Covering the 1968 Vietnam war, Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett quoted an American major: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” and said “he was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties.” The same quote could be applied to Israel bombing Gaza and more generally, the American attitude on the international order that she helped built in the last eight decades.

The current international order was built out of two world wars in an effort to reconstruct peace and avoid the ultimate third world war, after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The victorious powers at the end of the Second World War decided to divide the world between the American-led Free World and the Soviet-led Communist world. By 1991, the United States emerged as the unipolar power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Instead of dissolving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact crumbled, the old rivalry was rekindled when Russia felt that she was excluded from Europe and treated as the enemy. Shocked by the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001, the United States spent the next two decades fighting in the Middle East.

When Donald Trump emerged as President in 2016, neoconservatives in the American military industrial complex identified China as the existential rival, thus setting the stage for a multi-front confrontation for the unipolar power. By this time, the rise of China as the second largest economy in terms of GDP and largest trading partner meant that the unipolar order had begun to shift to a multipolar order.........

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