Author Archives: Alan Alexandroff

About Alan Alexandroff

Alan is the Director of the Global Summitry Project and teaches at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Alan focuses much of his attention on difficult global order issues including the appearance and consequences of the multilateral environment and the many global summits, especially the Informals such as the G7 and G20.

United States and its Course of Action With China – A Coming Podcast with Susan Thornton

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Errors have been made. And inconsistencies have occurred. But the current Trump policy toward China and its apparent encouragement  of a renewal of ‘the Cold War’ – in this instance with China – is simply stupefying. And very likely dangerous. As the Editorial Board of the Washington Post (WP) put it on August 6th:

Still, the risks are real, and Mr. Trump’s approach inspires no confidence that he has some strategic objective in mind, as opposed to the continuation of conflict with China for its own sake. We don’t expect the president to announce his negotiating goals in advance. He should, however, base policy on objective economics, not a general anti-China animus.

A low-level policy debate has  been encouraged in the WP pages and more broadly in the academic and policy publications.  Hopefully, the politicians – especially all those folk running for the Democratic nomination for President – have, or will pay attention to these debates and will respond in a thinking way to the destructive Trump policy.  There are a variety of views expressed in the WP – all worth considering.

The spark to this debate began with an open letter that was published in the WP Opinion section.  The ‘Scholars’ Statement ‘was published on July 3rd: “China is not the enemy”  M. Taylor Fravel, J. Stapleton Roy,  Michael D. Swaine , Susan A. Thornton and Ezra Vogel were the five principals that organized this statement on U.S.-China relations.  All  the principals are well known China hands, either academics or policy folk. After completing the Statement the principals then opened the opinion piece for signature and scholars and policy folk signed on. There were many signatories including an historian from Georgetown, James Millward . I mention him specifically because he critiqued the  Statement. And In his critique he identified a response to the Statement published on July 18th in The Journal Political Risk, titled “Stay the Course on China: An Open Letter to President Trump”. This Letter was penned by James Fanell, Captain USN (Retired), and former director of Intelligence & Information Operations U.S. Pacific Fleet.  This Letter too was opened to signature. As the title implied the Letter supported President Trump and the China actions his Administration has implemented: 

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Did the Osaka G20 Bring Global Governance Progress – Part Two

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So, the Vision 20 principals, Colin Bradford, Brookings, Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia and myself, at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy thought it would be valuable to take a second gaze at the G20 Osaka Summit. This look, of course, occurring following the conclusion of the Summit.

There is little question that the G20 was dominated by the Donald Trump’s ‘reality TV show’ – the meeting and joking with Putin, the dramatic meeting over tariffs with Xi Jinping. And, finally, but certainly not least, the dramatic ‘handshake summit’ with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un at the DMZ. In the end, there was little bandwidth left for any coverage of the collective meetings of the G20, or examination of the Leaders’ Declaration. The Oska G20 reflects the shape – read that as the fragmenting – of the Global Order. But the V20 principals thought to try and draw some conclusions where we could on the state of the order in this chaotic ‘Age of Trump’.

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Can the G20 Maintain Progress at Osaka in Global Governance – Part One

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Gathering for the G20 Osaka Summit

With this post RisingBRICSAM ‘returns to the air’. First up are the Vision 20 reflections on the impending G20 Osaka Summit. The Vision 20 principals include: Colin Bradford, Brookings, Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia and Alan Alexandroff, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto.

As we have expressed in the past, “Our ‘Visioning the Future Project’ focuses on defining the future by building a new blueprint of values and organizing principles for the global system.” The V20 is committed to a well-defined goal: a new and better articulation of the relationships between global, national, and local levels. We also emphasize new avenues for dialogue across cultural, regional, and North-South divides to avoid
a downward cycle of mutual misperceptions. The V20 has urged, principally through the Blue Reports, that G20 Leaders reach out with far greater efforts and with accessible messages that can better speak to their own publics and work to assist their publics to understand the collaborative efforts these Leaders and their officials strive to achieve through the G20.

And now to our examination of the Osaka G20 Summit.

