Those who are disappointed by the inconclusive outcomes of the COP26 climate-change meeting, US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent virtual summit, or efforts to achieve Covid-19 vaccine equity need to wake up about the world we live in. Under current circumstances, global governance is guaranteed to disappoint.
The only way forward is to recognize the connections between planetary public health, climate change, declining public trust and democratic legitimacy, and geopolitical instability. These issues are interlinked. Treating them as separate domains will get us nowhere.
Environmental stresses increase the likelihood that zoonotic diseases will spread to humans and become pandemics. The social, political, and economic stresses introduced by a pandemic then foster attitudes and behaviors that undermine social solidarity, making it harder for governments to secure public buy-in for strong decarbonisation measures.
This description is especially apt for the United States, the country to which so many look for leadership. The crisis of trust has weakened the US both internally and on the world stage, contributing to the deteriorating relations between the West and China. Following the logic of feedback loops, tensions over the pandemic and climate change have contributed to the world’s foremost geopolitical crisis. Yet without US-China engagement and mutual understanding, little substantive progress against either the pandemic or climate change can be made.
Sino-American cooperation could close this gap, given the two countries’ unmatched capital and logistical resources, and also could deal swiftly with the looming sovereign-debt crisis that is likely to strike low-income countries and then the rest of the world in 2022. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of such agreements any time soon.
The first principle – and the most immediate task – is to get all populations vaccinated, so that we can accelerate the shift from a pandemic to a more manageable endemic public-health issue.
The second (and longer-term) principle is to recognize that the US-China rivalry plays a central role in global affairs. Neither that rivalry nor the continuing importance of either countries can be wished away. The most urgent task therefore is to define an agenda and create a mechanism for the two superpowers to consult each other and collaborate on global challenges, even as they continue to compete in other fields.
The US and the Soviet Union exercised such discipline during the Cold War. But learning to do so took decades. Neither climate change nor international security nor effective governance can wait.
The third principle is that the trust and legitimacy crisis in the West needs to be taken more seriously. Western democracies’ increased vulnerability to extremist politics poses a danger not only to those countries but also to global stability and security. Here, the most urgent tasks are to update democratic rules and institutions for the twenty-first century; regulate social media to make those platforms more responsible; rekindle citizenship through new forms of participation; and expand investments to ensure greater equality of treatment and opportunity. Copyright: Project Syndicate 2021
