The world has entered the new year with the promise of peace and dignity, but under the thunder of military drills, airstrikes and missiles. China’s massive exercises around Taiwan, following Washington’s multibillion-dollar arms deal with Taipei, reflect a dangerous global pattern: deterrence replaces dialogue, and force supplants diplomacy.
This militarised mindset extends far beyond East Asia. The United States, for instance, recently launched airstrikes in north-western Nigeria, clearly following a familiar script — swift military action without exhausting diplomatic or politicial solutions.
The same logic has justified repeated violations of Syrian sovereignty, reckless attacks on Iran’s peaceful nuclear facilities, and now the reported US naval blockade of Venezuela, with warships positioned within striking distance. Such displays of brute power are meant to intimidate, not negotiate, while the world watches on in unsettling silence.
Powerful countries attack neighbours, hijack ships, fuel wars, and profit from the global arms trade, even as millions are killed, starved or displaced. Global institutions that are supposed to restrain excesses and protect peace, instead, remain largely paralysed.
Nowhere is this disorder more tragic than in the Middle East. Gaza bleeds without an end in sight. Children, women, journalists and aid workers are being slaughtered. The genocide is being live-streamed to a world numbed. Humanity remembers Auschwitz, and it should, but Gaza’s apocalypse is denied comparable moral outrage or accountability simply because power shields the perpetrators.
Elsewhere, Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine grinds on, reinforcing a grim lesson: military might erases account-ability, and international law bends before strategic interests. Yet, amid all this darkness, a fundamental truth endures: the world belongs not to power elites or military establishments, but to the people. Across continents, ordinary men and women demand justice, equality, dignity and peace. Wars have not solved humanity’s problems; they have multiplied them — enriching arms merchants while spreading hunger, displacement and despair.
Diplomacy today is imposed on the weak by the powerful. This hypocrisy is rooted in a post-World War II order designed by victors for victors alone — where veto power trumps justice. The world is likely to continue down this pathetic path in the new year.
One can only hope against hope that some semblance of sanity might prevail.
QAMER SOOMRO
SHIKARPUR
