Recent events have exposed the multilateral institutions tasked with facilitating and preserving global peace and stability as wholly ineffectual.

That’s nothing new. Indeed, describing the UN and sundry G[n]s as “ineffectual” is actually me being generous. I could conjure a long list of other, more pejorative adjectives. And they’d all be just as apt, if not more so.

But the slow-motion dissolution of the post-War world order feels increasingly like a fast-moving collapse. Unfortunately, that’s the context for this week’s meetings in Washington, where a who’s who of global somebodies with meet under the banners of the IMF and World Bank in the shadow of proliferating conflicts and amid the specter of a return to great power struggles.

New economic projections, including from the IMF, will be touted over the next 48 hours. And then summarily dismissed as meaningless the very second they’re released.

For whatever it’s worth, the Fund will probably upgrade its assessment to reflect a slightly quicker pace of global growth versus the current 3.1%.

Again, nobody will care, nor will anyone read the accompanying color. The IMF update will be good for a media headline or two, and that’s about it.

All the biggest names in central banking will speak at this week’s convention of elites. Markets will hear from Jerome Powell, Christine Lagarde, Andrew Bailey and Kazuo Ueda, among others.

Topics will invariably include the persistence of services-sector inflation, the tradeoff between growth and price stability, the difficulty of estimating the equilibrium rate for a new macro regime, the challenges of setting policy in a turbulent world, the demise of the so-called “peace dividend” (and the implications for macro outcomes and thereby monetary policy), rolling commodities volatility (and the read-through for goods inflation), fiscal dominance and so on.

It’ll be interesting to see if anyone mentions what’s shaping up to be a meaningful divergence between the Fed and its developed market counterparts, sans Japan. As discussed at length in the latest Weekly, Fed cuts are now a second-half story if they’re a 2024 story at all. By contrast, the ECB and the BoE are poised to start cutting fairly soon. There’s virtually no chance Lagarde and Bailey won’t cut in 2024. It’s possible, albeit unlikely, that the Fed will hold terminal through year-end.

As for the broader discussion around our fractious and fracturing world, everyone knows how that’ll play out this week. We’re talking about the politest of polite company in D.C., which means attendees will all suggest, in one way or another, that the best way forward for the species is together, in pursuit of a shared human destiny.

They’ll be right, of course, but the disconnect with the current state of global affairs (bloody conflict and an unfathomable lack of consensus on the desirability of stopping it) will be too glaring to ignore. That, in turn, means everyone will be compelled to address the notion that the world’s teetering on the brink of a quarrelsome, existential abyss. In that regard, everyone will say conflict’s bad, and multilateral problem solving’s good.

Then, a week from now once it’s all over, everybody will go back to killing each other and picking sides in what’s shaping up to be a bipolar world where 21st century hegemony is contested between two blocs: One defined by America’s interests and the other by China’s. (Pick a side. Neutrality won’t be an option. Just ask Sweden.)

As Kristalina Georgieva put it last week while previewing the IMF’s new economic outlook, “We have to buckle up. [This] is a world in which we have seen divergence not just in economic fortunes but also in objectives.”