Page 89 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

from remaining constant (in terms of the risk they pose), they
inflate and end up increasing systemic fragility. This is shown in

figure 1; strong interconnections exist between global governance
failure, climate action failure, national government failure (with
which it has a self-reinforcing effect), social instability and of
course the ability to successfully deal with pandemics. In a

nutshell, global governance is at the nexus of all these other
issues. Therefore, the concern is that, without appropriate global
governance, we will become paralysed in our attempts to address
and respond to global challenges, particularly when there is such

a strong dissonance between short-term, domestic imperatives
and long-term, global challenges. This is a major worry,
considering that today there is no “committee to save the world”
(the expression was used more than 20 years ago, at the height of

the Asian financial crisis). Pursuing the argument further, one
could even claim that the “general institutional decay” that
Fukuyama describes in Political Order and Political Decay [86]

amplifies the problem of a world devoid of global governance. It
sets in motion a vicious cycle in which nation states deal poorly
with the major challenges that beset them, which then feeds into
the public’s distrust of the state, which in turn leads to the state’s
being starved of authority and resources, then leading to even

poorer performance and the inability or unwillingness to deal with
issues of global governance.

COVID-19 tells just such a story of failed global governance.
From the very beginning, a vacuum in global governance,

exacerbated by the strained relations between the US and China,
undermined international efforts to respond to the pandemic. At
the onset of the crisis, international cooperation was non-existent
or limited and, even during the period when it was needed the

most (in the acme of the crisis: during the second quarter of
2020), it remained conspicuous by its absence. Instead of
triggering a set of measures coordinated globally, COVID-19 led to
the opposite: a stream of border closures, restrictions in

international travel and trade introduced almost without any
coordination, the frequent interruption of medical supply
distribution and the ensuing competition for resources, particularly

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