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‘Soldiering On’ – A Few Reflections from the T20s Gathering in Buenos Aires

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It was, is, a trying time for the Argentinian leadership. A striking and current economic crisis haunts the Macri government.  The peso has depreciated dramatically; interest rates have been boosted to 60 percent; and the current efforts by the Macri government to return the Argentinian economy to health – a policy of gradualism – lies in tatters. The government valiantly has returned to the IMF – hated by so many Argentinians for the institution’s policy ‘support’ in the early aughts in a former debt crisis – for a major infusion of funds.  And, oh yes, then there is the hosting of the G20. This is a government that appears to be distracted – and reasonably so – by the domestic economic crisis they face.

It is hard for this government to commit the ‘bandwidth’ required for hosting the G20.  Hosting is not just the host’s efforts to prepare for the leaders’ summit: fashioning the agenda and reaching consensus over a number of policy initiatives. It requires examining past agendas and bringing forward those policy efforts that can be advanced in the current year. It is also the various officials’ meetings at the cabinet level and below. The host needs to advance task force reports from ministers and international institutions and it requires coordinating efforts and insights from today’s many engagement groups – B20, L20, W20, C20 and T20 to  name some. 

Where are we, then, in the continuing G20 and T20 efforts? Many hundreds of us have just recently attended in Buenos Aires for the final Argentinian T20.  The Argentinians put on a fabulous meeting.  Co-ordinated by co-hosts CARI (The Argentine Council for International Relations) and CIPPEC (Center for the Implementation of Public Policies Promoting Equity and Growth) these think tanks handed off a wide-ranging Communiqué to the Argentinian government – indeed a public presentation to President Macri.  This Communiqué was a product of 10 Task Forces that generated 80 Policy Briefs with as the Communiqué states “with evidence-based policy recommendations to address global challenges such as climate change, food security, multilateral and global inequality, among others.” The hope for the T20, expressed in the Communiqué is that “The Think 20 (T20) works to help the G20 find solutions to global challenges by putting forward concrete proposals that eschew sector-specific interests and are rooted in evidence-based research.”

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The Myth of ‘the Myth of the Liberal Order’

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So, we keep searching for the appropriate framing to understand the impact of Donald Trump on the international system. Can we adequately describe the impact of Trump on the progress of global governance; the consequences for  geopolitical competition and rivalry; the longer term relationships in trade, investment and security? What will be the future shape the liberal international order (LIO) and will it even continue to exist?  There is an ongoing intellectual struggle to understand the consequences and the ability of the Order  to cope with the chaos created by Trump.

I was fingering through various sources. I was trying very hard to understand what conclusions my colleagues had reached in their assessment of the state of the Liberal Order and then the consequences for the international system of Trump actions. .And, I came across this word picture that seemed ‘on the mark’. It was created by my good friend and colleague from CFR, Stewart Patrick. Somewhat strangely It comes from his 2009 book The Best Laid Plans: The Origins of American Multilateralism and the Dawn of the Cold War. Now, what’s notable is that the picture drawn by Patrick was done well before Trump.  It captures an American foreign policy course not chosen at the end of World War II. But in broad strokes it seems to very well describe Trump foreign policy today: 

With these drawbacks, [to multilateralism] a reasonable observer might have expected the mid-twentieth-century United States to avoid multilateral arrangements altogether in favor of a mixed strategy of unilateralism and unequal bilateral arrangements. This would have widened U.S. freedom of action, allowed Washington to coerce and extract concessions from weaker countries, and protected the United States from the incursions of inter-governmental governmental arrangements. (Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 106-109)

Now that pretty much fits Trump policy – unilateralist,  preferring bilateral trade and security alliances and a strongly anti-multilateralist approach. Well, what might have been U.S. policy at the end of World War II and the commencement of the Cold War has apparently become reality today. Continue reading →

More Urgent than Ever – ‘Small Ball’ – A First Glance

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Now for a little catch up.  So, on Labor Day, I thought it would be useful to ‘rev our summitry engines’.  But the trend line, or lines, remain clear. First, Trump continues to dismantle various elements of the liberal international order.  Here an acute perspective from Philip Stephens of the FT in the  summer (August 2, 2018):

For all the present let’s-be-nice mood in the White House, Mr Trump is progressively dismantling the pillars of the US-led international order. One way or another the president has undermined the US commitments to climate change, nuclear non-proliferation, Nato, the EU and longstanding treaty relationships with Japan and South Korea. No one can be sure that tomorrow he will not tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement or pull US troops out of the Middle East. The credibility and trust on which US power was built is draining away. If the US does not respect an American-designed order why should anyone else?

