How to fix the world: the elements of global stability

The world has destabilised to a very large degree, very quickly. It is now riven with conflict and war. Geopolitically, it is splitting ever more sharply into two camps: the old, Western, US-led grouping around the G7, EU and NATO; and the newer “CRINKs” or the Eurasian Axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, broadly backed by other quasi-partners in BRICS or the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation).

American hegemony has been facing this trend for a couple of decades now, since the first offshoots of panic at the “Rise of China” in the mid 2000s. The response has come in stages. First, rebalancing: Obama’s Pivot to Asia. Then, containment: Trump’s trade wars and crackdown on the likes of Huawei, as well as boosting NATO. Finally, competition bordering confrontation: Biden’s post-Covid decoupling and security-heavy approach in the Indo-Pacific.

Throughout this period, the assumption has been that there is a policy “solution” to the authoritarian disruption of the world. A way to contain the problem and then somehow “defeat” it. Enable friends and allies on the front lines in Europe, Middle East and Asia to resist revisionist pressure and wear down the CRINKs until they crack. None of this was ever articulated in an actual strategy, but the vast advantage of the Western Alliance in terms of wealth, technology and military power has so far removed any serious argument for a need to compromise on the status quo. Who would want to back down while they’re nominally ahead?

This is what Thucydides Trap means: the established power would rather go to war to preserve its primacy than accept parity with a rival – for fear of ultimately losing even that. To the wider public in “free and open nations”, especially Western liberal democracies, this has been sold as an uncompromising defence of “liberal values” and the so-called “rules-based international order”. But it is really about preserving the dominant power position in the global system that has made America and the West the richest and most advanced nations on earth. Lose that position, and everything else inevitably comes into question sooner or later.

Any such uncompromising attitude against a rising rival inevitably leads to tensions, or indeed war. Compromise – called appeasement by some, détente by others – usually works no better over the long run, because it turns the possibility of the continued rise of a rival into a certainty if they are not actively challenged.

We have travelled a rather long way down this road by now, over the past decade in particular. Tensions have spilled over into open warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East, while the Western Pacific is a powder keg. Increasingly more observers note that things are coming close to a breaking point, i.e. a general conflagration. The arrival of North Korean troops in Ukraine – and now the suggestion of a matching move by South Korea – is only the latest indication of this domino effect. 

The conclusion is that, despite its lingering ascendancy on paper, the Western Alliance might have lost the window of opportunity to neutralise these threats before they grew too big and inter-connected. Unfortunately, structural changes in the balance of power are not linear and cannot be observed in real time: they work like fuse bombs, with delayed effect. When they start to go off, it might be already too late to take decisive action. The cost of doing so now – through war, which is becoming the last resort – in order to bring the CRINKs in line, is prohibitive.

The time may be coming when we will have to step back from the brink and change the ultimate goal of our policy from the preservation of Western primacy to the restoration of global stability. The two used to be the same; no longer.

But what does that mean? What are the elements that would contribute to “stability” in a post-Western – though not strictly “multipolar” – world? The future is unknown, but what we do know – from the entire history of what today we call international relations – is that any stable world order must include some version of the following, adapted to our times:

First, a new system for managing great power relations. This was the original idea behind the P5, the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Their special right of veto reflected their great power status and role in shaping global affairs via the UN. Now the UN is not just dysfunctional, but discredited; the jury is out on whether it can or even should be “restored” to something approaching its original mission, according to its Charter. 

In any case, as the world has largely reverted to its more natural state of pure power politics and military aggression, it is time to turn again to the only solution that we know has worked in the past as a stabilising device: a version of the “Concert of Powers”, the notion that emerged from the Congress of Vienna in 1815. 

Inevitably, this is a prescription for Realpolitik, which some might say runs against the liberal foundations of the rules-based international order, i.e. against our “values”. Others would counter that this “order” has already crossed into myth, and that holding on to this illusion in the face of the brutal reality of war today is simply irresponsible.

A 21st century version of the Concert of Powers would necessarily have to include, below, a broader and more sophisticated system of consultation mechanisms that would take account of the views and interests of lesser, 2nd and 3rd rank “friends and allies” of the principals – such as the broader membership of the UN Security Council, or the other states in the G20.

The vital precondition for even beginning to build such a new system is a political resolution of current tensions. In other words, the necessary first step would be a general diplomatic settlement of all the major outstanding geopolitical issues between the principal powers of the two “camps”, the G7 and the CRINKs. In scope, it would have to be on the scale of Versailles 1919, and to include a number of separate agreements on the different matters at hand, from Ukraine to the Western Pacific.

