Just When It’s Needed Most, International Cooperation is More Elusive

A World in Crises

I’m publishing this series of articles to share and discuss my ruminations on coping with a troubled and messy world. You can “follow” me to never miss an article.

Three stories paint a stark picture of the Threats endangering us. The first is the dire Perils that election officials Nationwide are facing[i]. The second is the never-ending wave of half-baked rationalizations by Republicans condemning the FBI’s “unlawful raid” of Trump’s Florida estate. The third is not only a detailed look at the multiple Threats facing us world-wide, but how they are dangerously intertwined[ii].

As I’ve reported many times before, election officials at both the County and State-Wide levels are under constant harassment by Right-Wing Groups who feel that unless their chosen candidates win, elections are rigged and therefore “stolen from them”. Things have become so bad that after receiving multiple Death Threats, election officials have had to hire their own security personnel. Indeed, demonstrations outside of Voting Precincts have become so violent such that on multiple occasions the Police have had to be called.

With regard to the second, Senator Marco Rubio has called the documents found in Trump’s estate merely a “storage issue.” More seriously, others have called it the “Weaponization of the DOJ by Democrats.” This of course stands in sharp contrast to the fact that it was a Federal Judge who l approved the lawful seizure of Highly Classified Documents and Top Secrets that were improperly taken and kept by Trump.

And, writing in Foreign Affairs, William Macaskill has warned that it will take a new round of International cooperation to produce innovative organizations that are up to the task of managing the multiple Risks brought about by the dark side of modern Technology. In particular, he worries about AI going rogue such that it could set off uncontrolled waves of new Pandemics by undermining security and thereby unleashing Bio-Hazards in labs across the world.

In a follow-on article, Richard Haass makes the salient point that if American Democracy goes, then so goes it around the world[iii]. In short, the U.S. is not only the bulwark for Democracies everywhere, but that they are inextricably tied to us. As a result, he too calls for new International Institutions to steer us through dangerous waters and thus protect us from utter chaos.

The point is that the Crises and Threats we face are world-wide. They require International cooperation on scales not achieved before. But then, the difficulty of forging them is one of the biggest Crises facing us.

[i] Neil Vigdor, “Around U.S. ,Voting Offices Raise Security,” The New York Times, Wednesday, September 7, 2022, PP. A1 and A17.

[ii] William Macaskill, “The Beginning of History: Surviving the Era of Catastrophic Risk, “ Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2022, PP 10–24.

[iii] Richard Haass, “The Dangerous Decade: A Foreign Policy for a World in Crisis,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022, PP 25–38.

Ian I. Mitroff is credited as being one of the principal founders of the modern field of Crisis Management. He has a BS, MS, and a PhD in Engineering and the Philosophy of Social Systems Science from UC Berkeley. He Is Professor Emeritus from the Marshall School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communication at USC. Currently, he is a Senior Research Affiliate in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, UC Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Management. He has published 41 books. His latest is: The Socially Responsible Organization: Lessons from Covid, Springer, New York, 2022.

Photo by Mike Swigunski on Unsplash