Aftermath of US-Israeli air strikes, Tehran, March 3, 2026. Photo courtesy Avash Media/Wikimedia Commons.

The Third Gulf War marks an epochal change in international politics. Global affairs have entered a period of unprecedented flux. Accustomed patterns that have endured for decades are being jettisoned in weeks, while what until recently was considered unthinkable has now become inevitable. Above all, the order established after the end of the Second World War is now shifting. In 1945, following the most devastating war in history, humanity came together to establish the Charter international system, with the United Nations at its heart. This system is based on the fundamental norm of sovereign internationalism—the balancing of national autonomy with global cooperation. It is this arrangement that is now unravelling.

The Charter order was never intended to be a world government, nor did it claim to be one, but it did establish what is legitimate in international affairs. It set normative, even moral, guidelines for relations between states. These norms are now not only flouted with impunity, but increasingly disregarded altogether.

All this is vividly evident in the Third Gulf War. The decapitation strike against the Iranian leadership, launched by Israel and the United States on February 28, 2026, broke every fundamental norm of international law. Assassination brazenly undermines the principle of sovereign statehood and repudiates the entire tradition of statecraft since the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648. That norm has now been eroded. The murder of the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other leaders, was conducted with total disregard for the lives of innocent civilians caught in the bombing, including family members. This repeated the pattern long established in Israel’s punitive and destructive campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. The assassinations in effect became a declaration of war, ignoring the protocols that had previously been considered standard procedure when initiating hostilities against a sovereign state. The next day, a school was hit in a double-tap strike in Minab, killing at least 175 civilians, including more than 100 schoolchildren.

In the following weeks, Israel and the US pounded not only military targets but also civilian institutions and infrastructure. At the same time, following the launch of missiles towards Israel from Hezbollah positions, Lebanon was subjected to an extraordinary bombing campaign in which whole apartment blocks were destroyed, and over one million people were displaced from their homes. At the time of writing, southern Lebanon has been cut off from the rest of the country, its population effectively expelled. Settler violence in the occupied West Bank has also intensified.

In response, Iran attacked US military bases, energy installations, airports, and civilian structures across the region, in Bahrain, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed to shipping, provoking a spike in energy, fertilizer, and food prices across the world. As the chokepoint through which a significant share of global oil and liquefied gas exports pass, its closure immediately reverberated through global energy markets, exposing the fragility of supply chains and the extent of systemic interdependence.

Three simultaneous conflicts—in Ukraine, Palestine/Lebanon, and the Gulf—are beginning to merge, heightening fears of nuclear escalation. Humanity is facing the most perilous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. With some form of Third World War in prospect, it is not surprising that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on February 4, set the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight.

How can we make sense of all this? In part, the answer lies in the long-term weakening of the Euro-Atlantic alliance system that took shape as the Cold War intensified after 1945. Often dubbed the ‘collective West,’ it is more accurate to call it the ‘political West.’ The term captures a specific constellation of power, distinct from broader historical ideas of the West. The scale of what this political and security community has done has still not been fully reckoned with. Just as joining the European Union transforms countries into “member states,” alignment with the political West reshapes them in similar ways. It reaches into identities, ideologies, and even the nature of citizenship itself. The EU, as recent events have shown (with some exceptions in its regulatory and economic roles), has in many ways become subordinate within this wider and unprecedented formation.

The wartime alliance against Nazi Germany was turned into a permanent bloc to counter the Soviet Union after 1945. The political West that emerged from the Cold War still carries many of those institutional and ideological traits. It is more than a NATO-centred security system; it is a dense web of political institutions, arrangements, and shared assumptions that bind the two sides of the Atlantic into what its defenders still see as an essential partnership. For the first time, historically rival European states were brought together under American leadership to form this kind of political entity.

When the Cold War ended in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many expected this alliance—its original purpose fulfilled—to fade away. The Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991, but NATO did not. Instead, the political West expanded and hardened. With the Soviet alternative gone, it began to present itself as the only viable economic and political model. It claimed a universality that properly belonged to the Charter system, effectively appropriating it, with far-reaching consequences. At the same time, the Euro-Atlantic system pushed eastward across much of the former Soviet bloc, while pointedly excluding Russia.

