Abstract

The era of Pax Americana–sometimes called the Liberal International Order by its supporters and enthusiasts–is over. The era’s institutional infrastructure, built and modified after 1945 through the end of the Cold War, will far more quickly rust, shrivel, and melt away over the next four years than it did during the 1993-2024 period. Unless bold and enlightened leaders around the world quickly cooperate to devise a means to construct a new Global Commons Order (GCO), concerted action to deal with common global challenges will dwindle. Worse, cross-border aggression, civil disorder, refugee flows, pandemic disease, and poverty will metastasize as they interact with one another. Absent the expeditious rise of a new GCO to replace the postwar US role, the triumph of a post-Enlightenment zero-sum, law-of-the-jungle ruthlessness will pervade an increasingly integrated but conflictual global geopolitical environment.

About the Speaker

Adam Garfinkle is a consultant on American politics to RSIS for the period August 2024-January 2025. He was a Senior Fellow at RSIS for the 2019-20 academic year. Dr Garfinkle was founding editor of The American Interest magazine and served previously as both Executive Editor and Editor of The National Interest. Dr Garfinkle also served in 2003-05 as speechwriter to the Secretary of State (S/P, Policy Planning), before which he held appointment as professorial lecturer in American Foreign Policy at the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and other institutions of higher learning. Dr Garfinkle also served as a member of the National Security Study Group (as chief writer) of the US Commission on National Security/21^st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission), and as principal investigator on studies for several government agencies.