The next domino

Express Tribune

26-07-2025

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The Domino Theory explains how one event sets off a series of similar events. The theory is not attributed to any single author but is a concept that gained popularity during the Cold War. The theory suggested that if one country fell to communism, the neighbouring countries would also succumb to the same, like dominoes. Taking lead from this theory and the scholarly work and assumptions made by some scholars in international relations, I am inclined to postulate the next domino that the world may face.
The hypothesis of the next domino is based on the reality that the anarchic international system thrives, and no central authority has been able to end the ongoing conflicts between Iran and Israel, India and Pakistan, and in Ukraine and Gaza. These conflicts have not ended, and in two cases, active armed conflict may have been brought to an end, but no peace treaty or political framework exists to resolve them to the satisfaction of the combatants, thus entitling them to be termed as frozen conflicts.
In 2001, Professor Mearsheimer wrote the book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. He argued that great powers will retain the desire to create and dominate a sphere of influence, balance against each other by building military capabilities; and their efforts to gain power and security will lead states into conflict.
In the unipolar moment of the world Robert D Kaplan wrote The Coming of Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of Post World Order in which he explained that in the coming years subnational actors (tribes, warlords, criminal outfits) will assert themselves; fragile and failed states will be the key contributors to global instability; overpopulation and resource scarcity will play a key role in creation of global instability; ethnic and religious conflicts will contribute towards fragmentation of global order; globalisation will intensify disparities between the wealthy and the poor states; there will be rise in urban warfare; and conflicts will move into densely populated cities where military and civilian lines will stand blurred.
Fareed Zakaria, in his 2008 book, The Post-American World, argued that the US was no longer the undisputed leader of the world; the rise of the rest was creating a multipolar world; the US was struggling with its foreign policy; the world was not just competing but in the globalised world cooperating and relying on each other for trade, technology, resources and security; and soft power was being utilised by states to influence others by their culture, values and diplomacy.
In 2003, Professor Mearsheimer in his book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, wrote that desire for power by states leads to a security dilemma. States' foreign policy decisions are heavily influenced by geographic positions and strategic vulnerabilities, and regional hegemony is a key goal for great powers.
The assumptions made by all these scholars were more or less true, and the world could have benefited from their work and also from the work of many others to understand the nature of international politics. The US had a liberal foreign policy agenda during the unipolar moment, but it utilised realist statecraft to achieve the goals of its foreign policy and thus failed. Today, to resolve conflicts, the emphasis remains on the use of force.
The US-Russia relationship is overshadowed by a feeling of mistrust. There are only ongoing or frozen conflicts with peace efforts being undermined, thus less hope for meaningful peace. The world witnesses no decisive defeat, and states are being subjected to aggression to make them dysfunctional as they don't relent to defeat. The spread of Western democracy and Western institutions eastwards has only given rise to more nationalism and a nationalist perspective of viewing the ongoing conflicts in the countries of the Global South. As world powers fail to address matters leading to global instability and as globalisation recedes, in the global south, there is a greater rise of isolationism and acceptance of the concept of regionalism.
The civil war in Donbas could have been stopped by negotiations but that didn't happen, and Russia was forced to initiate special operations in the Donbas region. The US and Israel both failed to achieve their objectives in the 12-day war against Iran. The Iranian enrichment facilities were partially destroyed, but the enriched uranium by Iran was never secured. Neither was the political goal of regime change in Iran achieved. Iran remains stonewalled, and the conflict is frozen.
There should be a diplomatic end to conflicts in an ideal world, but that is not happening. Russia has put forward three main demands for Ukraine to find a diplomatic end to the war - that Ukraine must recognise the Russian-annexed Donbas region; agree to act as a neutral state; and reduce the size of its military and change its military posture as a threat against Russia. From a Ukrainian point of view, these demands are unacceptable, and so we have another frozen conflict on our hands.
India is in no mood to negotiate with Pakistan. In fact, after the military drubbing it received from a relatively less powerful state, its bruised ego will not rest until it inflicts some costly damage on Pakistan. Stopping the flow of water to Pakistan was the meanest thing that it could do, but it has gone ahead and done that despite an international treaty prohibiting it from doing so. Israel's shameless display of murder and killing in Gaza is falling on deaf ears and blind eyes. Israelis have made genocide an acceptable norm, and today the world looks at the daily number of deaths and not the deaths of human beings and humanity.
As a consequence of what is currently happening in the world, there is a phrase that can describe its future, and that is: 'the future is bleak.' The next domino is based on how the states in the global south will make this important foreign policy choice of drawing away from internationalism and what constitutes the international community. They would prefer to substitute it with the concept of regionalism based on a community of nations that believe and trust in the great powers in the region.
Multipolarity in its continental form will be the next domino for the states of the global south. In the future, China and Russia may create a sense of regionalism in which great powers not only make promises but also keep them. The next domino will constitute new political, economic and military alignments of states in which regionalism will replace internationalism. The bleak future is a gift of unfair and unjust internationalism, and the domino effect of regionalism is a force that may contest with internationalism to create a better future for the world.