Everyone thinks that the United States will not stand still when China is showing off its muscles. China has a misunderstanding of global power. We forget that we live in an era where not only economic and military power, but also cultural and cooperative leadership are more important. I thought China was very classical and conservative. China still thinks that it can use its own domestic market and large population as a last resort without external cooperation. -지대물박(地大物博) All Things in Prolific Abundance -
I thought the world could be divided into China and other countries at a time when China's conflict-based worldview was far more serious. However, the United States was also motivated to use China as an excuse to enter the hegemonic competition and wage more aggressive wars. Originally, the founding ideology of the United States was not actively involved in external wars, but the oath has long been broken. Unfortunately, the world is losing hope because the United States withdrew from the United Nations, which served as a buffer, and the world met this rubble.
- If you think about it, a World War is reserved, would a small citizen like me be happy to live? I had a hard time because of the war in my parents' era. However, bizarre and strange leaders appeared in Korea and the world and wanted to do something bizarre called war. -.
These days, I still remember the past whenever I walk by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building. I regretted for 40 years that I had refused a letter of recommendation from my department assistant to me because I had not studied English to study for the bar exam. I was also a bizarre person. However, I feel sorry for the situation in which the United Nations is becoming increasingly powerless as the United States, a pacifist and money supplier, has left.
The Erosion of the Buffer: A Critical Note on the Collapse of Conflict-Absorbing Institutions in the Age of Multipolar Hegemonic Rivalry
이형춘(Lee Hyeong-chun)
2026년6월
Abstract
This essay analyzes the present crisis of international order as a four-stage chain: China's hegemonic challenge, the United States' reactive hardening under security-dilemma dynamics, the erosion of America's non-interventionist tradition, and the loss of institutional buffers as multilateral bodies are abandoned. Its central claim is that even granting the realist premise that conflict is the default state of international politics, the postwar order's stability rested not on the absence of conflict but on institutional buffers (UN, WTO, IMF) that absorbed conflict to a manageable level. The ongoing 2026 US-Iran war and the U.S. withdrawal from multilateral bodies are presented as evidence that these buffers are rapidly weakening.
I. Introduction: Framing the Problem
The realist tradition in international relations treats anarchy as the default condition of relations among states, with cooperation arising as a secondary product layered atop that default rather than as an end in itself. Yet the eighty years without a great-power total war since the end of the Second World War constitute important empirical evidence of how the variable of cooperation has operated atop the constant of conflict. This essay frames that cooperative mechanism through the concept of an institutional 'buffer,' and traces the simultaneous weakening of those buffers as of 2026.
The chain this essay traces runs as follows. First, China under the Xi Jinping leadership abandoned the 'hide your strength, bide your time' (taoguang yanghui) doctrine and began mobilizing a hegemonic legitimacy narrative rooted in Sinocentric thought. Second, the American response followed the classic pattern of a security dilemma, hardening reactively. Third, that hardening spilled into the Middle East, producing the 2026 US-Iran war and a break from the non-interventionist tradition dating to the American founding. Fourth, in the same period the United States withdrew from a series of UN-affiliated multilateral bodies, contracting the very institutional buffer that had long absorbed international conflict.
II. China's Hegemonic Challenge: The Political Mobilization of Sinocentrism
China's hegemonic challenge can be diagnosed as resting on an overconfidence in 'vast territory, abundant resources' (didao wubo). Reducing this to an essential cultural flaw, however, risks an Orientalist essentialism. A more precise diagnosis is that a latent, constant hierarchical worldview embedded in Sinocentric thought was politically mobilized by the specific agent Xi Jinping. As the Northeast Project (2002-2007) illustrates, attempts to preemptively construct historical legitimacy over border regions were relatively restrained under Hu Jintao, only to resurface under Xi (from 2012) through the Belt and Road Initiative, 'wolf warrior diplomacy,' and the militarization of the South China Sea.
