{"id":46657,"date":"2026-08-24T20:41:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T16:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=46657"},"modified":"2026-08-24T20:41:53","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T16:41:53","slug":"a-tale-of-three-wars-the-world-order-coming-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/a-tale-of-three-wars-the-world-order-coming-apart\/","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Three Wars \u2014 The World Order Coming Apart?"},"content":{"rendered":"

International Relations<\/u><\/span><\/p>\n

You can bomb. You can destroy. You can occupy. But ultimately you must negotiate. Peace requires compromise<\/em><\/span><\/h4>\n

By Vijay Makhan<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Ukraine, Gaza and the US-Israel-Iran war tell three different stories but carry one disturbing warning \u2014 military might is proving easier to unleash than to translate into peace, old security certainties are wavering, and the multilateral order constructed from the ruins of the Second World War is steadily coming apart.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/span>‘President Trump should by now know something about that. When the United States, egged on by Israel, attacked Iran, we heard the familiar grandiloquence: overwhelming force, obliteration, indeed the annihilation within weeks of a civilization several millennia old. That was in February. We are now in August. In between came the 60-day ceasefire, duly declared and signed. That period has expired. And what, precisely, has been resolved?’<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a lesson which history has taught us time and again and which, strangely enough, appears to escape those who embark upon wars — a war is infinitely easier to start than to end.<\/strong>\u00a0I have returned to this proposition in several of my recent writings and, indeed, in my forthcoming book on the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean. I wish events would prove me wrong. They stubbornly refuse to do so.<\/span><\/p>\n

Leaving aside the appalling Sudanese debacle and other conflicts which barely make the headlines, three wars stare us in the face \u2014 Gaza, Ukraine and Iran. \u00a0Different wars. Different histories. Different circumstances. However, one disturbing thread runs through all three, military might is proving far easier to unleash than to translate into peace.<\/span><\/p>\n

Iran: Sixty days <\/strong>\u2014<\/strong>\u00a0and then what?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

President Trump should by now know something about that. When the United States, egged on by Israel, attacked Iran, we heard the familiar grandiloquence: overwhelming force, obliteration, indeed the annihilation within weeks of a civilization several millennia old.<\/span><\/p>\n

That was in February. We are now in August. In between came the 60-day ceasefire, duly declared and signed. That period has expired.<\/span><\/p>\n

And what, precisely, has been resolved? Has the nuclear question been settled? Has the confrontation between Iran and Israel ended? Is the region any safer?<\/span><\/p>\n

Hardly. The guns may have been temporarily silenced. The causes which made them fire remain. Meanwhile, Hormuz has demonstrated once again how one narrow stretch of water can hold much of the world economy hostage, affecting energy, shipping, insurance and trade. Add to that the psychological impact of war fatigue on board the USS Lincoln which has had to be recalled!<\/span><\/p>\n

America also confronts an uncomfortable reality. Even the greatest military arsenal on earth is not bottomless. Depleted stocks of missiles, interceptors and precision weapons inevitably raise questions about its ability to sustain commitments accumulated across the globe.<\/span><\/p>\n

Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Different wars. Different circumstances. But the lesson remains: winning battles is not the same as winning wars \u2014 and winning wars is certainly not the same as winning the peace.<\/span><\/p>\n

Putin: The other side of the coin?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Russia should derive little comfort from America\u2019s predicament. When Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine in February 2022, little did the Kremlin imagine that more than four years later it would still be fighting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cities destroyed. Millions displaced. Countless lives lost. Europe strategically transformed. And still no decisive victory. Putin and Trump are very different men operating in very different circumstances. Yet, somehow I feel that Putin and Trump are both sides of the same coin.<\/span><\/p>\n

Both illustrate the uncanny temptation of great powers to believe that superior military might gives them the ability \u2014 even the right \u2014 to impose their will upon other countries and peoples. But History repeatedly demonstrates that peoples have a habit of refusing to behave according to plans drawn up for them in distant capitals.<\/span><\/p>\n

And Gaza?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Then there is Gaza. How much more destruction will be required before it is accepted that there can be no purely military solution to the Palestinian question? Years of warfare have produced devastation which will scar generations. How then are Israelis and Palestinians ultimately to coexist in security and dignity? A fundamental question!<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Board of Peace was supposed to provide an answer. But, even Israel, after years of near-unconditional American backing, is critical of elements of Washington\u2019s peace project.<\/span><\/p>\n

Again, the same wall. You can bomb. You can destroy. You can occupy. But ultimately you must negotiate. Peace requires compromise. And compromise remains the one weapon no military arsenal contains.<\/span><\/p>\n

Old friends hedging their bets<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Something else is happening while these wars drag on. America\u2019s friends are watching \u2014 and drawing their own conclusions. Europe, after decades beneath the American defence umbrella, is increasing military expenditure and speaking with greater urgency about assuming responsibility for its own security.<\/span><\/p>\n

More revealing perhaps are developments in the Middle East. Who would have imagined, only a few years ago, Saudi Arabia and T\u00fcrkiye \u2014 hardly the closest of strategic companions \u2014 entering, together with Pakistan, into a defence arrangement bearing something of NATO\u2019s principle that an attack against one would be treated as an attack against all?<\/span><\/p>\n

