Category Archives: Global South

Struggling with Global Leadership

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So, with the last several Posts here at Alan’s Newsletter, I have been transitioning – altering my mindset, and bidding farewell to the Biden administration and contemplating the reality of the return of Donald Trump as US President with a new administration. There are certainly strong signs that this time around, as opposed to 2017, that the Trump administration is intent on ‘hitting the ground running’. As The Economist noted, for Trump there is nothing more critical than immigration and the removal of illegals:

Mr Trump has long been exercised about immigration. He made building a wall along America’s border with Mexico a central theme of his election campaign in 2016. He duly issued a flurry of executive orders on immigration within weeks of taking office in 2017, including a ban on visas for applicants from various largely Muslim countries and instructions to federal agencies to expedite the construction of the border wall and to detain more illegal immigrants. … Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, is an America First, anti-immigration hawk who has been fighting against bipartisan immigration reform in Congress since 2013. “As God is my witness,” he declared last year, “you are going to see millions of people rapidly removed from this country who have no right to be here.

The question is where does Trump and his team take the US? On immigration? On US-China relations? On relations with allies and the multilateral relations and organizations that the US has built over the past several decades? What approach is Trump going to take in rolling out ‘America First’? Now, there is lots of speculation but with so much being described really knowing is nearly impossible. But that being said, one clear direction is described by Fareed Zakaria. Like many, Fareed has to absorb the recent inducements and/or threats by Trump with respect to Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal. As a result Fareed suggests:

Having campaigned on a policy of ending wars, making peace, putting America first and disentangling the country from the world, President-elect Donald Trump this week decided to revive 19th-century imperialism. In a single news conference, he pondered making Canada a state and acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal by economic coercion — and declined to rule out using military force in the latter two cases.

Fareed, in his weekly Washington Post opinion piece titled, “Trump revives 19th-century imperialism. Make Russia great again!”, suggests these territorial aggrandizement initiatives simply put the US today in the same league as Russia and China:

In the news conference, Trump proposed getting rid of the “artificially drawn line” between Canada and the United States. Of course, that is precisely what President Vladimir Putin says about the line between Russia and Ukraine. Or President Xi Jinping about the division between China and Taiwan. This is a world that makes Russia and China great again.

It is tough to really understand the future US foreign policy with Trump at the helm. Now I may be reaching way too far but I was intrigued by the republishing, recently by Foreign Affairs, of a piece by Richard Haass now President emeritus of CFR and Charles Kupchan a Senior Fellow and Director of European Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Charlie is also Professor of International Affairs at the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University. The article is entitled, “The New Concert of Powers: How to Prevent Catastrophe and Promote Stability in a Multipolar World”. The piece was originally published in 2021.

For Haass and Kupchan the future of the global order is multipolarity as they describe it in the FA article. As they suggest:

Moreover, even if Western democracies overcome polarization, beat back illiberalism, and pull off an economic rebound, they will not forestall the arrival of a world that is both multipolar and ideologically diverse.

And as they argue the best means, maybe the only structure for the global order to achieve some stability in such a coming multipolar environment is a gathering of major powers:

The best vehicle for promoting stability in the twenty-first century is a global concert of major powers. As the history of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe demonstrated—its members were the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria—a steering group of leading countries can curb the geopolitical and ideological competition that usually accompanies multipolarity.

 

This recent uptake in concert operation and interest in the same includes a major piece by my colleague, Andrew Fenton Cooper, from Waterloo University. You might want to take a look at his recent publication from Oxford Press titled: The Concertation Impulse in World Politics”. But turning back to Haass and Kupchan this is their description and understanding of such a concert:

 

Concerts have two characteristics that make them well suited to the emerging global landscape: political inclusivity and procedural informality. A concert’s inclusivity means that it puts at the table the geopolitically influential and powerful states that need to be there, regardless of their regime type. In so doing, it largely separates ideological differences over domestic governance from matters of international cooperation.

Concerts have two characteristics that make them well suited to the emerging global landscape: political inclusivity and procedural informality. A concert’s inclusivity means that it puts at the table the geopolitically influential and powerful states that need to be there, regardless of their regime type. In so doing, it largely separates ideological differences over domestic governance from matters of international cooperation.

A global concert would be a consultative, not a decision-making, body. It would address emerging crises yet ensure that urgent issues would not crowd out important ones, and it would deliberate on reforms to existing norms and institutions.

 

This steering group would help fashion new rules of the road and build support for collective initiatives but leave operational matters, such as deploying peacekeeping missions, delivering pandemic relief, and concluding new climate deals, to the UN and other existing bodies. The concert would thus tee up decisions that could then be taken and implemented elsewhere. It would sit atop and backstop, not supplant, the current international architecture by maintaining a dialogue that does not now exist.

This new global concert proposal, according to Haass and Kupchan, would have the following membership:

A global concert would have six members: China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States.

The concert’s members would collectively represent roughly 70 percent of both global GDP and global military spending.

The analysis seems to be moving full speed forward until:

This proposal presumes that none of the concert’s members would be a revisionist power bent on aggression and conquest.

Ah, and there is the dilemma – the ‘fly in the ointment’. The reality is that two great powers are evidently revisionist – that is Russia and China, and now under Trump the same may well be said for the upcoming Trump administration.

But as Nathan Gardels, the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine and also the co-founder of, and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute, just recently wrote in Noema:

A revisionist state seeks to change the rules and norms of the extant world order. In recent years, we have become used to castigating China and Russia as the chief renegades in this endeavor. Now, as Princeton political scientist John Ikenberry pithily notes, another “revisionist state has arrived on the scene to contest the liberal international order … it is the United States. It’s Trump in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world.”

