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The monoculture of power: How unilateralism threatens global stability
Coercing weaker nations rather than engaging in diplomatic solutions reflects the fundamental flaw of Trump’s unilateralism.
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United States President Donald Trump and US Vice President JD Vance meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in Washington on Feb. 4, 2025. (Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz)
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tep into the Amazon rainforest, and you’ll find a masterpiece of resilience: towering trees, dense undergrowth and countless species. Each playing its part in an ecosystem that has thrived for millennia. This diversity is not just aesthetic. It is the reason the rainforest endures.
Now, picture a vast plantation of a single crop, such as palm oil. For the first few years, the land is fertile, production is high, and profits flow. But as time passes, the soil weakens. The monoculture depletes its own foundation, leaving the land barren, drained of life.
For decades, the world has functioned like a rainforest – not perfect, not always orderly, but ultimately sustainable. Institutions like the United Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the wider international treaties have never been flawless, but they have provided a system of checks and balances that prevents any single country from dictating the terms of global stability alone.
These institutions, much like the diverse species of a thriving ecosystem, ensure that even when one part falters, the whole does not collapse.
Unilateralism, on the other hand, is the political equivalent of clear-cutting a forest to plant a single crop. It may look efficient in the short term, but by erasing diversity of voices, of negotiations, of shared decision-making, it creates a system that cannot endure.
And no leader in recent history has championed this monoculture of power more than United States President Donald Trump.
His approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his so-called "solution" for Gaza, was not just a failure of diplomacy. It was a symptom of something much bigger.
