What Should Be the Capital of the New World Order?

In recent years, the United States has retreated from many global leadership roles. It has imposed tariffs, questioned long-standing mutual defense pacts like NATO, challenged democratic norms and cut funding to human rights watchdogs, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, and shuttered USAID.

What places are stepping up to replace Washington when it comes to international trade, diplomacy, advancing democracy, climate, and global health?

We asked international trade scholar James T. Gathii, Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies senior researcher Sansom Milton, Democracy International global policy and advocacy lead Caroline Vernaillen, documentary filmmaker and ASU journalism professor Marcos Colón, and Planetary Health Philippines convener Renzo Guinto to make a case for new global capitals in Nairobi, Doha, Bonn, the Amazon, and Manila.

This “Up for Discussion” is part of “What Is the New World Order?,” Zócalo’s series of editorial essays and a public program, presented in collaboration with JLF Los Angeles, that draws on history, literature, and politics to help us understand the world’s next turn.

Nairobi Is the Future of Trade

James T. Gathii

If we measure trade power not by the volume of goods moving through ports and financial markets but by where new ideas about governing trade are emerging, Nairobi has a strong claim as the new capital of international trade.

Across much of the 20th century, the rules of international trade were largely designed elsewhere and then exported to Africa. Today, policymakers, lawyers, legislators, businesses, and civil society actors meeting in Nairobi are increasingly asking more fundamental questions: What would trade governance look like if Africa’s priorities, rather than external interests, were at the center? And can African institutions help realize a long-standing ambition: transforming Africa from a rule-taker into a rule-maker in international trade, and into a competitive center of production and innovation?

The answer is complicated. Nairobi is hardly a revolutionary city. Kenya remains deeply connected to global financial networks and maintains close relationships with powerful external actors. These include the United States, the European Union, China, international financial institutions, and multinational corporations. Its designation as a major non-NATO ally of the United States is emblematic of how well-embedded Kenya is in these contemporary global economic and security networks.

But now, the world is no longer dominated by a single power. And countries like Kenya are at a crossroads. Competing visions of Africa’s economic future collide in Nairobi.

One vision sees Africa as a supplier of raw materials and a market for goods produced elsewhere. Another seeks to keep more of the production process within Africa, from processing agricultural products and critical minerals to manufacturing pharmaceuticals, textiles and consumer goods. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the clearest expression of that second vision. It is the largest free trade zone in the world consisting of 54 countries across Africa, or 1.4 billion people in a market worth $3 trillion. For the first time, African countries are developing common trade rules and lowering barriers to commerce on a continental scale, creating opportunities for African firms to serve African markets before looking elsewhere.

What makes Nairobi especially significant is that it has become a laboratory for testing whether African economic self-determination can move from aspiration to reality. The AfCFTA, the East African Community, and regional legislatures are all testing whether Africa can govern integration on its own terms rather than through inherited models designed elsewhere. Indeed, Africa’s experiments with regional integration, including efforts to connect economic integration with broader social and development goals, may offer lessons for the rest of the world.

The future of trade will not be decided only by markets, ports, or investment flows. It will be shaped by the institutions that govern them, and the new ideas that guide them. If Nairobi has become important, it is because it is helping answer one of the defining questions of our time: Can economic integration become a pathway to economic transformation and greater self-determination?

James T. Gathii is the Wing-Tat Lee Chair in International Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a leading scholar of international trade and African regional integration. His work explores how international law can advance economic transformation, development, and self-determination in Africa and the Global South.

Doha Is the Center of Diplomacy

Sansom Milton

In a truly multipolar world, there is a need for a plurality of capitals that serve as key nodes for global diplomacy. Over the past few decades, Doha emerged as one such capital, a heavyweight in peacemaking and conflict mediation.

Doha serves as a bridge between East and West, literally and figuratively. Hosting the offices of proscribed groups such as the Taliban and Hamas made Doha indispensable for global efforts to engage with these movements through diplomacy. Notably, it was the U.S. that first requested that Doha host both of those offices—a key steppingstone on the pathway to the strong U.S.-Qatar partnership seen in conflict mediation today in Afghanistan, DRC, Libya, and elsewhere.

The U.S.-Taliban talks are a case in point. Engagement with the Taliban ran through Doha in various forms over the course of a decade, starting with initial exploratory talks in safe and confidential spaces in Doha far removed from the battlefields of Afghanistan. The process later widened into multi-party facilitation involving Qatar, Norway, Germany, and other third parties, with a steady stream of mediation professionals flowing through the city.