So, are we at a brick wall when it comes to promoting stability and dampening geopolitical tensions? Well, like many of my international relations colleagues I have spent time examining the contours and the operation of the classic global concert – the Concert of Europe. For Haass and Kupchan this is the model for a contemporary concert designed to diminish tensions and mitigate conflict. But the Concert is 200 years ago and it is not at all clear that a modern day instrument could operate in any way similar to this much earlier European instrument. And I would think we have already a ready-made instrument of concert-like characteristics – the G20. This involves a membership wider than that suggested by these authors. The G20 today includes: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Türkiye, United Kingdom and United States and two regional bodies today: the European Union and the African Union. It seems to me this Informal has a much better representation from the Global South and the collective could turn its attention to critical global security issues as well as global economic issues if the motivation were there.

But concerts may not be, or may not be the only mechanism to generate potentially greater stability in a world of increasing disorder. Rather, plurilateral structures – smaller groupings that include major and Middle Powers, especially from the Global South targeting growing challenges to global stability – plurilateral collaborations that could target climate change and the green transition, debt distress and relief, regional conflicts and more. Let’s tackle real threatening problems starting with these plurilateral collaboratives and build our way to a global concert in time. Let’s start here with this smaller step, and who knows, in time it might also provide for a larger grouping, even a ‘global concert’ with possibly better leadership than we seem to have right now.

This first appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter – https://globalsummitryproject.substack.com/publish/post/155031165

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The New Global Leadership, perhaps

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So there is a lot of spinning now that it is clear – he’s coming back. And as we look out on the global order the current international system appears chaotic enough, even before Donald Trump returns to the White House. As described by Flavia Krause Jackson in Bloomberg: 

North Koreans are fighting in Europe for the first time. Israel is resisting US efforts to halt fighting with Hezbollah and Hamas. China regularly conducts military exercises surrounding Taiwan. Nuclear war is suddenly a risk amid surging tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And that’s even before Donald Trump returns to the White House.

What are possibly answers to this growing chaos? One very clear note appears to be Middle Powers and their capacity to gain influence and importantly perhaps maintain greater openness notwithstanding a world dominated by Trump 2.0.  And these tensions are already apparent as Flavia summarizes the just recently concluded Brazil G20 Summit:

This was the week Lula was supposed to cement his status as the preeminent leader of the developing world. Instead, the chaotic summit he hosted in Rio highlighted his inability to bridge growing divisions between global superpowers. In a surprise anti-climax, Lula even canceled his end-of-summit press conference two hours after it had been scheduled to start.

Still, the first big unknown is how chaotic the new Trump administration can wind up the international system and are there possibilities to ease some of this Trump chaos? How, and who, possibly will seek to temper the chaos and propel forward both global political and economic relationships. Here, Shiro Arnstrong in an EAF piece titled, “Trump-proofing economic security in Asia” sets the stage:

The United States has gone from enforcer to spoiler of the rules-based economic order as it deals with domestic challenges and threatens a return to its pre-World War 2 isolationism. The rest of the world has to avoid the United States dragging the global economy down with it.

In the presumed Trump withdrawal from alliances and partnerships, his determination to close the open trading world with Trump’s loud noises over America First, and its many tariffs, there is a noticeable attention shift to the potential role of Middle Powers in retaining and augmenting, possibly, the global economy for one.

Now, there are all sorts of questions surrounding this attention to Middle Powers and their influence in advancing  the global order. Needless to say it starts with who are the Middle Powers. And, not surprisingly, there is no agreement on who the likely actors are under that apparently highly fungible label. So we know there is the ‘traditional’  Middle Power label that describes at least Canada and Australia. Then there are the new ‘Big Boys’ today – Brazil, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and at least for some South Africa and even Nigeria. And then there are the relatively close US partners, or other possible regional powers, so, Turkey, Mexico, Japan and South Korea.  What can I say, it is a recipe with the main ingredient up to the expert or analyst.

And then there is the logic and possible action of Middle Power policy. Now this is a tough category often rather muted in current analyses.  But Shiro gives us some direction here. He targets Trumpworld:

There will be pressure all over the world to ‘protect’ domestic production from a flood of Chinese and other goods shut out of the US and looking for new markets.

There will of course be pressure to cut losses by dealing with Trump 2.0:

The incremental choices of countries to do deals with Trump’s United States — managed trade deals and voluntary export restraints — may be diplomatically expedient but will weaken the rules that underpin global trade and are against their core long term interests. That would reinforce the trajectory of the global economy heading towards an economic nosedive of the kind it suffered in the 1930s.

The Middle Power alternative:

It will be up to the middle powers like Australia and Japan — that cannot change the status quo unilaterally but are large enough to mobilise coalitions of countries for change — to keep the global economy open and save the furniture of the multilateral trading system.

 

Middle powers must convince China and the European Union that their best course of action is to avoid large-scale retaliation and go in the other direction, opening up their economies further. That will make them better off and make the global economy larger, even with restricted access to the US market. …

 

The economic coercion that China deployed against Australia in 2020 and Japan earlier was blunted by the multilateral trading system which, despite its weaknesses, allowed Australian exporters, for example, to find alternative markets and provide an exit ramp from the problem, with the last of Chinese trade restrictions lifted in October 2024. The open global trading system crucially ensures that there are alternative buyers and sellers.

As Shiro concludes, enlarging if possible but at least maintaining the open trade world – with as wide a set of actors as possible, is slightly counterintuitively called for and the answer presumably to Trump tariffs:

The multilateral trading system is the biggest source of economic security for open trading nations. That includes Southeast Asia, which is more exposed than other countries with its high trade shares that are its source of prosperity and security.

 

Utilising platforms in ASEAN-centred institutions and connecting them to other efforts in Europe to promote collective action is where the strategic focus needs to be now, on trade, climate action and other global public goods, otherwise we risk a much smaller, poorer and less secure world.