Next, and equally a trend line – my call for summit leaders to ‘hunker down’ and play ‘small ball’ now.  Why not big efforts to formulate and declare global governance initiatives in the face of the ‘Great Dismantler’. In the broad global governance picture preservation is critical.  There is a limit I suspect to acting without the U.S. Undertaking ‘multilateralism without the United States’ is critical but ‘poking the bear’, or eagle possibly more appropriately, is probably unhelpful, unnecessary, even possibly counterproductive.  Episodic multilateral efforts without the United States are emerging. CPTPP, or the TPP11, driven in particular by Prime Minister Abe is a singular example of this new multilateralism.  Equally, German efforts at the Hamburg G20 Summit to maintain climate change efforts led to the end of absolute G20 consensus and a climate change statement in the Leaders’ Declaration of just the G19. 

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A Necessary Move to ‘Small Ball’ for the G7 and the G20 – A First Glance

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I was speaking to some of my ‘global governance co-conspirators’ recently. We were struggling to describe and capture the consequences for global governance of American policy in this ‘Age of Trump’. 

The difficulties were on full display in Buenos Aires this week with the the G20 finance ministers and central bankers meeting.  The impact of the tit-for-tat tariffs initiated by the United States, but responded to many of the G20 members, was so apparent as described by Benedict Mander and Chris Giles from the FT.  The French Minister spoke for many I suspect when he said: “the EU would not negotiate trade with the US “with a gun to our head.” Tensions are apparent and not mollified by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin suggesting that the retaliatory tariffs are not impacting the United States.  G20 Progress is obviously difficult:

This tension is good for no one,” Marcello Estevão, deputy finance minister of Brazil, told a group of journalists on Sunday, betraying clear frustration at the failure to make progress in strengthening multilateralism in international trade.

The shift from anti-protectionist rhetoric and trade liberalization efforts on the part of the G20, to rising protectionist tariffs from the U.S. and responses from many of the G20
Hubert Fuchs, the Austrian finance minister, who attended representing the European Council, said: “Even the minister of the treasury of the US says that he’s in favour of fair and free trade, but the problem is that the US understands something different under fair and free trade”.

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The Consistent ‘Dismantling’ Strategy of President Trump

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The above has become the iconic image of Trump with other allied leaders. For some time, now, the ‘Experts’ have been trying fully to capture the core, and the operating mechanics of Trump foreign policy.

This started before Trump’s surprise election. It has continued on since that time.  Understanding Trump’s foreign policy and his various initiatives have become rather more critical as time goes on. We see Trump and his close colleagues trying to advance Trump policy at the regular summits, most evidently the G7 (the picture above); at summits of his own making most notably the Singapore Summit with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, and a soon to be convened NATO Summit to followed by Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin of Russia in Helsinki.   

So where are we? And where is Trump leading? Describing Trump foreign policy means an effort to capture what Trump means by his ‘America First’ strategy.  It seemed early on that America First was built on a foundation of some form of U.S. unilateralism and strong skepticism over the multilateral institutions in trade and political alliances that served as the heart of the liberal international order. Most of us saw the irony of this: after all the United States had been the chief promoter and ‘construction boss’ for building the liberal international order. As our colleague John Ikenberry declared in FA in his article, “The Plot Against American Foreign Policy”, there is yet another irony: 

A hostile revisionist power has indeed arrived on the scene, but it sits in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world. Across ancient and modern eras, orders built by great powers have come and gone—but they have usually ended in murder, not suicide.