Notably, Xi has borrowed Mao's techniques of statecraft while simultaneously restoring the Confucian tradition and the Sinocentric legitimacy narrative that Mao himself had destroyed during the Cultural Revolution — an asymmetric combination. Slogans such as the 'Chinese Dream' and the 'great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation' are not Maoist in origin but the culmination of a neo-Confucian turn that began under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
III. The Security Dilemma and America's Reactive Hardening
Security dilemma theory holds that one state's defensive measures are read by a rival as offensive intent, producing an arms race that neither side desired. China has interpreted the Obama administration's 'pivot to Asia' as containment, and has likewise reinterpreted the post-2017 Indo-Pacific strategy, the Quad, AUKUS, and semiconductor export controls as containment. Because Xi's hardening (from 2012) preceded the American hardening (from 2017) in chronological terms, the diagnosis that China's behavioral shift was the initial trigger of the security dilemma carries analytical weight.
This diagnosis, however, rests on chronological sequence rather than normative judgment, and remains contestable, since China can counter-argue that the Obama pivot itself constituted prior containment.
IV. The Break from Non-Interventionism: The 2026 US-Iran War
The diplomatic principle of the American founding generation was non-interventionism, rooted in Washington's Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine. This principle had already been bent repeatedly through twentieth-century Wilsonian liberal interventionism and Cold War containment, yet the 2026 episode carries a distinct character: it is not merely historical recurrence but a direct contradiction of the current administration's own 'America First' pledge of non-intervention.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a surprise strike on Iran without a declaration of war, citing support for anti-government protesters and the prevention of nuclear weapons development. The strike killed Supreme Leader Khamenei and much of Iran's senior leadership; the Iranian Red Crescent estimated more than 600 civilian deaths. Iran retaliated by blockading the Strait of Hormuz and striking U.S. bases in the region, and the war spread across West Asia through the Israel-Hezbollah front and statements of position from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Even after an April ceasefire, direct strikes resumed on June 7, prompting assessments that President Trump had 'lost control' of the conflict; a ceasefire agreement was reached on June 19, though the prior collapse of the April truce makes its durability uncertain.
Notably, the roughly 90-day deadline under the War Powers Resolution embroiled the administration's exercise of commander-in-chief authority in constitutional controversy — evidence that the break from non-interventionism is straining not only executive policy choices but the constitutional check mechanism itself.
V. The Loss of the Buffer: Withdrawal from Multilateral Bodies and the Weakening of the UN System
On January 7, 2026, the Trump administration signed a presidential memorandum directing withdrawal from 66 bodies and agreements — 31 UN-affiliated organizations and 35 non-UN international bodies — including the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, UNFPA, the ILO, and the UNFCCC. The White House stated that many of these bodies pursue 'radical agendas' contrary to American sovereignty and economic competitiveness. This stance directly contradicts the United States' position as a permanent Security Council member and the largest financial contributor, bearing 22 percent of the UN regular budget and 26.15 percent of the peacekeeping budget.
Legally, the United States has not withdrawn from the UN itself, and retains its Security Council seat. Yet as the UN Secretary-General's office has noted, the U.S. paid none of its regular budget assessment the previous year, leaving arrears of roughly $1.5 billion — a de facto non-fulfillment of its legal obligations under the UN Charter. Given that the UN's founding purpose in 1945 was precisely to institutionalize collective security and prevent the recurrence of war, this withdrawal and non-payment sit at the exact point where America's rationale of 'restoring sovereignty' collides with the international community's concern over the 'hollowing out of the conflict-absorbing apparatus.'
The central diagnosis of this essay is that the conflict intensification described in Sections III and IV — the US-China security dilemma and the US-Iran war — is occurring in precisely the same period as the weakening of the very institution (the UN system) that should be buffering that conflict. If one accepts the liberal-institutionalist insight that the eighty-year absence of great-power total war reflected not the disappearance of conflict but the presence of a buffer, then the simultaneous weakening of buffers across multiple fronts creates conditions under which conflict can more easily cross a critical threshold.
VI. Conclusion: From a Third-Party Vantage Point
Taking a third-party vantage point that does not unilaterally vindicate any single camp's legitimacy, this essay has redefined the present crisis not as the emergence of conflict but as the simultaneous erosion of the institutional buffers that have long absorbed it. China's mobilization of Sinocentric hegemonic legitimacy, America's reactive hardening under the security dilemma, the break from the non-interventionist tradition, and withdrawal from multilateral institutions should be read not as discrete events but as a single structural chain. The practical implication of this diagnosis is that the task ahead must move beyond apportioning 'blame' to one side or another, toward the question of how the weakening buffer institutions might be rebuilt.
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