A great deal of compromise will have to be accepted, the alternative being – likely – generalised warfare, whether immediate or a gradual slide into chaos across all key regions of the globe. However, compromise would not automatically have to mean a return to “spheres of influence”; adroit negotiations backed by force and political will can, arguably, still find an equitable equilibrium acceptable to all sides. Whether our failed and intellectually-exhausted foreign policy “elites” still have the wisdom to see such a project through, is a different question.

Without doubt, this would be the most difficult diplomatic and political challenge since the days of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years’ War; we should expect it to be so, given that the scale and even nature of our problems are very similar to those that confronted monarchs and diplomatists nearly 300 years ago.

Second, we’ll need a new global security architecture. The legacy UN system has clearly failed, and the US-led Western Alliance – broadly speaking – has also proven unable to deter major state aggression in Europe and the Middle East. This fact should not be in dispute, after Russia has literally invaded Ukraine and Iran has literally attacked Israel. Only China is still holding back over Taiwan, but it’s not clear for how long. It should be obvious to everyone that whatever “international security system” we think we still have in place right now, it is not working. 

A new security system is therefore needed, and of course it will have to be conceived and negotiated in relation to the new Concert System described at Point One above. It would build upon existing security mechanisms – like NATO or AUKUS on our side, or the CSTO, SCO and others on the Eurasian Axis side – but seek to both connect and deconflict them. 

The “connecting” aspect would, for the first time, impose a holistic, truly global-level view on the shape of this new security architecture. It would take into account the reality, already recognised in Western doctrine, that the Atlantic and the Pacific now form a single security continuum, the “Atlantic-Pacific”, as Britain’s top-level strategic documents call it. The current legacy post-1945 international system is not structured on this holistic principle. The very emergence of frameworks like the Quad or AUKUS are a symptom that such ad-hoc patches are needed to fix an outdated settlement. But stability can only come from a re-founding of the global architecture in a new “1945 moment”, with the participation of all key actors, rather than by applying one-sided band-aids.

The “deconfliction” of the existing defence and security structures of the two sides will have to be achieved by negotiating arms limitations, demilitarised zones, and verification and transparency mechanisms – in other words, arms and technology control agreements. Again, today this would represent an unprecedented challenge given the very long range, high speed weapons now in existence – such as hypersonics – and new technologies like AI which are inherently hard to control but can create enormous strategic advantage. The other challenge is in terms of scale, as new arms control agreements would have to be at least on the level of ambition of the1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), but replicated in Asia with China as well.

Of all the challenges to restoring global stability, the extreme difficulty of achieving robust arms control in the 21st century is the most worrying and hard to surmount. As vicious and violent as the political struggle between the West and the authoritarian revisionists is, political matters can ultimately – theoretically – be solved by negotiation; history abounds with such examples.

But the one element that is unique in our age is the spread of new technologies, from AI to quantum and to biotech, and the way they are proliferating across the world. These all have profound defence and security implications, but are near impossible to control via international agreements. Throughout history, negotiated settlements of disputes and conflicts have worked (where they have) because the factors underpinning national power – the key element in the system – were amenable to some form of negotiated limitation, or at least they were measurable to some degree. Today, that is very difficult – but, we must hope, not impossible.

Third, we’ll need a new arrangement for global trade and economic relations. The free trade system, that created so much wealth – and, indeed, fuelled even China’s rise – is in free fall. The WTO lies in tatters. With the return of great power competition, economic relations have increasingly become subordinated to security concerns, while Covid illustrated the vulnerability of global supply chains. 

The entire system is defaulting to the instinctive, “emergency-mode” of decoupling, on a path to bifurcating into separate “economic spheres” broadly aligned to the two principal camps. Some players, like the EU, are trying to straddle both sides of this trend, but they increasingly risk falling between the stools.

None of this is good for business. With more trade barriers and protectionism (including through regulatory barriers) come higher costs and less global economic growth, as we are already seeing. This ultimately translates into more social problems as public spending is squashed between higher demand (especially in the West, as the baby boomer generation enters old age) and lower tax receipts together with ever higher interest payments on mounting debt.

Even the US is not immune to this problem, with debt servicing now taking up 23 per cent of the country’s tax and tariff intake, and the deficit galloping at 8 per cent this year. The picture is certainly more complex and diverse than this, at a global level, but the bottom line is that a splitting world economy, with trade wars and huge capital allocations driven by (unproductive) security reasons rather than economic logic, is making everyone poorer in the long run — and contributes decisively to global instability.

In this area, as in that of international security, a new global political settlement (per point no.1 above) should be paralleled by a new system of global free trade agreements and rules — under a reformed WTO if that is possible — as well as global accords on new regulatory regimes for data and key technologies that impact the financial system in particular, from AI to crypto.