This mix of expansion and claimed universality reshaped the political West itself. As it became more assertive, it rebranded as the “rules-based international order”—a confident framing that assumed it could set the rules for everyone else while applying them selectively at home. Double standards became the norm rather than the exception. Expansion also carried heavy costs, fuelling tensions along its borders that eventually contributed to the most destructive interstate war in Europe since 1945.

To make sense of this, it helps to draw a basic distinction. There is the international system itself, and then there are the different ways of organising it. A “world order” is just a relatively stable pattern of power, shaped by certain ideas, institutions, and assumptions about how states should behave. Each has its own logic, even if reality doesn’t always follow it. The Soviet model, for instance, promoted socialist internationalism, but in practice it could still sit alongside the Charter system’s principle of sovereign internationalism.

The political West followed a different path: liberal globalism. Here, the emphasis was on loosening state sovereignty in exchange for access to public goods underwritten by the leading power—the US. This model helped drive an era of deep economic integration and prosperity, but it also reproduced older hierarchies in new forms. Western Europe, having long benefited from the arrangement, is only now beginning to confront its costs.

This model of world order is now disintegrating. This has been a long process, with elements in the US always dissatisfied with the burdens that liberal globalism imposed on the country. America First proponents have long argued that the security guarantees offered to Western Europe through NATO allowed Washington’s transatlantic partners to focus on welfare and social development while the US picked up the military tab. Now the dissatisfaction has spread into multiple spheres. The US National Security Strategy published in December 2025 represented a radical break with earlier assertions of US leadership in a unipolar world. It recognised systemic and civilizational pluralism while asserting that “in everything we do, we are putting America First.” Europe came in for particular censure and was presented as America’s main ideological opponent. The document noted that the continent had been losing its share of global GDP, down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent, “partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.” Europe was portrayed as suffering from out-of-control migration, over-regulation, and restrictions on free speech, and thus facing “civilizational erasure.”

We now face a double negation. The Charter international system is not only suffering from a lack of efficacy, but its legitimacy is also increasingly questioned. The US under Trump cut its funding and withdrew from some important agencies, while establishing putative alternatives, notably in the form of the so-called Board of Peace, proposed in September 2025 and then established at the World Economic Forum at the beginning of this year. UN Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 17, 2025, recognizing the Board as responsible for implementing Trump’s Gaza “peace plan,” is one of the most controversial on record. It ceded universal responsibility to an evidently partisan body.

At the same time, the US-led political West is also disintegrating. The European powers are bereft of their customary guarantor and so far lack the strategic capacity to do much beyond trying to sustain the system on their own, at least until Washington, as they would see it, comes to its senses under new leadership. In fact, Trump was only the most extreme, and inconsistent, expression of a longer-term trend within the US and its foreign policy. The Russia-Ukraine war had already exposed divisions within the political West, and now the Third Gulf War has brought home to Europeans the consequences of their failure to uphold their professed normative commitments. Their inability to preserve the Iran nuclear deal of 2015 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), after it was abandoned by Trump in 2018, laid bare Europe’s political self-marginalization in both the Charter international system and the transatlantic alliance.

A structural transformation of international politics is underway. This affects not only the accustomed models of world order but also the international system in which they have been embedded since 1945. There is no coherent alternative system on offer today. This makes the need to rally in defence of the Charter system all the more urgent. The so-called “political East” and much of the Global South continue to proclaim their allegiance to Charter institutions and norms, but the time has come to act in defence of the UN and its principles. The alternative is a wider slide into the kind of anarchy and double standards already visible in parts of the world—including, increasingly, in the core of Western modernity.

Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Kent. He has published widely on Russian, European and global affairs. Recent books include Russia against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2017), The Putin Paradox (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War (Lexington Books, 2022) and The Lost Peace: How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War (Yale University Press, 2023).

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