Category Archives: Global Summitry

The Evolving Role of Japan in the Liberal Order

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My podcast guest, Phillip Lipscy and were fortunate enough recently to attend a major conference on Japan’s leadership in the Liberal Order.  This conference was organized by my good friend and colleague, Professor Yves Tiberghien of the University of British Columbia and its Centre for Japanese Research Worksop. Many Japanese colleagues joined experts from North America to discuss the role of Japan in the Liberal Order, especially under the current Abe Government. It is clear that Japanese foreign policy has changed. But how much. One need only look at Japan’s major role in picking up the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) after President Trump withdrew the United States from it.  The vigorous Japanese leadership efforts resulted in the conclusion of the TPP 11with all members other that the United States agreeing to the revised TPP. And Japan has hosted the G20. Nevertheless, the question remains why and how far has Japanese foreign policy changed. There seems to me to be a rather mixed Japanese leadership role but let’s join Phillip in getting his views of Japanese leadership in the Liberal Order. 

Phillip has recently joined the University of Toronto from Stanford University as an Associate Professor of Political Science at the UoT and is the new Chair in Japanese politics and global affairs and Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Japan at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy here at the the University of Toronto. Phillip has published extensively on Japanese politics and foreign policy.

So come join us as we discuss the role of Japan in the current Liberal Orde. This is Episode 17 of the Summit Dialogue Series at Global Summitry at iTunes or at SoundCloud. . 

 

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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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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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

Chasing One’s Own Tail – What Was Agreed to by Trump and Kim in Singapore: A ‘First Glance’

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The Summit has come and gone.  What was agreed to?  It will be anyone’s guess as the media now will try and chase down the detail.  Lord knows, we will be unable to rely on the President.  What we are left with is Trump’s own magnified sense of what he can negotiate. As Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote: 

The president is counting on his personal skills to convince Kim that abandoning North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, and the security it provides him, is in his country’s and the world’s best interests. That will require hard bargaining in the future. But the joint communique signed by the two leaders offered scant concrete evidence to back up the North Korean leader’s pledge to “complete denuclearization.

So, we are likely to witness an almost endless cycle of media efforts to determine what was agreed to by the DPRK and the U.S. So, enervating! And meanwhile as Balz makes clear we will wilt under the impetuosity of an ill-disciplined President.

To reach the goals Trump has outlined will require discipline and commitment that has not been part of the president’s foreign-policy tool kit. And he must resist the kind of impetuousness he displayed on his way to Singapore when he abruptly withdrew U.S. support for a joint communique negotiated with other nations at the Group of Seven meeting in Canada. His pique at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s post-meeting news conference created a rupture in relations with America’s closest allies.

Image Credit: cnn.com

The Curious Calculus of Donald Trump – A ‘First Glance’

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What a weekend of summitry! Look at that intense discussion among leaders.  A deeply troubled alliance; and a deeply fractious G7 meeting in Canada.  

There is much one could comment on but let me just frame one encounter.  First, it this Trump statement – his call for readmitting Russia to the G7, returning it to the G8 is Trump at his most incendiary.  If nothing else he is the master of controlling the news cycle. 

Leave aside the fact that such a readmittance would have to be agreed to by all the members.  It was evident that the statement by Trump took everyone by surprise.

And leave aside that in his initial statement where he failed to raise the Russian annexation of Crimea  and Russia’s current involvement in the Ukraine, though later he suggested it was a long time ago.

Leave all these matters aside. The call by Trump for Russian readmittance is really a most odd reflection on the architecture of global summitry. It has me baffled.  Here is Trump’s original comment:

Whether you like it or not, and it may not be politically correct, we have a world to run and in the G7, which used to be the G8, they threw Russia out. They should let Russia come back in because we should have Russia at the negotiating table.  

Yes, Russia has been ousted by the G7. But there is a G20. And, indeed Russia is a member of the G20, last I looked.  And if Trump is truly convinced that these countries – the G7 –  have a ‘world to run’ well, might I suggest Trump consider China before he worries about giving his pal Putin a pass on the Crimea and the Ukraine and invites Russia back in. 

Image Credit: Jesco Denzel/German Federal Government, via Reuters

The first ‘First Glance’

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You’d have to be in Antarctica, maybe not even there, not to see the growing chaos in the liberal international order (LIO) since Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States.  And, it is evident that the election of the ‘Great Dismantler’ does not nearly explain the growing turbulence in international relations. Rising great power rivalry, the rise of populist leadership in liberal democrat countries and the growing authoritarian swath of global leadership – all this, and more. impact and undermine the LIO. 

So, it is fitting, I think, to announce the ‘First Glance’ series at the RisingBRICSAM blog.  On the weekend of the G7 in Charlevoix, Quebec with Trump anger and accusations at full tilt targeting his G7 allies, and Trump’s early departure to fly to Singapore for his summit encounter with the DPRK’s Kim Jong Un, it is the right time to rev-up the blog. 

The ‘First Glance’ posts will, I hope be relatively frequent.  They likely will be shorter than the traditional RisingBRICSAM posts – more from the hip, but with a desire to inform closer in ‘real time’. The LIO is under stress and from the country most responsible for its building.  What is happening,  and the course of international relations and the LIO demand greater attention. 

Here’s to ‘First Glance’.   

Alan S Alexandroff

The ‘Great Dismantler’ – Can A Liberal Order Be Rebuilt after the ‘Age of Trump’

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It has become clear where Trump’s policies are taking us – or as clear as one can be when it comes to interpreting Trump policy.  Trump is breaking the structures and  policy frameworks of America’s existing domestic and foreign policies.  The question is less whether he can accomplish some measure of this, then what will  it take future US leaders, assuming they are willing, to rebuild the institutions and policies that have been constructed over the past seven decades.  As Tom Friedman of the NYT recently declared:

Moreover, when you break big systems, which, albeit imperfectly, have stabilized regions, environments or industries for decades, it can be very difficult to restore them.

The litany of destruction by this President is now  all too familiar.  In his first day in office after his inaugurated, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  He now appears to be targeting for destruction the NAFTA before the rather hapless Mexican and Canadian leaders.  And the South Korea-US free trade agreement appears to be next for the chopping bloc, notwithstanding the need it would seem to maintain close alliance support in the face of the North Korea’s nuclear and missile ambitions and US efforts to force DPRK denuclearization.

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