We are living through disruption. Not for the first time an old order is broken and the new has not emerged. Mark reaches back through his own years on the global frontlines as well as his perceptive reading of twentieth century history to chart the implosion of the world created by the two Western victories of 1945 and 1989. He recalls first hand his times in Moscow and the Balkans after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today that euphoria is a distant memory.
This sets up the central question of where the world is headed. As China becomes the world’s leading trading nation, and countries such as Brazil and India assert both a new regional dominance and lay claim to a global voice, he sees an earlier more benign reordering of the world being overtaken by a new more contested and malignant power shift as the US digs in its heels. He explains the rise of Donald Trump as a consequence of relative American weakness not strength — a phenomenon at its core of a white working class America feeling the pinch of lost jobs and status.
He spells out what this may mean for the world of rules and institutions set up in 1945 and encapsulated in the UN Charter. Will the UN survive and what are the chances of restoring respect for international law? Are we reverting to a nineteenth century world of state power and interests prevailing over the norms painfully established after two world wars? We have already reverted to much higher levels of conflict than we have seen in decades.
And what are the implications for an apparently weakened Europe, or for the Gulf, or for Africa undergoing dizzying demographic change? Anticipate a sweeping global tour of these issues and their interplay — resting on a lifetime of professional and personal insight.