How to Fix Our Global Malaise

Fixing Global Malaise: How Rebuilding Local Communities Can Counter Populism

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Essay: How to Fix Our Global Malaise

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Essay

How to Fix Our Global Malaise

Focusing on local communities can have a surprising international effect.

October 5, 2026, 4:00 AM

By **Gordon Brown**, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom and the U.N. special envoy for global education. Brown is the author of *The Future Starts With Us*.

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In a landmark June speech delivered to the Economic Club of New York commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talked of a new economic statecraft, rejecting the long-established U.S. commitments to free trade, the free movement of capital, and an open world economy. The speech turned 80 years of U.S. international policy on its head.

The United States would now practice the “disciplined use of America’s economic power in service of our sovereignty” by weaponizing U.S. assets, including the dollar and U.S. control of the international payments system, by building national capacity and by requiring the world to accept U.S.-imposed protocols. This would, Bessent said, entrench U.S. global leadership even if it meant imposing sanctions not just on adversaries but on long-friendly countries where necessary. These allies would be subject to “non-negotiable obligations.”

In a landmark June speech delivered to the Economic Club of New York commemorating the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talked of a new economic statecraft, rejecting the long-established U.S. commitments to free trade, the free movement of capital, and an open world economy. The speech turned 80 years of U.S. international policy on its head.

The United States would now practice the “disciplined use of America’s economic power in service of our sovereignty” by weaponizing U.S. assets, including the dollar and U.S. control of the international payments system, by building national capacity and by requiring the world to accept U.S.-imposed protocols. This would, Bessent said, entrench U.S. global leadership even if it meant imposing sanctions not just on adversaries but on long-friendly countries where necessary. These allies would be subject to “non-negotiable obligations.”

The speech followed a November 2024 note by Stephen Miran, who would later become chair of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, that envisaged a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” with the United States restructuring the global economic order entirely in its national interests. Both signaled that the decades-old Washington Consensus no longer had the support of Washington itself. If in the past the United States acted multilaterally in a unipolar world, now it would act unilaterally—despite the fact that ours is becoming a multipolar world.

We cannot overstate the importance of the changes now underway. Just as three Western-led world orders—the Concert of Europe after 1815, the League of Nations from 1918 to 1939, and the United Nations Charter-led order of 1945—rose and fell in the last two centuries, so too the fourth order, the U.S.-led liberal international order triumphantly announced by George H.W. Bush in 1990, is now declared by its authors to be dead, having lasted little longer than today’s average marriage. But the question that matters is whether we are condemned to return to a world divided into spheres of influence or to a U.S.-China “one world, two systems” future or, simply, to disorder. Or is a fifth and stable world order now possible, and, if so, could it be grounded in something more solid than temporary marriages of diplomatic convenience? And what form might it have to take if we are to restore the domestic legitimacy that the post-1990 order lost—and failed fully to recover—after the global financial crisis?

!A row of young adults sitting on chairs against a weathered wall, reading documents, talking, and looking at mobile devices.

*A row of young adults sitting on chairs against a weathered wall, reading documents, talking, and looking at mobile devices.*
: Unemployed people fill out forms at a jobs fair in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, on Nov. 11, 2009. AFP/Getty Images

!A line of men gathered alongside a large bus on a street framed by tall modern buildings in the background.

*A line of men gathered alongside a large bus on a street framed by tall modern buildings in the background.*
: Migrant workers line up for a bus to return them to labor camps after a day of work in Dubai on July 11, 2008. Ghaith Abdul Ahad/Getty Images

Left:
Unemployed people fill out forms at a jobs fair in Hefei, in China’s Anhui province, on Nov. 11, 2009. AFP/Getty Images Right:
Migrant workers line up for a bus to return them to labor camps after a