Henry Huiyao Wang: It’s time for global governance to reflect the new realities
CCG founder in South China Morning Post: Despite international tensions, countries still seek cooperation based on shared interests. Institutions must embrace this trend
The following is the latest piece by Henry Huiyao Wang, founder and President, Center for China and Globalization (CCG), in his South China Morning Post column.
It’s time for global governance to reflect the new realities
Despite international tensions, countries still seek cooperation based on shared interests. Institutions must embrace this trend
The global order has outgrown itself. The 2026 Munich Security Report describes this moment as a period of “wrecking-ball politics”, in which the post-war order constructed in 1945 is “under destruction”.
However, that order was designed for a world shaped by bipolar rivalry and later sustained by American predominance. Today’s global system looks very different: economically diffuse, environmentally constrained and politically fragmented but deeply interconnected by both trade and technology.
Meanwhile, rising populism in Western countries seeks to tear down multilateral structures perceived as holding back national prosperity.
Yet multilateral institutions remain anchored in yesterday’s distribution of power, while today’s challenges – climate change, digital fragmentation, supply-chain insecurity, debt distress and geopolitical rivalry – demand frameworks that reflect contemporary realities. Global governance has struggled to keep pace with these changes.
That old architecture was built for a world of steel, grain and territorial sovereignty. The system now finds itself confronting problems driven by data flows, artificial intelligence, cross-border platforms, atmospheric physics and globally integrated capital markets. Governance remains predominantly state-centric, while value creation and systemic risk increasingly transcend borders and sectors.
The late 20th century was defined by confidence in a rules-based international order that could universalise principles under Western stewardship. It was also built on fading asymmetries of influence and supported by states that wholeheartedly backed these ideas.
Today, economic weight has shifted towards Asia. Emerging economies command a growing share of global growth and trade. Middle powers increasingly assert strategic autonomy. We are witnessing an overdue recalibration amid the final death throes of the unipolar moment.
However, we aren’t returning to rigid Cold War blocs or militarised balance-of-power politics. Instead, we have entered a complex pattern of issue-based cooperation and small alignments – a world in which cooperation varies by domain and no single power can impose universal rules.
A patchwork system of overlapping coalitions, regional frameworks and minilateral operations is emerging where universal consensus is not necessary for cooperation. States may align on semiconductor security while diverging on climate finance or coordinate on maritime security while competing over industrial subsidies.
The erosion of the transatlantic relationship shows this process in motion. The US has threatened the territorial integrity of Greenland, called Canada the 51st state, cast doubt on Nato and arguably forced through a US-EU trade agreement which has been cast aside. Washington’s transatlantic and Indo-Pacific allies are now hedging against risk outside well-established blocs along ideological lines.
The assumption that the US will steward the multilateral system can no longer be taken for granted. As a result, the European Union’s long-standing pursuit of strategic autonomy is moving from rhetoric to practice.
Today we are entering a “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” moment in global politics, with the US, China and the EU anchoring networks of trade, financial flows, technology standards and industrial policy. Influence increasingly flows not through territorial control, but through voluntary and often non-committal engagement in platforms, standards-setting, supply chain integration and capital markets.
Middle powers are shaping affairs with their own agency. These states have awakened to the fact that they cannot just be rule takers. Instead, they increasingly act as brokers and coalition builders in a world where all must adapt.
Trade governance offers a clear illustration of this. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was once to be a US-led instrument of regional economic statecraft. Today it is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and is stewarded by middle powers after the US’ withdrawal.
A treaty to which Britain is in the process of acceding, and one that the EU and China seek entry into or engagement with, the CPTPP has evolved. It is shaped less by ideology than by mutual interest and economic standards.
Similarly, the acknowledgement of continued engagement on shared topics of interest in the form of limited coalitions shows a persistent demand for cooperation. As traditional ideologically based blocs decline, problems such as climate change, pandemics, financial contagion and technological disruption ignore geopolitical divides.
Multilateral governance must evolve from making rules to implementing rules. For decades, the primary achievement of global institutions was norm creation – trade liberalisation, financial standards, environmental accords and human rights conventions.
