02 ISSUE III
FEBRUARY 2025
FEBRUARY 2025
Countering the Concert of Authoritarianism
The United Nations is seen as a counter to a world order normalizing ethnic cleansing, aggression, plunder, pollution, militarism, inequality, and injustice. Is it up to the challenge?
By Peter J. Hoffman
President Donald Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy and slash-and-burn attitude toward domestic and international institutions has produced shock and awe. So much that is dangerous and unconstitutional has taken place, and with such rapidity, it is difficult to process. This holds for the current shift of US foreign policy toward dismantling global governance, leaving many reeling as they ponder the future of multilateralism. The imposing of sanctions on the International Criminal Court, withdrawing from the World Health Organization, freezing international aid, and closing USAID, along with flexing coercion, are direct attacks on international institutions, from operational agencies to foundations and think tanks. Moreover, beyond Trump, international politics is increasingly filled with nationalist populist dictators that seek to destroy the liberal “rules-based order” and any sort of equity in global institutions while dividing the world into spheres of influence based on great power politics.
The embryonic post-liberal world order is multipolar. Though declining, the great powers – the United States and Russia – still dominate. Next to them are the new great powers challenging existing global governance arrangements. China is foremost among these. This group also includes a host of middle powers with regional influence, such as India, Nigeria, Türkiye, South Africa, and Indonesia.
The most powerful governments are authoritarian; beyond concentrating power internationally by limiting global institutions, they concentrate power domestically by suppressing democratic checks. While there is unrestrained imperial competition and naked power grabs, there is also cooperation in mutually sustaining despotism domestically and institutional deadlock internationally. The pillars of this system are Trump in the US, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, Narendra Modi in India, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye. They are abetted by a few less globally powerful figures that thrive in their shadows, such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, Javier Milei in Argentina, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.
At least eighty, perhaps ninety or more states are authoritarian. What is emerging is akin to the 19th century when, after the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars, the victorious great powers organized the Concert of Europe to negotiate and engineer a divvying up of the world, drawing lines on maps without regard to the interests of the people who they would rule. Thus, the current illiberal multilateral world order can be considered “the Concert of Authoritarianism.”
The Concert of Authoritarianism is a transactional system predicated on acknowledging spheres of influence among the great powers. Russia in Ukraine and other irredentist areas in the Baltics and Eastern Europe get most of the attention, but there are also power projection places like Syria and Mali. China has ongoing claims in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Kashmir.
France, the UK, and other European states, no longer top-tier great powers, have given up their formal colonies, though they continue to pursue ties and exert influence. The US, too, has had its slices of the imperial pie in this arrangement—from the Philippines and Vietnam to Cuba and Central America, and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq. President Trump’s recent bluster regarding staking claims to Greenland and the Panama Canal, as well as a call for Canada to become a 51st state of the United States and a stated intention to “own” Gaza, fit into how the Concert operates.
Tech cronies have their own enriching deals with authoritarian leaders: Google Maps and Apple Maps now utilize a “Gulf of America” label for the body of water traditionally known as the “Gulf of Mexico.” When Russian names appear in places that have Ukrainian ones, that will be another signifier. In the coming years, how the Arctic is governed will be another indicator of the Concert’s sway.
What can be done to counter the Concert of Authoritarianism from building a world order that normalizes ethnic cleansing, aggression, plunder, pollution, militarism, inequality, and injustice? Where and how will resistance manifest? Both questions have the same answer: the United Nations.
Critics of the UN dread that conclusion because it has always been a dubious creature; some say the organization is a tool of great powers, is corrupt, or claims it protects abusive governments. Indeed, many insist the UN must be “decolonized.” This agenda reflects how the UN has often been complicit, if not a champion, of unsound, unfair arrangements (such as the Security Council) where entitlement is obscured and reiterated. However, in a world composed of states turning inward, the slog to fix the UN is not imminent and won’t occur, while the Concert holds the political and financial reins of the organization. Moreover, in the era of autocrats, before the UN can be re-made, there is more immediate triage to be done in maintaining the guardrails of global governance.
For all its failings, the UN provides essential protection because the political space it uniquely inhabits transcends the parochial interests of states and the private sector. Strange bedfellows of critics who want more representation and also proponents of the Concert who want it to reflect imperial grand bargains may welcome a complete meltdown of the UN as necessary, but the cost to those who count on it for the rudiments of world order would be unconscionable and impair progress when the global political situation changes. As of the start of 2025, over 300 million required humanitarian relief, nearly 120 million were refugees, and over 700 million live in extreme poverty.
The UN was never a panacea, but as possibilities for a more just world have been set back indefinitely by a torrent of tyranny, it nonetheless remains the best chance for a course correction in the right direction, regardless of how compromising that may be. Given the stakes of global governance, the perfect being the enemy of the good is an unaffordable luxury.
The Concert of Authoritarianism won’t be easily defeated, especially when they are pulling strings at the UN, but the organization’s architecture does afford some avenues for countermeasures. Despite its structural shortcomings and malfunctions, the UN can legitimately keep conversations on global public goods going, push back on disinformation, and have opportunities to shame and sanction states that violate international agreements and outsource burdens and costs while hiding behind sovereignty.
Although weak in enforcement, the UN can bring attention to rights and responsibilities, yield some transparency, and administer operations as proof of a just multilateralism. That sort of institutional power can diminish and slow the damage of the Concert and position the organization to facilitate recovery—this wave of authoritarianism will not be vanquished in the halls of the UN as much as it will be outlasted by those who maintain them.
Peter J. Hoffman is an Associate Professor of International Affairs at The New School.