What's next for the United States? Moving from the agonistic phase to the architectural phase.

By: Ricardo Israel - 07/07/2025

After Iran, what should the US's next step be? It has returned with a vengeance, but to be an irreplaceable power, it must be so in both war and peace. The ancient Greeks, to whom the West owes so much, along with Aristotle, used to say that politics is a process, a struggle followed by accommodation, with two phases: the agonal phase (from argón, meaning struggle) and the architectonic phase (from arquitektón, meaning construction).

This is what the US ideally needs to do, combined with what was very useful to it in the Cold War: the return of the so-called red lines, so that, in today's world, so confusing, everyone, adversaries and friends, know what is acceptable and what is not, under what circumstances it is willing to go to war, and what new alliance it is considering or what reform it wants to make to the current one, all of which is not at all clear today.

And I think it should be done as soon as possible, not even waiting for the fall of the ayatollahs' regime, a circumstance that is not only uncertain, but also no one is clear about what would happen the next day, starting with Washington, just as probably no one there even imagined that the Shah's flight would hand power over to a regressive theocracy.

However, I believe the defeat inflicted on Israel's supreme leader and its dominance in the air is so evident by 2025 that the United States can move from the agonistic phase to the architectural phase, toward a profound and lasting change that reflects not only the new realities of the Middle East, but of the entire world.

And this is something that only the United States can undertake today, no one else. The world lacks good governance, and a significant part of the problem is due to the great paradox of the 21st century, since the architecture of international organizations is in the hands of institutions that belong to another era. Indeed, the world seems complicated, difficult, and chaotic, and one of its obstacles is that we are, with advances and setbacks, in the era known as globalization, while most of the organizations that govern the planet cannot provide governance or protect peace, since they were created with a different logic, that of the post-World War II world, and some, during the Cold War.

Furthermore, those of a financial nature created more recently do not alter and, on the contrary, confirm what has been said, since they either operate with a similar logic or even derive from institutions created at that time. This is also the case with almost all thematic organizations, for example, the World Health Organization, which showed its shortcomings during the pandemic, UNESCO in culture, or the FAO in agriculture and food, as well as territorial bodies of the UN system, such as ECLAC, which still proclaim the virtues of import substitution. Furthermore, all are extremely politicized.

The above takes place in a world in constant transformation, and somewhat worryingly, when the power structure is perhaps being altered for a long time with Artificial Intelligence, what is described shows a constant lack of adaptation to these modifications, as reflected in the annual rites of the UN General Assembly, despite the fact that its composition has varied enormously, since the decolonization process, so much so that in 1946 there were few sovereign African countries and today there are 54.

This lack of adaptation is evident not only within the UN but also outside it, in those groups that link countries by affinity or region. This is the case with the African Union, the Arab League, and the Organization of American States, which may be headed, if not toward extinction, at least toward total irrelevance. Furthermore, what was once heralded as a success, transformed into the current European Union, has fallen into increasing marginality in the global decision-making process. Compared to China or the United States, it simply demonstrates that it lacks the international clout commensurate with the economic, historical, and cultural weight of its member countries.

Although the UN system and its agencies continue to be essentially funded by the US, this institutional framework has turned against the US as a country and against what the West represents. At the same time, a bureaucracy has developed within it that now feels it has the power to activate its agenda, even by imposing it on countries that don't want it.

Within the UN, power is concentrated in the Security Council, which has the anachronism that those powers with permanent veto power represent the victors of the Second World War, which explains why neither Germany nor Japan sit on it, nor does that great rising power, India. It is also a system that has not only a political component but also an economic one, since the origins of both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund date back to July 1944 and the Bretton Woods Conference.

The result of all this is generally irrelevance, and much criticism of an excessive, costly, and inefficient bureaucracy, which, it seems, lacks an adequate control mechanism, which is why it sometimes predominates within these organizations, something that is felt in different places, in the form of a kind of moral superiority, which, as a prominent African intellectual once told me, reminded them of the European colonial bureaucracies of the 19th century.

