Our international environment today is as chaotic, disorderly and bleak as any of us can remember. The last decade or more has been a far cry from the cooperation and optimism that generally prevailed in the first two decades after the end of the Cold War.
The litany of what has gone wrong is long. We have seen an erosion of respect, especially by the biggest powers, for international law, multilateral institutions and processes. We have witnessed the waging of aggressive war in Ukraine and Iran, the militarization of the South China Sea, paralysis in the U.N. Security Council and a collapse of development assistance funding. The United States has withdrawn from multiple international agencies, and retreated from the World Trade Organization while adopting trade coercion. There has been a failure of response to mass atrocity crimes, assaults on the International Criminal Court and weakness in collective responses to the great existential threats of climate change, pandemics and nuclear war. Nuclear arms control agreements are either dead, dying or on life support, and no solutions have yet emerged for the new risks associated with artificial intelligence.
One driver of all this has clearly been the absence of effective leadership in too many of the countries that really matter. The digital media age has encouraged dumbed-down populism, making courageous or sophisticated policy responses ever more difficult. And there is a troubling amnesia among policymakers and publics about how military aggression so often ends catastrophically, and how peace and prosperity are best ensured by diplomacy and cooperation, finding security with others, not against them.
