The strategic challenges and the emerging new order

by Dr h.c. Hans von Sponeck*, former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Germany

 

We live in a time of perhaps the greatest geopolitical divide when it comes to creating a humane and dignified world order. The dream of Yalta in 1945, of putting wars behind us and replacing bilateral aggression with multilateral cooperation, was short-lived. It was replaced by a nightmare of fear, uncertainty and confrontation that continues to this day.
  All that remains of the dream is the Charter of the United Nations with its timeless ethics and profound vision for all eight billion citizens of our world.
  The many international wars and national conflicts that have occurred worldwide since the creation of the UN testify to the fact that the political UN, as a legislative body, especially the Security Council, has remained largely incapable of fulfilling its peace mandate.
  One of the main reasons for this is that, in pursuing its global geopolitical interests through a unilateralist foreign policy, the US has used its military and economic power, both in the United Nations and elsewhere, at its own discretion rather than in accordance with the principles of the rule of law and multilateralism.
  This pattern of behaviour is the only plausible explanation for both the turbulence in international relations and the often-disappointing performance of the United Nations.
  May this be regarded as a serious fact and not as an ideological statement.
  The multilateral construction site for a new, peaceful and just world order is truly enormous.
  It involves the geographical adaptation of a Security Council that has become unrepresentative.
  It involves a reformed application of the veto.
  It is about cooperation between the General Assembly, as the majority of states, and the Security Council, as the minority of states.
  It is about the existing insufficient authority of the General Assembly as the principal of the Security Council.
  It is about the independence of the work of the Secretary-General and the specialised agencies and their protection against bilateral interference.
  It is about the financing of the United Nations.
  I would like to add that the United Nations is “inexpensive”. The annual budget of the United Nations Secretary-General for 2025 amounts to 3.7 billion US dollars, or 0.46 euros per world citizen.
  Not to forget: it is also about a new and fairer international economic order, which has long been demanded by the non-Western world but continues to be rejected by the OECD countries.
  In short, it is about the democratisation of the entire UN system and the obligation of member states to comply with international law, with consequences for non-compliance.
  According to the UN Charter, such a list of challenges should have been discussed by the General Assembly back in 1955. With a 70-year delay, the so-called “Pact for the Future” was finally adopted last September at a special summit of the General Assembly.
  The current geopolitical situation may serve as an indication that the path to a new world order and the creation of a correspondingly reformed United Nations that meets the needs of humanity, of all people, wherever they live, will be a long one. It will also be a dangerous path, with many obstacles and potholes.
  It is encouraging that the UN General Assembly nevertheless seems determined to pursue this path. A majority of states and non-governmental organisations are simply no longer willing to accept a Western-centric world order.
  A valuable international toolbox is ready and waiting, containing almost everything needed for a comprehensive transformation.
  There is long-standing experience in all areas of human knowledge, both within the United Nations and its specialised agencies, as well as in other multilateral and national institutions that have been involved in the development of institutions for renewable, peaceful, inclusive and equitable development.
  Proposals for reforming international financial structures have been around for a long time.
  Climate change scientists and experts in tradition and local knowledge are ready to contribute.
  The UN Charter and the two covenants on political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights are valuable guides for future reform.
  However, there is one crucial factor without which neither a new world order nor a reformed UN can emerge: the political will of the major powers to unanimously commit to a future-oriented and humane multilateralism.
  No one can expect a dramatic shift from bilateral egoism to multilateral community spirit to happen overnight. The current state of global discord makes it difficult to believe in the utopia of peace.
  Nevertheless, the key to reform has been forged by the UN pact.
  The apocalyptic dangers lurking in the world – such as climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics, artificial intelligence and human migration caused by crises, persecution and poverty – are global challenges that affect all 193 UN member states without exception.
  All countries, but especially China, the United States, Russia, and emerging powers such as India and Brazil, should take these challenges very seriously, not only for pragmatic geopolitical reasons.
  This is a unique opportunity to create a community of survival with the noble goal of bringing world peace closer.
  Through cooperation, it would be possible to develop a multilateral team spirit and build an assembly of nations into an alliance of united nations, the United Nations.
  “Creating something new means resisting. Resisting means creating something new!”

The great Frenchman Stéphane Hessel must not be forgotten! •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2025/nr-16-22-juli-2025/die-strategischen-herausforderungen-und-die-entstehende-neue-ordnung

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

Not many people find themselves propelled suddenly to worldwide celebrity in their 90s. This is what happened, however, to Stéphane Hessel, who has died aged 95 [ in 2013]. Having had a distinguished career during the second world war in General Charles de Gaulle's Free French movement and as an international civil servant after the war, Hessel in 2010 published a pamphlet, Time for Outrage (Indignez-Vous!), which became the manifesto for anti-capitalist protest groups such as the Indignados in Spain and Occupy Wall Street in the US. It is estimated to have sold some 4m copies worldwide.

