The World at a Crossroads: Managing a Change of Eras in an Age of Belligerent Uncertainty

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Abstract

The narrative offers an original conceptual framework and observations to help make sense of the current predicament in which the world finds itself. A once-in-a-lifetime change of eras is unfolding amid a return of war as a tool of choice, or of Belligerent Uncertainty—a concept introduced in the narrative—with existential challenges at the world’s doorstep, Artificial Intelligence increasingly permeating daily life, as the multilateral mindset recedes into irrelevance. The change of eras is ‘unwrapped’ into its constituent elements, with innovative views of recent history and international events. Among these are the mega forces at play, such as the current state of the liberal economic order; geopolitical rivalries among the three most powerful states and their effect on the rest of the world; and a realignment of countries along ethnic and civilizational lines with the disappearance of the ideological divide of the bipolar era. These and other elements point to a coming paradigm shift. The role of the unsuccessful first stage of the post-Soviet transition is analyzed, pointing to the West’s over two-hundred-year conundrum of dealing with Russia in its various iterations. In an innovative approach, this relationship is broken down into three stages spanning the time from the early eighteenth century to today. A sobering conclusion points out that while the current situation is not yet a world war, it is certainly a world at war. The narrative closes with an emphasis on the need to resuscitate diplomacy as humankind’s most effective tool and offers practical directions in which the international community needs to proceed.

1. Time of Belligerent Uncertainty

We have just entered the second quarter of the XXI century, yet our instincts and behavior seem almost as primitive as they were at the dawn of civilization. If you want something, take a bigger stick than your neighbor’s and use it. The ‘sticks,’ in the meantime, have become increasingly sophisticated and lethal.

I have coined a phrase for this state of the world: Belligerent Uncertainty.

• It is belligerent, because the threat and use of force at every level have again become the tools of choice, despite the admonishments of the UN Charter and of the reams of international law that humanity has accumulated in over a century and a half.
• It is fraught with uncertainty, because those wielding this tool with such abandon across the globe have no idea where their belligerence may lead.

The return of war as the ‘tool of choice’ has almost entirely sidelined the multilateral diplomacy mechanisms set up over 80 years ago in favor of ‘multipolarity’ or, at best, of ‘multilateralism in groups’. This sad reality is starkly reflected in the dysfunction of the UN Security Council. Yet, multipolarity without strong, accepted and properly used multilateral instruments is inherently unstable, volatile, and dangerous, and the multilateralism of ‘like-minded groups’ is at best a placebo for particular situations and cannot take the place of universal multilateralism.

To further complicate this, we no longer live in a bipolar or unipolar world; and not yet in a multipolar one, but, rather, in an unsettled world with multiple actors of varied caliber with clashing interests and often isolationist politics of fear and resentment.

When the world was rocked on its axis by COVID-19 in 2020, on top of all the other acute global problems that it was facing, many thought it a ‘perfect storm’ situation. Little did the world realize then that it was one dangerous element short of a ‘perfect storm’ and that element was a major war in the heart of the European continent.

Russia’s war in Ukraine brought to a critical point most of the geopolitical problems that were festering and rising to the surface in the first stage of the post-Soviet transition, which clearly ended in a major ‘train-wreck’ over four years ago.

That vicious, brutal war in Ukraine has been almost overshadowed by the heretofore simmering Iranian flashpoint exploding into a full-scale war that has engulfed the entire Middle East, adding significantly to one’s sense of Belligerent Uncertainty. With the addition of these major wars to the savage conflicts in nearby regions and further afield, the world is truly in a ‘perfect storm.’

The world is feeling the initial ramifications of the war in the Persian Gulf acutely and bracing for more. The conflict not only threatens the economic wellbeing of most of the world but is poised to become the trigger of World War III, which some observers consider having already begun. Both are ‘wars of choice’ prosecuted by permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, who on paper bear special responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security.

