From the article:
"At the international level, the next administration should work to defend and upgrade multilateral institutions that have come under strain. The European Union has just agreed to a large bailout package to help member states get back on their feet, but amid the pandemic, Brexit, and democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland, the bloc’s future is still uncertain. Meanwhile, UN agencies face the herculean task of reducing poverty, supporting human rights, and helping record numbers of migrants and refugees in the age of COVID-19. There are genuine substantive disagreements and problems inside many of these institutions, but they all suffer from the same central challenge: no international body can work properly when the world’s most powerful countries do not play their part by investing the time of senior officials and the resources that effective reforms require. The World Health Organization, for instance, has come under serious criticism for its indecisive leadership during the pandemic, but as Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official, has written, the WHO ultimately has to defer to its member states, who have saddled it with 'an expansive global mandate, but an annual budget of $2.2 billion, smaller than many major U.S. hospitals.'"