Peacemaking Is Power Politics Again

The post-Cold War decades produced a genuine boom in international peacemaking, with the United Nations and regional bodies helping end dozens of civil wars — Rwanda's genocide notwithstanding. That era has been quietly fading for years, and the last genuinely comprehensive peace accord, Colombia's, is now a decade old. Foreign Policy argues the boom itself may have been a historical anomaly: a byproduct of the unusually low great-power tension that followed the Cold War, not a durable model of how peace gets made. As geopolitical rivalry hardens again, the cooperative, institution-led diplomacy of the 1990s and 2000s is giving way to something older — ceasefires and settlements brokered not by neutral institutions but by whichever great power has the leverage to impose them. Interstate conflicts hit a post-1945 record of sixty-five last year, and global military spending has grown 41 percent over the past decade, evidence that peace is being priced, not negotiated. From Gaza to Ukraine, today's peace efforts increasingly run through Washington's bilateral leverage rather than UN mediation, with weaker states left to accept whatever terms the powerful will underwrite. The UN's peacemaking machinery still exists, but it is being sidelined precisely when multipolar competition makes it most needed. What looks like a return to realism, the piece warns, is really a return to a world where peace itself is just another arena of power politics.