The danger of Belligerent Uncertainty, as compared to the average periods of strategic instability, geopolitical fragmentation, etc., is in the fact that it is happening in a world where:

• Most existing, proven security guardrails are being dismantled.
• International Law in all its aspects is sidelined.
• Arms Control and Disarmament are no longer considered relevant and are cast aside.
• The multilateral state of mind is replaced worldwide by ‘national egoism.’

As a result, humanity finds itself facing increasingly complex, interlocking, truly existential challenges, in a situation of a near-total breakdown in the multilateral thinking and action among the leading nations of the world, particularly those controlling the UN Security Council.

2. A Change of Eras

To say that the world is in transition would be a naïve simplification. What we are living today is not a routine change of landscape. Rather, it is a pivotal moment, a change of eras, which occurs only every century or so, with the emergence of a new social and economic paradigm.

In historic terms, its beginning can be traced to the end of the Cold War. The end of an ideological standoff, however, even the disappearance of a major empire does not in itself make a change of eras. The international community’s inertia notwithstanding, this slow-motion transition has been acquiring the features of a change of eras for over three decades, and it has yet to run its course.

There are mega factors at play in this process:

• Highlighted back in 1996, the Clash of Civilizations continues to unfold, underlying and magnifying today’s geostrategic and economic rivalries. This clash became evident to many in the wake of the end of the Cold War. The bipolar organization of the world had logic and discipline to it based primarily on ideological affiliation. The discipline of the ideological organizing element disappeared with the standoff, leaving most of the constituents on both sides to search for and adhere to different organizing principles. The most obvious, DNA-engrained, ostensibly safest in an unsettled world, and most facile was to flock to ‘your own kind.’ The downside of this mindset is that it plays to and strengthens the vilification of ‘them’, usually communities of a different cultural, racial, religious makeup. This is one of the drivers of today’s proliferating, often irrational conflicts.
• Geostrategic and economic rivalries have precedents in history, whenever a dominant power or powers are challenged by one, or a group of emerging powers. It is a fact of history and of geopolitics that there will never be a shortage of those who will come to challenge an existing order, to upend it. Together with the civilizational clash, this defines and drives geopolitical tensions. For the past almost decade and a half, the advent of a strong rising power in the East, a new global player that is seen by many as the leader of the next world order, of Pax Sinica–ambitions that power itself denies—was considered as the main challenge to the existing world order, the postwar so-called ‘liberal world order’. This perceived challenge was supported by a revisionist Russia, and several other smaller players such as North Korea, Iran, and others, loosely coalescing at different times and in various capacities around such organizations as the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Union.
• A game-changing new factor has recently appeared quite unexpectedly, one could even argue, counter-intuitively: the dominant power which the world had expected to be challenged for its position, indeed, the creator and until now the main guardian of the existing ‘liberal world order,’ which it did so much to establish in the wake of the Second World War, is currently seen as renouncing its own creation and undermining and discarding the main principles that are the bedrock of this system, most importantly, its alliances that have stood the test of time.
• It must be noted that this system itself, which had created unprecedented economic prosperity in the first three postwar decades, is increasingly hard-pressed to keep delivering at the expected level. The 2008-2009 financial crisis of planetary proportions—the twenty-first-century rough equivalent of the 1929 crash—dealt a severe blow to this order, crystallizing disillusionment with the system that no longer seemed to provide as promised for the population that had benefitted from it in the postwar years. This is certainly the case in the United States of America and largely in the European and Far Eastern constituent parts of this system. It also dealt a fatal blow to Globalization.
• Enter Artificial Intelligence into this potent mix! AI is inexorably becoming a defining factor in the change of eras we are witnessing. Some see it as a panacea for many of society’s ills, and for good reasons, while others focus on its ‘dark side.’ Clearly, AI is a phenomenon that needs to be not only factored in but managed and regulated by Human Intelligence (HI), which is the one that has created and is perfecting it. In doing so, another acronym needs to be kept in mind: HN – Human Nature, which is at the core of many of humanity’s problems. It will also seriously complicate the current change of eras.

