NEW YORK, September 4 — The marble lobby of United Nations headquarters still hums with the same diplomatic choreography, but the machinery beneath it is grinding. Delegates pass through security checks, interpreters click on their headsets, and somewhere above the East River, the escalator that once stalled beneath Donald Trump stands as a minor monument to a larger malfunction. The global order built here after World War II is cracking open, and the question on the ground is whether what replaces it will be order at all.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb, who holds a doctorate in international relations, argues the world is experiencing a power vacuum from which a new world order will likely emerge over the next five years. His assessment carries weight in European capitals, where leaders have watched the American president’s “America First” ideology collide with the institutions that once depended on Washington’s steady underwriting.
The escalator incident has become a kind of accidental metaphor. During a September 2025 visit to UN headquarters, Trump’s escalator ride stopped working. His teleprompter failed during his speech.
The president joked about receiving a bad escalator and teleprompter from the UN. The UN later said the escalator incident was accidentally triggered by Trump’s own camera operator.
The scene captures something analysts still debate: whether Trump’s confrontational approach is a symptom of the crumbling multilateral order, or its accelerating cause.
The Postwar Framework Frays
The United Nations was founded in 1945 to prevent wars. Its mandate later expanded to global health, development, and climate protection. For decades, the Security Council sat at the apex of this architecture, its permanent members wielding veto power as both shield and cudgel.
Now that same council is widely considered in need of an overhaul, its composition frozen in a postwar settlement that no longer reflects the distribution of power in the world. Teresa Nogueira Pinto, a globalization expert at Lusofona University in Lisbon, said the framework of multilateralism connected with the post-World War II era and the UN’s golden period is over.
She noted that many peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions have failed and that the UN desperately needs reform. Her verdict is stark: the institutions that once managed great-power competition have lost their purchase on events.
A World Without Order?
Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Foreign Affairs that the old order has disappeared and that the world will be without any order at all for some time. He described a landscape swept by fragmentation, contagion, and the weaponization of geographic, economic, and technological chokepoints. Leonard’s formulation strips away the comforting assumption that some new equilibrium will quickly replace what has been lost.
The implications ripple outward from the UN’s glass towers. Regional powers are building parallel institutions.
Trade relationships are fragmenting into blocs. The very concept of collective security—never fully realized—now looks almost antique to policymakers in capitals from Brasília to New Delhi. What comes next remains contested terrain.
Stubb’s five-year horizon suggests a period of creative destruction, with new powers and new forums gradually filling the vacuum. Leonard’s darker reading warns of an interregnum where no single logic governs competition, and where the tools of economic and technological warfare proliferate faster than the norms to constrain them.
The UN’s escalator has been repaired. The larger machinery has not.