In interviews for my research, leading practitioners of mediation consistently emphasized Doha’s importance to Qatar’s rise in conflict mediation. They noted the ease of facilitating peace processes in Doha—a compact, well-serviced city where hotels, conference venues, and the rhythms of daily life sit close together. Doha is also located between Asia and Africa, offering direct and relatively short flights to many conflict- and crisis-affected countries involved in peace talks. More broadly, Doha served an integrated urban hub for brokering peace negotiations, engaging in humanitarian diplomacy, and as a convening platform for global policy and academic communities.

Contrary to predictions of its demise, Doha’s rise as a key site for the conduct of global diplomacy has been decades in the making and will not be undone by any single crisis, including the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. Gulf capitals continue to serve as vital economic, transport, and diplomatic hubs. Moreover, since the Strait of Hormuz has emerged as the key flashpoint for geopolitical tensions and economic disruption, the region will likely play an even more important role as diplomatic centers in which such tensions are managed.

Sansom Milton is a senior researcher at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies and co-author with Ghassan Elkahlout of Gulf to Global: The Rise of Qatar in Conflict Mediation.

Bonn Does Democracy Right

Caroline Vernaillen

If there is to be a new international capital of democracy, Bonn has an unlikely claim to the title: It knows how to stop being a capital.

After World War II, Bonn became the provisional seat of the West German government. It was a choice born out of necessity and the dawn of the Cold War. The first parliament met in a former teachers’ college. A return to Berlin was always the goal and when the wall fell, Bonn relinquished power.

And in doing so, Bonn cemented its global leadership. Bonners are Germans, Europeans, Indians, Brazilians, and Kiwis. One third of the people here have a migration background. International organizations, including the U.N. climate secretariat, are based here. In recent weeks, traffic on the Rhine was closed due to an unprecedented drought. Here, we see the effects of climate change and we know the people working to stop it. If you want local to global, Bonn has got it.

Bonn does democracy well. As a Belgian in Bonn, I have been asked to sign citizens’ initiatives, vote on local proposals, and participate in budgeting decisions. Some concern ambitious developments; others concern swimming pools. If that sounds a little random, that is the point. Democracy is not only elections, parliaments, and presidents. It’s letting people decide on the places and lives they share.

In my work with Democracy International, I’ve spent a decade asking people what they think about how we make decisions. And boy, do they have ideas. As humanity is faced with increasingly bleak futures, perhaps we should have a little more faith in our shared values and creativity. We are more educated and more connected than ever. We can do democracy better! Why should we not make global decisions with citizens? Just as Germans believed that East Berlin would be free again, we can believe that humanity is not fated to be ruled by authoritarians, tech bros, and mega-corporations.

International institutions could learn something from this former capital. Seats of power should be transient (like Europe’s rotating council presidency) and democracy should not care about passports. As global problems increasingly require global decisions, citizens need more ways to participate in making them. Bonn’s most famous resident, Ludwig van Beethoven, composed the “Ode to Joy,” which became the European Union’s anthem. From this quiet former capital on the Rhine, now emerges an ode to a different kind of power: less permanent, more participatory, and shared.

Caroline Vernaillen has spent the past decade pushing for a democracy fit for our time and the challenges we face. A Belgian based in Bonn, she leads global policy and advocacy at Democracy International, championing a stronger citizen voice from the local to the global level.

The Amazon Is a Climate Capital Without a Country

Marcos Colón

Can the Amazon become the new capital of global climate policy? Only if we stop imagining a climate capital as another Washington.

The Amazon is central to the planet’s climatic metabolism, and that ecological centrality gives it unavoidable geopolitical significance. The Amazon can be a capital of climate representation, but in order to become a capital for transformative climate policy its people need to be heard.

The Pan Amazon is a living system that exceeds national borders, stretching across eight sovereign countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela, as well as French Guiana, an overseas territory of France. Brazil’s Legal Amazon alone covers nearly 60% of the country’s territory. Across the wider region, more than 500 Indigenous peoples live alongside Afro-descendant, riverine, peasant, and other traditional communities. They represent hundreds of ways of inhabiting, sensing, interpreting, and imagining the world, and therefore different understandings of what territory, development, prosperity, and life itself can mean.

The peoples of the Amazon are already practicing another kind of climate diplomacy, one that has no seat at any existing table.

Consider what happened along the Tapajós River in the Brazilian state of Pará. Indigenous peoples from across the region, including Munduruku communities, occupied and blockaded the grain terminal of the U.S. agribusiness corporation Cargill in Santarém. They opposed plans to dredge the river and expand its use for transporting soy and other commodities to global markets, as well as a federal decree opening Amazonian waterways to private concessions. After 33 days of mobilization, the Brazilian government revoked the decree.

This resistance defends a territory and interrupts the material circuits that drive climate collapse—the expansion of monocultures, deforestation, and extraction.