Paradigm shifts happen at crucial moments in history, mainly as a result of two types of developments: a military conflagration (which the world should do all it can to avoid, because it may be the last cataclysm it creates); or a tectonic technological shift, akin to the invention of the printing press, or the introduction of gunpowder and firearms, or of the internal combustion engine, or of oil becoming the fuel for war and peace. This coming paradigm shift encompassing economic, technological and social global trends, and that has AI stamped all over it, is moving towards us—according to some observers—as the key component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Together, all the above have created a world of great danger, even by the standards of the classic Cold War. It is not yet a world war, but certainly, it is very much a world at war. What is a world war? Is there a particular protocol for how it starts? There are many definitions and all of them refer to the same element: the armed forces of many countries involved in hostilities in different parts of the world. By this definition, we are already in a world war. The element that is mercifully missing from our current predicament, and which prevents us from stating that we are already in a full-fledged world war, is the absence—for now—of direct hostilities among the major powers.

Therein lies the narrowing window of opportunity for seasoned, determined and creative diplomacy, based on stable judgment and statesman-like approaches to international affairs, something that in today’s reality seems to be a rare commodity indeed. Diplomacy, both bilateral and multilateral, is sidelined and major efforts are required to refocus on it. Yet it is the only tool that can and should put an end to all the devastating wars and bring about stable and sustainable peace.

3. Failed Post-Soviet Transition: Learning from the Past

Beyond the horrific individual conflicts, the dysfunction of the current arrangement makes the overall problem steadily worse and existentially dangerous. The world needs to think through the current situation, to review the existing security arrangements and structures, and ask if they are adequate to the task, or critically flawed in some way?

Absent a robust strategic debate on the directions in which the current paradigm shift should evolve or be steered—i.e., a ‘day after’ review of the several current hot wars—some workable options need to be developed on balanced, sustainable security arrangements that could be acceptable to all. To do so, we need to study carefully and in an impartial manner what exactly went wrong in the past few decades. Of the many compelling reasons to do so, one stands out prominently: we might well be poised to make the same mistake again.

With the crumbling of the bipolar world, U.S. President George H. W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on 9/11/1990, ushered in the vision of a New World Order built on the principles of justice and fairness, with freedom, human rights and common good for all peoples of the world. Our world has professed to be on the road to that new world order since the early 1990s. But to date it never quite arrived anywhere—mostly, because it did not know where the final stop was and which direction it was supposed to move in. In fact, it still does not. Moreover, the international community did not really believe it had compelling reasons to work seriously on achieving this lofty goal: old habits were too ingrained, old enmities too scary to let go of and old rivalries too comfortable a zone to dismantle.

That initial, belabored trajectory towards a New World Order came to an abrupt and tragic crash in exactly eleven years to the day of President George H.W. Bush’s 1990 speech, on 9/11/2001, the somber twenty-fifth anniversary of which the world is marking this year. Looking back twenty-five years, it seems so clear that the new century and the new millennium really began on September 11, 2001. As the then-United Nations Secretary-General, the late Kofi Annan, expressed so vividly in his Nobel Lecture: “We have entered the new millennium through a gate of fire.”

The key relationship throughout that time, and to date, was that between the United States and the Russian Federation–between the owners of the two by far largest nuclear stockpiles in the world.  That fact is underscored by, among other things, the palpable concern across the world with the recent expiration of the last major nuclear weapons reductions treaty—the New Start—and the absence of intention on either side to start negotiations on a successor. Concerns are only slightly assuaged by the expressed consent of both sides to abide by the expired treaty’s provisions for at least one year.

When the bipolar world collapsed, what collapsed with it was the Yalta compact and the ‘spheres of influence’ that Yalta had created. The predominant notion after 1990 was that there was now only one sphere of influence, the other having crumbled and dissipated. This notion received its ‘theoretical validation’ by the misinformed and misleading, but catchy, slogan of “the end of history.” Consequently, no policies were devised and implemented to take the place of the Yalta compact.

