4.5 – Preventing International Conflict

The world community has yet to create a global governance authority capable of guaranteeing security and preventing international aggression, despite major attempts following each of the two world wars.

After World War I, the League of Nations was formed, for the purpose of enabling world peace and security through international law. It had many weaknesses, including a requirement for unanimity, the non-ratification by the United States, and the initial exclusion of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria (the defeated side in WWI), and Bolshevik Russia.

The League was established by Part 1 of the Treaty of Versailles; Part 8 of the same treaty required reparation payments from Germany. These reparations were later set at ruinous levels, fueling an ongoing grievance which fueled Hitler’s rise, leading to World War II. Obviously, the League of Nations failed.

After World War II, the United Nations was born when humanity united in calling for mechanisms to prevent the horrors of war from recurring. Yet although the United Nations endures today and has been an important step toward making warfare obsolete for statecraft, current events demonstrate its inadequacy to prevent territorial aggression by nuclear powers or their client states. 

The UN’s structure presents challenges to reform. The veto power of the “P5”, the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US), has at times constrained peacekeeping efforts and blocked international consensus. This has led many observers to call the system unrepresentative, slow to act and in need of change. While there have been over 200 overt vetoes in UN history, the threat of veto in closed-door negotiations (known as the ‘hidden veto‘) also influences outcomes. The UN Charter has not been substantively amended since 1973, despite growing demands for reform.

Sadly, levels of violent conflict are now among the highest since World War II. 2022 was the deadliest year for armed conflict in 30 years. In 2024, 92 countries were at war, the highest number since the Global Peace Index began measuring in 2008. Moreover, “the likelihood of another major conflict is higher than at any time since the inception of the GPI,” according to its authors, the Institute for Economics & Peace. 

Preventing the escalation and outbreak of war is cheaper in terms of both money and lives than trying to stop a war that has already started. According to the UN Development Programme, prevention is 10 times more financially efficient than post-conflict recovery.

The extent of warfare today and the risk of escalation, especially compared to the cost-effectiveness of prevention, demonstrate the failures of our current model.

In the absence of a political mechanism for justice, violence is an inevitable result. Academic studies have found that terrorism is often driven by political injustice, and that countries with fewer political rights tend to face a higher risk of terrorist attacks. As President John F. Kennedy famously said, “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Here are three salient examples that highlight the inadequacy of our current systems:

2.5.1 – Russia’s War on Ukraine

According to some scholars of Russian geopolitics, the origins of the Ukraine war began with the eastward expansion of NATO in 2004, in violation of an agreement between Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush that NATO would not move “one inch” to the east after the Russians withdrew their forces from Eastern Europe and allowed Germany to reunite. George Kennan, the intellectual architect of US cold war policy, warned that eastward expansion of NATO would lead to war. 

In the absence of an effective system trusted by all to manage long term geopolitical tension between Russia and the West, conflict may have been inevitable.

Still, Russia’s war of territorial expansion in Ukraine violates the basic Westphalian premise of nation-based security. The United Nations failed to prevent the invasion. Only Ukraine’s own resistance has mounted an effective defense, despite a diplomatic alternative, the Istanbul Communiqué, which may have been available in early 2022. 

The failure to prevent or stop the war shows that today’s security institutions are toothless when facing aggression by a nuclear power. Intermittent US-led diplomatic efforts to broker a ceasefire have often centered on pressuring Ukraine to concede territory illegally seized by Russia during its 2014 annexation of Crimea and the full-scale invasion launched in 2022. Such approaches risk undermining core international norms meant to uphold global security, and instead of deterring aggression, they may inadvertently reward it, setting a dangerous precedent.

One encouraging development is the ongoing effort to create a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, supported by the Council of Europe. The successful establishment and operation of such a tribunal — the first established specifically to investigate and prosecute the crime of aggression — could provide an important deterrent effect against future acts of aggression by countries. In this way, the tribunal could be a core element in the construction of a system of global governance that more effectively prevents, rather than just reacts to cases of aggression and to international conflict writ large.

2.5.2 – Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon

Since the attack by Hamas in October 2023, the Israeli counteroffensive has killed many Palestinians in an assault widely criticized for violating human rights and the laws of war. In 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion calling Israel’s presence in Gaza unlawful and calling for an end to the apparent violations of international law. After a ceasefire, Israel has re-launched its military escalation in Gaza while continuing to block essential humanitarian aid. At the same time, Israel has expanded its physical presence further into southern Syria through ground incursions — an overreach that could create enemies where there currently are not any and further destabilize the region.

There is currently no global governance mechanism adequate to prevent these actions. 

This absence is not only a recent phenomenon. Throughout the modern history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which dates back more than a century, there has never been a global authority capable of acting as an impartial arbiter and guarantor of security for both sides. The British Mandate in Palestine at first broadly supported the early 20th century upsurge in Jewish immigration to the area, then later acknowledged the resulting harm to Palestinians before Britain abandoned its role there following World War II. Since 1947, the United Nations has stepped into an oversight role, but it has been neither even-handed nor effective. UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israeli aggression have been vetoed consistently by UN Security Council (UNSC) permanent members since the mid-1950’s. Initial vetoes came from Britain, France, and the USSR, but since 1972, the United States alone has vetoed 45 UNSC resolutions critical of Israel. Meanwhile the UN General Assembly has passed more than 180 such resolutions; consequently, Israel advocates have typically viewed the UN as hostile to their interests. The net result is that the UN is not trusted by either side, begetting a justice vacuum that enables impunity.

2.5.3 – China and Taiwan

Conflict between mainland China and Taiwan has simmered for 75 years, with ominous escalations reported recently. China has been making increasingly aggressive claims over Taiwan and its dominance in the region. It has built military outposts on rocky shoals in the South China Sea and conducted alarming military drills around Taiwan, which it officially regards as a renegade province. 

Meanwhile the United States has repeatedly promised to defend Taiwan in the event of attack (despite an official policy of strategic ambiguity).

Global governance systems have not yet been adequate to calm the waters, nor to achieve a structurally stable solution. To the contrary, past efforts have contributed to instability. For the first 26 years of the UN’s existence, Taiwan’s government was recognized as representing China, stoking a long-term grievance with the mainland People’s Republic. 

Then in 1971, President Nixon intervened to transfer the Chinese permanent seat on the UN Security Council to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For the last 50 years, this has left Taiwan without representation in the UN system except via the PRC’s claim to sovereignty over it.

Without a mechanism credibly adjudicating between both sides, the conflict simmers, fueling ongoing risk of a potential nuclear war between China and the United States. More robust global governance is needed to guarantee the security of all parties.

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The common thread across these three conflict zones is the absence of a system preventing territorial aggression. Instead, we’ve relied for nearly eight decades on an unstable balance-of-power calculus that too often rewards acts of war rather than deterring them, as long as the perpetrating state is a nuclear power or is backed by one. 

Further, ongoing, protracted conflicts in countries like Ethiopia, Sudan, and Yemen have claimed and destroyed countless lives, crippling the development potential of the affected states, and highlighting the limits of international order. Because these so-called “internal” or “regional” conflicts are less entangled with great power politics than crises in Ukraine, Gaza, or Taiwan, they often suffer from a lack of attention from the United Nations and major powers capable of helping to stabilize them. Even in situations where the UN or major powers have engaged, their efforts have largely proved feckless and, in some cases, even exacerbated the situations. This “attention gap” characterizes the current weak architecture for preventing international conflict.

Rather than providing a global peace dividend from reduced military spending, limiting threats of aggressive war, and discouraging nuclear proliferation, today’s vacuum in global governance incentivizes hostility.