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Opinion | Why crumbling West must humble itself to shape the post-pandemic world order
- The wealthy West – and the US in particular – must be able to admit there are equals and peers in power that want to reset the rules of the game
- We need many conversations involving everyone, from the strongest to the weakest, before deciding what the new order should look like
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As tensions over the Taiwan Strait mount, everyone needs to think through whether war is inevitable. Leon Trotsky is credited as saying, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” If we slip into war by what historian Barbara Tuchman called the “march of folly”, can the great powers step back from mutual nuclear annihilation?
When the world’s only superpower suffers more Covid-19 deaths than any other country – more than 730,000 at the last count – and left Afghanistan in defeat, no one should be surprised if people ask whether America, and by extension Western civilisation, is in decline.
Foreign Affairs magazine devoted three issues this year to the topic – “Can America Recover?”, “Decline and Fall” and “Can China Keep Rising?”. Given the steady barrage of invective between the United States and its rivals, it certainly feels like the Cold War has returned with a vengeance.
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However, for Greta Thunberg and other climate activists, surely world leaders’ priority should be to work together to address our looming climate disaster. Why are people fighting over a burning planet? Shouldn’t we call time out and collectively address the urgent, existential issues of human and planetary distress?
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COP26 Glasgow, the UN Climate Change Conference: last chance to save the planet?
COP26 Glasgow, the UN Climate Change Conference: last chance to save the planet?
The World Economic Forum meets in Dubai next month with an agenda to move to a “grand narrative” initiative “to shape the contours of a more prosperous and inclusive future for humanity that is also more respectful of nature”.
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