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.

COP25: A Video Conversation with Matthew Hoffmann on How Countries are Doing in Reaching Their Emission Goals

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COP25 in Madrid is upon us. To get a better understanding of where key emitters – the United States, China  and others are I sat down with Matthew Hoffmann at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto recently to talk about the climate change ‘state of play’.

Matt is a Professor of Political Science and he is also Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab with Professors Steven Bernstein and Teresa Kramarz. Matt will be attending COP25 but before his departure for Madrid I wanted to get his overview of the national efforts to meet their Nationally Determined Commitments (NDCs) and to hold the temperature to 2C or significantly below. The first of two video sessions is now up at the GSP Project YouTube GSP Channel. Catch him there.

 

 

 

A Podcast Interview – Ep 15 Global Summitry’s ‘Now’ Series with Sheri Berman

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We entered the virtual studio with Seri Berman to examine the crisis of democracy in Europe.  Sheri is a political scientist from Barnard College, Columbia University. She recently published with Oxford University Press, Democracy and Dictatorship: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day. 

We were fortunate to have Sheri join us at recent roundtable at the APSA in Washington “The Strange Death – and Possible Rebirth – of the Liberal Order. There, Sheri added a great perspective on the rise of nationalism and populism in Europe, especially.

With that in mind I asked Sheri to join me in the Global Summitry’s ‘ virtual studio for a podcast – ‘Now’ Series, Ep. 15: An Interview with Sheri Berman on the Crisis of Democracy in Europe.  The podcast can be found at the Global Summitry site and can also be downloaded at iTunes and SoundCloud.

Come join us!

Between Chaos and Leadership – The Instance of the G7 Gathering in Biarritz, France

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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.

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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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