The Age of Converging Crises Why the Western liberal order is struggling to keep pace with the world it helped create
The Age of Converging Crises Why the Western liberal order is struggling to keep pace with the world it helped create Patrick R. Eaton, PhD The West’s gravest vulnerability is not any single adversary but a widening gap between the tempo of the challenges it faces and the tempo at which its institutions can decide, implement, and sustain a response. This essay defines that gap as an institutional adaptation deficit , proposes three ways to measure it, tests the idea against Europe and the United States, weighs the strongest objections, and sets out a transatlantic agenda for narrowing it. The European Parliament in plenary session, Strasbourg. Photo: Diliff, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA). In 1970, the futurist Alvin Toffler warned of a new affliction he called future shock : the disorientation that results when individuals experience more change than they can absorb. [1] His subject was the human psyche. More than half a century later, the diagnosis fits states be...