Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Dr. Abdullah Yusuf
When Donald Trump announced a new “ceasefire deal” between Israel, Qatar, Turkey, and the United States, the world reacted with a mixture of fatigue and fascination. Another handshake, another round of declarations about peace. Yet behind the headlines lies the deeper logic of international relations: a world still governed by anarchy, hierarchy, and habit. This essay reads Trump’s ceasefire through the classical and critical traditions of international thought: Realism, Liberalism, Constructivism, the English School, Gramscian theory, and Cosmopolitanism. Each illuminates a different aspect of the political condition. Realism exposes the struggle for survival behind every handshake. Liberalism clings to the faith that institutions and transparency can tame mistrust. Constructivism shows how ideas, norms, and words themselves shape the world. The English School imagines a society of states bound by etiquette rather than justice. Gramsci reminds us that hegemony survives through consent as much as through coercion. And Cosmopolitanism holds on to the hope, however faint, that humanity might one day transcend the prison of sovereignty.
At the centre of these traditions stands the United Nations, part theatre and part conscience, a symbol of the world’s refusal to abandon the dream of a shared moral community. Through the prism of Trump’s ceasefire, the UN appears not simply as an institution but as an inheritance, a fragile architecture that still gives shape to humanity’s search for peace, order, and meaning in the midst of chaos.
The Stage of Anarchy
The world remains an anarchic system. No sovereign rules above the states, only the shadow of power and fear. It is a world, as Hobbes, a classical realist, might say, where promises have meaning only when backed by the sword. The United Nations was born to soften that truth, to civilise the struggle for security into a drama of negotiation. Yet its founders knew that peace is a word forever written on water.
Realism begins with the understanding that states are not moral creatures but actors bound to their own preservation. Even the kindest gesture hides calculation. Qatar signs ceasefires not from trust but from necessity, and in that necessity lies the brilliance of its soft power. Doha’s mediation is born of danger as much as design; when Israeli F-35s struck Qatari territory during negotiations, the message was clear: small states are never immune to the arrogance of power. Yet Qatar turned humiliation into leverage. It compelled Washington to demand an apology from Netanyahu, transforming injury into influence. Its wealth funds reconstruction, its Al Jazeera network shapes global narratives, and its diplomats can summon both Hamas and the White House in the same breath. Qatar’s quiet pressure on Hamas and its recalibration of Al Jazeera’s tone reveal a state that trades in persuasion, not coercion. In this, Qatar embodies the very logic of the United Nations itself: the use of soft instruments, norms, visibility, and moral vocabulary to temper the anarchy that Realism describes.
The Trumpian Peace
Trump’s ceasefire tells this story in miniature, a gospel of the age where words of virtue mask the machinery of survival. Israel, ever wary of multilateral diplomacy, think of Camp David in 1979 or Oslo in 1993, prefers smaller rooms where power is personal, and arithmetic cannot outvote it. The United States assumes its known role as patron, guarantor, and protector of its own supremacy. Qatar, struck yet unbroken, returns not as supplicant but as mediator, transmuting injury into authority through the quiet grammar of influence.
Turkey’s presence in the ceasefire carried a quieter logic. For Israel, it was not reconciliation but containment. Since the flotilla incident, when ships bearing aid and celebrities sailed toward Gaza and turned moral outrage into global spectacle, Turkey has stood at the intersection of symbolism and strategy. To include Ankara was to enlist a gatekeeper, one who could prevent another theatre of embarrassment from unfolding on the high seas. For Israel, it was a way to outsource conscience; for Turkey, an opportunity to recover relevance. Realism dressed itself as mercy, and diplomacy became the art of averting shame. Yet beneath this management of cooperation lies something older, the struggle of states to manage not only their borders but their image.
The System and Its Habits
Kenneth Waltz, the founder of neorealism, would call this the logic of an anarchic world. Leaders come and go, but the structure remains, without any supreme sovereign authority above it. The powerful do not manage crises out of mercy but to keep the machinery turning, to ensure that order remains just stable enough for their own survival. They preserve the system so that it continues to depend on them.
Even without the UN on paper, the system still plays by the rules it learned from it: rules of restraint, diplomacy, and procedural delay. The United Nations, then, is not absent from such deals; it lives within them as memory. Its methods of observation, verification, and ritualised dialogue persist even when its name is omitted. It is the ghost that guides the living.
The Illusion of Morality
Liberalism offers a gentler lens, what Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye once called complex interdependence, the idea that transparency can tame mistrust. The ceasefire depends on precisely that: on monitors, data, and humanitarian access. Bureaucracy becomes the last form of faith. In spreadsheets and inspection reports, civilisation still clings to reason, echoing the liberal institutionalism of Keohane’s After Hegemony (1984), where cooperation survives even without perfect trust.
Constructivists, meanwhile, would notice the script. As Alexander Wendt argued, ‘anarchy is what states make of it,’ meaning arises not from material power but from shared ideas. The words “historic,” “unprecedented,” “for the sake of the children” – these are not random. They are borrowed from the United Nations’ moral lexicon, rehearsed until they sound inevitable. Even those who defy the UN must still speak its language, like heretics who cannot stop quoting scripture.
Order Without Justice
The English School of International Relations, which appeared in Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society(1977), would call this the society of states, a club that prizes order above righteousness. The Trump deal, for all its exclusions, still performs the rite of civilisation: the belief that talk is better than conquest, that power must occasionally apologise. It is not justice; it is etiquette. Yet etiquette, in a violent world, is sometimes the only peace available.
A Gramscian, meaning someone who follows Antonio Gramsci’s view that power is maintained through consent and cultural leadership rather than force, would go further. The deal reproduces the ideology of hegemony: the idea that Western power is stewardship, not domination. The United States appears as peacemaker, Israel as indispensable, Qatar and Turkey as grateful participants. The UN, by lending legitimacy to the script, becomes both witness and accomplice.
The Last Ideal
And still, a trace of conscience survives. To pause the guns, even briefly, is not nothing. To open a corridor for food, to exchange prisoners, to let the wounded breathe – these gestures, however transactional, carry the faint light of a cosmopolitan faith, the belief that all human beings belong to a shared moral community, and that life, however politicised, still matters.
Perhaps this is why the United Nations lives. Not as an institution of victory but as an institution of memory, reminding us, however dimly, that power without restraint is death. It is less an empire of law than a conscience with a flag.
The Curtain Falls
The Trump ceasefire reveals the truth the UN was built to contain: that the world is not governed by justice but by exhaustion. The handshake is not peace; it is a truce between competing fears. Yet even fear requires grammar, a ritual, a rule, a signature. That grammar is the UN’s gift to the world, the art of surviving ourselves.
In Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, the wars of Troy end not in triumph but in weariness. “The end crowns all,” says the noble Hector. But in our time, the end never comes, only pauses, treaties, and fragile hopes written in the sand, waiting, like the UN itself, to be washed and rewritten again.
Author’s Bio:
Dr. Yusuf is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Dundee, UK.