Interestingly, and as noted earlier, there is a growing interest in Middle Power action in the face of the about to reappear Trumpworld. Another proponent for Middle Power action is Dani Rodrik. Rodrick, a deep thinker when it comes to the global system, has written recently on the role of Middle Powers in the evolving global order. Rodrik is the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is co-director of the Reimagining the Economy Program at the Kennedy School and of the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity network. In a recent piece in Project Syndicate (PS),  Rodrik suggests that while Middle Powers are unlikely to become a bloc but rather quite possibly able to possibly shape a variety of paths prompting a far more multipolar environment:

While some American national-security elites seek continued US primacy, others seem resigned to an increasingly bipolar world. A more likely outcome, however, is a multipolar world where middle powers exert considerable countervailing force, thus preventing the US and China from imposing their interests on others.

 

The middle powers are unlikely to become a formidable bloc of their own, mainly because their interests are too diverse to fit into a common economic or security agenda. Even when they have joined formal groupings, their collective impact has been limited.

 

Perhaps the most important contribution middle powers can make is to demonstrate, by their example, the feasibility of both multipolarity and diverse development paths in the global order. They offer a vision for the world economy that does not depend on either America’s or China’s power and goodwill. But if middle powers are to be worthy role models for others, they must become responsible actors – both in their dealings with smaller countries and in promoting greater political accountability at home.

A world that does not depend on the leading powers that is the vision from Rodrik. For this, and other perspectives, the China-West Dialogue (CWD) has directed recent energies this fall to sessions on Middle Powers and Middle Power Diplomacy (MPD). With great thanks to our Lead Co-Chair, Colin Bradford CWD constructed a series of sessions on a number of key Middle Powers. We began this Middle Power Diplomacy series with a Zoom session on Japan with lead organizer, Mike Mochizuki of George Washington University. From there we turned our attention to Latin America in a Zoom session led by our good colleague Jorge Heine from Boston University and a number of colleagues who published a recent volume: “Latin American Foreign Policies in the New World Order: The Active Non-Alignment Option”. From there we shifted to a session on South Korea prepared by the lead organizer, Yul Sohn from Yonsei University. And most recently we turned our attention to Turkey with colleague Guven Sak as the lead organizer. Guven is from The Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV). Still, to explore are sessions on Australia and New Zealand with lead organizer Shiro Armstrong from ANU and EastAsiaForum (EAF) and Indonesia and ASEAN with lead organizer Monica Wihardja from ISEAS in Singapore.

There is much learning at hand and hopefully we will be able to draw out the means for Middle Powers to resist the more destructive Trump 2.0 efforts. We will return to these conclusions in the future.

This first appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter. Comments and subscriptions are welcome.

https://globalsummitryproject.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/152039338/share-center

Image Credit: G20

 

What is Needed for MPD Success?

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It is really not possible to begin this Substack Post without a quick glance at the first US Presidential debate of 2024. It was ugly. It was a tough night, especially for President Biden but I will let the political pundits to have their say.

Now to the  subject of this week’s Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter – a focus on Middle Power Diplomacy (MPD) and the capacity of Middle Powers to drive global governance activities. We start with an examination first on multilateralism. There is a strong logic to this starting point given we are beginning by targeting the institutional apex of the international multilateral system – the UN and its agencies. This introduction is also understandable given that the UN will, this September, complete a UN summit cycle which I have referenced in past Substack Posts. This UN summit cycle commenced in 2023 with the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) Summit and it will complete with the critical Summit of the Future (SoTF) this September in New York with the finalization and issuing of the Pact for the Future. In preparation for the UNGA 79th edition, and its opening gathering of Heads of State and Government for  the SoTF, and as described by IISD, the UNGA has elected its newest President:

The UN General Assembly (UNGA) has elected, by acclamation, Philemon Yang, former Prime Minister of Cameroon, to serve as President of its 79th session. His tenure will be guided by the theme, ‘Unity in diversity, for the advancement of peace, sustainable development and human dignity for everyone everywhere.’

And with the usual optimism and urgency the new President declared:

I am convinced that through dialogue, through consensus, talking together and looking to the future together, we can solve problems,” Yang said speaking to journalists following the elections.

Yang underscored the continuing multilateral wish:

Outlining the thrust of his Presidency in his vision and mission statement, Yang describes the UNGA as the highest, most representative deliberative body at the global level, which serves as “the lone forum where, based on sovereign equality, States in their diverse opinions meet to jointly seek solutions” through the free expression of diverse convictions, opinions, interests, and  approaches.

To preserve peace, promote sustainable development and protect the planet,” Yang underscores, “the international community should ensure that the objectives jointly set by Member States… are achieved.” According to his statement, the need to fast-track the measures to be taken by the UNGA to ensure the effective implementation of mutual commitments will be one of Yang’s priorities.

The collective effort is heartfelt without question but after the last several decades it has to be accepted as wishful thinking, nothing more. I don’t know how else to describe the effectiveness of the UN.

If formal institutional multilateral action has faltered in the growing international disorder: the rising tensions between the two great powers US and China, and recourse to aggression in the Russian war on Ukraine,  and the Hamas-Israel Gaza war, then where can the global order firm up international stability and advance collective efforts?  Where can the  global order save the planet and improve collective efforts in critical areas of global finance, cybersecurity and AI just to mention three critical subjects?

