Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images
May 03, 2020
The World Order Is Dead. Here’s How to Build a New One for a Post-Coronavirus Era.
International orders seldom change in noticeable ways. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, the Pax Romana was not a passing phase: it persisted for centuries. The order that arose from the 1815 Congress of Vienna didn’t fully unravel until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
But at rare moments, confidence in the old order collapses and humanity is left with a vacuum. It is during these times that new orders are born—that new norms, treaties and institutions arise to define how countries interact with each other and how individuals interact with the world.
As the most far-reaching global disruption since World War II, the coronavirus pandemic is such a moment. The post-1945 world order has ceased to function. Under a healthy order, we would expect at least good faith attempts at international coordination to confront a virus that knows no borders. Yet the United Nations has gone missing, the World Health Organization has become a political football and borders have closed not only between countries but even within the European Union. Habits of cooperation that took decades to entrench are dissolving.
Read the full article in POLITICO Magazine.
More from CNAS
-
Sharper: The State of AI
Commentary
The U.S. government's recent chip export controls are the latest salvo in the U.S.–China rivalry in artificial intelligence. Semiconductors are a key input for AI systems and ...
By Anna Pederson
-
Sand in the silicon: Designing an outbound investment controls mechanism
Commentary
Recent congressional efforts to establish new authorities to regulate outbound investment have revived a long-simmering debate in Washington about the economic and security ri...
By Emily Kilcrease & Sarah Bauerle Danzman
-
The Cost of Economic War
Podcast
Sanctions, not bombs, have been the weapon chosen to take on the Putin regime. BBC speaks with macroeconomist Rachel Ziemba about the effectiveness of modern economic statecra...
By Rachel Ziemba
-
Containing Crisis
Reports
As the United States and China seek to manage an increasingly tense relationship, both sides have turned to coercive economic statecraft as a core part of their broader foreig...
By Emily Kilcrease, Emily Jin & Rachel Ziemba
