Eyal BENVENISTI

Whewell Professor of International Law Emeritus at the University of Cambridge

The UN Charter promised that sovereignty would no longer be decided by conquest, coercion, or great-power bargains. Eighty years later, that promise is being quietly undone by the UN Security Council itself. On 31st October 2025, in a vote that attracted little public attention, the Council endorsed Morocco’s ‘autonomy plan‘ for Western Sahara. Buried in technical language, the Council blessed a territorial arrangement that denies a people – the Sahrawis – their widely recognised right to self-determination. This resolution was the harbinger of an unsettling order that is now taking shape.

In the footsteps of this endorsement came, on 17th November 2025, another Council resolution. Endorsing a US-brokered ‘comprehensive plan’ to end the war in Gaza, the resolution created an international ‘board of peace‘ with its own international legal personality, headed personally by Donald Trump, with a discretionary mandate to oversee transition arrangements – and, in the interim, the lives of millions of Gazans. Whatever one thinks of the plan’s merits, the institutional message is stark: self-determination becomes conditional, to be supervised, managed and possibly postponed indefinitely, and administered by outsiders, not even UN organs, accountable to no one. Two months later, President Trump revealed a broader ambition: to expand the mandate of the board to address conflicts around the world, that is, to erect ‘a more nimble and effective international peace-building body‘ than the Security Council. The UN was repurposed to endorse the hollowing-out of the rule-based order and, with it, the UN’s own authority.

What convinced the members of the Security Council to give up both its foundational principles and its institutional responsibility? The answer: a tacit agreement between the three nuclear-ready powers, enabled by intimidated middle powers and smaller states.

This reflects the world we live in: a tripolar era dominated by the United States, China and Russia. Under the shadow of their rivalry, the three share a converging interest: exploiting the vulnerabilities of other states while trading tolerance for one another’s territorial preferences. China presses its claims in the South China Sea and expects international silence on Taiwan; Russia invokes territorial integrity even as it redraws borders in its own neighbourhood and beyond; the United States acts as if it owns, or is entitled to own, the entire Western Hemisphere, and speaks openly of protecting access to ‘key geographies.’ In this endeavour, the Security Council serves as a forum for managing rival spheres of influence, disguised as law.

But what about the lesser powers, whose votes are crucial for adopting resolutions in the Security Council, and whose own borders become even less secure as a result of such votes, yet raise little opposition? What explains their silence? The answer: ‘madmen‘ politics by the three entente leaders that chills the lesser powers’ willingness to commit to cooperative resistance.

This is because the tripolar entente is not only about creating protectorates and disrespecting the sovereignty of others. It also thrives on volatility, unpredictability, and lack of accountability. The US president advertises unpredictability as a bargaining tool. He cultivates uncertainty about his red lines, threatens and then reverses, while constantly making outlandish challenges to established principles and historic alliances. Russia resorts to ambiguous, liminal coercion through deniable use of drone swarms, cyber operations and undersea disruptions that test thresholds while blurring attribution. China incrementally transforms South China Sea islands into fortified fortresses, while making simulated or symbolic armed attacks against its neighbours. This collective espousal of the ‘madman theory’ carries a deeper cost for all, but first and foremost for lesser powers that depend on cooperation to be able to withstand pressure. The atmosphere of purposeful unpredictability erodes the very conditions under which inter-state cooperation is possible.

International politics is not a one-shot encounter. It is played out in an indefinitely repeated game among repeat players. Sustaining cooperation requires an infrastructure of order that creates a ‘shadow of the future’ in which restraint is rewarded, and violations are punished. Robert Axelrod’s classic insight about the evolution of cooperation hinges on predictability: credible commitments and credible consequences must be communicated clearly and consistently enough that actors can coordinate expectations around them. Volatility breaks this mechanism. Conditional cooperation collapses, and everyone shifts toward short-term defensive strategies, as if relationships and rules might end abruptly. The twelve other members of the Security Council cannot help but join the big three to vote the Security Council out of business.

International law is one of the system’s crucial ‘clarity devices.’ It provides focal points that stabilise expectations. In a volatile system, commitments to cooperate wobble, and the temptation to treat law as flexible and institutions as expendable becomes overwhelming.

The sovereignty system is not being toppled in a single dramatic rupture. It is being worn down through repetition: a handful of UN resolutions few bother to read, a series of unilateral acts that defy collective imagination, and a steady normalisation of ‘exceptions’, until suddenly the world is deprived not only of legal constraint but of the predictability that makes cooperation and restraint possible.

The remaining act of resistance is for scholars to deny that this emerging ‘un-legal system’ has any legal validity. We live through a state of exception in which law is invoked as form while suspended in substance. This necessarily temporary state of affairs can wreak havoc on all of us, but it cannot modify the law. There can be no sustainable alternative to sovereign equality and self-determination. The international rule of law may now be hibernating, but it will eventually reappear after the collapse of the current, necessarily brittle entente.

Photo credits: Shutterstock.com/Alba_alioth