Mark Leonard: Governing a post-Western world

The sooner the United States, Europe, and their allies recognise the limits of the post-1945 international institutions they established, the better off they will be

Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg speaks with US President Joe Biden during a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of a Nato summit in Brussels. China pursued a three-pronged strategy of extracting as much value as it could from global institutions while also preserving its own sovereignty and building parallel institutions. 

When Nato leaders descend on Vilnius this month for the alliance’s annual summit, they will demonstrate that the organisation, newly united behind support for Ukraine, is far from “brain dead,” as French President Emmanuel Macron infamously described it in 2019. 

But Nato's new vitality belies a larger problem: the West’s failure to convince the rest of the world that it also has a stake in Ukraine’s defence is emblematic of a broader shift.