Nadia Schadlow
Power shifts are never easy. A major one is now underway, not between rival states, but between competing approaches to international order. Call it a clash of two operating systems. One view holds that the most pressing issues of the day can be addressed only through a framework of global and supranational institutions and multilateral rules. The other insists that the nation-state remains the foundation of legitimate authority and effective action, and that outcomes ultimately depend on the decisions, capacities, and accountability of individual states.
For much of the post–Cold War era, what one can call a “global first” approach dominated international thinking. Governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental actors shared the assumption that challenges to do with security, economic disruption, migration, pandemics, and climate change required global solutions. The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization accelerated economic globalization, reinforcing the belief among leaders in the United States and elsewhere that global institutions were best suited to manage complexity and preserve peace. For decades, these institutions (and the governments and the phalanx of nongovernmental organizations that supported them) advanced a common creed: that only global bodies could tackle the defining problems of the age.
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