The Failure of Constructive Collective Action When We Need It Most
The war in Ukraine, after President Putin’s invasion on 24 February 2022, violated Article 2 of the UN Charter, as well as peremptory rules of public international law. It also represents a failure by the states and international organizations that opposed Mr. Putin’s illegal act to deter the invasion and to meet their “responsibility to protect” Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure after the invasion. It exposed our collective inability to manage complex circumstances to avert tragedy in a highly connected world. The reasons are clear: overconfidence bordering on hubris in the West in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and neglect of the need to construct a viable security architecture in Europe, coupled with Mr. Putin’s revanchism and nationalistic hubris. Meanwhile, in October 2023, the United States was confronted with a second major war in the Middle East after Hamas breached the border with Israel on 7 October, and Israel counterattacked in force. The costs of a failure to construct the “two-state solution” to the Israel and Palestine conflict were highlighted again. Washington and its allies also risk “sleepwalking” into a similar unintended conflict with China through a series of reciprocal miscalculations. Our limited cognitive capability to address the challenges posed by the workings of complex systems and our reliance on linear, logical processes to devise policies, which are often distorted by fear and ambition in their execution, are inadequate in the context of complexity. The illusion of control of future circumstances that afflicts governance at all scales, sharpening conflict and fracturing even relatively mature national societies, is particularly dangerous in the context of the deep global connectivity effected in the past three decades. The asymmetry of a highly connected global economy and a deeply fractured global society has exposed the dysfunctionality of our international policy, triggering a symmetry break in the international rules-based order, and tipping the world system into a new meta-stable state in which the “West” is increasingly pitted against the “Global South.” Reconfiguration, based on humility and reflection, is urgently needed.
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