In our discussions and work at the China-West Dialogue (CWD) we have examined MPD with growing positive reflection and a nod to Middle Power action in the face of weakened multilateral progress. The CWD lead Co-Chair, Colin Bradford has pivoted to an examination of MPD. He does this in a recent article, “Toward a New Era in Global Relations: The Potential of  Middle Power Diplomacy” in the 2024 Global Solutions Summit edition of  Global Solutions Journal. Now almost without exception raising the MPD configuration immediately encourages a discussion over what is, and what is not, a Middle Power. We found that out in one of our recent CWD gatherings. As fun as that discussion can be there is no real conclusion to it and I would note that Colin has avoided that seemingly inevitable discussion by targeting the G20. As Colin points out, the G20 consists of the following:

The 9 EMPs [emerging market powers] along with the 9 AIC [advanced industrial countries] MPs constitute a significant and diverse number of Middle Powers that have the potential to change the global landscape, if and as they choose to exercise global leadership in ways that cut across traditional groups, incorporate contradictory viewpoints and focus hard on practical policy issues and avoid ideological polemics and geopolitical theatrics.

From the start, then, Colin turns his MPD focus on the role of those Middle Powers in the G20 and more particularly the series of immediate G20 presidencies beginning with Indonesia in 2022, followed in 2023 by India, Brazil in 2024, and South Africa in 2025. As he writes:

The argument in this paper is that, as a result, 2024 could be a year of opportunity for advancing global governance in addressing global challenges by capitalizing on latent, underlying global political dynamics to tee up a new era in which global governance can advance, even as systemic competition continues between the US, China, and Europe. … The Brazilian and South African G20 presidencies during 2024 and 2025, with the US to follow in 2026, could become pivotal focal points for the transition to a new era in global relations in which middle-power diplomacy demonstrates the feasibility of advancing humanity’s quest for systemic sustainability, despite the necessary acceptance of geopolitical tensions as a reality.

What Colin then suggests is:

Middle Powers exist today and have agency and influence precisely because they are:

• Independently concerned with global threats and seek to play a role in addressing them rather than seeking a prominent role in international relations only as a projection of national strength and identity;

• Capable of self-interested contributions to global decision-making characterized by diversity of perspectives, competitive behaviors, and shifting coalitions of consensus rather than fixed allegiances based on normative values; and

• Basing their actions and behaviors in the international arena on national interests and pragmatic articulation rather than values which have resulted in ideological differences and confrontational tensions.”

And as he then concludes:

As these brief examples suggest, there could be a new global order based on secular interests, non-ideological formulations, and multiple sources of global leadership which interactively generate composite outcomes embodying contradictory but valid perspectives from different vantage points that move the world forward to addressing systemic global challenges in significant ways. This shift in the global political dynamic toward pluralism driven by middle power diplomacy does not inevitably lead to “a new global disorder”, but rather could become a more inclusive, integrated network of significant countries to drive global solutions, defining a new global order.

Middle power diplomacy is based on listening, learning, brokering, give and- get bargaining, inclusion, embracing diversity, being as comfortable with “difference” as with “like-mindedness,” understanding that “shifting coalitions of consensus” is better for global governance than fixed alliances and blocs, and adjusting pre-positioning by being open to enabling unexpected insights and different ways of seeing issues and opportunities to shift perceptions and change positions.

So Colin hones in on ‘pluralism’ and the impact of MIddle Power ‘coalitions of the willing’ in advancing global governance policies even in the face of geopolitical tensions. The diverse collective effort, it is presumed, can advance global governance policy.

This line of reasoning is underlined by Bob Carr and Gareth Evans, both former foreign ministers of Australia in an article titled, “Detente: Towards a balance of power between the USA and China”, identified by Colin and focused on Australian action in a competitive geopolitical environment. As these two former foreign ministers see it:

Lasting peace is always best achieved with others, not against them. Of course we have to prepare for worst-case scenarios, but it is in Australia’s interests to bring diplomacy back to centre stage, resist policies of containment and confrontation of China, and promote a political accord between the United States and China that could help ease tensions in the South China Sea and over Taiwan and the Korean peninsula.

Here then a further nuance of Middle Power action targeting Australia as an Indo-Pacific actor.  So it appears that there is a strong favoring of Middle Power action. It is a starting point but more needs to be fleshed out. While we can acknowledge pluralism and the construction of ‘coalitions of the willing’, where have we seen MPD in action especially in the face of great power interests that may not accord with the Middle Power goals. When does the dynamic of Middle Powers action draw together a coalition of the willing that ‘drives global solutions’? How does this dynamic gather and then advance policy? We need more on the mechanics of MPD.

More on that to come.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

 

Threatening a ‘Single International Community’

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Who would think that the threat to the global order could emanate from global summitry leadership. But that appears to be a real possibility. Let me explain.

For some time now at CWD and the Global Summitry project (GSP) we have identified that sustaining global order requires the maintenance, even strengthening of a ‘single international community’. Stability cannot be sustained without such a community. Fragmentation hinders collaboration. But that single international community is being challenged today. The current wars in Europe and in the Middle East undermine a single international community.  Rising geopolitical tensions between the leading powers, China and the United States, especially, erode it. Fragmentation then undermines stability of the order and diminishes, or eliminates,  opportunities for advancing global governance.  As described in the WPR Daily Review:

These tensions were underlined recently by statements from the President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, now the host for this year’s G20. In an opinion piece he published in the Washington Post in January Lula described the impact of geopolitics and nationalism on global governance efforts:

The world is experiencing a contradictory moment today. Global challenges require commitment and cooperation among nations. We have never been so connected. At the same time, we are finding it increasingly difficult to dialogue, respect differences and carry out joint actions. Societies are taken over by individualism and nations are distancing themselves from each other, making it difficult to promote peace and face complex problems: the climate crisis; food and energy insecurity; geopolitical tensions and wars; the growth of hate speech and xenophobia.

