We did not see the back of 2009 soon enough. In fact, it will be good to be done with the entire first decade of this century. "Double Aught" is more revealing than it might seem. Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opines that the last 10 years should be called "the Big Zero," "a decade in which nothing good happened and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true."
That might be a distinctly American perspective on the last decade — Japan's "lost decade" is generally associated with the 1990s — but there is no escaping the disappointment that blankets any assessment of that period. One crisis followed another — from the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars they triggered, to the growing recognition that human activity was altering the climate, to a financial debacle that destroyed trillions of dollars of global wealth, ending the dream of millions of people who hoped to escape the poverty that marks their daily lives.
That enduring poverty is disturbing, but we should be even more troubled by the poverty of our collective imagination. It has been two decades since the end of the Cold War. The world has changed in fundamental ways; indeed, it is more accurate to say that the world has been transformed. Yet despite this change, the norms, institutions and operative procedures of global governance remain as they were. We seem to be running on autopilot. There is a profound need for the renewal and renovation — and in some cases the reconstruction — of the international system.