sides treat as existential. Expert surveys now place the median arrival date for human-level artificial general intelligence within the next decade, with the transition to superintelligence potentially following in months or years. The alignment problem—ensuring that an intelligence vastly greater than our own remains beneficial—is widely regarded as one of the hardest technical challenges humanity has ever faced. And the probability that leading AI researchers assign to existential catastrophe from misaligned AI this century ranges from five to twenty percent.
These are not problems that any nation can solve alone. A CERN-scale multinational project for AI safety research. Binding international agreements on the conditions under which autonomous recursive self-improvement may proceed. Shared early-warning systems for dangerous capability thresholds. Coordinated governance of compute infrastructure. Treaties ensuring that no single lab or nation crosses a critical line in secret. These are the minimum rational responses to the situation—and every one of them requires exactly the kind of functioning, credible, enforceable international framework that is being dismantled before our eyes.
The irony is savage. At the moment when humanity most needs the capacity for global coordination, global coordination is collapsing. At the moment when shared rules and mutual accountability could mean the difference between a flourishing future and an existential catastrophe, the powerful are treating rules as optional and accountability as a constraint to be discarded. We are not merely failing to build the governance infrastructure that the AI transition demands. We are actively destroying the foundations on which such infrastructure would need to stand.
What Remains
It would be dishonest to pretend that the UN, even at its best, was ever fully adequate to its mandate. The veto was a design flaw from the beginning—a concession to realism that embedded impunity into the architecture of accountability. The system was always more aspiration than enforcement. And there are domains where it continues to function: the common language of diplomacy it provides, the norms articulated through General Assembly resolutions and International Court of Justice opinions, the humanitarian and technical work that persists in the spaces between great-power conflict. These are real, and they matter. For smaller states, international law remains the only shield they have. Its erosion leaves them more vulnerable, not less.
But the honest assessment, as of early 2026, is that the institution designed to prevent the catastrophic breakdown of order among the powerful is not preventing it. The rules survive as rhetoric. The enforcement mechanisms are frozen. The financial base is eroding. And the most consequential challenges in human history—challenges that will determine whether the next century is one of unprecedented flourishing or existential crisis—are arriving into a governance vacuum.
Calls for reform persist: limiting veto use in mass-atrocity cases, expanding the Security Council, creating new institutions purpose-built for emerging threats like AI. Middle powers and Global South coalitions are pushing for a voice. None of this is futile. But none of it is happening at the speed or scale that the moment demands. The gap between what is needed and what is underway is not a crack. It is a chasm.
The House Divided
The pattern is now familiar. We saw it with semiconductors: a critical vulnerability identified, flagged, documented in report after report—and ignored until crisis forced action, years too late. We are seeing it again with AI safety: the risks cataloged, the timelines collapsing, the experts warning—and the response fragmented, competitive, nowhere near commensurate with the stakes.
And now we are seeing it with the international order itself: the institution meant to hold the world together under shared rules is being hollowed out by the very nations that built it, at the very moment when the need for global coordination has never been greater.
I have said before that I am a strong supporter of AI and that I am not arguing we should stop its development. That remains true. What I am arguing—what I will keep arguing—is that we cannot afford to cross the thresholds ahead of us as a house divided. The technologies we are creating will not wait for us to get our governance in order. They will not pause while we sort out our rivalries or reform our institutions or decide whether international law still matters. They will arrive on their own schedule, and when they do, we will either have the capacity to respond as one civilization or we will not.
Right now, we are moving in the wrong direction. The machinery of global cooperation is being disassembled. The norms that constrain the powerful are weakening. The vacuum is filling with exactly the kind of fragmented, transactional, short-term power politics that is least equipped to handle what is coming.
This is not a distant problem. It is not a theoretical concern for future generations. It is happening now, in 4K, on every screen, and the window to reverse it is not infinite. The question is not whether we need a functioning international order to navigate the most consequential transition in human history. We do. The question is whether we will rebuild one before the transition is upon us—or whether we will face whatever comes next as a collection of rivals, divided and exposed, hoping that the fragility we have chosen does not become the catastrophe we cannot undo.