Such a statement seems to suggest that Lula really gets it. Only a single international community can maintain a stable global order. But that may not be true. In fact Lula’s recent statements may be undermining such a goal. Why such statements are unclear. Some have suggested that he is determined to promote a different global order no longer dominated by the US and the West more broadly. Others focus on his imperatives in current domestic politics. Whatever. Nevertheless his recent comments over the War in Gaza may make it difficult to promote collective efforts in this critical Informal – the G20. One need only reference Lula’s view of Israel’s action in Gaza expressed by him in remarks at the African Union Summit Conference in Addis Ababa and reported in the NYTimes:

What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in other historical moments,” Lula told reporters during the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. But, he then added, “it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.

And now as a result of these remarks his global summitry leadership efforts – and here I am focusing on his G20 efforts as the President – are being called into question. Rather than trying to knit the order together he apparently seems willing to fracture it.

Such a rupture of the international community is possible notwithstanding a promising start as G20 host. Indeed at the time of the transfer of hosting to Brazil, Lula set out important developmental priorities in a speech at the closing of the India G20 Summit. There he declared:

We are living in a world where wealth is concentrated. In which millions of people still go hungry. In which governance institutions still reflect the reality of the middle of the last century.

We will only be able to tackle all these problems if we address inequality.

Income inequality; inequality in access to healthcare, education and food; gender, race and representation inequality is behind all these anomalies.

If we want to make a difference, we must place the reduction of inequalities at the center of the international agenda.

Thus, Brazil’s G20 presidency will have three priorities:

(i) social inclusion and the fight against hunger;

(ii) energy transition and sustainable development in its three aspects (social, economic and environmental); and

(iii) reform of global governance institutions

All these priorities are contained in Brazil’s G20 presidency motto: “Building a fair world and a sustainable planet”

In advancing these priorities Lula announced  that Brazil would establish two G20 Task Forces (TF) for the Brazil hosting year. These TFs will unite the Finance and Sherpa tracks in a concerted effort to advance global governance policy. The two are: the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, and  the Global Mobilization against Climate Change.

And in addition in the Concept Note Brazil also committed to the  following:

Seeking to close this gap, Brazil plans to launch a G20 Initiative on Bioeconomy with the objective of deepening the international debate on the subject and of identifying potential avenues for cooperation in the area. The Initiative would be structured into three axes: (i) research, development, and innovation for bioeconomy; (ii) sustainable use of biodiversity for bioeconomy; and (iii) bioeconomy as an enabler for sustainable development. As a final result,  the Initiative would be expected to produce a set of “High Level Principles on Bioeconomy.

All these priorities and institutional efforts require concerted collective action. Yet today all these promises seem to be in question over Lula’s statements on the current geopolitical crises, notwithstanding Lula’s injunction in his speech at the closing of the India G20 Summit that:

Thirdly, we cannot allow geopolitical issues to hijack G20 bodies’ discussion agendas. A divided G20 does not interest us. We can only tackle present day challenges through joint action.

Lula needs to heed his own words or he will find that his G20 leadership is undermined by his own words. Such words put at risk his determined collective priorities in the G20. They divide the international community putting at risk ‘a single international community’.

Image Credit : Brazil

This Post was first published at my Substack Alan’s Newsletter

https://open.substack.com/pub/globalsummitryproject/p/threatening-a-single-international?r=bj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Maintaining ‘Entanglement’: APEC Summit Discussions including the Xi-Biden Bilateral Summit

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Doing some quick catch up on the APEC Summit that was held between November 11th and 17th in San Francisco. The main event, as it turned out, was the much discussed bilateral summit between China’s Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden. While the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) meetings to receive some attention – more for what didn’t happen than what was secured – the APEC gathering activity was dominated by US-China Bilateral Summit and there was some attention paid to the other bilateral Summit of note that between President Xi and the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

The Post here is constructed from several Substack Posts in Alan’s Newsletter: “Maintaining ‘Entanglement‘: APEC Summit discussions and more” and “It’s working; just not like what was anticipated: The sudden rise of Bilaterals”; and “So Success, or What? Final thoughts on the Summits in San Francisco”. Feel free to subscribe to my Substack: Alan’s Newsletter

Maintaining ‘Entanglement’: APEC Summit discussions and more

It appears that we are likely to see a meeting this month of President Xi and President Biden at the margins of the APEC Summit. I think that is a good thing. What can we, or should we, expect from such a summit of leaders of the two leading powers? While contemplating this question, I was caught by two articles written by Brookings colleague, Ryan Hass. Ryan has recently been named director of the John L. Thornton China Center and holds the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies at Brooking is also a senior fellow in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. Ryan has contributed two first rate articles on US-China relations – what they are, and what they need to be.*

First, there is the big question of where US-China relations are, and then where they need to be? There is little question that Ryan is correct in believing that the US and the global order would be far worse off if China were to exit the current international system fragmenting what is still a critical -and I believe necessary – ‘single international community’. As Ryan urged in one of the two contributions, this a recent Foreign Affairs piece:

Washington should aim to preserve a functioning international system that supports U.S. security and prosperity—and that includes China rather than isolates it. Meanwhile, the United States should maintain a strong military to deter China from using force against the United States or its security partners and seek to sustain an overall edge over China in technological innovation, particularly in fields with national security implications. … Washington’s goal should be to keep China entangled in a global system that regulates interstate behavior and pushes Beijing to conclude that the best path to the realization of its national ambitions would be to operate within existing rules and norms.

‘Entanglement’ as a strategic aim strikes me as ‘right on target’.

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Not Simply the Pace of Summitry: In then end, it is all about the 4Cs

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I posted recently here at Alan’s Newsletter on the upcoming BRICS Summit – Puzzling over a BRICS Enlargement. And BRICS, as I described in the Post, is a ‘big deal’ in the pantheon of Leaders’ Summits. I also noted the possible ‘reignition’ of the Trilateral Summit – China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (Korea). But this is not the current extent of summit activity. There is, in fact, another Trilateral Summit that is about to gather – what I am referring to as a ‘Second Trilateral Summit’. This is the gathering at Camp David of the leaders of Japan, Korea and the United States. And since that gathering is tomorrow, Friday, I thought I’d get this Post out in anticipation of the Camp David Trilateral Summit of the three leaders.

