As leaders now exit from the G7 meeting in Biarritz France, it is worth reflecting on the state of the Liberal Order. Or, maybe more appropriately, and at least for the moment, its state of ‘Disorder’.

It has been a chaotic preceding week, even by Donald Trump standards, I think. Trump sharply raised his attack on various allies –  most particularly last week, Denmark. Attacks on allies have become rather routine, though exceedingly troubling. But this particular episode was to see the least – startling. In this case Trump suggested that the United Sates might want to purchase Greenland. When President Trump was met by a strong statement of rejection by Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, that called the President’s suggestion, “absurd”, the President called her statement ‘nasty’ and then turned around and postponed a state visit to one of America’s closest and most faithful allies. It led my colleague Thomas Wright of Brookings to conclude in an article in The Atlantic :

The cancellation of Trump’s visit to Denmark is part of a disturbing pattern. Trump regularly beats up on and abuses America’s closest democratic allies while being sycophantic to autocrats.

Then there was the continuing trade war with China. Just before Trump was to leave for Europe and the G7, China announced that it was prepared to  raise tariffs on $US75 billion worth of American-made goods, including crude oil, cars and farm products, if Mr. Trump was to carry through with plans to tax an additional $300 billion worth of imports from China. In an angry tweet  in response, President Trump declared: “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing our companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” Ordered! Yikes! After that Trump was ‘all over the map’ defending past statements such as ordering American companies to leave, then regretting the ratcheting up of tariffs only to have his officials suggest that he only wished he could raise the tariffs even higher. It could make one’s head spin.

Trump was clearly initially outraged by these various events. The responses were harsh and personal and not very diplomatic. This level of personal response hardly augured well for the weekend G7 meetings. It is therefore unsurprising – though a touch disappointing –  that even my Vision 20 colleague, Yves Tiberghien from UBC,  turned a thumbs down on this G7 meeting:

In sum, the G7 pageantry will offer little positive contribution to global systemic issues. Instead, the antics of Johnson and Trump may suck much of the oxygen. Some signs of hope may be found in lower-level concrete proposals emerging from well-intentioned year-long working groups on inequality, gender, environment, health, and African development.

Global governance today is torn between two highly different poles in shaping the evolving Liberal Order. One pole is energized by chaos.  Chaos has been driven principally, though not exclusively by Donald Trump. The shape of the Liberal Order future at this pole of the Liberal Order will be a highly fragmented system, or what some others have described as a largely G-Zero world. Not only would there be no major leadership – no hegemon in the IR parlance – but there would additionally be, as we are already seeing, rising great power rivalry from the United States, and China, especially in global economic relations, but not only, and additionally competition with Russia and potentially others in global political and security relations .

The other pole for an emerging Liberal Order is likely to be driven by a variety of leaders. In some instances this could be what has classically been described as multilateralism but the issues and the decision makers may have quite different configurations.  So Leadership, this the other pole, could rely on singular leadership, or it may emerge from bilateralism, or it may be made by various ‘coalitions of the willing’. This is what a number of us in the latest Blue Report at the Vision 20 call – ‘effective multilateralism‘. Now those who are the strongest believers in power and its consequences – the structural approaches  to international relations – view this Leadership construction of effective multilateralism as a ‘pipe dream’ – or worse. Especially those wedded to hegemony, and more particularly U.S. hegemony – believe that if there is no U.S. leadership then, there is no Liberal Order – no ‘rules-based’ order. But at the Leadership pole of the Liberal Order we look to the reconstitution of various leadership shapes notwithstanding the destructive policy advanced by President Trump and his Administration. As we declared in the Blue Report:

Should we then ‘throw up our hands’ and dismiss the prospects for multilateral leadership? We do not believe that is required. In describing the way forward, we have in various ways urged G20 leaders to exercise ‘effective multilateralism,’ defined as selective, targeted, and purposeful actions with varied coalitions. We believe encouraging effective multilateralism is a vital tool in meeting the challenges the G20 and the international system face.

These are quite different architectural shapes that could lead to quite distinct decision mechanisms. These various configurations suggest quite different probabilities for stability and reflect quite different prospects for global governance and the future of the Global Order, 

Many observers accept that chaos and instability are the future of the Global Order. Pessimism abounds among experts and analysts as a result of the growing chaos driven by President Trump.  That chaos was on full display this past week.  As WP  analysts Michael Birnbaum  and Damian Paletta describe:

Advisers to some of the other leaders at the summit said that they were resigned to having a meeting in which relatively little is agreed upon, and a best-case scenario in which they escape without having been bloodied by Trump’s angry tweets. One official said that Trump’s combative history at the summits was reducing the utility of the gathering, thus reducing U.S. power as well.

But such a disheartened view is both premature and unreflective of what may in fact emerge. It misses the fact that the evolving Global Order may not be driven by Trump and his evident chaotic behavior. Such pessimism ignores the actions that are a product of Leadership.

Were there, in fact, any instances in the G7 meeting that gave us some hints of the emergence of the Leadership architecture for the Liberal Order? In fact there were. There was the host, France’s President Macron abandoning the traditional Leaders’ communique. Some condemned the action but in the face of the contending poles this action eliminates a focus for Trump officials intent on diluting the collective efforts. And President Macron’s effort to at least reduce the temperature of the Iran crisis by inviting Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to the margins of the G7 was an intriguing stroke in a counter to the shape of a Trump action. It got the President at the press conference with President Macron immediately following the G7 to concede that he might in the right circumstances meet with Iran’s President Rouhani.  President Macron made clear that he  would try to set up such a meeting in the next few weeks.

And then there was the action by France, and other G7 countries to address the threat posed by the raging fires in the Amazon.  According to Peter Baker of the New York Times :

The Group of 7 agreed on a $20 million aid package to help Brazil and its neighbors fight the fires raging in the Amazon rain forest, President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Monday. Mr. Macron and President Sebastián Piñera of Chile said they also had reached an agreement in concept with the countries of the Amazon basin for a long-term program of forest protection and reforestation of cleared lands. They said more details might be presented next month at the United Nations General Assembly.

The announcements followed a session on climate, the oceans and biodiversity that included representatives of several countries that are not members of the Group of 7. President Trump did not attend that meeting, according to Mr. Macron.

Here then a coalition of the willing emerged to tackle a dramatic immediate crisis and the added commitment to dealing with climate change, an issue that the United States under Donald Trump is not prepared to tackle in a serious way.

So, Leadership was present in this global summit.  These Leadership instances do not lead one to conclude that the shape of the Global Order will be a product of this pole; nor does it lead us to conclude that Chaos is the only future.

Image Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times and politico.eu