OPINION - Will 2025 be a year of reform or chaos?

The author is Milbank Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University, and former special rapporteur for the UN Human Rights Council on occupied Palestine.

ISTANBUL

Rarely has the crystal ball used to divine the near future seemed so clouded by uncertainties. The year 2024 was dominated by disappointments, disturbing surprises, and continuing devastation in Ukraine and Gaza. It was also a year that underscored the inability of the UN to stop the most transparent genocide ever in Gaza, a senseless war in Ukraine, and mass slaughter in Sudan.

Is 2024 a turning point?

There were a variety of multilateral efforts in 2024 to escape from US international dominance after the Cold War. This dominance had fueled a global politics of resentment and a search for an alternative world order that is law-governed and not subject to the geopolitical maneuvers of the five winners of World War II. These powers were granted unrestricted veto rights in the UN Security Council under the UN Charter, which has long paralyzed efforts to ensure compliance with international law. This produces a deep contradiction in the way the world is organized, allowing the most powerful and dangerous countries, all five being nuclear-armed states, to be legally free of any obligation to respect international law.

The question in many thoughtful minds is whether these developments in the prior year will continue in the year ahead. One near certain development is the rightward turn of internal politics in the West, given a dramatic twist by the prospects of radical change associated with the second coming of Donald Trump as US president. Trump has already appointed highly controversial political figures to his Cabinet, with the expectation of implementing an ultra-right domestic agenda. However, what is his approach to foreign policy? As well, the leading governments of Europe, including Germany, France, and Italy, all exhibit signs of leaning further toward authoritarianism.

Crisis areas in the world

There are some hopeful signs. Trump seems likely to push for a negotiated peace in Ukraine and bring to a close US President Joe Biden’s "geopolitical war," involving fighting Moscow by supplying and funding Kyiv with ever more provocative weaponry while turning his back on diplomacy and urging NATO to join in the fight with Rusi to the last Ukrainian. Such a posture raised risks of a confrontation with Russia that could also result in catastrophic nuclear warfare. Trump wants to cut spending on distant and expensive foreign adventures with no genuine American security interest and stand before the world as a peacemaker. Ukraine was a war that never should have been, as a diplomatic compromise between Russia and Ukraine was from its inception in the interest of Ukraine and world peace, as well as being attainable by responsible statecraft.

In contrast to Ukraine, the context of Israel/Palestine is far bleaker. There is every indication that Trump intends to outdo Biden by being an even more unconditional ally of Israel, fully supportive of the Netanyahu-led project entailing the establishment of Greater Israel. This is a plan to erase the Palestinian challenge through the annexation of the West Bank, parts of Gaza, and to support Israel in extending its "buffer zones" in Syria and Lebanon. The plan also includes intensified efforts to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and promote regime change in Tehran by force. The rightward turn of major governments in the West is likely to repress civil society opposition to the continuation of Israeli genocide and expansionism.

Militarism versus symbolic victories: The calculus of legitimacy wars

The efforts by countries in the Global South to have recourse to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC) are a notable expression on the part of non-Western states to invoke international law to serve the causes of peace with justice. And the ICJ has responded in an encouraging professional manner, ruling in favor of provisional measures in response to South Africa’s submission and issuing a separate opinion invalidating Israel's continuing occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in an authoritative near-unanimous exposition of applicable international law. Of course, it is expected that Israel will defy these developments, as it has consistently done in the face of adverse rulings by international tribunals. Nevertheless, such rulings sympathetic with Palestinian grievances are symbolically important, delegitimizing Israel and mobilizing civil society activism that gives rise to global solidarity initiatives of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) variety.

The fate of the arrest warrants issued by the ICC, ordering the arrest and transfer to The Hague for prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after a long delay is highly uncertain. Israel has mounted a legal challenge, and its government has made clear that the arrest warrants for the Israeli leaders are antisemitic outrages, and any implementation would be denounced and disrupted no matter what the ICC might decide. As with the ICJ genocide and occupation cases, the mere issuance of arrest warrants by the ICC was a significant symbolic Palestinian victory in the Legitimacy War, which may yet surprise the world in 2025 or shortly thereafter, by its overall impact on the viability of the Israeli state as now operative. It should be appreciated that the anti-colonial wars of the past 50 years were won by the weaker side militarily that managed to prevail on the symbolic battlefields of the Legitimacy War, which gives decisive weight to law, morality, and perseverance of a repressed people. The establishment of the civil society Gaza Tribunal in November of 2024 is a further legitimizing development in the Palestinian struggle for basic rights that seeks to activate global solidarity initiatives that shifted the balance in the global movement against South African apartheid, and before that of the global anti-war movement that nullified US military superiority in the Vietnam War.

The rise of multipolarity in 2025?

At the same time, global society is experiencing a surge of multilateral initiatives. Strengthening the impulse to create autonomous multipolar networks of the sort modeled by the BRICS, and especially to mount challenges to dollarization of trade and finance, which, to the extent successful, will produce a backlash in the form of high tariffs and the economic menace of a trade war, aggravated by an increase in the tendency to replace workers with digitally sophisticated substitutes for human labor to promote profitability and efficiency.

Above all, 2025 will witness growing tensions between the unified governance of global security by continued US hegemony and a resurgent challenge mounted by the Global South in the ongoing Legitimacy War with the West.

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.