Russia was down for the count but had nevertheless fomented and supported vicious, bloody secessionist armed conflicts in several former Soviet republics, as a way of keeping them from ‘straying too far’ while Russia recuperated its strength. Professing to feel a lack of respect from the West, the Russians did not help matters, being seen as not respecting themselves as they succumbed to a ‘feeding frenzy’ on the carcass of the defunct empire. The all-consuming obsession of the Clinton administration to keep Boris Yeltsin on life support, politically and physically in the face of a perceived danger of a Communist victory in the 1996 election, led it to overlook all other political forces, most notably, a sliver of disgruntled powerful political actors, who evolved into the group in charge in the Kremlin today.

Importantly, the only remaining superpower, flush with its new-found status, saw no compelling reason to share its unique power position with anyone else, which is what it would have had to do to forge a balanced new sustainable international way of doing things. It could have entertained the creation of a truly multilateral way of managing problems through the existing machinery, i.e. the United Nations, as the most universal of these, or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which comprises a huge chunk of Eurasia and North America. There was a moment when the international community felt that the United Nations could be made to work. However, it was not allowed to work; nor was the other mechanism that was idling on the side of the road—the OSCE. On the contrary, the United Nations was disempowered in the 1990s, the most visible aspect being the denial of a second term to then-UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali who had dared think that after decades of bipolar stalemate, the UN’s moment had finally arrived.

As a result, no comprehensive security system was put in place. The Western democracies ‘cherry picked’ select groups from among the remnants of the political East, historically weary of their huge eastern neighbor that had already shown his claws in the early 1990s and hurriedly put them in the existing Western security alliance. That activity soon proved to have had several major flaws: a) The biggest bear on the planet was left to wander outside the newly enlarged stockade, looking for its former area of domination. b) It resented the fact that it was left outside and saw this as a threat. c) The other countries, for example Georgia, that remained outside after the cherry-picking was over, were and continue to be held against a much higher admission performance standard, than those that were cherry-picked twenty or so years ago. d) Worse still, they were left outside the stockade, conveying the clear—if unintended—impression that they were fair game and no one would stand up for them. This was proven in 2008 in Georgia, and again in 2014 and 2022 in Ukraine.

Western politicians think fondly of the early 2000s when they felt they had a sense of security. Well, as is plainly evident now, that was a false sense of security. The war in Ukraine did not happen only because of one man at the head of one country. The end of the bipolar world is merely a catchphrase. 1989-1991 was in fact not just the end of something, but the beginning, the first step in the transition. It took over thirty years of wandering in the ‘wilderness’, without knowing where to go and how to get there, to arrive at the proverbial ‘train wreck’ in February 2022. The overriding geostrategic conundrum for the West in the second stage of the post-Soviet transition is clearly how to go about it, how to structure and manage it.

Dealing with Russia in its different incarnations has been an overriding geopolitical concern for the collective West and the continuation of a phenomenon that has been a key, if not central element of geopolitics for roughly the last two and a half centuries. The central player in that phenomenon is Russia in its different incarnations and the main conundrum for the collective West continues to be how to manage relations with it. At the 1994 Annual Dinner of the Economic Club of New York, the main speaker, Henry Kissinger, made a simple enough, but farsighted observation for early 1994, given that the West was still on a honeymoon with Boris Yeltsin, who had emerged from the ruins of the USSR that he himself had helped bring down, as president of the new Russian Federation. Kissinger noted that Russia presented a problem for the West not because of its ideology, or its various regimes, or leaders; it was a problem for the West because of its size and its location.

I have identified three distinct historical periods of the West’s efforts to manage Russia in all its mutations. Each period represents a ‘Great Game’ in its own right, as they have similar basic traits, one of them being the ‘zero-sum’ mentality.

