We have entered a leaderless phase in current world order

As the death toll from Covid-19 mounts, disrupting lives, livelihoods and much of the free market, the search for global leadership became bleaker this week. History is likely to view President Trump’s intention to suspend America’s funding to World Health Organization a catastrophic failing and a further atrophying of the old world order. There are over two million cases of the infections worldwide. That number is rising. Low and middle-income countries, which include Pakistan, India and much of the developing South, depend on the WHO’s interface for fighting disease, improving public health and combatting misinformation. Half a billion people already face poverty as a result of the pandemic.

With the UN in terminal decay, the pandemic has brought the crumbling of existing social and cultural systems into sharp focus. If the global malaise of the last four years birthed the withering collaborative spirit of the G-7, Britain’s exit from the EU, and the stillborn Paris Climate agreement, the pandemic may well be its tombstone. For the foreseeable future global governance will continue to be a lightning rod for American invective. The US has already refused to ease sanctions on Iran, Cuba and Venezuela despite entreaties by the UN. America’s retreat from shouldering global responsibility (different from American declinism, since this has more to do with America’s willingness rather than its capacity) will have a butterfly effect across the Global North and the Global South.

What does this mean for global balance of power in a fragmenting system? The most popular axioms, that declining American leadership might usher in an opportunity for a greater role for Sino-centrism, or a prolonged period of multipolarity, should be treated with caution. Food inflation is soaring in China. Over half of the Chinese economy is reliant on foreign trade and global demand. Multinational corporations are suffering from overexposed supply-chains. The effectiveness of China’s opaque bureaucratic system has been exposed by local government’s lack of action and fear of action. With a global recession now imminent, it is not clear whether Beijing and Shanghai will continue to be able to export domestic overcapacity abroad. Or indeed, if China’s much-touted Belt and Road Initiative can serve to expedite recovery. Absent a “G2” kind of configuration between the United States and China, deteriorating Sino-American relations will undercut the centrality of either in positively affecting global stability.

Poorer countries with limited resources and means of recovery, and refugees and people in conflict zones, especially South Asia, will be the hardest hit by absentee global leadership. Sovereignty will once again be seen as indivisible; this will have consequences for the legitimacy and effectiveness of regional groupings. We’re already seeing this happen with the EU.

Fahd Humayun

In the absence of alternative poles and the world facing a de-globalizing retreat, the reality for the time being is that we have entered a leaderless phase in the current world order. The heavy lift of global governance requires investment, and fostering dependencies that no single country – the US and China included – is likely to be able to afford or want, at least in the short term. In Germany, Angela Merkel has said she will not be a candidate in the country’s 2021 vote, marking a possible end to the centrist, consensus-driven politics at the heart of the EU. 

Governments in Brazil and India are likely to remain subservient to toxic ultra-nationalisms that will keep them them from stabilizing their respective regions. Around the world, power will be more diffuse than concentrated; there will be no single center of gravity; “nation-states” far from avant-garde, will dominate much of the global landscape. Smaller nations – South Korea, Sweden and Ireland – may continue to champion multilateralism, but these will at best be lone liberal islands, crowded out in an atomized world.

The implications of a rudderless global system will have downstream consequences for member state-driven institutions, in which case the WHO might just be the first casualty in a string to come. 

Last week Pakistan appealed to world leaders, heads of financial institutions, and United Nations for debt relief to developing countries to help combat the coronavirus. But multilateral mechanisms and international organizations will only be as strong as the sum of the lengths the countries backing them are willing to go to. 

A supply-demand gap in global governance has implications for global conflict: the deterioration of East–West relations offers plenty of excuses and opportunities for revisionist powers to try their hand at more assertive posturing. Poorer countries with limited resources and means of recovery, and refugees and people in conflict zones, especially South Asia, will be the hardest hit by absentee global leadership. Sovereignty will once again be seen as indivisible; this will have consequences for the legitimacy and effectiveness of regional groupings. We’re already seeing this happen with the EU.

The last global pandemic may have been 100 years ago, but back then there was a clearer sense of pragmatic, rational choice-driven decision-making at the helm of global affairs. Today that fulcrum is missing. What that means is that until a vaccine can be found, efforts to shore up global resilience in the pandemic will be piecemeal rather than collective. Until then, the last few of remnants of global governance, much of which was based on that chimera of chimeras, liberal hegemony, will circle the drain.

The writer is a PhD candidate at Yale University.