‘Global summitry’ – the extent, importance and consequence of these leaders’ gatherings and the global governance progress achieved at these gatherings is, not surprisingly, at the heart of the Global Summitry Project (GSP). It is here in the e-journal Global Summitry, in our work with colleagues in the China-West Dialogue (CWD), and the strengthening of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and our work with students and researchers through the GSP including the articles, podcasts and videos.

Well let’s turn back, for just a moment to the upcoming  Summit. What, you say, a second trilateral summit? Well, yes, actually. The JapanTimes sets out possible goals for such a Trilateral Leaders’ gathering – the Second Trilateral Summit :

In a major step toward making trilateral cooperation a more permanent fixture, U.S.President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean leader Yoon Suk-yeol will agree to hold three-way summits at least once a year, while also conducting more frequent joint military drills around the Korean Peninsula and bolstering intelligence-sharing, including real-time warning data on North Korean missile launches.

The three leaders are also expected to signal deeper cooperation in areas such as cybersecurity, supply chain resilience and fighting economic coercion.

The one-day meeting — the three leaders’ first stand alone summit not held on the sidelines of a separate event — will take place against the backdrop of North Korea’s ever-improving nuclear and missile programs as well as China’s growing military assertiveness. Both issues will be high on the agenda.

But first and foremost, the summit is expected to focus on laying the foundation for a more durable trilateral relationship that can withstand political change, namely the growing partnership between two of the most powerful democracies in Asia.

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‘The Decline of US Hegemony and its Consequences for the Global Order’ – A Roundtable at the International Studies Association

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ISA 2023: Exhibit, Advertise, and SponsorSo, the International Studies Association (ISA) just concluded in Montreal  after a visibly energetic in-person gathering following several years of virtual meetings only.

I was fortunate enough to chair the roundtable. All sorts of good folk attended including panelists: Arthur Stein, UCLA, Lou Pauly, University of Toronto, Yves Tiberghien, University of British Columbia, and Kyle Lascurettes, Lewis and Clark College. Unfortunately, our colleagues, Janice Stein could not join but I was fortunate enough to receive her speaking note and I have tried to reflect some of her thinking with the notes from other colleagues.

What didn’t surprise me, of course, during the session was the recognition from all that we have a fraught period of transition in the international system. There is the obvious Russian aggression against Ukraine and the challenge by Russia to some of the basic tenets of the current order – most notably territorial integrity and national sovereignty. There is also the obvious growing leading power tensions between the US and China and the growing threat of confrontation and conflict especially over Taiwan that currently stock the relationship. There was the obvious attention to US determination to sustain dominance even in the face of a dramatic power transition with the emergence of China and more broadly the Global South – India and other Indo-Pacific nations including Indonesia, etc. and other Southeast Asian states and then, of course, the return of Lula to Brazil.

But raw geopolitics did not dominate the discourse of the Roundtable. Equally significant in our discussions was the acknowledgement of the continuance of the intergovernmental institutions and collective actions of states to advance global order and achieve collective action within the framework of the current and evolving Order. While some decried the faltering of the global institutions, nevertheless, there was general acceptance that regional and other informal order-based institutions continued advance policies in various ways. AS one of my colleagues Kyle Lascurettes noted: “There is a truly global rules-based order that stands a good chance of outliving American hegemonic decline. But the so called “liberal” or “Western” rules-based order is and will be in trouble.” Indeed, the liberal order or the Liberal International Order (LIO) disappeared, I’d argue with the Global Financial Crisis” in 2008 but the Global Order does indeed remain. And, as Yves Tiberghien focusing on the dramatic power transition suggested: “today is a time of disruption and transition – a special phase. Major shocks, change, crises, innovation will take place over the next 1-2 decades … Also shift in awareness. Western dominated order was an anomaly of last 200 years, with a rise phase for 300 years before that. Return of multiple voices all over the world. Return to a diverse, polymorphic, poly polarity.” As Jagannath Panda recently wrote in an EAF blog on March 20, 2023:  “Obituaries of the US-led liberal international order may be exaggerated, but the shift towards multipolarity is in motion.”

And what then do we have as the Global Order, and how will it advance. Arthur Stein recalled the fragile nature of the Order, which he described for me in his opening chapter of my 2008 edited volume – Can the World be Governed? The global order, he wrote then, and repeated at our Roundtable was:  ‘a weakly confederal world’. As he said at the time (2008, 52) : ”In fact, one could argue not only that multilateralism is an existential reality but that weak confederalism is the nature of modern reality.”

So the LIO has faded,  and what remains is the global RBIO (rules-based international order). Weaker and less collaborative – indeed as Arthur pointed out, the low hanging fruit of cooperation has passed and it is and will be increasingly difficult to reach collaborative solutions . But as Yves points out that there is continuing support for aspects of the Order including with China where Yves notes the significant China support for COP15 the Conference on  Biodiversity where the multilateral conference came together to agree on a new set of goals to guide global action through 2030 and to halt and reverse nature loss and the recently concluded agreement on the text for the critical High Seas Treaty. The challenge for the leading powers is to maintain a forward collaborative thrust, and as Lou Pauly warned, it is critical for the US to accept: “The challenge is to overcome perennial tendencies toward either insularity or spasmodic over-extension, toward temporizing on necessary decisions, toward shifting the costs of adjustment to the relatively poor internally, and toward exporting the rest of those costs to other countries.” It will not be easy; and Arthur reminded us that American domestic politics has been a problem since 1919 and continues today with the failure to approve through the US Senate, international agreements and the often strained effort to use executive power.

