“Fire everywhere,” a senior EU official expressed at a recent Korea-Europe conference in Brussels to assess the world situation following the Hamas attack on Israel. It echoed my remarks to the same audience that a Pandora’s box has been opened wide on multiple fronts – geopolitical, geo-economic and geo-technological as well as on the global governance dimension.

This convergence of views is, of course, only a partial representation of ongoing debates among policymakers and opinion leaders on the current state of world affairs and their prognoses for the future. Some focus on immediate symptoms, whereas others fathom the root causes of what may be called “poly-crises” or “tectonic changes” in the global order.

With the end of the post-Cold War era, we are now entering a fragmented world, fraught more with perils than opportunities, of "unknown knowns," "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." Geostrategic competition has triggered gaping geo-economic fractures in trade, finance and technology transfers, putting economic security upfront. What we are witnessing is a serious gap between global challenges and global responses — an over-supply of problems with a clear deficit of solutions.

This lacuna mainly stems from the hard reality that the old order is gone, but a new order is yet to come. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres elucidated in his “New Agenda for Peace” report last July that power dynamics have become increasingly fragmented in this moment of transition to a new global order and new poles of influence are yet to assume the leadership to address the poly crises that are roiling the world........

© The Korea Times