Despite my sincerest hopes, it is more likely than not that the world’s three major powers – the United States , China and Russia – will fail to cooperate coming out of the current international coronavirus crisis . This is a function of deep mutual distrust and what I call the consolidation of ideological belief within the leaderships of Washington, Beijing and, to a lesser extent, Moscow. Perhaps leaders in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, India or Japan will step in to save the day, but this can only be a partial save in the best case, given the huge disparities in size and capabilities between these secondary powers and the “big three”. Will the US, China and Russia come together for a new world order post-Covid? So what are the worst-case scenarios that may arise if Donald Trump , Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – or their successors – do not come to a meeting of minds by the end of this year? Answer: There are three. They are all bad taken on their own, and horrific in any combination. Let us all pray that we do not get there. The most probable and nearest-term consequence of trilateral discord will be an acceleration and deepening of parasitic regulatory competition between US-led commercial and trading spaces and Chinese-led spaces, with Russia, by far the weakest economic player, tilting ever more intensely towards the Chinese spaces and attempting to exert, with growing ferocity, regulatory control over at least 12 of the 15 post-Soviet states. Regulatory control over a specific territory becomes the equivalent of military victory and territorial acquisition, occupation or annexation in conventional war. If such behaviour was arguably anticipated by the 2014 “regulatory conflict” over Ukraine between the European Union and Russia (or the Eurasian Economic Union more broadly), and exacerbated by the subsequent proliferation of sanctions and counter-sanctions that created regulatory bottlenecks across the world, then the competition that awaits after the coronavirus crisis will be all the more formidable in “de-stitching” the various political-economic geographies of the world. Who will set the economic rules for the Middle East and major parts of Africa? Will the unified regulatory space of Europe dissolve or crack under pressure? And who will regulate the big prize: the 600-million-strong market of Southeast Asia? The outcome will most likely be a hodgepodge of regulatory regimes and “information spaces”, straddling different countries and sectors, making it extremely difficult for countries, companies and people to navigate and negotiate across borders. This is not a recipe for great global growth. The second, possibly medium-term, disaster outcome is that one or more of the great powers would be severely destabilised on the domestic front. (Modern states, I calculate, tend to last about 60 years.) Russia is the leading candidate for such destabilisation, not only because of the absence of clear succession arrangements in Moscow, but also due to the collapse in oil prices and revenues, and the increasing pressure on the country’s fiscal resources to spur an already anaemic economy across a large population and vast territory. Any deep destabilisation of Russia would reverberate well into Europe, the Middle East and all of Asia. Pulling a Xi Jinping? Putin’s power play for modern Russia is not what you think The US is the second leading candidate for domestic destabilisation, leading into and coming out of the November presidential election. Could the US collapse within the next year or two? While this is unlikely, ever-rising radicalisation between the two major political tribes, and between and within blue and red states, could easily lead to a rise in political violence, militia activism and the delegitimisation of central authority and government. Weak public institutions, coupled with rising ideological radicalism, would easily spill over into neighbouring theatres like Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean Basin. A path to Chinese domestic destabilisation is far less predictable, but the pressure on Beijing from domestic destabilisation in major neighbouring states like North Korea would be immense. This brings us to the third disaster scenario: war – whether direct or indirect, deliberate or accidental, conventional or unconventional. This is, by some margin, the least likely scenario in any foreseeable future, but clearly the one with the most catastrophic effects. It is unlikely that the US, China or Russia would consciously target one another in any frontal form, but this should not be ruled out in the event of an existential political threat to any of the leaders. Accidental entanglement in war is far more likely, either in false anticipation of an attack or through a miscalculation of the already tangled nature of the extant conflicts and tensions in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea. Proxy war is more likely than direct war, and growing cyber warfare more likely still. Direct war could be total war, causing near-total destruction. All the more reason for the great powers to get together immediately, regularly, and with the greatest seriousness of purpose. ■ Irvin Studin is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Global Brief Magazine , and President of the Institute for 21st Century Questions (Toronto)