Global health security: The retreat of the liberal international order and the prospects for cooperation in a multi-order world

This Forum article examines what the emergence of a multi-order world might mean for the future of international cooperation over global health security. It argues that recent years have seen a retreat of key states of the liberal international order from the internationalist vision of collective disease control, weakening its foundations. At the same time, leading states of other international orders, such as Russia and China, have been resistant to some of the core principles of global health security, and have primarily been interested in utilizing health as a part of their wider order-building strategies. We seem to be entering a future in which the world could splinter into multiple order-based sets of parallel cooperative arrangements. This is not a recipe for success in global health security given that transboundary disease threats cannot be addressed by individual international orders any more than they could by individual states.