After a week that started with the worst financial volatility in recent history and ended with the most serious escalation so far of the China-US conflict, it is time to distinguish the tectonic shifts from the tremors. If nothing changes, the 2020s risks being remembered as this century’s devil’s decade – the term historians once used for the 1930s. It will be defined not just by seven million people who have died of Covid-19 and rising global poverty and inequality – but also by a dismembered Ukraine, a burnt-out Gaza and little-reported atrocities in Africa and Asia, each testimony to the violent displacement of a rules-based global order by a power-based one.
Indeed, before our eyes, every single pillar of the old order is under assault – not just free trade but the rule of law and the primacy we have long attached to human rights and democracy, the self-determination of peoples, and multilateral cooperation between nations, including the humanitarian and environmental responsibilities we once accepted as citizens of the world.