As Janice Stein alludes to in her notes: “Plurilateral and minilateral institutions – from AUKUS to IPEF to Trade and Technology Councils will be the principal sites of innovation. I have called this process “taking it offsite.” New institutions are being stood up, led by the willing, who set rules and invite others to join if they wish. One could argue that we are entering a period of start-up innovation in the creation of new, smaller, more flexible, and more focused institutions.

Although Janice may be a touch pessimistic over multilateral collaborative action, the Global Order has its worked cut out for it to avoid great power conflict and achieve critical global governance policies in climate, global finance, global health and much more.

 

Image Credit: ISA

Indonesia’s G20 Win: behind-the-scenes gatherings and unity in a time when global governance needs it most – and now to India

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Dominating our smartphone screens, televisions, and front pages were photos of Justin Trudeau, Xi Jinping, Joe Biden, and Giorgia Meloni in traditional Indonesian attire, participating in a ceremonial mangrove tree planting event and gathering late night to discuss the missiles that killed two Poles, contemplating potential next steps using NATO’s Article 4. These leaders are – whether they want to be or not – celebrities. They are simultaneously praised and critiqued depending on who is watching them. Yet, what is not seen by mainstream audiences, perhaps even those more politically astute, is the intricate machine of behind-the-scenes work taking place throughout 257 meetings between December 2021 and December 2022 under Indonesia’s presidency of the G20 Summit.

In 2011, the Director of the Global Summitry Project, Alan Alexandroff, wrote about the notion of the G20 not being solely about its leaders, but rather surrounding the Leaders’ Summit an array of complementary “personal representatives, ministers, other officials, IFIs, IOs, [and] global regulators that make the G[20] system work – or not”. Whether the G20 is successful (a subjective term, in any case), is a different conversation.

Alexandroff’s Iceberg Theory of Global Governance positions the G20 Leaders’ Summit at its tip, but the vast bulk of the iceberg is situated below the surface, and often goes unnoticed by the majority of observers and experts.

This underwater all-encompassing mass is formed by numerous assemblies: from Ministerial meetings regarding health, environment and climate, women’s empowerment, trade investment and industry, the energy transition, development, labor, research and innovation, and tourism; to Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governor meetings, Finance-Health Deputies meetings, joint Sherpa and Finance Deputies meetings, individual Sherpa meetings, Foreign Ministers meetings, G20 Digital Ministers meetings, and Education Ministers meetings; and lastly, engagement group gatherings (including the U20, B20 on climate/energy, integrity, compliance, and business leaders; the T20, with numerous recommendations from think tanks around the world, the Y20, with priority areas on digital transformation and youth empowerment, and the L20 Employment Summit).

It would be hard to contest that the G20 indeed has been a platform that has developed and advanced key collaborative actions toward policies and priorities, from the Leader Declaration identifying the Pandemic Fund, the Financial Intermediary Funds for Pandemic Prevention, which employs the World Bank and World Health Organization.

The incoming G20 Troika – Indonesia, India and Brazil – will mark a unique shift in global governance deliberations. It will be led by three Global South countries with emerging large market economies hosting the year-long activities. The hosting will pass from India in 2023, Brazil in 2024, and South Africa in 2025.

We anticipate this three-year spread of Global South presidencies will tackle issues that have been brushed to the side or missed in other G20 Summits. This is certainly a significant step in the effort to construct a multilateral network to seek mutually beneficial responses to growing challenges impacting all countries.

The Financial Times released an article following Indonesia’s Leaders’ Summit, deeming its outcomes “remarkable”. Russia, represented by its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, seemed isolated on the world stage as China put forth a more neutral stance in its support towards Moscow. Xi commented that his administration “resolutely opposes attempt[s] to politicize food and energy issues or use them as tools and weapons”.

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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization: “Symbolically significant”, for now

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The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) leader-led summit was held in Samarkand in this September. It brought global attention to the group first established by Beijing at the start of the 21st century. Not only was it Xi Jinping’s first trip outside the country since January 2020, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, but the meeting was also an opportunity for a sit down between Xi and Putin on the margins of the summit. That meeting was the immediate point of interest for the global media. In Samarkand, India’s PM Modi was openly critical of Russia as he tried to carve out a leadership position for the South Asian republic. While commentators noted that PM Modi did not hold a bilateral with President Xi indicating that the warmth of 2018’s Wuhan Summit between the two has not yet been rekindled.  Iran participated for the first time with the group now representing 40 percent of the world’s population and nearly a third of global GDP and all of which, barring India, are decidedly illiberal regimes.

While the SCO has more than two decades of existence, the summit is of interest not just because of the high-level leader diplomacy but on the peculiar qualities of a multilateral institution that is often neglected by Western scholars and analysts.

The SCO was established in 2001 by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the intention of providing stability to the former Soviet Central Asian spaces with a particular focus on cooperation to combat what the members called the ‘three evils’ of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. This initial motivation reflected China’s broader concerns about counterterrorism and Islamic extremism in the early 2000s as well as long term anxieties Beijing has had about the threat to the Communist Party of China (CPC) rule at the peripheries of the China.

The initial work of the SCO focused on coordinating the members’ security policies and sharing information, as well as conducting regular military exercises. The group added narcotic trafficking to its counterterrorism agenda and began to talk about economic collaboration and had periodic rhetorical flourishes about global governance and international order. From its initial membership of: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, the SCO has expanded to include India and Pakistan in 2017and now Iran.

While the SCOs public diplomacy has been wide ranging, the group was, and remains at its heart, interested primarily on matters of international and transnational security. Yet as many analysts point out, Beijing and the members often appear disinterested in many quite obvious regional security matters, the most immediate example of which is the deadly clash between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan taking place barely 200 km from the current Summit which elicited neither comment nor action from individual leaders or the group as a whole.