To be sure, the original Great Game, ‘played’ between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, around the crown jewel of the British Empire—India—lasted from the early 19th century right up to the Bolshevik revolution and the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. Its seeds were planted even earlier, under Peter the Great when Russia became an empire and began its relentless expansion. Dreams of India’s riches and the wish to access them through the Caucasus and what today is Central Asia, were the driving forces of Russia’s efforts in these geographic regions. The geopolitical maneuvering and shifting alliances among the great powers of the day—Britain, France, Russia, Ottoman Turkey and Persia—as well as their interaction with the local khanates and potentates of various shape, size and viciousness, makes for spellbinding reading and research. Throughout, the Colonial Office in London and the East India Company in Calcutta used all their political, economic, military and diplomatic power to thwart the Russian advances. This was their first encounter with the emerging Russian Empire, and it required both managing it and finding a modus vivendi.

In the end, the British political system of parliamentary democracy, its industrial might born of its leading role in the industrial revolution of the 18th century, the quality of its colonially sourced industrial production and exports, naval supremacy and generally advanced military forces proved superior to the Russian Tsar’s autocratic political system, its ill-equipped, albeit large army, its inferior tactical training and outdated weaponry. World War I and the Russian revolutions of 1917 dealt a mortal blow to the Russian Empire. The result of part one of the Great Game: 1-nothing for Britain.

The second iteration of the Great Game unfolded from 1918 through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Around the time of World War II, the British Empire was obliged to hand the baton over to the United States of America as Pax Britannica ceded its place and role to Pax Americana, while retaining an important support role, despite the increasing loss of Empire. The Russian Empire had by then mutated first into Bolshevik Russia—which won a bloody civil war and beat back significant outside intervention within the first three years of its existence—and as of 1922 into the Soviet Union. Here, too, there would be periods when the Soviet Union was seen to be invincible and ‘on a roll’—the beeping of Sputnik and the voice of Gagarin from space being two vivid examples—and there were periods, particularly following the invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, and the Chernobyl accident in 1986, when the USSR’s decline accelerated. Many of the political, economic and military tools and weapons systems that exist in the West today were developed in this period with the stated purpose of managing the Soviet Union, whether through containment, roll-back, détente, etc.

A good case can be made that the decline of the Soviet Union began with Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the XX communist party congress in 1956. Why? Because the USSR was a creation of Stalin’s and as the ultimate political apothecary, he personally collected all the components and calculated their precise role and weight in the complicated structure. The most sinister and key component was fear for one’s life as an incentive to work hard and selflessly. When that element was eliminated with Stalin’s death, a succession of his heirs, despite strenuous effort and lots of fiddling with the system, never managed to substitute the element of fear and its role with any other, less terrifying incentive, moral, financial, or otherwise. However, the system that Stalin had built was so solid, that it took generations of feckless leaders and forty years of tinkering with the structure to finally have it collapse under the well-intentioned, but inconsistent policies of Gorbachev, the self-serving political opportunism of Boris Yeltsin and the principled, firm positions of Prime Minister Thatcher and Presidents Reagan and Bush. Unlike 1917, however, the collapse of the USSR happened without a major war, or bloody revolution in Russia. The bloodletting around the former Soviet Union would soon follow, though. Yet again, the democratic order of government and a market economy prevailed over the command economy and political authoritarianism. The score at the end of stage 2 of the ‘zero-sum’ Great Game, 2-nil for the West.

Today, we are clearly in the third stage of the Great Game. This stage started in January 1992 with the advent of the ‘new’ Russian Federation and continues to this day. The lead Western role in this third stage is firmly retained by the United States, with the UK and NATO a close second. The unfolding of this third stage is the crux of world politics today and its outcome is the great unknown.

After a brief flirtation with ‘democracy’ and severe indigestion from its ‘spinach treatment’ during the early 1990s by the Clinton Administration, NATO’s out-of-area military activity, particularly in the Balkans, and a growing self-impression of being the full and only successor to the USSR, the Russian Federation increasingly moved to the ‘dark side,’ to use a Star Wars metaphor. It succumbed to Soviet-style spoiler psychology, instead of seeing the benefits of continuing with its growing role in that rules-based international order, to which it had been invited and which it had deeply infiltrated with its energy supplies, its financial capital and human assets.

