World At Net | Geopolitics | Analysis | Wednesday, June 10, 2026
The Fracturing Order: How China, Russia, Iran, and the Arab World Are Rewriting the Rules of Global Power
Let's be honest about what's actually happening out there. The world most of us grew up reading about, the one where Washington set the rules, the dollar was king, and American military reach kept everyone more or less in line, is not the world we're living in anymore. That's not a radical talking point. It's what the numbers show, what the diplomats are quietly admitting, and what ordinary people from Cairo to Caracas already feel in their bones.
The order that emerged after the Cold War was always built on a set of assumptions: that American power would remain unchallengeable, that Western financial institutions would define the terms of global prosperity, and that liberal democracy was essentially the destination every serious country was heading toward. All three of those assumptions are now in serious trouble. The fractures are not rhetorical, not theoretical, they show up in trade data, in voting patterns at the UN, in who's brokering peace deals and who isn't getting invited to the table anymore.
Five things are happening at once, and that simultaneity is what makes this moment feel different from the usual cyclical shifts in great-power competition. China is methodically expanding its footprint across every region where the United States used to operate unchallenged. Russia, despite being hit with the most sweeping sanctions in modern history, has not only survived but managed to position itself as the symbolic leader of a growing anti-Western bloc. Iran, long written off as a cornered pariah, has used the chaos around it to quietly emerge as a regional player with real diplomatic insulation. Israel's military campaign in Gaza has shattered American credibility across the Arab world and the Global South in ways that will take a generation to repair. And Arab governments, watching all of this unfold, are making a rational calculation: stop putting all your eggs in one basket.
Start with China, because you really have to. In 2024, Beijing's economy grew 5 percent to reach roughly $18.77 trillion USD, according to China's own National Bureau of Statistics. By 2025, it crossed $20 trillion for the first time. Those are obviously enormous figures, but the more telling number is this one: over the five years between 2021 and 2025, China accounted for roughly 30 percent of all global economic growth. Think about that for a moment. One country. Nearly a third of everything the world added. And that means a staggering number of governments in Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America now depend on Chinese demand, Chinese credit and Chinese infrastructure contracts in ways that reshape their foreign policy options whether they like it or not.
But GDP is only part of the story. The Doublethink Lab's China Index 2024 tracked Beijing's actual footprint across 101 countries and found that 56 of 81 nations it monitored in both 2022 and 2024 saw their Chinese influence scores go up. The biggest jumps were in Central America and the Caribbean, up 12.1 points on average, with Sub-Saharan Africa and South America not far behind. China isn't projecting this influence through aircraft carriers. It's doing it through roads, ports, telecoms contracts, media partnerships, and patient relationship-building with governments that Washington has long taken for granted or actively antagonized. Back in the US, a Pew Research survey from April 2025 found 73 percent of Americans believe China's global influence is growing, a view held equally by Republicans and Democrats, which tells you something about how deep the anxiety runs.
Nothing captures this shift quite like what happened on March 10, 2023. Saudi Arabia and Iran, two countries that had spent years funding opposite sides of wars across the region, that cut off diplomatic relations in 2016 after Iranian mobs torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran, sat down in Beijing and announced they were restoring ties. Brokered by China. Not by the Americans, not by the Europeans, not by the UN. By China. Foreign Affairs called it a potential transformation of the whole Middle Eastern order, and for once the hyperbole seemed justified. The joint communiqué literally opened by crediting President Xi Jinping personally. The International Crisis Group described five days of intensive secret sessions in Beijing before the deal was announced. That kind of public, specific attribution to a Chinese leader in a Middle Eastern settlement, five years ago that simply wouldn't have happened. The Saudis, for their part, concluded that getting Beijing involved was the best insurance that Tehran would actually keep its word, since neither side wanted to jeopardize their relationship with China by blowing up a deal Xi had personally championed.
Russia launches full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Western powers impose sweeping sanctions on Moscow, expecting economic collapse. Russia's GDP defies predictions.
China brokers the restoration of Saudi–Iranian diplomatic relations in Beijing, Beijing's most consequential Middle East diplomatic breakthrough.
BRICS formally expands to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Over 40 other countries express interest in membership.
Russia hosts the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan with representatives from 32 nations. UN Secretary-General Guterres attends, drawing Western criticism.
145 countries recognize a Palestinian state. 19 new recognitions occur in this period alone. Israel's ICC indictment of PM Netanyahu deepens its international isolation.
China's GDP surpasses $20 trillion for the first time. BRICS now includes Indonesia and Nigeria as Partner States, representing the majority of global energy producers.
Russia is the part of this story that Western analysts keep getting wrong, mostly because the script was supposed to go differently. When Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, the prevailing view in Washington and Brussels was that crippling sanctions would quickly bring the Russian economy to its knees, domestic discontent would grow, and Moscow would be forced into some kind of retreat. That didn't happen. The IMF ended up revising Russia's 2024 GDP growth upward to 3.2 percent — well above what almost anyone had forecast. War spending pumped money into the domestic economy, energy revenues kept flowing through non-Western channels, and trade with China, India and the Gulf filled the gaps left by departing Western companies. Russia hurt. But it didn't break.
