The 'new world order' of the past 35 years is being demolished before our eyes. This is how we must proceed

After a week that started with the worst financial volatility in recent history and ended with the most serious escalation so far of the China-US conflict, it is time to distinguish the tectonic shifts from the tremors. If nothing changes, the 2020s risks being remembered as this century's devil's decade - the term historians once used for the 1930s. It will be defined not just by seven million people who have died of Covid-19 and rising global poverty and inequality - but also by a dismembered Ukraine, a burnt-out Gaza and little-reported atrocities in Africa and Asia, each testimony to…