Since February 28, the war in West Asia has exposed a question larger than any single conflict: who decides what is lawful, when great powers disagree?
At this year’s UNGA, small island states from the Pasifika and Caribbean, African leaders, and countries outside traditional power centers are not merely debating today’s crises. They are questioning the architecture of the international system itself.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley called for the Caribbean to remain a zone of peace, invoking “dialogue, sovereign equality and respect for international law.” Fiji’s President, Ratu Naiqama Lalabalavu, framed its participation around multilateralism, sovereignty, climate change and small island needs. Palau’s president put it plainly: the Pasifika is our home, not a theatre for geopolitical competition.
When we discuss the emerging multipolar world, we imagine a table where only great powers sit. But 193 countries are in that room. They do not possess equal power, but they are all there.
Consider China and Iran. China buys Iranian oil; Washington regards this as undermining its sanctions. Who gave Washington authority to decide China cannot support Iran? The UN Charter is built on sovereign equality. The US has enormous authority under US law to decide its own sanctions. But US domestic law is not universal international law.
Turn the mirror: the US provides Israel with enormous military and diplomatic support. Suppose China said this assistance enabled a war threatening regional stability and would use its power to counter it. Would Americans accept China’s characterization as legitimate simply because Beijing disagreed? Probably not. If sovereignty means anything, it cannot mean one great power exercises sovereign discretion while another’s is automatically illegitimate.
The most revealing thing at this UNGA isn’t any single speech but the cumulative effect. Countries disagree on almost everything, yet there is remarkable consistency in concerns raised outside traditional power centers: sovereignty, international law, representation, development, climate vulnerability, economic inequality. These voices are not arguing for China or against America. They are arguing for space—for smaller states to make their own choices without becoming collateral damage in great-power competition.
For much of the post-Cold War era, the US possessed extraordinary power. That power remains immense, but power is not the same as legitimacy. As other centers emerge, we may be moving from a world where one power sets the terms to one where several claim the right to interpret them. When great powers disagree, what constrains them? And who gets a voice in deciding those constraints?
The UN Charter is clear on sovereign equality, territorial integrity and the prohibition on the use of force. These are not Chinese or American principles—they are supposed to be international. The gap between having rules and applying them consistently is the crisis.
There is nothing wrong with a “rules-based international order”—until it becomes unclear whose rules, enforced against whom. If the rule is genuinely international, it must constrain Washington as much as Beijing, Israel as much as Iran, the powerful as much as the weak. Otherwise, countries will stop seeing rules and start seeing instruments of power.
This is why the voices of Fiji, Barbados, the Caribbean and Africa matter. Small states have little interest in replacing a US-centered order with a Chinese-centered one. Their interest is more fundamental: they do not want their sovereignty to become theoretical because someone else has more ships, missiles, money or influence.
The UNGA gives the world a microphone. West Asia is testing whether the international system can operate when major powers disagree about sovereignty, self-defense, sanctions and international law. The question cannot simply be who is right. It must also be: who gets to decide? By what rules?
Perhaps the real question is whether we can build a system in which no country gets to be the world’s policeman—not Washington, not Beijing, not anyone. A world where sovereignty is real but not absolute; where self-defense is recognized but not unlimited; where international humanitarian law applies to friends and adversaries alike.
That is a harder standard. It is also the only one that can survive the transition to a genuinely multipolar world. Because once several powers can say “your rules don’t bind us,” the only sustainable alternative is rules everyone believes will bind all of them.
The test of a rules-based order is not whether the powerful can invoke the rules. It is whether the powerful are willing to be bound by them.
