Sublime

Nothing captured the empty idealism of the age so much as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was initially signed by fifteen countries in 1928 and eventually included 62 signatories. The parties committed not to resort to war to settle disputes among them. It was less an act of serious foreign policy than an alternative to it—a high-minded statement wi

Order and the balance of power buttressing it can take many forms. There can be a single dominant country or empire, which is then referred to as a hegemon; this tends to be described as either a unipolar world (for example, the status of the United States just after the end of the Cold War) or an imperial order, as was the case in parts of the anc

The Federal Reserve’s response was inadequate, as it did not take sufficient measures to…

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Stability during the four decades of the Cold War also benefited from the structural design of international relations at the time, namely, bipolarity. It is less difficult to manage a world with two principal centers of power than many. There are simply fewer independent actors and decision makers with real impact. This is not to say that Great Br

There is also the G20, a larger grouping that includes China, Russia, and a number of medium powers, that has met annually since 1999 and also tries to deal with global challenges. And there are any number of small groupings formed for narrower purposes. All contribute something to the world’s order even if the world remains something other than or

East Asia and the Pacific (mostly referred to here and elsewhere as “Asia”) is a study in contrasts. Its thirty-one countries range from China, the world’s most populous country (until it is overtaken by India) with nearly 1.4 billion inhabitants, to Nauru, an island country of some 13,000 citizens. Similarly, China has the world’s second-largest e

Regional institutions have a mixed record. The Organization of American States lacks the ability to get much done given its requirement for consensus and the lack of military and economic resources at its disposal. The Lima Group, formed by a dozen countries in the region to promote a peaceful outcome in Venezuela, has yet to demonstrate it has muc

For Latin America, this has been an era of democratic consolidation in many countries (including Mexico) that had long been run by a single party. It has also been a time in which a number of civil conflicts have been brought to an end, most notably in Colombia. But democracy and populism remain in tension in both Brazil and Argentina. Elsewhere, a

There are a good many institutions and frameworks in place to promote global governance. The most prominent is the United Nations, an institution created to advance order and to prevent or, failing that, to resolve international disputes. It was designed during World War II and came into being in its wake. Its aim was to encourage countries to sett