It could be argued that Russia ‘jumped the gun’—no pun intended. Had it found a proper niche for itself in that international world order, and persevered for another, say, five years in its lucrative role of the ‘gas station’ to a Europe that had all but disarmed itself—and to most of the world—it would have probably made it next to impossible to ‘expunge’ from the lifeblood of the West its energy supplies, its finances and the hundreds of its more affluent citizenry that had permeated every nook and cranny in most Western countries.

In a marked change from the previous two iterations of the Great Game, the current political apothecary in the Kremlin has learned and applied the lessons from the disasters that befell Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, and President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Nicholas II sent Lenin into internal exile in eastern Siberia, then to Switzerland, and then to what is now Finland, where he was free to plan and prepare the October coup. Gorbachev announced his two main policies of Glasnost and Perestroika simultaneously. While Perestroika—a proposed fundamental restructuring of the Soviet economy—kept ‘spinning its wheels,’ Glasnost—the freedom to speak openly—took off like a prairie fire, creating a situation where 290 million people spoke their mind on an empty stomach. The current system in Russia is ‘airtight’ compared to the previous two historical periods. This, in and of itself, however, is no panacea in our age of instant communication and social media.

Russia is not to be underestimated, however, even when it seems to be down and out, much less, mirror-imaged by Western analysts who use their own yardsticks to measure a huge, intractable, incomprehensible landmass of a country, with its own dynamic, its own resilience standards, its own, if warped, sense of identity and a thoroughly troubled past and equally unclear future. The complex composite that is today’s Russia can withstand a lot more hardship than the West can imagine, and turn around and do something unpredictable, when least expected. That was the case after the fall of the Russian Empire, the dissolution of the USSR, as well as at such moments in history as the defeat in the Crimean War of 1856 in the face of the Anglo-French-Ottoman coalition, after which they went on a geopolitical march, not least the Russo-Turkish wars of the 1870s.

4. America, China, Russia: A Troubled Triangle’s Effect on the Rest of the World

Much to the detriment of the overall world situation, the crucial relationship among the three most powerful states—the America-China-Russia triangle—has rarely been this dysfunctional, marked by a sharp decline in bilateral diplomacy, and growing posturing due to an absence of balanced, constructive, mutually acceptable and proactive policies towards each other. To complicate matters further, all three leading powers are facing various forms of transition of their own.

Dysfunctional relationships ‘at the top’ have a negative effect on the rest of the world. In the absence of responsible behavior on the part of the ‘big boys’, and of ‘adult supervision’ as it were on their part, we are seeing increasingly militaristic rhetoric and activities around the world, growth in nationalist, egoistic and isolationist politics of fear and resentment, and the burgeoning role of technology and the private sector—including social media—in international relations. This new-found ‘national egoism’ has eclipsed the multilateral state of mind and taken precedence over international law and human, civilized cohabitation. The result is unprecedented geopolitical fragmentation.

In the space of some thirty-five years, America’s relationship with Russia has gone from paternalistic condescension of the early 1990s, to a forceful economic, political and military, but measured response to naked aggression in the heart of Europe, and then to today’s on-again, off-again diplomatic efforts to play a role in ending the war in Ukraine and finding some common ground aimed at obtaining mutual economic benefit.

The prevailing idea guiding government policy in the United States today, however, is that despite its nuclear arsenal and its ongoing aggression in Ukraine, Russia is supplanted currently in its role of America’s main antagonist by the People’s Republic of China.

China’s move to an active, internationalist role under President Xi Jinping, first and foremost in its own region but also increasingly on the world stage, is a departure from the political stance of the Deng Xiaoping era, that of a giant developing nation that is looking inward and ensuring its own economic and social development. China has come of age, developed a robust economy and is developing a powerful military and an active international political and economic presence, so it is and will increasingly be a major player in the world along with the United States.

