For the first time in decades, the principles on which the modern world was built are open to question. The healthy instinct of nations to hang together, first in security blocs and UN bodies, and then in free trade zones and multilateral mechanisms like the World Trade Organization, is being replaced by a disregard for the treaty-based and rules-based order that holds the world together. Meanwhile, the clarity which the culture of transparency had brought to public affairs is being replaced by the fog of state-backed disinformation.
This week, it was reported that US president-elect Donald Trump’s administration would withdraw the polio vaccine. Then, he denied it in his first press conference since he won a second term. The point is not whether the initial report was true—what matters is that people took the news seriously. The polio eradication programme, which began in 1988, is of great significance for all of humanity. It could be the second great victory against a viral disease, after the eradication of smallpox in 1980. Success would also confirm that an organism which infects only humans can be tackled by herd immunity, without the challenging process of inoculating the global population.
Such projects need nations to follow a common rule book. And Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the disease remains in the wild, have faced criticism for breaking ranks. Their inoculators have been resisted due to the colonial-era perception that vaccination is an imperial plot to sap the strength of sons of the soil. It did not help that the CIA used a vaccination programme in Abbottabad to find where Osama bin Laden was hiding. But since diseases do not respect national borders, these nations could be endangering the world’s children, not only their own.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter to their governments, since they are not model members of the world order. But imagine the cost to the image of a country like the US if it were to withdraw from the push to eradicate polio. The government is unlikely to take the risk, even if the incoming health secretary is an anti-vaxxer. But floating a wild idea and having the president-elect deny it is politically useful: it leaves the world a little less sure of what to believe, and more receptive to disinformation. This is useful if you plan to break some of the bonds of the rules-based world order.
This year, the International Court of Justice issued warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Warrants were issued against Russian President Vladimir Putin, too. They must be arrested if they travel to 124 ICC member states. Well, they’ll just change their vacation plans, won’t they? Putin is suffering some real consequences, having to skip BRICS and G20 summits. Nevertheless, neither he nor Netanyahu have obeyed the ICC’s summons. They are letting the world know that they won’t be constrained by the rules-based order.
The UN and its agencies like WHO were early institutions of that order. The first is now cautionary rather than regulatory. By flooding the world with advisories based on little knowledge and excessive caution, the latter confused the Covid response, brought needless hardships upon a suffering world and lost credibility. But the WTO, which was founded on the Dunkel Draft of the early 1990s as a global bargaining mechanism, has remained somewhat effective in managing disputes in international commerce.
Such institutions were born out of the understanding that nations could readily share a platform based on common rules rather than common political values, and that membership could be regulated by economic benchmarks (the EU is a good example). The WTO worked until Trump’s first administration stuck a spanner in the works: in 2019, the US refused to confirm the appointment of judges to the appellate court of the body.
Without a functioning court of appeal, the WTO was crippled. Nations were free to file complaints about unfair trade practices, but no final decision could be arrived at. Now Trump is roaring back to office and threatening tariff barriers—exactly what the WTO’s founding document addresses. If the WTO is dysfunctional over the next four years, tariff wars and differences over non-tariff barriers could turn into potent geopolitical weapons. The saving grace is that Trump may only brandish tariffs like the Soviets used to show off ballistic missiles at Moscow’s Red Square as tools of deterrence.
Detente gave the Cold War the air of reliability, but the recent revelation of a 1983 Pentagon war game suggests that it’s a slippery slope. It revealed that while all-out nuclear war, as seen in Dr Strangelove, is unlikely to start, conflict could begin with the use of a low-yield battlefield weapon and grow into an ever-escalating game of nuclear ping-pong. The game showed that nuclear conflict could spiral out of the control of the players.
A world free of nuclear war was perhaps the most important assurance delivered by the post-war, treaty-based world order. Today, if even nuclear deals can’t be trusted, does it mean the old certainties have collapsed and nothing is for real anymore?
(Views are personal)
Pratik Kanjilal
For years, the author has been speaking easy to a surprisingly tolerant public
(On X @pratik_k)