President Xi Jinping’s call to “build a community with a
shared future for mankind” will have an even better chance of being realized,
should the United States be ready to move beyond challenges and seize new
opportunities.
اضافة اعلان
With its recent general election, the Capitol Hill riot on
January 6 in Washington, DC, and the impeachment trial of former president
Donald Trump behind it, the US must now transition from challenges, and move on
to opportunities and new solutions.
The nation should recall the words of former president
Abraham Lincoln in his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, during
the US Civil War: “It is not ‘can any of us imagine better?’ but, ‘can we all
do better?’ ... We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our
country. ... Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. ... We shall nobly
save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
The time has come for the
US to disenthrall itself once
again and to revisit the first principles of its greatness, the foremost of
which is tolerance — now needed not just urgently, but existentially, to launch
a new discourse for global resilience and collaboration. In that spirit, as a
start, the US and China can endeavor to promote international tolerance,
sustainable development and cooperation at multiple levels globally. We need a
clear call to action.
First, about two weeks after the US general election on
November 3 last year, the International Day for Tolerance was observed. I,
along with my Global Challenges Forum Foundation co-founder, Walter Christman,
responded by issuing a Global Partnership Declaration. Our aim is to connect
the world through relational trust building and to confront the emerging
challenges of the 21st century.
More than ever, in a hyper-connected world, local is global,
and global is local. Remote challenges ripple globally. Any mass threat, no
matter how distant, is global.
Therefore, we must address challenges and collaborate. What
is needed is a world campaign encouraging a new spirit of partnership for
global resilience, while respecting the needs of China and the US to balance
complementarity and competition.
To build a shareable discourse respectful of all mankind,
and to avoid dividing humanity into rival blocs, the two nations must jointly
articulate shareable interests to the rest of the world. The new “last best
hope of earth” is for the US and China to join with other nations to co-develop
partnership principles for global resilience in the 21st century, while
reaffirming the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
Second, US President
Joe Biden’s well-received inaugural
speech on national healing should soon be followed by a speech on global
healing — with a call to build global partnerships for a sustainable world. The
COVID-19 pandemic has rattled everybody, and the paramount question the US
faces is not whether China is a threat, but whether post-pandemic nations will
become more resilient to manage future global challenges.
US-China relations, poised precariously, are paramount for
world progress, and all people await their positive development. Enabling
partnerships for global resilience is precisely why partnership is the final,
crowning goal among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Promoting tolerance,
global resilience, and youth empowerment for sustainable development are
feasible partnership options.
Emerging global challenges will be multiple, interconnected,
unpredictable, and persistent. Global challenges need global solutions, in
which we must all be partners.
We need a new global partnership that is more equitable and
balanced, also yielding mutually shared benefits. To pursue that entails
collective rethinking — on how to be secure, for example. There is no zero-sum,
absolute security. We are interdependent. We also need new thinking: concepts,
mechanisms, and means to achieve a secure world.
President Biden should respond positively to President Xi’s
call to “build a community with a shared future for mankind.”
Finally, I am issuing a call for all of humanity to join in
support of
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ statement that if the US and
China grow apart, the world risks splitting into two rival blocs. All peoples
everywhere should endorse his appeal for the two nations to cooperate to
overcome major challenges, including the
COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.
The issue before us is how best to move from challenges to
opportunities to solutions — by launching a new endeavor to promote global
resilience through partnerships for sustainable development.
I began with a thought from the great US president Lincoln.
I will end with wisdom from China, from the Analects of Confucius: “Men of
virtue can cooperate, even when they don’t agree; men of meanness can’t
cooperate, even when they agree.”
Let us all together face and overcome world divisions and
crises by recalling our virtue.
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