Well, not quite Doctor Strange’s sagas in parallel universes, but arguably Indonesia and the international community is currently experiencing multiple challenges in the “universes” of geopolitics, geostrategic, geo-economics, digital and tech rivalries, the pandemic as well as climate change and its dire environmental impacts.

Let’s look at the exhibits.

First, unipolarity.

The current global security architecture is a fundamentally unipolar universe, where the United States sits at the top with the highest military spending in the world, at over US$870 billion, and holds security treaties with over 50 countries across the world from South America to the Middle East, and Western Europe to East Asia and the Western Pacific. These treaties mean that the US has a military presence in many corners of the continents and is able to deploy its massive military capabilities anywhere in the world in probably less than 24 hours.

This unipolarity has created a substantial major obstacle for the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to achieve resolutions for peace-making and even peace-maintaining. In addition, the composition of the permanent members of the UNSC, which is basically formed of the winners of World War II, is incompatible with the current global security threats.

However, reforming the UNSC is so difficult that all discussions seem to be just lip service. It would be against the interests of all UNSC permanent members to allow new permanent members because each of them has separate but common interests.