What's more striking than the economics is what Russia pulled off politically. Brookings Institution researchers pointed out in April 2025 that despite his ICC indictment for alleged war crimes, Putin hosted leaders from 32 nations at the Kazan BRICS summit in October 2024. The UN Secretary-General showed up, which drew sharp criticism from Western governments but also told you something about how the geopolitical math had shifted. The whole point of Kazan was to show that Russia wasn't isolated, that the framing of the war as a struggle against Western hegemony had traction in the Global South even among countries that hadn't formally endorsed Moscow's position on Ukraine. Eurasian Review described it as the most significant geopolitical event Russia had orchestrated since the invasion began. That's probably right.
Kazan also moved the de-dollarization conversation forward in concrete ways. BRICS launched "BRICS Pay," a cross-border payment system aimed at reducing reliance on the SWIFT-dominated dollar architecture, and member governments agreed to study a new settlement and depository framework using national currencies. It's worth being clear-eyed here: the dollar isn't going anywhere fast. The Federal Reserve's own 2025 analysis confirmed the greenback still makes up 58 percent of global foreign reserves and sits at the center of roughly 90 percent of all foreign-exchange transactions. But it was at 72 percent of reserves back in 2001. That 14-point slide over two decades is not noise. It's a trend, and every country that joins BRICS with a grievance against dollar weaponization nudges that trend further along.
The BRICS expansion is worth pausing on because it gives you the clearest read of how the non-Western world is actually thinking. When Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all joined the bloc in January 2024, it wasn't just a bureaucratic enlargement. The Council on Foreign Relations counted more than 40 additional countries lining up to join or gain partner status. By 2025, Indonesia and Nigeria were in as Partner States. Researchers in a Global Power Shift analysis on ResearchGate noted that BRICS now represents the majority of the world's energy producers. That matters enormously because the whole foundation of dollar dominance in global commodities, the petrodollar system that Saudi Arabia and Washington quietly sustained since the 1970s, rests on Gulf oil being priced in US dollars. Saudi Arabia being inside BRICS while also being one of the world's largest oil exporters is an arrangement that will have consequences, even if they play out slowly.
And then there's Iran, which is the country in this story whose transformation gets least attention in Western media. For decades the narrative was simple: Iran as the rogue state, the proliferation risk, the sponsor of proxy militias. That's not a false picture exactly, but it's a frozen one. Tehran has navigated the post-2022 world with real strategic shrewdness. The BRICS membership, the restored Saudi relationship, the deepening ties with Moscow and Beijing, these have given Iran a degree of diplomatic cover it genuinely hasn't had since before the 1979 revolution. The Carnegie Endowment observed that Washington's decision not to offer Riyadh binding security guarantees, even while designating Saudi Arabia a "major non-NATO US ally" in November 2025, effectively pushed the Saudis deeper into the China-brokered equilibrium with Tehran. The Saudis aren't seeking warm reconciliation with Iran. They're managing risk. A weakened Iran is useful to them; a Middle East engulfed in war is not. China is the broker they trust to hold that tension in place, because China has skin in the game and America, increasingly, seems distracted.
Gaza is where American credibility took its most severe hit. Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack killed around 1,200 Israelis and took over 200 hostages, a horrific assault that triggered Israel's military response in Gaza. What followed was a military campaign whose civilian toll produced a level of international outrage genuinely without precedent in Israel's history. The Arab Center Washington DC polled 8,000 people across 16 Arab countries between December 2023 and January 2024. Ninety-four percent considered the US position on Gaza to be bad. Eighty-two percent called it "very bad." Those are not the numbers of a superpower with soft-power reserves to draw down. That's collapse.
The 2025 Arab Opinion Index, the most comprehensive of its kind, with 40,130 face-to-face interviews across 15 Arab states between October 2024 and August 2025, found something that should give pause to anyone still operating on Cold War-era assumptions about the Middle East. Forty-four percent of Arab respondents named Israel as the main threat to regional security. Twenty-one percent named the United States. Iran, the country American strategy has spent decades presenting as the central threat to Arab stability, came in at 6 percent. That is a complete inversion of the threat hierarchy Washington has been trying to construct and sell to Arab governments since at least 2003. Another 77 percent said US policies directly threaten Arab regional security and stability. In Morocco, support for recognizing Israel fell from 20 percent in 2022/23 to just 6 percent in 2024/25. In Kuwait, opposition to recognizing Israel climbed to 94 percent. The Abraham Accords still formally exist on paper, but they've become politically radioactive in Arab public life in ways that will constrain any government that cares even marginally about its own legitimacy.
