The Only Way to Save Global Order?

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**Ravi Agrawal** (1:01)
Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policies Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.
Twenty years ago, the answer was clear. A liberal international order backstopped by the United States and defined by a system of rules with the United Nations at its core. But now, the answer is a lot more fuzzy. And since that's the case, it is time to plan for the future. My guest this week has a big new idea for how to govern the world. That is coming up, but first, it is now September, which means we're in the month for all kinds of geopolitical summits including the UN's annual meeting. But the season kicked off this week with a curious split screen. A G20 meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, and half a world away in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, attended by the leaders of China, Russia, India, Iran, and several others. Two opposing world orders?
Here's my read on things. So the G20 meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bankers sparked some controversy when Germany's representative, Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil, criticized the Trump administration for inviting Russia's Finance Minister. But Russia is still formally a part of the G20. China had a seat at the table too. Trump himself defended the move saying plainly, We like getting along with everybody.
The thing is, despite those Trumpian words, the White House declined to invite South Africa, Africa's largest economy, and the hosts of last year's G20 summit over a spurious narrative of genocide against White farmers there. Clearly, the United States does not get along with everybody. If anything, attending finance ministers had serious questions about America's impact on the global economy this year. The Iran War has damaged global supply chains and raised energy prices. The bond markets are panicking right now, in part, over US debt topping $40 trillion. And US relations with most traditional allies in the G7 and the G20 have frayed.
So you contrast the imagery from North Carolina with the visuals in Kyrgyzstan, where one saw Xi Jinping meeting Russia's Vladimir Putin, Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian and India's Narendra Modi. This is not a group of ideological allies. It is a group that sees the growing dysfunction at settings like the G20 and wants to hedge its bets. And each attendee has different goals. China's is to be seen as a credible alternative to the United States. It does not want Washington to set every agenda. Moscow and Tehran want something else. They want to thrive outside a U.S.-led net of sanctions. And New Delhi and other key attendees just want more options.
The tragedy for US allies in Europe is that the split screen I'm describing needn't have told a story of fracture on the one hand and hedging on the other. This is a self-created problem, and one image feeds the other. And it's a trend that we will see at other summits this fall. And in fact, it will be the defining theme of the next several decades.
Okay, time now for our featured interview this week. The current problems with our world order are more than familiar. You just heard me describe some of it. These days, I'm yearning for solutions, and I'm increasingly willing to throw some spaghetti against the wall. This is actually the theme of FP's forthcoming print issue, How to Survive in a World Without Rules. I thought I'd preview one of the essays on FP Live this week. This one's by Charles Kupchan, who has a novel idea. He writes that an irreversible diffusion of power is already underway. Regional groups are becoming more powerful, and so a bottom-up approach to global governance in the future is a baked-in certainty. But that is not a recipe for order on its own.