| Summary/Abstract |
Today, I have the rare honor of giving the annual John W. Holmes Memorial Lecture for a second time, the first time being in 2007.1 That gives me the distinct opportunity to reflect on what I said the first time, and whether it has held up or not. In the 2007 lecture, I speculated that it would take a big global shock or disruption to create the conditions for a real “San Francisco moment,” as it is often called—a major UN reset as momentous as the 1945 conference in San Francisco that led to its birth. Since then, there have been a number of major crises, possible San Francisco moments—the financial crisis of 2008, the current dramatic global public health crisis of COVID, and the longer running but no less dramatic crisis of climate change—and yet, if we’re frank, the UN remains stubbornly unchanged. There have been reforms at the margin, but we have not seen the response to these crises that we might have hoped for and even anticipated. The financial crisis kicked the Group of 20 (G-20) up a notch or two on the annual calendar of such events, from a meeting of finance ministers to a significant meeting of heads of state. Such a boost in its authority could perhaps have signaled the beginnings of the makings of an economic Security Council. After all, the G-20 brings together the top twenty economies in the world, representing the clear majority of global gross domestic product. But it has been as cautious and conservative as its older sibling, the Group of 7.
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