The legal dimension of this story deserves more attention than it usually gets. Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were indicted by the International Criminal Court over the conduct of the Gaza campaign, a charge that would have been unthinkable against a US-allied leader a decade ago. By 2025, 145 countries had formally recognized a Palestinian state. Nineteen of those recognitions came just in 2024 and 2025, including from 15 European nations. The Atlantic Council put it bluntly: the Gaza war had fractured a pro-Israel consensus that had held for decades, and Israel had started losing political support within the United States itself, particularly among younger voters across both parties. That's not a marginal blip. That's something structural changing underneath the surface of American politics.
Arab governments have drawn their own conclusions from all of this, and they aren't pretty for Washington. The Carnegie Endowment's December 2025 analysis noted something genuinely surprising: the cascade of recent crises had pushed Arab states toward a level of diplomatic coordination that hadn't existed in years. Wars and disasters that were supposed to divide them had instead forced a kind of practical cooperation. Saudi Arabia is simultaneously engaging China, Russia, Iran, the US, and its Gulf neighbors, advancing Vision 2030, holding firm on OPEC-plus production strategy, and doing all of it without asking Washington's permission first. That's new. It's what multi-alignment looks like in practice, and it's spreading fast across the developing world.
None of this means America's done. It's worth saying clearly, because the argument can slide easily into hyperbole. The dollar still dominates global finance, the Federal Reserve's own data show it accounting for roughly 90 percent of all foreign-exchange transactions. The US military remains in a league of its own. American universities, technology companies and research institutions still attract the world's best talent. The alliance network, however strained, encompasses most of the world's wealthy democracies. These are real assets, not illusions. But what has eroded, what is genuinely in trouble, is something harder to quantify: the unipolar premium. That was the ability to write the rules, punish violators through financial exclusion, and claim to speak for the whole international community on questions of law and norms. That premium depended on there being no credible alternative. There now is, and it's growing.
Historian Alfred McCoy predicted back in 2010 that American hegemony could begin its decisive unraveling around 2025. Most people dismissed it. It's harder to dismiss now. The domestic political dysfunction, the debt trajectory, US government debt was projected by the Atlantic Council to hit 118 percent of GDP by 2035, the credibility gap from Iraq that Gaza has ripped wide open again, the failure to build a genuinely inclusive international order that brought China and Russia inside rather than defining them as adversaries: these aren't random bad luck. They're the accumulated bill for decades of strategic choices. The Carnegie Endowment's January 2026 polling of American public opinion found that most Americans now believe the US is declining in global power and influence. Nearly two thirds said China's power either equals or exceeds America's. That's a remarkable self-assessment from the citizens of a country that still outspends the next nine military powers combined.
The world taking shape is not one where China simply slides into the American slot at the top. It's messier, more chaotic and in some ways more dangerous than that. Multiple powers competing and cooperating simultaneously, regional players exercising real autonomy, old institutions struggling to stay relevant, that's what genuine multipolarity looks like. BRICS is not NATO. It holds within it serious contradictions: India and China eye each other warily across contested borders, democratic Brazil has uncomfortably little in common with authoritarian Russia, the Gulf's oil wealth creates different priorities from Africa's development needs. But the thing that binds them, and the 40-plus countries queuing up outside the door, is a shared frustration with rules they had no hand in writing and institutions that still don't reflect how the world's weight has shifted.
The real question isn't whether the world is becoming multipolar. It already is. The question is whether the United States can adapt fast enough to operate effectively within a world it no longer dominates. That means genuine multilateralism rather than the performative kind, addressing the credibility deficit that Gaza has carved into American standing, and competing on the actual merits of what it offers rather than relying on financial coercion and military positioning as substitutes for strategy. History isn't encouraging here, dominant powers almost never manage this transition cleanly. The British handed off to America partly because they shared a language, a legal tradition and overlapping strategic interests. Nothing so convenient exists today. The transition will be long, contentious and punctuated by crises in the exact regions, the Middle East, East Asia, Eastern Europe, where the fractures are already deepest. What's already clear is that the world has changed more in the last four years than in the previous twenty, and the pace isn't slowing down.
Sources consulted for this article include: Doublethink Lab China Index 2024; Pew Research Center (April 2025); National Bureau of Statistics of China; World Bank China Economic Update; Brookings Institution; Eurasian Review; Council on Foreign Relations; Foreign Affairs; International Crisis Group; Chatham House; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Arab Center Washington DC; Arab Opinion Index 2024–25, Doha Institute; US Federal Reserve (2025); Atlantic Council; Carnegie Endowment (January 2026).
This article is produced for informational and analytical purposes only. The views expressed represent an editorial synthesis of publicly available research, data, and reports from cited international institutions and think tanks. World At Net does not advocate for any particular government, political party, or geopolitical bloc. All statistical data and event descriptions are sourced from credible institutions including the World Bank, IMF, US Federal Reserve, Pew Research Center, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Brookings Institution, Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, International Crisis Group, and others, as cited within the text. Readers are encouraged to consult primary sources independently. World At Net is not responsible for the content of external websites linked within this article. The geopolitical situation described continues to evolve; this article reflects conditions as of June 2026.
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