When the historian Margaret MacMillan—author of Paris 1919 and The War That Ended Peace—warns in the starkest of terms about our accelerating global disorder, it’s time to listen. Few historians have examined so thoroughly the failures of judgment that led to one world war and that failed to create an international order capable of preventing a second.
“When a storm is coming, there will always be signs,” MacMillan, age eighty-two, wrote in Sunday’s New York Times. “The wind might suddenly drop. The tide goes out farther than usual. Streamers of clouds sail across the sky.”
In that spirit, she reminds her readers of French writer Albert Camus’s postwar novel, The Plague, in which dead rats appear on the streets of the Algerian city of Oran, and its people fall ill. Despite the rats, most citizens ignored the signs and paid the price.
“Today, there are dead rats all around,” she wrote, adding that temperatures are rising, global debt levels among advanced economies are at historic highs, and the rapid, largely unregulated rise of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens jobs, security, “and, in darker projections, human existence.” Writes MacMillan:
- “Revisionist powers flout rules and norms with impunity. Electorates are angry and volatile. Slow, deliberate, necessarily discreet diplomacy, which builds trust and understanding, has given way to a performative, brash style more suited for TikTok-addled attention spans or the playground.”
I read MacMillan’s powerful essay after a week in New York watching the eighty-first session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and tracking the Washington summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the two most powerful leaders of their time. Everyone involved in those meetings was discounting the proverbial rats at a moment when they are proliferating.
Simultaneously, wars in Europe and the Middle East are bleeding across borders. In both theaters, autocratic powers China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are testing the eighty-year-old commitment of the United States to enforcing its interests alongside its allies. The world has entered the first stages of the Intelligence Era, powered by AI, which will dramatically augment the power of humankind’s best and worst instincts. Yet so far, there has been no serious international effort to establish guardrails for the rapidly advancing technology.
The United Nations meetings last week accomplished something necessary but limited, given the urgency of our times. Even amid some sixty-five state-based conflicts, the most since 1946 according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the UNGA gives adversaries and allies a place to talk. It’s a positive thing that leaders can still name the dangers they face. But it is a negative that they are unable to summon a strategy or even a convincing process to end wars in Ukraine or around Iran, or for governing technologies whose risks cross every border.
The Trump-Xi summit produced more tangible but also narrower results than the UNGA did. The leaders agreed on improved tariff treatment for some goods, stronger trade and investment channels, and a better way for the two governments to communicate about AI incidents. Those are necessary and useful steps. Yet the two sides have done little to resolve disputes that dangerously divide them, above all Taiwan, or to engage seriously on each country’s role in the Ukraine and Iran crises and a path forward for each.
The two leaders have demonstrated that they can manage a meeting, and they are scheduled for two more this year. But they have not yet shown that they can seriously address the global disorder that only they, more than any other two people on the planet, can influence. “That amounts to a dereliction of duty, and leaves the rest of humanity as the losers,” wrote The Economist this past weekend. “The list of urgent global crises and threats is long. Wars in Iran, Sudan, Ukraine and beyond are ending lives and roiling markets for energy and food. Every week brings fresh reports of AI agents breaking free of human trainers to roam digital networks in feral packs.”
The Economist concludes: “Given the unusual dominance that both men enjoy over their respective political systems, Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi could have agreed on a few concrete, world-saving ambitions, and tasked aides with delivering on them.”
Yet that’s not where we are.
Xi’s China reckons that Beijing profits from every additional month of US dysfunction, weakening its dollar, eroding its alliances, involving its military in conflicts that sap resources from countering China. Meanwhile, Trump’s United States dismisses concerns regarding the future of the global order and its relations with allies as something for policy wonks, focusing instead on culture wars, midterm elections, and the presidential election cycle to follow.
“But a new reality has arrived with startling speed,” warns MacMillan. “The world order that held together for most of our lives started to erode when those within it got too comfortable and complacent and when there was too much acceptance—and even approval—of bad behavior.”
MacMillan’s conclusion is that it is time to begin “the laborious process of building something else”—something the United States has done before, and most notably after World War II. In his book Present at the Creation, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson (one of the Atlantic Council’s founders) described the task “to create a world out of chaos” after the wars in Europe and Asia ended in 1945.