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Over the past thirty years the world’s major powers have all embraced “globalization”—an economic system that promised rising living standards across the world and that created common interests between the world’s most powerful nations. In the aftermath of the cold war, America was obviously the dominant global power, which added to the stability of the international system by discouraging challenges from other nations.
But the economic crisis that struck the world in 2008 has changed the logic of international relations. It is no longer obvious that globalization benefits all the world’s major powers. It is no longer clear that the United States faces no serious international rivals. And it is increasingly apparent that the world is facing an array of truly global problems—such as climate change and nuclear proliferation—that are causing rivalry and division between nations. After a long period of international cooperation, competition and rivalry are returning to the international system. A win-win world is giving way to a zero-sum world.
>"Zero-Sum Future" by Gideon Rachman
>The financial and economic crisis unleashed by the Wall Street crash of September 2008 threatened the globalization consensus that the leaders of the world's major powers had all accepted. It created something close to panic in prime ministers' offices and presidential palaces across the world.
Faced with the most serious economic upheaval since the 1930s, politicians fearfully looked back to the politics of the interwar period. Ed Balls, a British cabinet minister and the closest ally of Gordon Brown, the country's then prime minister, observed gloomily just after the Davos meeting of 2009 that the world was facing a financial crisis that was even more serious than that of the 1930s, adding "we all remember how the politics of that era were shaped by the economy."