State of the world: many not-so-beautiful games The FIFA World Cup ended on 19 July with an apotheosis of the Spanish national team and a resounding boo for US President Trump. Whether one agrees or not with the appropriateness of these facts, there is a broader sense of a world caught up in an endless…
The international community has become preoccupied with reforming its institutions. We debate the future of the United Nations Security Council, the composition of the G20, the legitimacy of international financial institutions and the emergence of a more multipolar world. These are important conversations, but they all risk overlooking a more fundamental problem. The world is…
The process is underway to choose the new UN Secretary-General. Candidates have been declared and hearings held. With Security Council deliberations pending, the situation is revealing of the condition of the international system, and the distance between what that system claims to be and what it has become. Today, the questions about who is best…
The debate over China’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI) arrives at a moment when questions surrounding global governance are becoming increasingly difficult to avoid. Institutions established in the aftermath of the Second World War are confronting pressures they were never designed to manage: shifting economic power, technological disruption, climate change, geopolitical fragmentation and growing dissatisfaction with…
In my long (40 years), undistinguished career in marketing communications and journalism, I have had a chance to work with some very good and some not very good bosses. However, there was one in particular, who had common sense without being too common. He taught me a valuable lesson. In describing success, he said, “There…
There is an increasing sense that the war in the Middle East is revealing more than a crisis in the regional order. The latest escalation, where the United States and Israel attacked Iran, which in turn attacked the Gulf states, is being considered not only for the various and immediate consequences. It is also illustrative…
The international system appears to be entering a period of profound uncertainty. Geopolitical rivalry is intensifying, confidence in global institutions is weakening and rules that once appeared relatively settled are now being questioned with increasing frequency. In such an environment, the conversation about the role of so-called “middle powers” becomes more important than it might…
The international system today does not appear to be collapsing in any dramatic or spectacular sense. Institutions still exist. Forums continue to convene. Rules remain written down. Yet there is a growing sense that something more subtle, and perhaps more consequential, is underway. The political consensus that once gave multilateral cooperation its coherence is thinning….
The United States’ military operation against Venezuela in early January has been widely reported as a dramatic episode: air strikes on strategic sites, the forced removal of President Nicolás Maduro and the most direct US intervention in Latin America in decades. But to treat the event as merely another regional crisis is to fundamentally misunderstand…
Iran is in flames, with thousands of people protesting on the streets of cities around the country. Ostensibly, it is the drastic devaluation of Iran’s currency (the rial has fallen to a historic low of more than 1 million rials to 1 USD) and high inflation that set off the protests on 28 December 2025,…