International security

The quiet global crisis that scares the State Department

A big new State Department assessment has identified a major threat to global security. It's not ISIS or Vladimir Putin. It's not a rickety global economy or climate change or the threat of global pandemics.Instead, the report argues, these individual problems are symptoms of a much bigger issue — namely, a slow breakdown in global governance. Many of the institutions that were created in the past century to deal with economic and security risks around the world, such as the UN and IMF, may no longer be adequate to the task.