So many crises are happening all over the world at the same time. The old ways of solving world problems won’t work. Can we begin afresh with new solutions?
A teen is despondent over the many crises he reads and sees in the news. (Illustration by News Decoder)
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Glaciers are melting in the ocean, in the Alps and in the Himalayas. Tech executives warn that artificial intelligence could destroy humanity. Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, while horrific deaths and destruction continue in the Middle East.
Experts use the term “polycrisis” to describe multiple crises that happen at the same time.
The situation of hundreds of thousands of people starving in Sudan stretches our comprehension. Economic uncertainty and disparities contribute to the rise of fascist and far-right movements.
This accumulation of crises stretches our intellectual and emotional capacities to respond, leaving us struggling to comprehend what is happening, let alone how to act fast enough. The problem is that geopolitics — the clashes between governments and regions — dominates chronopolitics, the significance of when, not where.
How can the old solutions that worked in the past cope when our world turns upside down?
A new world order
Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan wrote recently in The New York Times about the new world order we are not ready for.
She cited record high and low temperatures, historically high national debts and people dying because of cuts to government aid and services. Diseases are spreading which can cause new pandemics and unregulated artificial intelligence threatens jobs, security and even human existence.
MacMillan believes that governments are ignoring the signs of the calamity, just as they did the dead rats in Albert Camus’ 1947 novel “The Plague,” about an outbreak of a deadly disease. She concluded that we have reached a “new stage of disorder.”
To prepare ourselves, she said we must be honest about the seriousness of what is happening and accept that the systems we have relied on are collapsing.
Now, if you are comfortable with the status quo, this seems dire. MacMillan is known as a historian of moments when the world changes direction and likened ignoring today’s crises to those governments in the past toppled because they ignored the revolution stirring around them.
“The French kings and their courtiers misunderstood the depth of the discontent and assumed that nothing could shake them from their privileged position,” MacMillan wrote.
Tell that to the thousands of Parisians who stormed the Bastille in July 1789, and the millions of French peasants who were demanding an end to feudal privileges and aristocratic exemptions.
Revolution in Russia
The same occurred in Russia in 1917. After defeat from abroad, some 10 million peasant households were desperate. But the vast swaths of land was mostly held by a small number of wealthy people. “Czar Nicholas II also insisted, against all evidence, that no reforms were needed because Russians still adored him,” MacMillan said.
There are parallels today between Trump and the King Louis XIV of pre-revolution France who saw himself as synonymous with the state and therefore whatever he said would go.
MacMillan points to statements Trump has made in interviews in which he said that the only thing limiting his actions was his own morality.
Certain economic factors give similar indications to pre-French and Russian Revolution situations. In the United States today, the concentration of wealth is striking: the top 10% of households held roughly $150 trillion in wealth in the second quarter of 2026, compared with about $4.3 trillion held by the bottom half.
Globally, the richest 10% now receive 53% of all income, while the poorest half of humanity receives just 8%. The top 0.1% alone — 10% of 1%, or a fraction of a fraction — receives as much income as the entire bottom half.
More than money
These economic factors are relevant, but don’t give full focus to the polycrisis. What about climate change? What about AI? Elon Musk said there is now a 20% risk that robots will destroy all humanity in the very near future.
Ten years ago, the “Doomsday Clock” set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was at three minutes to midnight, which seemed unnerving. It now stands at 85 seconds to midnight — that’s a gap closure of more than half.
Whether Musk’s prediction is right, or the Doomsday Clock is an appropriate warning, does not help us answer what to do. MacMillan says we must “begin afresh.”
But where do we start? After the horror that was World War I, nations met at Versailles to form the League of Nations to prevent any future world wars, and we know how well that worked. Out of that came the United Nations, established with full recognition about what had been wrong with the League of Nations. But now, where is the UN in Ukraine? Iran? Gaza? West Bank? Humanely, what is it doing to change the situation in Sudan?
“Building something fresh” misses a subject that is at the heart of the polycrisis: we are not simply dealing with a broken geopolitical system that can be rebuilt.
Bringing the world together
The League of Nations and the United Nations were created in the aftermath of major wars, just as earlier international settlements followed major geopolitical ruptures: the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) followed the Napoleonic Wars, and the Congress of Berlin in 1878 followed the Russo-Turkish War.
We have had major international conferences and settlements that followed wars or major geopolitical ruptures. Now we are dealing with several completely different systems breaking down or changing at the same time: political, economic, environmental and technological. There is no single Vienna, Berlin, Versailles or San Francisco moment waiting to fix them.
Have we begun to understand the rapid changes taking place? All the major conferences cited above, as well as the institutions they created, were based on countries and national sovereignty.
When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accompanied Trump to the United Nations General Assembly, the goal as described by their press office was to “to advance an agenda of peace, prosperity and the primacy of nations” and get the United Nations to return “to its core mandate of maintaining international peace and security while respecting national sovereignty.”
But “the primacy of nations” and “respecting national sovereignty” denies the current state of the world: one of global interdependence. And it ignores the role of civil society.
The inferiority of nations
Instead we should call into question the very notion of the primacy of nations and respect for national sovereignty. The current state system was crystallized way back in 1648 in the Peace of Westphalia, which ended a 30-year war and first established the system of nation-states.
Much has been written about how we are moving into the post-Westphalian era. But what should that look like?
Three decades ago French diplomat Maurice Bertrand and I asked a more fundamental question when we published “A New Charter for a Worldwide Organisation?” In it we questioned whether the existing international system was adequate and proposed an entirely new charter for an entirely new worldwide organization. This was before climate change and AI had become the systemic issues they are today.
There can be no one simple solution to a polycrisis moment. Perhaps not even one worldwide organization.
Looking to the past can tell us much about how the world has responded to moments of upheaval. When radical change is coming you can’t just rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, and MacMillan warns us against the tendency to misread, downplay or ignore the signs until it is too late.
The process of building something afresh will be “laborious” she said.
Running out of time
But do we have the time to do that? In the New Yorker magazine in September, Jill Lepore wrote this about our need to regulate artificial intelligence: “Time seems to be flying by. How should humanity prepare? There is no time to prepare.”
Laws take time and can’t keep up with today’s rapid pace of technological change, she wrote. That’s what makes the current polycrisis so different, and so worrying. Political institutions operate according to geopolitical time. Negotiations, laws, conferences, treaties, reconstruction, institution-building all take time.
Meanwhile, technological and environmental change are moving on radically different timescales. It may be that we truly have “no time to prepare” if we continue to think only in geopolitical terms.
So if the old solutions can’t cope when our world turns upside down, perhaps we need to look for solutions in entirely new ways. We simply can’t remain comfortable with things remaining basically as they are.
We need to begin afresh.
A version of this story has previously appeared in the publication Counterpunch.
Questions to consider:
1. What is meant by a polycrisis?
2. Why does the author mean when he argues that we need to de-emphasize the primacy of nations?
3. How would you “begin afresh” to get the world on a better track?
Daniel Warner is the author of “An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations” (Lynne Rienner Publishers). He lives in Geneva, Switzerland.