There was some degree contention by analysts to assess what degree of aggressiveness – how forward or uninvolved – Trump foreign policy would be. This assessment was not so much against America’s rivals but with America’s allies.  As time has passed though, it seems there is a growing sense that Trump is mounting a serious, even concerted effort to dismember the liberal order.  Continue reading →

‘America Alone’ – A ‘First Glance’

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My IR colleagues, and other IR experts are reeling from the actions of this President  at various summits – the G7 at Charlevoix and the Trump-Kim Summit in Singapore.  More than anything we now see the President’s actions in advancing the ‘America First’, I hate to call it this – but a so-called U.S. foreign policy strategy.

First our CFR colleague Stewart Patrick describing the personally offensive Presidential behavior in this post, “At G7 Summit, Trump Takes a Wrecking Ball to the West”  The Internationalist:

He is destined to be one of America’s most consequential foreign policy presidents. Fewer than seventeen months into his administration, Trump has already shaken the foundations of international order. He has abdicated U.S. global leadership, which he believes has bled the United States dry, and he has sidelined multilateral institutions (from NATO to the WTO), which he perceives constrain U.S. freedom of action. The G7 summit suggests he is just getting started. He seems prepared to abandon the transatlantic relationship, and even the concept of “the West,” as pillars of U.S. global engagement.

Increasingly, ‘America First’ now has t be understood as ‘America Alone.  Here is Patrick summing up: 

Under Trump, the United States is off the rails. Rather than debating the merits of his case maturely, the president vents at America’s closest allies. “We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing,” he cried over the weekend, while blastingTrudeau as “very dishonest and weak.”

 

Kori Schake, our Stanford colleague, who is currently deputy director-general of IISS in London summed up in the  Sunday NYTimes the view of Trump actions following his recent summit exercises:

Such reckless disregard for the security concerns of America’s allies, hostility to mutually beneficial trade and willful isolation of the United States is unprecedented. Yet this is the foreign policy of the Trump administration. Quite explicitly, the leader of the free world wants to destroy the alliances, trading relationships and international institutions that have characterized the American-led order for 70 years.

Where are we at this moment?  Here is Schake’s take:

The administration’s alternative vision for the international order is a bare-knuckled assertion of unilateral power that some call America First; more colorfully, a White House official characterized it to The Atlantic as the “We’re America, Bitch” doctrine. This aggressive disregard for the interests of like-minded countries, indifference to democracy and human rights and cultivation of dictators is the new world Mr. Trump is creating. He and his closest advisers would pull down the liberal order, with America at its helm, that remains the best guarantor of world peace humanity has ever known. We are entering a new, terrifying era.

Trump’s actions are a dramatic attack on the multilateral economic system and an equally direct and a punishing undermining of the global security system with its allies, and frankly its adversaries.  Nothing good will come of this.   

Image Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times

A Threat to the Entire Order – A ‘First Glance’

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Philip Stephens, opinion writer at the FT concluded his examination of the current state of the liberal international order by saying:

I am sometimes asked what I consider to represent the biggest threat to global peace and stability. A nuclear North Korea looks dangerous, but containable. Mr Kim is not a madman. So the temptation is to reply that the risk is found in China’s rise or in Russian revanchism. The real answer is Mr Trump’s retreat.

Having just completed a podcast with my colleague Bruce Jones, the Vice President and Director – Foreign Policy, Brookings (the podcast at Oxford’s Global Summitry should be up next week)  I decided to find a small hole to crawl into it. 

All right so that comment is a bit exaggerated. But the point is:  ‘America First’ is not just about Trump skepticism over the global economy and the continuing attack on the value of the multilateral trade regime.  No, it is also a mighty scepticism over the value of the multilateral security arrangements.  Let’s just contemplate for a moment the likely Trump bullying over the upcoming NATO Summit. 

But meanwhile his eagerness to question the deployment of U.S. forces in Korea and to accept apparently without consultation the suspension of ‘war games’ with his Korean allies leads to  a general expert view, that of course may be wrong – that a big winner on the Peninsula  after the Singapore Summit is a non-attendee – China. A Stephens suggests: 

Absent from the Singapore summit, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, was nonetheless a big winner. In Mr Trump’s world of everyone for themselves, China will replace the US as the pre-eminent power in east Asia. Japan, Taiwan and, in time, South Korea itself, may choose to take a tip from Mr Kim. If you want to be safe, build a bomb. 

What an unhealthy result that would be. 

Image Credit: cnn.com