China has always acted prudently and played the ‘long game’, but especially now, with the example of Russia’s strategic blunder, it is not about to put itself in a position like the one in which Russia now finds itself. The Chinese learn from the mistakes of others and from their own. In this sense, they are carefully watching America’s actions regarding Iran.

There is one particularly important difference between Russia and China vis-à-vis America: Russia has never had any significant economic relations with the United States to speak of, hence, not much to lose, while China is a major trading partner of the United States—despite all the ‘decoupling’ efforts—and both countries have a great deal to lose.

Without going into the details of how and why each of them arrived at an understanding that they needed to be ‘friends against somebody’—a friendship of convenience, to be sure—it is clear that both Russia and China see the international rules-based order and its creator as precisely that ‘somebody’ they need to be ‘friends against’. This mindset underlies attempts to construct an alternative world order, political, as well as economic, most visible in the practical activities of the members of the BRICS group to create a payment system among them that would not be dollar-based. These and other ‘common wisdom’ considerations and analytical outputs of the recent past have been thrown into a tailspin by the unexpected policy redirections of the current US administration.

5. Breaking the Vicious Cycle

We are at an existential crossroads with a multitude of warning signs flashing that a) we really have no idea where our own actions are taking us, b) they are more likely than not heading somewhere really bad, and c) standing silently by or even “doing one’s best” is inadequate to the magnitude of the risk.

There is a pronounced need for policy. Policies, however, should not be built on one’s own propaganda formulations, but on elemental interests. And great powers, especially in the nuclear age, need to have well-thought-out, balanced policies toward each other, not a set of reactions that have little effect, but purport to take the place of policy. There should be no room for the ‘zero-sum’ approach. The ‘other guy’ also needs to have something to show for a relationship.

Multilateralism is key. Multilateralism should be the default mindset and not something the world turns to only after sleepwalking or charging into a catastrophe. There is no room for the latter today, as a catastrophe today could well be final and definitive. The practical incarnations of the multilateralist mindset were invented over 80 years ago and can and should be used and not abused. With all its warts, the United Nations Organization is a tool that can deliver. 

While the most powerful countries are engaged in wars of choice and are pursuing their own interests, real and perceived, the so-called Middle Powers are attempting to step up to take on the responsibility of reapplying the diplomatic toolkit and demonstrating leadership both regionally and on the world stage. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address in Davos was a strong rallying point in this regard. What such a Middle Powers strategy can look like remains to be seen. But it is the task to which the best hearts and minds around the world are applying themselves.

One thing, however, is clear: today, perhaps more than ever, the world is in need of leaders, not mere politicians who are in abundance, but leaders, whose actions would give grounds to call them ‘stateswoman’, or ‘statesman’, leaders who look beyond narrow national interests and to the more integrated and global common good in an era in which technology has permanently linked the local and the global. Such leaders recognize the need for hard choices and courses of action that demand commitment and sacrifice from everyone to achieve a world that is as safe and secure as can be.

As G. Michael Hopf elaborated the aphorism in his recent novel, echoing a similar saying attributed to Herodotus, “Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create bad times. Bad times create strong men.” The world can only hope that the current bad times will create a higher caliber of leaders, women and men of moral and intellectual strength, integrity and empathy, who have the courage to lead on a path that recognizes the technological conditions that now link the local everywhere to the global, making interdependence a reality, not a choice, and one way or another, multilateralism a practical necessity.

The urgent need today is to break the dangerous generational cycles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: World War I gives rise to the League of Nations, only to relapse in twenty years into World War II, the end of which sees the creation of the United Nations with the immediate onset of the Cold War for the next forty years; the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War, the 1990 Paris Charter for a New Europe, the 1990 Madrid Conference on the Middle East, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and some thirty years later we are seeing the current landscape, pockmarked with over fifty savage wars involving dozens of countries.