The chaos of the Iran War has reminded the world why multilateralism matters. From Singapore to Riyadh, the world’s governments are drawing the same conclusion: the absence of a credible multilateral process does not produce stability—it produces arms races and chaos. China has seized the moment, using the War to contrast its declared faith in multilateralism and cooperation with the Global South against Washington’s demonstrated willingness to resort to force. Whether Beijing’s positioning is sincere or merely opportunistic is almost beside the point; the narrative vacuum created by unilateralism will always be filled.
The question, then, is not whether multilateralism should be rebuilt. It must be. It is how to make multilateralism more effective, more credible, and more resilient against the political pressures that have historically unravelled it. This is where emerging technology—specifically, AI and blockchain—enters the picture not as futurism, but as practical infrastructure for a new kind of international governance.
Consider the challenge of real-time monitoring. One of the chronic failures in conflict prevention is the gap between intelligence and collective action. States possess information asymmetries; multilateral bodies move slowly; by the time consensus is reached, escalation has already occurred and windows of opportunity lost. AI-powered conflict monitoring systems, trained on satellite imagery, social media signals, economic indicators, and diplomatic communications, can now detect escalatory patterns faster than any human analytical process. Had such systems been feeding shared, verifiable data fed into a common multilateral dashboard in 2025, the trajectory from the IAEA’s June declaration to Israel’s strike 13 hours later might have looked very different. While speed of information cannot substitute for political will—but can minimize uncertainty and serve to clarify intentions and actions. Beyond early warning, AI prognostic models can simulate the downstream consequences of military action across economic, humanitarian, and political dimensions—giving decision-makers a clearer picture of second and third-order effects before the first missile is launched.
Blockchain technology addresses a different but equally critical failure: the trust deficit that makes multilateral agreements fragile. Smart contracts deployed on a distributed ledger can encode compliance obligations in ways that are transparent, tamper-resistant, automatically verifiable, and less prone to resistance. A next-generation non-proliferation framework built on blockchain infrastructure would not require parties to trust each other—only to trust the protocol. Inspection data, enrichment levels, and compliance milestones would be recorded in real time on an immutable chain, visible to all signatories simultaneously. The JCPOA collapsed in part because one party could exit unilaterally and privately, with no automatic mechanism to trigger a multilateral response. A blockchain-anchored treaty makes defection visible the moment it occurs, triggering pre-agreed consequences before escalation becomes irreversible.
The post-conflict dimension is equally urgent. History is unambiguous: reparations and reconstruction that are usually poorly coordinated, politically captured, or opaque, producing grievance rather than stability. Iraq and Libya are cautionary monuments to that failure. Blockchain-based reparations frameworks offer a compelling alternative. Aid disbursements recorded on a distributed ledger are auditable by recipient communities, donor nations, and independent monitors simultaneously. Smart contracts can condition tranches of reconstruction funding on verifiable benchmarks—civilian infrastructure restored, civil society institutions stood up, and transitional justice processes initiated. AI tools can model the distributional impacts of different reconstruction strategies in real time, flagging approaches likely to entrench elite capture or regional inequality before funds are committed. Crucially, these systems can also surface the voices of affected civilian populations—aggregating needs assessments, grievance data, and community feedback, and potential responses at a scale no traditional aid architecture can match. This is not techno-utopianism; these capabilities exist today. What lacks is the political architecture and will to deploy them multilaterally.
The Iran War has demonstrated, with painful clarity, what the world looks like when international institutions are bypassed, diplomatic processes abandoned, and force is substituted for law. Whatever one’s view on the optimal path to reform, it must be multilateral and take seriously the security concerns of all states, rather than only the small handful with extraordinary wealth, power, and military might. AI and blockchain will not generate that political will on their own. But they can build the infrastructure upon which a more honest, more transparent, and more durable multilateralism can be constructed—one where compliance is verifiable, escalation is visible, and the costs of unilateralism are harder to conceal. The technology is ready. The only question is whether the political will to use it will arrive before the next war.
- Daniel Wagner is managing director of Multilateral Accountability Associates and co-author of “The New Multilateralism”.
