On Monday, US President Joe Biden raised some eyebrows when he stated that a “new world order” would be developed shortly, and it would be up to the US to spearhead it.
Biden claimed the globe was at a “inflection point” that “occurs every three or four generations” and therefore it was up to the US to decide the result during an address at the Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting.
“As one of the top military people said to me in a security meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946, and since then we’ve established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while,” the president said.
“A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos, and now is the time when things are shifting,” he continued.
There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it, and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it
The remark sparked outrage in the United States and throughout the globe, with ‘New World Order’ emerging as a hot topic on Twitter on Monday.
Former US President George H. W. Bush, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair have all employed the phrase “new world order” to allude to a period of significant international upheaval in the past.
However, for decades, the phrase has always been the focus of a popular conspiracy theory alleging a covert, aristocratic effort to establish an authoritarian worldwide government.
Politicians and government officials have been chastised in the past for using the word, most recently Dr. Kerry Chant, the chief health officer of New South Wales in Australia.
“We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the new world order,” Chant stated at a Covid-19 press conference in September, enabling the term to become popular on social media.
Social media users and journalists criticized Chant for using the term, with former journalist Chris Urquhart writing on Twitter that “government officials would be well advised to avoid phrases like ‘the new world order’ when they’re talking at press conferences about massive limitations on people’s freedoms.”