From introduction:
Renowned political scientist Ian Bremmer draws lessons from global challenges of the past 100 years—including the pandemic—to show how we can respond to three great crises unfolding over the next decade.
In this revelatory, unnerving, and ultimately hopeful book, Bremmer details how domestic and international conflicts leave us unprepared for A TRIO OF LOOMING CRISES—GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCIES, TRANSFORMATIVE CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE AI REVOLUTION.
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Today, Americans cannot reach consensus on any significant political issue, and US and Chinese leaders behave as if they’re locked in a new Cold War.
We are squandering opportunities to meet the challenges that will soon confront us all.
In coming years, humanity will face viruses deadlier and more infectious than Covid.
INTENSIFYING CLIMATE CHANGE WILL PUT TENS OF MILLIONS OF REFUGEES IN FLIGHT AND REQUIRE US TO REIMAGINE HOW WE LIVE OUR DAILY LIVES.
Most dangerous of all, new technologies will reshape the geopolitical order, disrupting our livelihoods and destabilizing our societies faster than we can grasp and address their implications.
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The good news?
Some farsighted political leaders, business decision-makers, and individual citizens are already collaborating to tackle all these crises.
The question that should keep us awake is whether they will work well and quickly enough to limit the fallout—and, most importantly, whether we can use these crises to innovate our way toward a better world.
Drawing on strategies both time-honored and cutting-edge, from the Marshall Plan to the Green New Deal, The Power of Crisis provides a roadmap for surviving—even thriving in—the 21st century.
BREMMER SHOWS GOVERNMENTS, CORPORATIONS, AND EVERY CONCERNED CITIZEN HOW WE CAN USE THESE COMING CRISES TO CREATE THE WORLDWIDE PROSPERITY and opportunity 20th-century globalism promised but failed to deliver.
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From book sample:
In the coming decade, we will face great risks.
To survive the challenges detailed in this book, we must all learn the lessons the pandemic can teach us, even if world leaders aren’t ready to agree on them.
U.S., CHINESE, AND OTHER GOVERNMENTS WILL CONTINUE TO COMPETE, BOTH OPENLY AND SECRETLY, over hundreds of political, security, and economic issues they don’t, and will never, agree on.
But on the big risks that menace us all at the same time, we can share responsibility, information, burdens, blame, and credit as we learn from past mistakes.
Unless leaders of the world’s most important countries can work together on the threats we share, we will all suffer unimaginable catastrophes.
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Two years after the worst global health crisis in a century, the world still struggles to regain its footing, but our future is now coming into focus.
Let’s first face two facts.
One, DOMESTIC POLITICS INSIDE THE UNITED STATES, STILL THE WORLD’S SOLE SUPERPOWER, IS BROKEN.
Two, the relationship between the United States and China, which will matter more than any other for the world’s collective future, is headed in the wrong direction.
Both of these realities make it difficult to respond to global crises as they occur.
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We face three such crises today.
The world is still struggling to shake off the economic, political, and social effects of COVID-19, and more deadly viruses will inevitably plague us.
Climate change will upend the lives of billions of people and threaten the sustainability of life on the planet.
THE GREATEST THREAT OF ALL TO OUR COLLECTIVE FUTURE WILL COME FROM THE UNEXPECTED IMPACT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES that change the way we live, think, and interact with other people and will determine our future as a species.
America’s broken politics and the intensifying US-China rivalry imperil our ability to build the international trust needed to meet the great crises of our time.
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Americans no longer look abroad for their most dangerous enemies.
They find them across state lines, across the street, across the hall.
WE SEE MEMBERS OF THE OTHER POLITICAL PARTY, NEIGHBORS, AND EVEN RELATIVES AS HATEFUL, IGNORANT ENEMIES who must be checked.
Voters on the left and right deliberately seek out information (and misinformation and disinformation) about the world from sources they know will confirm their biases and make them fighting mad.
Government—federal, state, and local—increasingly reflects these distortions in frightening ways.
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Even on issues where AMERICANS OF LEFT AND RIGHT SOMETIMES AGREE—SUCH AS ON THE NEED TO STAND UP TO A RISING CHINA, but they don’t agree on what the problems are or what to do about them.
It’s difficult for citizens of other countries and their governments to see the United States as a source of solutions to global problems when tens of millions of Americans consider tens of millions of other Americans to be violent radicals or irredeemable fascists.
(end of section 1)
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(own comments)
“Intensifying climate change will put tens of millions of refugees in flight and require us to reimagine how we live our daily lives.”
We and They see ahead and know the current undefeatable (despite the billions of dollars Dems want to waste trying to fight it, ruining U.S. and enthroning CCP-China) natural cyclical global warming will bring much more northern land into crop production.
People up north won’t need to move south to escape cold weather because they will already be warm.
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“We see members of the other political party, neighbors, and even relatives as hateful, ignorant enemies.”
Personally, and All Real Republicans must, really see Democrats as friends and allies to be embraced not erased, each side be doing their duty: Reps accept HAT and push Forward, Dems doff and scoff at HAT inflaming, energizing, and pushing Reps upward.
Dems be good guys with bad terms.
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“Americans of left and right sometimes agree—such as on the need to stand up to a rising China.”
This be untrue, despite zeir words Dems be demi-commies and zeir thoughts be with not against tightly-governmentally-controlled CCP-China.
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