This bureaucracy was contained during the Cold War, but today it doesn't always seem to be accountable to its constituents, the member states. Moreover, more than once, through minor resolutions, agreements, and programs, using "soft law" as a shortcut to international law, bypassing the legal mechanism of treaties themselves, it has pressured member states in various ways, sometimes using specific rulings from international courts, to achieve its objectives.

Finally, it is a system characterized by abundant biases toward Israel, even when it should be free of them due to the nature of its activity, as is the case with UNESCO, and especially in the area of Human Rights, which focuses on Israel and not on systematic violators of universal rights, as demonstrated by the case of so many countries that served on its Council in those years when complaints against it abounded, such as Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Cuba, or Venezuela. It is not bad, and even good, to scrutinize Israel or any other country, the US or any other, but what is striking is the obsessive fixation on that nation, as demonstrated by the fact that most of the condemnations by the UN system, from that Council to the General Assembly, are concentrated on that single country, with even North Korea going unnoticed.

In short, starting with the United Nations itself, the world needs a new structure and institutionality, a new architecture that reflects new realities and replaces what is currently inefficient and obsolete, or at least introduces a profound and lasting reform. What complicates everything is that, although there is some consensus on the diagnosis, there is no consensus on what needs to be done. In other words, as none other than Violeta Parra once said in a song, something like, if there is consensus on the problem, there is no consensus on the "solution," perhaps because there are no proposals, and if there are, they only address minor issues.

Can it be done? Yes, it can, of course, but it must be added that it fundamentally depends on the US, but why only them?

It is still the leading power, the main financier, but not only for that reason, but also because of its history, since the two great endeavors of the 20th century were its creation, the extinct League of Nations of President Woodrow Wilson in the first half of the century, and the current United Nations, in the second half.

There is no other. Some, like China or Russia, have no interest, and others, like the United Kingdom or France, lack sufficient power. Furthermore, the United States needs the challenge, since it would allow it to have something it lacks today, in the form of a unified, bipartisan foreign policy that would also organize its foreign policy with the automatism and clarity that its great rival for the crown of the leading superpower currently enjoys.

Outside of China, there is no other country that can aspire to challenge the US for first place, with the added benefit of growing economic resources. Therefore, what Trump is doing with tariffs and rare earths must be analyzed in both economic and geopolitical terms, although stock market analysts don't always see it that way. Similarly, what China has been doing for some time, area by area, sector by sector, must be appreciated as exactly the same as what the US did in the 20th century, when it sought to displace the British Empire.

Therefore, to remain the leading power, in addition to its will, the United States must do things that no one else can do for now, in addition to restoring the continuity of its foreign policy so that it doesn't change with each election. This is where the idea of a new international architecture, or at least a profound reform of the existing one, comes in, since its maintenance over time is absolutely essential to avoid what happened between 2016 and 2025: that is, profound changes in each election, not via laws, but rather executive orders, which are immediately challenged in court after being shown to the press, and whatever the judicial ruling is, ipso facto, appealed afterward.

It is essential to remember that there are still elements of Machiavelli's The Prince that remain relevant, such as the need to be respected and not just loved, as well as the vision held in classical Greece of political leadership, in terms of the leader as a Great Helmsman, that is, capable of steering the ship of State with a hand that is both sure and firm, allowing it to reach safe harbor, both in calm seas and in stormy weather, which is best achieved when foreign policy is of State and not just of party, as has been occurring, even more so if one wants to remain a superpower.

Trump and Rubio have had several successes in a row: India-Pakistan, Congo-Rwanda, the Middle East—more than expected in a short period of time—but all essentially modifiable by executive order of the next administration. Another necessity is to seize the moment or the day, the Roman "Carpe Diem," and if it's something that can last a generation, even more so, given each individual's personal motivations. In Trump's case, since he can't seek reelection, he can endure through the Nobel Peace Prize, which he has acknowledged he would like and which, it seems to me, and I've written, has haunted him since the Abraham Accords of his previous administration.

