Lives depend on new leadership skills for the 21st century

The double whammy of COVID-19—with its unprecedented fatalities and collapsing economy—plus race-related violence and property destruction the likes of which the United States hasn’t seen since the 1960s, says a lot about American leadership today. Rather than bringing people together and seeking to heal a wounded nation, President Donald Trump, in order to satiate his own ego, is dividing the country in a primitive attempt to reinforce his electoral base and enhance his prospects for a second term. In so doing, he is accelerating the unravelling of what was America’s already fragile social fabric. As he has done consistently in office, he creates much of the problem, then deploys his version of policy strength to show that only he can resolve it—much as he did in dealing with denuclearization in North Korea. In a column I wrote in February 2017, shortly after the president’s inauguration when he promised to “make America great again,” I asked if a global recession might not be a best-case scenario during his first term in office. With only seven months left in the term, there is every prospect that a global recession could indeed be the least of America’s woes. Not only has his leadership resulted in the chaos Americans are experiencing at home, with extraordinary pace, it has also diminished the global respect, goodwill, and moral high ground that President Barack Obama and his predecessors had built and been able to preserve since the end of the Second World War. Global polls today are consistent in revealing shrinking confidence in U.S. leadership, and a growing perception that the Trump administration and its Republican acolytes are remoulding America’s ethos—imperfect though it was—from that of a steward of democratic values, human rights, and a principled ally to other democratic states, into one of a self-centred, uncaring, and unprincipled force that can no longer be relied upon to promote the global public good—a narcissist foreign policy reflective of a narcissist leader. It is a state driven almost exclusively by its narrow self-interest, irrespective of what long-time allies, experts, and science-based policy might recommend. The unprecedented failure to convene the planned G7 meeting earlier this month—with key allies Germany, Canada, and the U.K. rejecting Trump’s proposal to invite Russia back into the organization—and his holding of a mass electoral campaign rally on June 20 in a state with a rising incidence of the virus, despite warnings from health professionals that it posed high risks for attendees and their families, are graphic symptoms of America’s retreat into national parochialism. Indeed, such is the callousness of the Trump leadership that his office required that all rally attendees sign a waiver that would prevent his administration from being sued should attendees contract the virus whilst there. When one considers that global pandemics are not the only challenge we face in the years to come, this blatant disregard for science and public health is even more unsettling. In addition to COVID-19, a number of other trends will also define American well-being in the coming years, with their impact extended to the health of the entire planet. These include the high probability of new pandemics emerging from a demographic transition that within 20 to 30 years will increase the planet’s population from its current 7.8 billion inhabitants to about 10 billion—three times what it was in the early 1970s—the vast majority of whom will be living in cities. This will require more housing, transport infrastructure, energy, and more land under cultivation for food. It will also intensify human contact with the animal world including, like bats, vectors of other viral diseases. A rapidly warming planet with increased flooding, droughts, and extreme weather will augment areas that become uninhabitable, accelerating migration flows that will prove increasingly difficult to manage, while fragmenting social cohesion even further. Inexorable also is the revolutionary transformation generated by robotization and artificial intelligence (AI), producing industrial and labour obsolescence at a pace that our current economic and social structures are not yet equipped to effectively address. Our political leadership has, for the most part failed to invest in the public education and training that would enhance the cognitive skills those being made redundant will require. Instead, America has Trump and the Republican party seeking to privatize education and training (not unheard of amongst some Canadian political leadership), while at the same time vowing to bring back jobs in coal mining, oil and gas (that, too, sounds familiar)—all sectors which a warming planet and AI and robotization will soon render obsolete. This failure of political leadership to recognize the larger, longer-term trends, the inexorable forces that determine our planet’s evolution—a function largely of a self-righteous aversion to expertise and scientific knowledge—puts us all on a dangerous path. The fact that the governments of the five countries with some of the highest levels of COVID-19 and related fatalities—the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Russia, and India—are all governed by populists, is not coincidental. From the elimination by the Trump administration of references to “evidence-based policy” in official U.S. documents—a practice engaged in first by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government—to Boris Johnson’s initial reliance on the advice of his “behavioural advisors,” Dominic Cummings and Steve Hilton (now a Fox News host), to Jair Bolsonaro’s assertions that COVID is little more than a seasonal flu, we witness leaders who neither perceive nor comprehend these global trends. Indeed, what they all have in common is an almost ahistorical view of the world that fails to recognize the systemic flaws in their societies—racism, sex and gender discrimination—that along with growing income inequality are at the core of today’s social upheavals. Instead, the inexorables—global warming, the demographic transition, robotization, and AI—require enlightened, empirically informed leaders with the courage to radically restructure our economic and social institutions so that they effectively address these global trends in support of both the nation’s public interest and the planet as a whole. Joseph Ingram is the chairman of Capitalis Partners, a former president of the North South Institute, and a former World Bank special representative to the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. He is an expert adviser to the Global Growth Dialogue and a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. The Hill Times

Lives depend on new leadership skills for the 21st century

When one considers that global pandemics are not the only challenge we face in the years to come, this blatant disregard for science and public health is even more unsettling.

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Lives depend on new leadership skills for the 21st century

When one considers that global pandemics are not the only challenge we face in the years to come, this blatant disregard for science and public health is even more unsettling.

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