Diplomacy Continues 'Normally' Despite Mounting Global Risks

Global governance since 1945 has rested on layered institutions. The United Nations and its General Assembly, the Bretton Woods economic bodies, and a growing set of regional and plurilateral groupings such as BRICS, the SCO, and the G20 all sit within this structure. It was designed to manage rivalry between states while putting a floor under systemic crises. It was never designed to override national sovereignty. This tension between national interest and global interest shaped Cold War arms control and decades of climate negotiations. It now shapes the emerging conversation on artificial intelligence governance as well.

The AI governance track shows the same pattern clearly. Since 2023, a sequence of summits has tried to build a shared framework for managing AI risk. The Bletchley Park Summit was held in the United Kingdom in 2023. The Seoul Summit followed in 2024. The AI Action Summit met at the Grand Palais in Paris in February 2025, co-chaired by India and France. Yet at Paris, the United States and United Kingdom declined to sign the joint declaration on inclusive and sustainable AI. This exposed a split between a safety-first camp and an access-first camp. India later hosted its own AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, organising its declaration around seven pillars called Chakras, to try to bridge frontier AI powers and the Global South. Alongside this multilateral track, the United States and China opened a narrower bilateral channel on AI risk. This echoes how Cold War superpowers negotiated nuclear risk-reduction rules even while competing fiercely elsewhere.

The same pattern of continuous summitry now recurs across BRICS, the SCO, and newer plurilateral formats. Diplomatic activity has become permanent and routine. What is less certain is whether this activity is proportional to the scale of the risks being discussed.