Former Prime Minister Bruce Golding is warning that the rules-based international order built after the Second World War is under serious threat and is urging world leaders to change course before the damage becomes permanent.
Golding makes the appeal in a column published in the Jamaica Observer, adapted from his address to the fourteenth World Peace Forum at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Robian Williams tells us more.
The former Prime Minister argues that the global architecture assembled in the wake of a war that claimed some 80 million lives is being steadily rolled back.
He points to what he describes as a resurgence of isolationism now dressed up as nationalism.
Golding says putting one’s own country first has never been incompatible with multilateralism, insisting national goals are better pursued through collaboration than through retreat.
He points to a string of conflicts and actions he says exemplify the erosion of peaceful international relations.
In his characterisation, these include the unprovoked Russian assault on Ukraine, the bombing of vessels in the Caribbean Sea he says are alleged but not proven to be carrying illegal drugs, a United States incursion in Venezuela, the war on Iran, and the denial of oil shipments to Cuba.
Golding argues the Geneva Convention is being shredded, and warns that might has been reaffirmed as right.
He also cautions that the retreat from cooperation carries real-world costs, linking the recent Ebola outbreak in parts of Africa to a scaling back of disease surveillance aid to the world’s poorest countries and noting that the virus recognises no borders.
The former Prime Minister reserves pointed criticism for the current United States leadership, which he describes as a principal driver of the new blueprint.
He says that leadership will soon pass, but questions whether the discord it has sown will harden into a new norm.
At the heart of his message is a warning about trust, which Golding says takes a long time to build and even longer perhaps more than a generation to rebuild.
He says the world is facing its most severe test since the Cuban missile crisis more than sixty years ago, warning that modern weapons are far more lethal than those of the Second World War, and that peaceful co-existence is the only alternative to catastrophe.
Invoking the anti-war message of Marvin Gaye, Golding says small countries like Jamaica with little economic or military power would be ruined in any such conflagration.
He closes with a call for the World Peace Forum to move beyond talk and stimulate action, urging leaders to heed what he calls the call of history.
