Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast.

I'm Wolfgang Munchau, and with me, Asa Zanamunshank and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about the decline of international institutions.

Jack, you wrote about the UAE leaving OPEC.

Now, OPEC is an international institution.

It's not just a cartel.

It is a cartel, but it is formally an international

institution. And it heads OPEC now. It is not just WTO and EU and NATO. It hits OPEC now. And

it's hit NATO as well, which is, while not an international institution, it is an alliance, a defense

alliance. So we have a very consistent

picture now that the age of globalization is definitely changing, definitely changing against

the institutional setup that was created in the post-world world and that has proved remarkably

stable until it didn't. Jack, what do you

make of this? I think the interesting thing about OPEC, and I think sort of what's equally

interesting about the problems that it's going through at the moment, is that it sort of superficially

looks like quite a different institution from the others. But OPEC exists, I think,

for a similar reason that many of these other institutions exist at its core, right? So the differences

are, you know, OPEC did not come about in the immediate post-war era, unlike institutions,

like the ones that sprung out of the UN system, which for that matter

includes institutions like the World Bank and IMF or NATO, which was founded shortly after the end

of World War II. OPEC came about a decade and a half after that in the early 1960s. And it didn't become the sort of really

globally prominent institution that it is today until quite a bit later than that, even in the

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