Mikhail Gorbachev as the last president of the Soviet Union played a defining role in ending the Cold War standoff by devising new ways to conduct international diplomacy that emphasized mutual cooperation, even among former enemies.

With the world now facing a new challenge in the form of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Gorbachev, 89, contributed an opinion piece to The Asahi Shimbun titled, “The Pandemic as a Challenge and the New Thinking in the 21st Century.”

He argues that humanity and the international community must once again find a new way of thinking to overcome the pressing issues the pandemic has cast on contemporary society.

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The pandemic that has infected and killed hundreds of thousands of people is a new challenge threatening modern civilization. It exacerbates existing problems among states while at the same time being a product of them.

The new coronavirus crisis is international, cross-border and universal. All countries turned out to be equal in terms of their limited ability to counteract the new global threat.

The crisis has demonstrated that civilization has reached the point where the interrelation and interconnection of all its parts mean that it requires a new global policy to address the problems that have been exacerbated by the pandemic and require immediate action.

The current model of globalization has demonstrated its vulnerability by laying bare the depths of global inequality in the face of the challenges posed by the pandemic. The gap between the richest and poorest states and the increasing economic inequality have created a range of problems that no national government can resolve.

Thus far, the United States and Western Europe have borne the brunt of the pandemic, but scientists warn that the spread of the disease in Latin America and Africa may cause many more deaths.

The breakdown of trust in domestic governmental institutions and the increased distrust at the international level have become a global problem.

The only way to solve the trust crisis domestically is through democracy (or democratization). Internationally, the only way is to build up a dialogue.

The pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated the trend toward a new bipolar confrontation that could stem from the growing tensions between the United States and China. None of the possible scenarios of a bipolar confrontation appears to be favorable for the prospects of global politics.

Russia would be wise to make preventing the emergence of a confrontational bipolar global system an objective of its foreign policy. Today, when a new world order is emerging, there is a greater need for a non-opportunistic, substantive policy buttressed by a vision of global perspective.

Now more than ever, we need to revise the concept of security and demilitarize politics and thinking. The global community should take particular heed of U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call for an immediate cessation of all armed conflicts and my proposal that states cut their military budgets by 10 to 15 percent.

As a first step, the leading military powers could make a statement pledging to base the development of their military forces on the principles of reasonable defense sufficiency and transparency.

Of immediate urgency is the issue of tackling the biosecurity problem both in its military (the need to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention) and medical aspects (international cooperation in preventing and combating pandemics).

The response to these challenges must be comprehensive and all-encompassing. Humanity must develop this response together to move to a new level of international cooperation and advance the creation of a more reliable global security system.

“New political thinking” updated for the rapidly changing world can serve as the philosophical foundation for this policy. The concept of new thinking developed in the second half of the 1980s proposed a project to reshaping the world in accordance with universal human values, above all, human life, freedom and security for each and every individual.

Three decades ago, new political thinking marked a new hope for the progress of democratization and for a more equitable system of international relations. The policy of new thinking made it possible to put an end to the Cold War.

The concept of the new political thinking proceeds from the premise that states and peoples, while respecting each other’s independence and refraining from interference in each other’s affairs, at the same time recognize their common responsibility for the survival of humankind. This realization makes it possible to transition from confrontation to partnership.

The crisis caused by the 2020 pandemic puts this objective back on the agenda. The ideas of the new thinking must be brought back to global politics.