BY JOHN WALLACE
Executive Director of Asia Pacific Journalism Centre, Australia
There is irony in the fact that the primary architect of the current system of global governance, the United States, is today its major detractor.
The global governance system put in place at the end of WW2 and championed by the United States is today widely viewed there as a threat to US sovereignty. As a consequence, the US has withdrawn from international agreements and agencies and engaged routinely in military interventions without UN Security Council authorization.
In the early days of the UN project, when US power was balanced against that of the Soviet Union, Americans were comfortable with the aspiration and reach of global governance. However, in the post-Cold War period of American ascendency and the growth in the US of the idea of US exceptionalism, this comfort gave way to annoyance that American sovereignty should be constrained by intervention from the UN and its agencies.
So now we see the US frequently using its influence to bypass or pressure international bodies, for example by paralyzing the WTO’s dispute settlement system, withdrawing from agencies like the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, and undertaking without Security Council approval military actions such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The recent 2026 strikes on Iran, conducted without UN Security Council authorization, continue this defiance of international law. At the same time, the US has used its veto power to block UN Security Council action on issues like the Gaza conflict, further demonstrating its willingness to sideline the UN when its interests are at stake.
It is against this historical backdrop that the push to re-invigorate global governance institutions is situated. The need for such action is demanded by the growing awareness that the major challenges of today have global dimension. These interconnected crises are exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused global economic disruption and exposed severe inequalities, and the cascading effects of climate change, conflict, and economic instability that have reversed progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
While the temptation to retreat behind national borders is attractive, the reality is that the world we live in today is increasingly interconnected and countries with different cultures, sense of identity and systems of governance must come together as partners on the journey ahead.
An additional factor driving the demand for rehabilitation of global governance institutions is the on-going reconfiguration of the global distribution of economic power, with a shift in economic power away from developed nations, which have roughly 15 percent of the world’s people and more than 70 percent of its wealth, to the developing world, and to Asia in particular.
To put numbers to this shift: in 2000, the G7 countries (US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada) accounted for approximately 65 percent of global GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis. By 2025, that share had fallen to around 45 percent, while China alone had risen from 7 percent to nearly 19 percent. India, Brazil and Indonesia have also more than doubled their shares over the same period. Projections from the IMF and World Bank suggest that by 2040, the combined GDP of the E7 emerging economies (China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and Turkey) will be roughly double that of the G7. Yet the UN Security Council’s permanent membership – the central decision-making body in global governance – has not changed a single seat since 1965, when it expanded from 11 to 15 members (with no change to the P5). The disjuncture between economic reality and institutional representation could hardly be starker.
These two factors will inevitably involve change to the status quo of current global governance arrangements so that they better reflect the reality of global society in the second quarter of the 21st century. And this, will require that legacy beneficiaries of the status quo arrangements make concessions in terms of national representation.
The most glaring example is the UN Security Council. Of its five permanent members (the P5) – the US, UK, France, Russia and China – three are European or Anglo-European states. No permanent seats exist for Africa, Latin America, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region, despite their growing populations and economic heft. The UK and France, in particular, hold their seats largely by virtue of their post-WW2 victor status and their possession of nuclear weapons at the time of the Charter’s drafting, rather than any contemporary demographic or economic dominance.
The rationale for Anglo-European dominance of the UN Security Council is totally outdated 80 years on from the end of WW2. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has himself stated that the Council’s composition no longer corresponds to today’s world, noting the over-representation of European powers and the lack of permanent seats for Africa and Latin America.
A common counter-argument is that the UK and France remain major financial contributors to the UN budget and that their diplomatic networks are globally extensive. Yet this line of reasoning conflates financial capacity with representational legitimacy – and, in any case, it ignores that Japan, Germany, India and Brazil are all among the top UN contributors without holding permanent seats. The principle of “no taxation without representation” applies no less to global governance than to domestic politics.
Resistance to such change can be expected. In the area of national party politics, national pride works against global aspiration and can be easily fueled by a neo-colonial ideology that presents the West as the proper leader of any global order. A key element of this belief is that Western nations are superior to other nations essentially because they have representative governance systems.
Western journalists, who are used to playing a role in government formation in their country, have generally accepted this belief and routinely have exaggerated governance difference, along with human rights allegations, in news reporting and commentary, in effect weaponizing it as a tool to question China’s legitimacy and intentions.
The relevance of governance system difference has now been challenged by China’s development success over the past 45 years. Western predictions of stunted growth and economic failure have routinely had to be revised and discarded, providing serial examples of analysis being clouded by ideology and not objectively informed.
Also, the erratic and destructive international behaviour of the United States in recent years, including the trashing of once-nurtured global institutions like the WTO, has raised questions about the centrality of governance system as an indicator of good intent on the world stage. This is underlined by the Trump administration’s proposal for a “Board of Peace” designed to operate in parallel with the UN and threats against allies like Denmark over Greenland.
China’s advocacy for UN reform is not purely selfless; it clearly serves Beijing’s strategic interest in reducing Western dominance and increasing its own global influence. However, this self‑ interest does not invalidate the broader case for reform, which is supported by many non-Western nations.
While legacy Western media, encouraged by defence sector voices, have been slow to discard ingrained anti-China reflexes, the increasingly global orientation of younger and social media ‑oriented audiences provides optimism that national leaders and mainstream news media will see the bigger picture.
To see that bigger picture means accepting that the UN Security Council’s current P5 configuration is a relic, not a reflection. The UK and France, along with the US, must be prepared to cede their over-representation – whether by expanding permanent membership to include Africa, Latin America and Asia, or by reclassifying European seats into a single EU rotating permanent seat. Either path requires the kind of concession that neither Washington, London nor Paris has yet shown any willingness to countenance.
It is against this cultural and geo-political backdrop that advocates for greater fairness in the global system of governance have to work. The debate being fostered within China and shared internationally is a timely and welcome presence.
For Western journalism, the challenge is to step back, see the bigger picture of the need for global cooperation, and identify with the aspiration for global governance renewal. This requires rejecting lazy isolationist thinking and, more specifically, abandoning the reflexive defence of permanent Western seats on the Security Council. The past is no excuse for the present. A forward-looking internationalism demands that the privileges of 1945 give way to the realities of 2026.
*The views and opinions expressed in the articles are solely those of the individual authors and do not reflect the position of the Secretariat of the Belt and Road Journalist Network.