Geopolitical orders, including the balance of power, arise to contain threats and promote the interests of nations that benefit from the stability they maintain. The present order is still primarily a legacy of past world wars. National arsenals and multilateral institutions established to fortify that order have all been aimed at not having to fight the last war again or prevailing in a rematch. As such, they are proving woefully ill-equipped for the threats we face going forward: global pandemics like COVID-19 and what some have called “the slow-motion pandemic” of climate change.

Of what use are stealth bombers against a virus invisible to the naked eye? What good are anti-ballistic missiles when what we need are antibodies? How does a modernized nuclear force stack up against mutating microbes? What is the point of a shock-and-awe 30,000-pound bunker-buster bomb when microscopic droplets from a cough or a sneeze are just as devastating?

Clearly, the time has arrived to redefine what defense means in this age of the first-ever real-time global pandemic. The same is true for climate change: How will fleets of submarines and aircraft carriers defend against melting icecaps and rising seas? Exposure to the COVID-19 crisis is also dealing a terminal blow to the elderly multilateral institutions born after World War II that are seeing their last days in the nursing home of a passing era.

If these new threats and convergent interests will shape the next world order, what should it look like?

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