There is no longer such thing as the international community,” a prominent African leader recently complained to me, lamenting that this week’s G20 would, like September’s UN general assembly, October’s IMF-World Bank meetings and this month’s Cop27, fail to combat the world’s food, energy, debt, inflation, currency, pollution and poverty crises.
At the very moment the world needs to work together to address global problems that cannot be resolved without global solutions, it is being pulled apart not just by conflicts but also by a rising protectionism. And while it is not difficult to blame poor leadership, an outdated geopolitics is threatening a decade of perma-crises.
Pillars of the post-cold war world order are tumbling down as we leave behind the unipolar, hyper-globalised, neoliberal era. Those who try to build the present in the image of the past are finding themselves wholly ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the future. As Mohamed El- Erian and Michael Spence have written, we need new models for growth, national economic management and global cooperation…..
After the truth-shower 