Riyadh has gone further. At the end of July, Saudi Arabia launched a multinational maritime defence initiative covering the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. Fourteen countries have associated themselves with its founding declaration.<\/span><\/p>\n

For decades, when these strategic waterways were threatened, eyes instinctively turned towards Washington and the Western naval powers. Now regional states are increasingly organising themselves. America has certainly not become irrelevant to Gulf security. But countries construct additional security arrangements because they perceive a need for insurance. One does not purchase insurance unless one perceives a risk.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is this the end of the American security umbrella? Certainly not. But is the world preparing for the possibility that the umbrella may no longer always be there? That question is increasingly difficult to dismiss.<\/span><\/p>\n

From guarantor to what?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Which brings us to an uncomfortable contradiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

For decades, the United States assumed \u2014\u00a0at times, indeed, arrogated to itself \u2014\u00a0the role of guarantor of world peace and principal defender of the rules-based international order. How then are we to understand the increasingly cavalier pronouncements from Washington about territories and strategic spaces belonging to others?<\/span><\/p>\n

First Greenland. Now the Strait of Hormuz. What next? Oman? One may dismiss such talk as Trump\u2019s penchant for provocative hyperbole. I hesitate to do so. Words matter in diplomacy, infinitely more when uttered by a US President.<\/span><\/p>\n

To talk casually of acquiring, controlling or \u201cAmericanising<\/strong>\u201d territories and strategic spaces over which others possess sovereign rights is hardly what one expects from the leader of a superpower claiming to uphold sovereignty and international law. If strategic necessity permits America to covet what belongs to another, upon what principle does Washington object when Russia invokes its own alleged strategic imperatives in Ukraine?<\/span><\/p>\n

The situations are not identical. But principles cannot be infinitely elastic. One cannot insist upon the sanctity of sovereignty in Kyiv while treating it as negotiable elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

That road leads back to spheres of influence \u2014 to a world where great powers decide that geography, military might and \u201cstrategic necessity\u201d confer special rights over the territories and destinies of others. And here lies an irony which should concern us, inhabitants of the Indian Ocean. At one end lies Hormuz, around which we hear the language of American control. At the other lies Bab el-Mandeb, where regional states are organising collectively to defend a maritime artery upon which much of the world depends. One speaks the language of control. The other, however untested, the language of collective security.<\/span><\/p>\n

A revealing contrast \u2014 evidence of a world becoming more regionalised, fragmented and less willing to assume that security must invariably be organised from Washington or the old European capitals. For Mauritius, sitting as we do in this very Indian Ocean, these are hardly developments on somebody else\u2019s geopolitical chessboard.<\/span><\/p>\n

And what of \u201cWe the Peoples\u2026\u201d?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

And that brings me to perhaps the greatest casualty of these three wars. Multilateralism.<\/span><\/p>\n

The United Nations Charter has not disappeared. Its opening words \u2014 \u201cWe the Peoples of the United Nations\u2026\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 stare at us from a document born of the determination to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, where has the United Nations been as these conflicts have unfolded?<\/span><\/p>\n

Too often marginalised when wars are started. Circumvented while they are fought. Then summoned to feed the hungry, shelter the displaced and help clear the rubble afterwards. Surely this is not what was envisaged at San Francisco in 1945. Have we reached a dangerous point where international law no longer consistently restrains power but, increasingly, determines when international law is convenient. When the powerful pick and choose which rules apply to them, why should anyone else feel bound by those rules?<\/span><\/p>\n

Small states cannot be indifferent<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

For Mauritius and other small states, this is not some distant intellectual debate. We have neither vast armies nor military capabilities. Our armour is international law.<\/strong>\u00a0Our protection lies in sovereign equality, multilateralism and institutions capable of ensuring that rules apply to the strong as well as to the weak, a position I constantly hammer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mauritius knows what international law and multilateral institutions can mean when the rights of a small state come up against the interests of considerably more powerful ones. We therefore cannot remain indifferent while the international order upon which we depend is progressively weakened.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three wars. One warning<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Ukraine. Gaza. Iran. Three wars which will eventually end \u2014 all wars eventually do. But what will remain when they do?<\/span><\/p>\n

America is discovering the limits of military supremacy. Russia is learning the same lesson at enormous cost. Gaza demonstrates that military domination cannot resolve a fundamentally political problem. Europe is reassessing its strategic dependence. Gulf states are constructing additional security arrangements. New alignments are questioning older assumptions.<\/span><\/p>\n

And the United Nations? Still there. Still indispensable but increasingly marginalised, precisely when the world most needs the principles upon which it was founded. Those who emerged from the carnage of the Second World War constructed the multilateral system after witnessing the carnage unbridled power can unleash.<\/span><\/p>\n

Eighty years later, are we really ready to suffer the same fate again? For, the greatest danger posed by these three wars is not ultimately who wins them.<\/span><\/p>\n

It is that, while fighting them, we may all be losing the international order that was supposed to prevent them.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

17 August 2026<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 21 August 2026<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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