Hessel's internationalism was rooted in his cosmopolitan background. He was born in Berlin to a bourgeois and intellectual Jewish family who had converted to Protestantism. His father, Franz, was an essayist and translator who had translated Proust into German. His mother, Helen (nee Grund), who had an intense liaison with a French friend of his father, Henri-Pierre Roché, was the model for Catherine (played by Jeanne Moreau) in the 1962 film Jules et Jim.

His mother took the young Stéphane with her to Paris in 1925 when she decided to live with her lover. Stéphane was educated in France and acquired French citizenship in 1937. Already bilingual in French and German, he learned perfect English while studying for a year at the London School of Economics in 1937. He mixed in London literary and intellectual circles, getting to know, among others, the writer Aldous Huxley.

Taken prisoner during the battle of France in 1940, Hessel escaped before he could be transferred to Germany. He made his way to Marseille, where he spent two very intense months with Varian Fry, who had been sent by the US first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, to organise the escape to the US of European intellectuals (among them the surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst) whose lives would be in danger if they remained in Nazi-occupied France. In Marseille Hessel met for the last time the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had been a friend of his father. Benjamin took his own life when he failed to escape from France across the Pyrenees. Hessel was luckier and arrived in London to join De Gaulle in May 1941.

He signed up to work for the Gaullist secret services in the section responsible for analysing intelligence received from agents in France. In March 1944, in preparation for the D-day landings, he was flown to France as part of the Greco Mission to make contact with a number of resistance networks. This was a period when the Gestapo was engaged in ferocious repression of the resistance, and many movements were infiltrated by traitors.

Hessel was arrested in July 1944 and underwent several weeks of torture before being deported to Buchenwald. He managed to escape execution, with the complicity of one of the guards, by substituting his own identity with that of a prisoner who had died of typhoid, which was ravaging the camp. Under his new identity, he was transferred to the camp of Rottleberode.

In the implacable universe of the Nazi camps, Hessel was helped by his perfect knowledge of German. He escaped but was quickly picked up again, and transferred to the notorious slave labour camp of Dora. As the allies approached, the Germans evacuated the camp and the prisoners were loaded into a train to be transferred to Bergen-Belsen. This time, however, Hessel was successful in escaping, through a gap in the floor of his carriage, and fled into the forest. He made his way on foot to Hanover and was picked up by American troops at the end of April.

 After returning to liberated France, Hessel embarked on a diplomatic career, working first at the newly founded United Nations. He was involved at a junior level in the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He then spent most of his career representing France at international organisations devoted to human rights and economic development in Africa. In 1954, he was an adviser to the left-of-centre prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, whose government put an end to the French war in Indo-China. In 1977, he was appointed French ambassador to the UN.

After his retirement, Hessel took up a whole series of progressive causes and acted as an adviser to various socialist governments. What turned into the pamphlet Time for Outrage started life as a speech he made in 2008 to commemorate the resistance and oppose its exploitation by rightwing politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy. The campaign took off in ways that he had never predicted. Hessel saw his denunciation of international finance as a way of remaining loyal to the humanistic and progressive values of the resistance.

He was also passionately attached to the Palestinian cause, and the virulence of his attacks on Israel attracted considerable controversy. A lecture he was due to deliver on the subject at the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2011 was cancelled at the last minute, leading to accusations by his defenders that he was being censored by Jewish organisations.

Although he was a courteous figure, with old-fashioned good manners, there is no doubt that Hessel enjoyed provocation. And he certainly basked in the international celebrity acquired so late in life. He was a hugely charismatic and seductive figure, with something of the performer about him. Behind the showmanship, however, was a richly cultivated European intellectual who could recite from memory long tracts of poetry in German, French and English. He claimed that poetry was what had helped to sustain him during his captivity. At the age of 88, he published an anthology of the poems that had meant the most to him.

His first wife, Vitia, with whom he had a son and two daughters, died in 1985. He is survived by his second wife, Christiane.

 Stéphane Hessel, resistance fighter, diplomat and writer, born 20 October 1917; died 26 February 2013

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/stephane-hessel

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fwXBgu6Z5I

Brian Berletic: Is the U.S. Setting a Trap for Russia in Alaska?

 

Brian Berletic is a former US Marine, author and international relations expert. Berletic discusses the upcoming meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska, and the history of US deception and faking diplomacy to regroup.

 

SEE ALSO: 

one can smell the western deceit from 5,000 miles away......

 

it's a trap....

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.