What Concrete Action Does the United Nations Owe the World in the Age of Unrestricted Warfare?
Takamasa ISHIZUKA, Director, DEVNET JAPAN
THE WARS YOU CAN’T SEE COMING
The numbers don’t lie — and right now, they tell an unsettling story. In a ranking of global power released by Record China at the end of 2025, the world’s six strongest nations are clustered within barely one point of each other. America sits at the top with 95.36. Japan — perhaps surprisingly — holds sixth place at 94.31. Between them: China, Russia, and the heavyweights of Europe.
The index weighs political stability, economic clout, military strength, alliance networks, and soft power. In practice, analysts note, guns and defence budgets dominate the calculus. The result is a leaderboard that looks less like a measure of national greatness than a snapshot of an arms race nobody officially declared.
Power without restraint
Washington’s response to that environment has been blunt. The Trump administration launched military operations against Venezuela and struck Iran with a scale that rattled global markets and sent commodity prices lurching. Across the Pacific, Beijing has been drilling amphibious landings — a pointed message, delivered in military exercises, about what China could do to disputed islands. Moscow, its entire economy now effectively organised around war production, keeps raining drones on Ukrainian cities.
Even Europe — long the home of multilateral restraint — is reaching for harder power. French President Emmanuel Macron put it plainly: in a world where the strong prey on the weak, you had better be strong. He dispatched the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the Mediterranean and announced plans for a next-generation nuclear vessel. The post-Cold War peace dividend, it seems, is well and truly spent.
The battlefield has moved
But here is the problem: counting warships and missile batteries no longer tells you much about how safe a country actually is. China’s strategic doctrine of “unrestricted warfare” — using every available tool without limit or scruple — has been widely observed in practice for years. Cyberattacks knock out power grids. Financial pressure chokes out rival economies. Disinformation campaigns hollow out public trust. None of this shows up on a ranking of military hardware.
The most dramatic illustration came from the United States itself. President Trump signed an executive order designating fentanyl — a synthetic opioid killing tens of thousands of Americans a year — as a weapon of mass destruction. The legal designation was striking in its candour: this was not a public health measure, officials signalled, but a national security response. A foreign-linked supply chain had become a weapon pointed at the heart of American society.
Analysts draw a parallel with the wave of mass migration reshaping Europe and the Americas. Deliberate or not, the social friction generated by large-scale population movements strains public services, fuels political polarisation, and erodes the civic cohesion that underpins stable democracies. It is, in the language of security strategists, a textbook vector for hybrid warfare — coercive pressure that leaves no fingerprints and exploits no treaty.
What the UN must do now
Which brings the question back to the institution built specifically to prevent the world from tearing itself apart. The United Nations was designed to stop armies from crossing borders. That mandate, already strained, looks increasingly insufficient as the most dangerous threats migrate into cyberspace, financial systems, and the social fabric of nations.
The UN cannot afford to spend this moment in the deliberative mode it defaults to — drafting declarations, hosting dialogue sessions, building consensus at glacial speed while the threats accelerate. What is needed is an operational framework: concrete, funded, and capable of holding great powers accountable in domains where the existing rules simply do not reach.
That is an enormous ask of an institution that has struggled to enforce its own resolutions against permanent Security Council members. But the alternative — a world in which the major powers compete across every domain, visible and invisible, with no agreed limits whatsoever — is a world in which no country, however high its ranking, is genuinely secure. The UN’s purpose was always to prevent exactly that outcome. Now would be a good time to remember it.