All these are very big and seemingly intractable challenges, as they are often rooted in fundamentally divergent philosophies and core interests. The approach to data regulation, for example, is radically different in the US, the EU and in China. In the financial field, the CRINKs — via the BRICS — are on a mission to dethrone the dollar, which appears to be a binary strategic issue with little scope for a new settlement.

Yet, the reality that the current situation is ultimately bad — and highly risky — for everyone in the end, offers a strong incentive for negotiating mutually acceptable solutions that are genuine win-wins. A genuine “reset” at the top of the geopolitical food chain would completely “change the weather” (gradually, at least) in international relations, and make room for types of dialogue that are deemed unfathomable today.

Finally, we need a new cooperation system for planetary protection. This term should be taken to include all the major “global challenges” that we tend to think are the proper remit of UN-level coordination, given their transnational nature. From climate change in all its aspects, to global health, migration, and a variety of humanitarian issues, and including problems that affect the “global commons” — such as piracy at sea or debris in space — these are matters that, by definition, concern the entire planet and affect both geopolitical “camps” of our era, and are in their interest to solve.

The difficulty is, again, that the UN system is dysfunctional and often these global issues are “weaponised” for political reasons. Green policies, for example, originally presented as a way to combat climate change, have become a strategic instrument of economic “warfare”, best wielded, so far, by China.

In other instances, such as bio engineering and AI — which, aside from their economic application, also hold a potentially huge risk for humanity overall, both physically and morally — the UN is simply structurally unsuited for negotiating joint approaches at the speed of relevance.

Space is another clear example of this: orbital congestion from the rapid increase in debris and deployed satellites is on track to produce catastrophic, cascading collisions which could make space unusable for everyone. This would have incalculable consequences on Earth, given the extensive dependency of key infrastructures and services on satellite systems. Only a multilateral political agreement can sort this out, not just through better regulation (accepted and observed by all) but also through joint action on debris removal at scale. As the technologies involved in active debris removal can also be mistaken for military weapons, such a “space-cleaning” initiative must have buy-in and participation from all key space powers.

Whether it is climate change adaptation, environmental preservation and indeed regeneration, a genuinely functional and transparent global health protection system, or orbital stewardship and indeed planetary defence (against asteroids) – none of these can be achieved or managed properly, i.e. with an effectiveness and speed higher than the pace of degradation or risk, without genuine cooperation in the common interest among the great powers. 

The degree of irresponsibility on all sides, as far as the long-term outlook of these global risks is concerned, is staggering. Geopolitical rivalry and national interests are taking precedence over collective safety from planetary-level catastrophes. This is not a friends-of-the-Earth, Greta-type talking point, but a cold reality. A new, sane, set of leaders could put the emotional, progressive nonsense aside, and start negotiating pragmatically with the great powers on the other side of the global divide a practical and effective suite of mechanisms and action-oriented institutions focused on first (re-)defining (in real, ideology-free terms), and then actually solving global problems – again, taking up an equitable share of the burden in the process. None of this is technically “impossible”.

To conclude, the world is coming perilously close to the abyss. The Eurasian Axis has consolidated more rapidly, especially since 2022, than our analysis has had time to adjust and process the implications of this process. Profound questions must now be asked about the real balance of power in the world, and the actionable margin of advantage that the West still retains – because, on current trends, the next phase of this multi-front confrontation might present us with a choice between general war or compromise (gradual, or sudden). The question is not what we would choose, but how to avoid that choice altogether and get ahead of it.

The default policy at present, inherited from the Cold War, is to stand firm, build up, and “deter” the adversary from going any further. The problem is that it’s not working that well any more, not least because today’s strategic landscape is so much more complex and our adversaries have so many more channels to disrupt and destabilise the West and, with us, the world. 

No one has so far been able to explain exactly how we get out of this mess and break the spiral of escalation – how the CRINKs will be made to cease their aggression, or how they will lose the means and resources to continue it before we lose ours – without war. There seems to simply be an assumption that our default policy will somehow lead to another “Berlin Wall” moment, where the other side gives up and disintegrates. This assumption, of course, is shaped and maintained by the same “elites” responsible of the West’s serial strategic failures over the past three decades. 

It needn’t be this way. There could be a path back to global stability – but we need to think bigger. The margin of Western ascendancy is still strong enough not just for deterrence (at least for now) but also for exploring, with a good degree of safety, the possibility of a “global reset”, negotiated with the singularly-vital purpose of restoring stability to the international system. All such moments in the modern history of mankind that have re-shaped world order – from Westphalia to Yalta – occurred after great wars. Perhaps we have learnt something and this time we’ll do it before.

Gabriel Elefteriu is deputy director at the Council on Geostrategy in London and a fellow at Yorktown Institute in Washington, D.C.