Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the post-Cold War period is over and the world is moving toward a new multipolar era already marked by the highest level of geopolitical tensions and major power competition in decades
Richard Gowan, U.N. director for the International Crisis Group, said this vision “of an activist, interventionist U.N.” has been its underlying policy for the past three decades. But he said Guterres’ “New Agenda for Peace” stresses that “the driving force for a new multilateralism must be diplomacy.”
In an analysis of the new agenda, Gowan said it focuses on what member nations need to do, and on multilateral cooperation in an increasingly fragmented and unequal world “in which Guterres believes that the U.N. must adapt to facilitating international cooperation, not aim to lead it.”
The democratic west spent decades after the collapse of the USSR hoping that if they were open and friendly to the major authoritarian powers that they would chill the fuck out and play nice with the world.
It would have been great, if it worked. But it didn’t.
He’s not wrong. There’s a lot of instability in the world right now. And it’s times of instability that we tend to see the miscalculations that lead to major power conflict.
As of late, I feel like we are just a few simple mistakes and a series of events away from large scale conflict.