An updated agenda for multilateral governance should proceed on several fronts. The Group of 20, which encompasses both advanced and emerging economies, should be further institutionalised as a steering forum for macroeconomic coordination. Unlike narrower groupings, it reflects a more accurate distribution of global economic weight.
Restoring the functionality of the World Trade Organization remains essential. An interim arrangement to preserve dispute resolution shows that member states still value a rules-based system. Revitalising the WTO’s core mechanisms would help stabilise commercial relations amid geopolitical tension.
Fundamentally, reform of the United Nations remains imperative. The UN serves as the core source of international legitimacy, yet its architecture reflects a 20th-century geopolitical landscape. Expanding representation in key decision-making bodies, increasing the voice of developing countries and modernising agencies to address emerging domains such as digital governance and climate coordination would strengthen the UN.
The transition towards a more adaptive form of multilateral governance will not be frictionless. Strategic competition among major powers persists. Domestic political pressures complicate international compromise.
But multilateral governance 2.0 must reconcile continuity with change, preserving the normative foundations of cooperation while adjusting structures to reflect contemporary power distribution and practical needs. Freer from the bindings of bloc-based diplomacy, resolution of these issues is in sight. We must step forward into the future clear-eyed. (Enditem)
Henry Huiyao Wang's diagnosis of the current global governance crisis is both timely and precise. His framing of a "wrecking-ball politics" moment, in which multilateral institutions remain anchored in yesterday's power distribution while today's challenges including climate disruption, digital fragmentation, debt distress, and AI-driven supply chain volatility demand entirely new frameworks, is compelling and accurate. His recognition that we have entered an era of issue-based, minilateral cooperation rather than rigid bloc politics is particularly astute. The emergence of overlapping coalitions aligned by shared interest rather than ideology, illustrated vividly by the evolution of the CPTPP from a US-led instrument into a middle-power-stewarded trade framework, demonstrates that pragmatic multilateralism is not dead but merely searching for new operating architecture. Wang's call to move global governance from norm creation toward norm implementation is perhaps the most important distinction in the piece, and one that deserves to be taken seriously by policymakers across every tier of the international system.
Where Wang's framework can be meaningfully extended is in recognizing that synthetic intelligence offers precisely the operational infrastructure that "Multilateral Governance 2.0" requires but currently lacks. The G20's chronic weakness has never been its mandate but rather the absence of continuous, technically rigorous, politically neutral analytical support between summits. AI systems could fill this gap directly, providing real-time macroeconomic modeling, scenario analysis, and policy impact simulations that allow member states to negotiate from shared factual foundations rather than competing national projections. On WTO dispute resolution, AI-assisted legal analysis and precedent mapping could dramatically accelerate case processing, reduce the backlog that has paralyzed the appellate body, and surface compromise pathways that human negotiators, constrained by domestic political pressures, struggle to identify. At the UN level, large-scale AI systems could continuously monitor treaty compliance, flag emerging violations or risks across climate, health, and security domains, and model the downstream consequences of proposed reforms to representational structures, giving developing nations data-backed leverage in reform negotiations rather than leaving them dependent on the analytical capacity of wealthier states.
The practical benefits of enlisting synthetic intelligence as a core operational partner in this reformed multilateral architecture are substantial. Perhaps most critically, AI can serve as a depoliticizing force in negotiations where trust between major powers is thin, providing a shared analytical layer that the US, China, and the EU can each engage with independently while still working from common datasets, reducing the information asymmetries that fuel suspicion and deadlock. Climate finance coordination, one of the most intractable areas Wang identifies, could be transformed by AI systems capable of matching developing-country mitigation proposals with appropriate financing instruments, monitoring disbursement in real time, and dynamically adjusting recommendations as atmospheric and economic conditions evolve. Pandemic preparedness, supply chain resilience, and digital governance standard-setting are all domains where the speed and pattern-recognition capacity of synthetic intelligence vastly exceeds what human-staffed secretariats can deliver. Wang is right that the transition to adaptive multilateralism will not be frictionless, but synthetic intelligence, thoughtfully integrated into the institutions he rightly argues must reform, offers the most practical means of bridging the gap between the world governance system we have inherited and the one that today's deeply interconnected, rapidly changing world genuinely requires.