And in the case of Rubio, who has managed to gain Trump's trust, Trump appointed several friends as special envoys early in his administration, whether to Ukraine, Gaza, or Venezuela, a country where he was swayed. With the help of the Republican Latino caucus and their votes, he was able to defeat Richard Grenell, who wanted to retain Chevron's oil license. Rubio seems well poised to compete for the 2028 presidential nomination, a race in which JD Vance is leading, but this is a marathon, not a 100 meters, and, of course, a long-term project would greatly help him, which could keep him in power until 2032 if the opposition wins.

The truth is, whether in a river or in international politics, once the moment has passed, unless it's stagnant, the waters never return to where they were before. I understand the existence of a situation where many reject everything Trump says or does, but we are living in a moment of real change in post-World War II institutions, whether economic or political, and the United States needs projects that restore the sense of mission necessary to confront China, the same one that abounded in the Cold War, in another historical era, where economic agreements, political alliances, and geostrategic locations are being redefined. Nobody wants, for example, to uncover the can of worms that contains the history of so many countries invented by colonial powers, but, on the contrary, a long-term project can allow us to ask questions that have not been asked, such as what is the role of NATO, if it is valid only for Russia as the Europeans seem to think, or if a new institution is needed for a greater challenge such as China, and related to the above, where is located what may be a relevant power, perhaps more than the current European Union in this 21st century, such as the one that is already the most populated nation and the fifth economy in the world like India.

However, does the US still have the will? I would like to, but I have doubts. What I don't have doubts about is that after the bombing of Iran, the time is ripe not only to talk about peace, but also to practice Carpe Diem, to seize the moment to change the world's conversation and move with a certain elegance from the agonistic phase to the architectural phase. The point is that the US can do it today; there's no guarantee that, in a few years, it will be able or willing. Today, it not only can do it, but it also still has influence on all indicators of power, from military to cultural, from soft power to hard power, terms coined in English by Joseph Nye in the distant 1990s in his book "Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power," and then expanded in 2004 in his book "Soft Power: The Means of Success in World Politics," concepts that for too many years the US forgot that it was better to use them simultaneously rather than one over the other.

The United States still has time, because if a historian of the future looks at what's happening, wars like Ukraine or Gaza, with the perspective that time gives, they will also see them as symptoms of an architecture of international organizations that are irrelevant, having already fulfilled the function that was assigned to them in the past, and that today create as many problems as they solve, which have stopped providing stability, and when it is lacking, forces and actors inevitably emerge that push toward conflict.

In conclusion, no other country could replace the United States in the pursuit of a new international architecture, or at least its profound reform, because no one has both its history and, for now, the power to attempt it.

What is unknown is whether he still possesses the will to exercise it, since not only has he lost the internal unity and sense of mission of his elite, where the unanimity of the past on the superiority of its economic and political systems disappeared, unlike the Chinese elite, where that idea of superiority seems to abound today, from business leaders to Communist Party officials, but also research in China by the Pew Research Center, the think tank that provides serious information on problems, attitudes and trends, shows that this vision is generally shared by the majority of the country.

The world is undergoing various transformations, such as the one where what was once right and left, which long ago originated in the places where Jacobins and monarchists sat, supporters of cutting off or keeping the king's head in the French Revolution, have now mutated in many countries into patriots versus globalists, as a differentiating factor.

According to the ancients, the two Greek stages of politics gave way to two faces in Roman mythology, where Janus was the god of beginnings, doors, passages, transitions and endings, a much richer vision than the one that has come down to us with its two-faced representation, but where the important thing remains that one looked to the past and the other to the future, which not only allowed for ambiguity, but more importantly, the control of time.

It's time to remember Winston Churchill, who defined the meaning of a successful and lasting foreign policy: "In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill." Martin Luther King Jr. added the necessary ethical meaning to this definition, saying, "There is always a right time to do the right thing."

@israelzipper

Master's and PhD in Political Science (Essex University), Bachelor of Law (University of Barcelona), Lawyer (University of Chile), former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

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