For the Munduruku people, moreover, the Tapajós River, Idixidi, is not simply infrastructure or a natural resource. It is an ancestor and an active participant in a living cosmos shared among people, fish, animals, forests, waters, and other beings. Defending the river therefore means more than conserving nature. It means protecting the relationships and flows through which life itself reproduces.

Seen this way, what happened on the Tapajós is also climate policy, even if it is rarely recognized as such. It asks not simply how much carbon can be reduced but what relationships between economy, territory, and life must be protected for a livable climate to remain possible?

For generations, governments have imagined Pan Amazonian regional integration as the physical and economic connection of the Amazon across national borders through highways, ports, pipelines, dams, waterways, and commodity corridors. Too often, integration has meant connecting territories of extraction to distant markets.

Imagine a climate politics that reversed that geography, where integration begins with rivers and watersheds that connect peoples and ecosystems across national boundaries and forms corridors of cultural and ecological continuity. Forests would not simply become reservoirs of carbon to be priced by global markets, but living territories that make life possible. I call these possibilities Amazonian Utopias: futures imagined from within the forest, grounded in ancestral knowledge and relationships that sustain life rather than turn it into a commodity.

This would mean connecting territories of life: Indigenous lands, Afro-descendant communities, forests, rivers, watersheds, food systems, and the human and more-than-human communities that sustain them.

As U.S. climate leadership retreats, the Amazonian countries do not need to occupy Washington’s vacant chair. Perhaps the next capital of climate policy is not a city or even a country. It is a living, multilingual territory capable of teaching international politics something it has struggled to learn: Governing the climate ultimately means governing our relationships with the systems that make life possible.

Marcos Colón is the Southwest Borderlands Initiative Assistant Professor of Media and Indigenous Communities at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is director of Beyond Fordlândia (2018) and Stepping Softly on the Earth (2022), author of The Amazon in Times of War (La Amazonía en tiempos de guerra, 2025), and organizer of Utopias Amazônicas (2025).

Manila Offers a New Vision for Global Health

Renzo Guinto

The Philippines, my home country, may be emerging as a new leader in global health. One reason is that important global health institutions, such as the WHO Western Pacific Regional Office and the Asian Development Bank, are stationed in Manila. But the country has much more to offer in terms of global health leadership and diplomacy.

Globally, everyone knows the Philippines for the astounding number of health professionals it trains and exports. The country is the No. 1 source for health workers, especially nurses, in the U.S. Yes, the high out-migration of health workers results in shortages and maldistribution domestically. But it also indicates that the Philippines has an enormous pool of talent, and the world can learn from how the country trains its health workers. The WHO estimates a global shortage of 11 million health workers by 2030, especially in developing countries. From Saudi Arabia to Singapore, Filipino health workers do not only practice, but also teach in medical, nursing, and other health professional schools, helping prepare the next generation of healers worldwide. They are not only technically equipped according to global standards. Compassion and care are at the heart of their training.

What’s more, the Philippines offers a model for a climate-ready healthcare system. Extreme weather events such as typhoons and heatwaves cause disease outbreaks, disrupt hospital operations and medicine supply chains, and kill people. Working in a nation often ranked the most climate-vulnerable in the world, health leaders in the Philippines are increasingly embracing the concept of “planetary health,” which recognizes the inextricable linkage between the health of people and that of the planet.

Already, the Philippines has developed climate laws such as the Climate Change Act and the Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Act that were once described by the United Nations as the “best in the world.” Building on these foundations, the Philippine Department of Health recently launched a national roadmap for climate and health and estimated the carbon footprint of its entire national health system, setting an example for many developing countries. In 2024, the Philippine government, together with WHO, launched the Philippine-Pacific Health Initiative, allowing neighboring Pacific Island nations to learn from the Philippines’ longstanding experience in health system strengthening and disaster risk reduction.

Finally, the Philippines is a laboratory for health innovation. The country continues to face many longstanding public health challenges, from infectious disease outbreaks to inequitable healthcare access. These experiences can make it a better learning platform for low- and middle-income countries than wealthier nations. Here, research institutes, implementing organizations, and entrepreneurial start-ups can test early-stage solutions, which health officials can later adopt and spread to scale. Filipino authorities, for instance, have been working to revitalize universal health care in the country, incentivizing efficiency and quality and prioritizing preventive health and primary care. These ongoing reforms can provide lessons to many countries who are embarking on the same journey to health equity; maybe even the U.S. one day.

As the U.S. steps back from global health leadership and a next generation calls for “decolonizing” global health away from the usual suspects of power, it is now time for new hubs for global health governance to emerge. The Philippines is one strong candidate. It should embrace this opportunity to open new pathways to a more inclusive and just global health order.

Renzo Guinto is a Filipino public health physician who specializes in the intersection of climate change and human health. He is the convener of Planetary Health Philippines and is an adviser to the World Health Organization and U.S. National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown

The post appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.