The world appears to be sliding toward greater chaos. The number and intensity of conflicts increased significantly in the past year, with wars in the Middle East, Europe and Africa. At the same time, uncertainty over economic policy has reached the highest levels since the pandemic, just as trade tensions loom. Mixed with this is the rapid advancement of frontier technologies — most notably, generative A.I. — that offer the potential for economic gains but are fast becoming a front line of misinformation and competition among nations.
Discontent with the existing global system has made the disruption worse. As a result, the once relatively stable order that was in place for a quarter century after the end of the Cold War — a system marked by reflexive collaboration in security, economic and environmental crises — has passed.
The global landscape of today is less predictable and more chaotic. But it doesn’t have to be less collaborative. Countries must embrace what I like to call disordered cooperation. Leaders should find ways to work with competitors. Countries should band together, joined by relevant parties, including corporations when it makes sense, to tackle big problems.
The world is staring at a series of grave challenges. Last year was the hottest on record. The global economy is on course for weak growth. Conflict has forcibly displaced over 122 million people around the globe. Renewed concerns about the spread of respiratory viruses are rising in both the United States and China.
These headwinds are borderless and can be addressed only through global cooperation — among allies and adversaries alike.
Though it may seem unlikely, collaboration in today’s climate is possible. Research by the World Economic Forum, which holds its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, next week, and McKinsey & Company finds that while global cooperation has stalled over the past three years, it is still progressing in several areas — notably the environment, health and innovation, albeit not as much as needed to achieve global goals. The takeaway is that cooperation can take place in periods of disruption and when distrust is high, as leaders work together in some areas and compete in others.
This means that we may see the United States and China, while competing fiercely, find new opportunities for cooperation in areas such as pandemic prevention and addressing the rise of cybercrime. Perhaps there is a chance they could reach a compromise on trade issues in a way that benefits both.
History has also shown that adversaries can collaborate. Famously, the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated during World War II, with America offering billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act. And at the height of the Cold War, both sides worked together on issues of global importance, such as the depletion of the atmosphere’s ozone layer, controls on arms testing and production, and the eradication of smallpox.
While lessons from previous periods are instructive, it would be a mistake to try to replicate the architecture of the past. The longstanding post-Cold War order was indeed largely stable and cooperative, but it was Western-led and increasingly not representative of the needs of other countries, particularly those in the developing world. That groups such as BRICS, a collaboration of emerging-market nations, are expanding and advocating change to the international system is a testament to a desire to rethink how cooperation is constructed. Even the United Nations itself has called for reforming multilateral institutions to make them more representative and responsive — a powerful sign that new approaches are needed.
Today, cooperation cannot be grounded in one institution or be singular in approach. It must be adaptive. At a practical level, large multilateral institutions such as the United Nations should help set agendas, but smaller networks of companies and countries that collaborate on advancing global priorities should increasingly help deliver results. One example of this approach is the First Movers Coalition, a collaboration between the United States and 12 other governments shepherded by the World Economic Forum that includes over 100 global businesses committed to investing in clean energy technologies. Members of the coalition include fierce competitors, like Boeing and Airbus, and Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, working in concert on a shared climate agenda.
Many of the challenges facing the world are too complex for one global body to address on its own. Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most salient example: It is developing at a far faster rate than previous technologies, making technology companies vital voices when it comes to developing safeguards.
This transfer of cooperation on a grand, global scale to smaller groupings is likely to feel messy and disordered. So too will the practice of trying to get private sector competitors to cooperate. But if groups are working toward global goals rather than against them, global institutions and powers should encourage and empower them.
Some may argue that election results in 2024 — a year in which governing parties in many developed economies lost vote share — mean that electorates are looking to turn their back on global approaches. But the election results did not reflect a widespread global shift to either the left or the right, but rather showed widespread disapproval with incumbents and the entrenched ways of doing things. The message was that people are looking for new and more effective solutions to the challenges they are facing — something that can happen only through cooperation.
As new governments enter office at the start of the year, leaders seeking to serve their citizens should ask themselves not whether they should cooperate with others, but how. Finding ways to work together in today’s more unsettled environment, even by taking a less ordered approach, is the only way to deliver the results people are looking for.
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