Existing international instruments are inadequate prevent victimization of poorer countries in the world. They cannot help when the power of wealth and military might is exercised internationally.
Considering violations of international law, the USA overrode an International Court ruling that the mining of a Nicaraguan port by the USA was illegal. Well documented "covert operations" against countries like Angola, Cuba, Cambodia and other developing countries have been conducted with impunity, and interventions in the political regimes of the South have almost become routine. Unrepresentative, corrupt or unpopular rulers are still installed or protected – and then abandoned or replaced when no longer needed by the big powers for their own purposes. The protesters are often subject to coercive economic or political pressures.
For some groups in the USA, the term new world order now triggers a totally negative image of world domination by a secret, manipulative, even evil power. They hold the view that enlightened leaders working towards this end have been unknowingly duped into undertaking initiatives on behalf a tightly knit secret elite group whose gal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers. Detailed scenarios of a dictatorial government of the future are widely circulated on the Internet.
In the acclaimed "new world order" there is, as the Iraq case shows, little obstacle to the deployment of force and economic isolation against those deemed by powerful states or blocs to be terrorist or pariah states.
The underlying factor in all this world of disorder is the sheer power of uncontrolled great wealth in the hands of a few nations, co-existing with absolute poverty elsewhere. These gross inequalities are incompatible with internal peace, political stability, or personal security for any citizen. Internationally there is no democracy.
The fall of the totalitarian system of "real socialism" has left a vacuum that has quickly been filled by the expanding system of increasingly unfettered capitalism characterised by policies that ravage nature and further impoverish many countries of the world. As a consequence, the gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" is widening. The escalation of "terrorism", culminating in the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and of "counter-terrorism" in many parts of the world, are interdependent links in a chain of growing globalisation of violence and of violent globalisation.
Restoring the thrust of the evolution of the international trading system towards greater comprehensiveness, further liberalization, and more consistent application of most-favoured-nation principles will broaden the scope for policy choice in developing countries.