Multilateral institutions often serve both symbolic and substantive functions. With the former, symbolic functions provide the opportunity to signal intent, represent collaboration and more broadly to perform statecraft. But substantive functions can provide the means to advance actual policy coordination and, in their more advanced forms, bind members into strict policy commitments, most famously exemplified by the EU and WTO. Most initiatives provide a blend of performance and policy as well as offering a platform at which ad hoc diplomacy can take place, such as the China-Russia meeting this year.

The SCO today is, however, a grouping that is long on symbolism and short on substance. At first glance it appears to be a good example of institutional balancing, that is when states use international institutions to balance against the influence of major powers. In this case the intention is to use the SCO to ensure that the US and its allies’ influence on the geopolitical dynamics in the Eurasian heartland is blunted. From this perspective bringing India into the fold was intended to hedge against Delhi’s growing alignment with Washington.

More broadly, it also represents a desire for a more multipolar and multimodal international order in which the North Atlantic powers have less influence; and liberal values are diluted as well.

While the symbolism is strong, and in the current moment it has particular salience given the Ukraine war illustrating starkly the clash between authoritarianism and democratic systems, there is little sign of the SCO making any meaningful progress on the substantive side of the ledger. One might be tempted to view the SCO as a nascent Central Asian NATO, yet the preferences of the key SCO powers remain low on concrete commitments as well as exhibiting not inconsiderable tensions between various members. At least for now, it is unlikely that the SCO will take any steps to move beyond the symbolic.

It is tempting, therefore, to write off the SCO as another example of shallow diplomacy in which grand statements of intent and photo opportunities are confused for actual statecraft. That is certainly true right now, but in the building of the foundations for collaboration among  influential and illiberal states in a geopolitically crucial zone of world politics, the members in general, and China in particular, have established a solid platform from which members may ultimately make good on their very real ambitions to transform the principles and practice of the regional order and possibly the international order.

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The Twin Threats to Global Governance and Global Summitry

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It is a challenging G20 Summit. For any host. No less so for Indonesia, the first Global South leader in a follow on series of Global South hosts.

This year in November the G20 Summit is scheduled for Bali to then be followed in 2023 by India. India will then be followed in 2024 by Brazil and presumably, though not yet announced South Africa in 2025. So, what’s the problem? Well, in principle nothing. But these Global South hosts are only slowly becoming accustomed to leadership roles where advancing the global governance agenda is called for in the leadership role.

The second dilemma is the dramatic impact of renewed geopolitics. The growing tensions and rivalry between China and the US now dominate relations between these two leading powers. These bilateral tensions have been amped significantly higher by the Russian aggression against Ukraine.  War in Europe, as we haven’t seen in decades now sharpens differences between China and the United States. These difficult bilateral relations have now been further strained by Taiwan tensions following US House Speaker Pelosi’s visit to the island state. These strains are reflected in the undermining of collaborative global governance relations between the two, and more broadly the apparent hobbling of multilateral relations.

So, two threats to advancing critical global governance policy at the global summitry level. These threats are particularly enhanced where domestic politics dominates and global leadership emerges rather more as an afterthought.  And it would seem that is exactly what our Host faces. First, the dominance of domestic politics. This feature of Indonesian leadership politics is precisely what is identified by Shafiah Mushibat in his recent post at EAF titled: “Indonesia steps innocently onto the international stage”:

In Indonesian politics, the domestic audience and interests still trump the global audience and global common interests. This is not unusual, and it’s reasonable, considering that foreign policy involves actions and activities by governments that aim to defend and promote national interests. But Indonesia is quickly discovering that marrying its international roles, responsibilities and expectations that go with them to national interests that please domestic audiences is not altogether easy.

Mushibat concludes that the Indonesian President has chosen to emphasize the domestic politics of Indonesia’s leadership of the G20. He writes:

Approaching the G20 presidency, the Indonesian government initiated many activities to promote its role domestically. This included raising awareness of the G20’s ‘benefits’, such as the direct economic benefits of hosting the summit. In a November 2021 speech, Widodo pressed the country to make the most of its strategic position in the G20 presidency and ‘prioritise national interests’. Explaining how the G20 presidency will benefit the country has been a main part of the government’s effort to ensure domestic support for all the efforts.

And as to the second and growing threat – the destructive impact of geopolitical tensions – they are real:

Indonesia has been lauded as representing the voices of developing nations and emerging economies outside of the G20, but its presidency faces major challenges — mainly because of the geopolitical implications from the Russia–Ukraine war. While the G20 has performed important functions for member states and the world at large, it struggles with balancing the pursuit of its members’ national interests with a genuine commitment to the global common good. As the world grapples with economic and health recovery from COVID-19 and the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on food and energy supplies, the global common good and how to achieve it is the vital interest.

The corrosive impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on global cooperation cannot be underestimated. It has ramped up Biden Administration efforts to build alliances and partnerships. Included in that circle of partnership efforts is the G7 where the United States has emphasized the ‘like mindedness’ and democratic character of the G7. With all the emphasis on the G7 there seems to be little room for a Biden collaborative focus on the G20. Working the G20 with China in particular with all its Ministerials, Working Parties and Task Forces is a key but apparently a key not willing to be turned by the Biden Administration.  The G20, of course, includes Russia and much of the US G20 public discussion has urged the exclusion of Russia from the Summit. Rather than a focus on advancing collaborative efforts the public statements have been on Russia’s exclusion and questioning China, at least in public, on its positioning with respect to Russia.

Meanwhile Widodo has tried to smooth the difficult Russian presence by inviting the Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine to attend at Bali as well. But the critical focus has to be on the Biden Administration to ‘grab’ the G20 ring, avoid the Russian distraction, and focus on critical multilateral global governance initiatives.

Image Credit: East Asia Forum