‘High Season’ for Global Summitry

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

So we are about to enter high season in the global summitry calendar. First up will be the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation scheduled for Yanqi Lake just outside Beijing proper on November 11 and 12, 2014. This is in turn followed by the ASEAN Summit (technically not a global summit) where the day following is the global summit meeting called the East Asia Summit (EAS). This Leaders Summit includes 18 Asia-Pacific leaders now that Russia and the United States have been added as of 2011. The meeting this year will take place in Naypyidaw the capital city of Myanmar. And with a final burst of energy Leaders will meet for the G20 Leaders Summit on November 14-15th in Brisbane this year. It is a tight schedule designed to allow leaders to attend all three and then to return to their home countries.

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Struggling to Understand ‘Order’ in the International System

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

As Stewart Patrick reflected today at the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) on President Obama’s forthcoming remarks to the UN General Assembly, the President will be called upon to: “… convince both foreign and domestic audiences that the world is not spinning out of control and that the United States is determined to keep it that way. At home and abroad, pessimism about the state of the world runs high.” And then Patrick confirmed the bleak view that has come to dominate the analysis of global affairs:

Syria is collapsing, Iraq is fragmenting, and Libya is disintegrating. Authoritarian leaders are tightening their grips from Cairo to Moscow, while Palestinians and Israelis murder each other. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is running rampant over the debris.

Now Patrick is not with these remarks, by any sense out of the main stream, in his downbeat description of the course of global politics.

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Geez Globalization is Dying Too!

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

Well it certainly has not been ‘the best of times’ – particularly not if you’ve been reading the international pundits. And indeed there is a lot of tension, strife and conflict in the international system whether in the Middle East, or in Eastern Europe or in Asia in the South China and East China Seas. No matter where you look it seems you can find these nasty conflicts.

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Is this Really the Demise of ‘Liberal Internationalism’

Posted on August 29, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

For liberal internationalists, this is a bitter pill to swallow—or even to accept. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” Secretary of State John Kerry fulminated on CBS’s Face the Nation back in March. Ah, but you do, if you happen to have a mindset more in keeping with Otto von Bismarck than Woodrow Wilson (to say nothing of Barack Obama).

This is how my good colleague, Stewart Patrick, expressed his outrage – or at least his distaste – the other day at the admittedly aggressive and deceitful behavior by everyone’s favorite bad guy right now – Vladimir Putin. As Patrick describes Russia’s actions in his recent blog post “Russia Assaults Ukraine—and the Liberal World Order”:

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It’s Broken Too! Or Is It?

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

So the assessment of what is broken, and what is not, at the global governance level continues among the experts.

First a rare corrective to the gloom-and-doom assessments particularly from the international media.

Dan Drezner recently released his book examining the response, especially of the G20 to the Great Recession. The book is entitled – The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression.

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It is Tough Exercising Global ‘Concert Diplomacy’ Leadership – Part II

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

So back to the role of the Stanley Foundation (TSF) in analyzing multilateralism in today’s global order. I had the good fortune to connect with TSF’s President Keith Porter. And he was good enough to respond to my questions. Keith started out responding to my questions:

I think your questions, “How does the Foundation tackle the broader concert diplomacy aspects of global governance? How does the Foundation capture and comment on contemporary multilateralism?,” don’t get to the heart of our approach. The foundation recently completed a major strategic planning effort where we re-affirmed our belief that multilateral action is the only way to bring about fair, just, and lasting solutions to the problems facing the world today. However, we also acknowledged that the infrastructure of multilateral cooperation has changed over the years. Given the growing number of active multilateral venues and the stubborn refusal of states to adapt older institutions to the changing world order, this doesn’t seem like the time to advocate for a grand, new, master plan for universal global governance.

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Where’s the ‘Number Two’?

Posted on July 9, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

With the gathering of US and China officials in Beijing for the sixth S&ED (Security and Economic Dialogue) meeting of the two, it is reasonable to take a step back to assess where relations are at the moment between these two great powers. I was tempted to do this in part because the meetings are now happening but also because I reviewed, just the other day, a piece on global order by my colleague Parag Khanna called a “World Reimagined” in the The National Interest.

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Engaging in the Review of Global Summitry

Posted on June 11, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

I’ve just had the good fortune to return from Oxford University where I spent several very pleasant days examining with experts and others the health and direction of global governance. This almost annual Princeton University Workshop is a highly satisfactory partnership of the Council on Foreign Relations and Stewart Patrick, Princeton University and John Ikenberry, The Stanley Foundation, President Keith Porter and Program Director Jennifer Smyser, and ‘moi’ of the Global Summitry Project at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

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A World in Flux II

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

It’s a pleasure to review work of colleagues seriously grappling with the contemporary world order. Back in March I reviewed Bruce Jones’s examination of the global order at the point just prior to the publication of his new book – Still Our To Lead. Since that time a number of other close colleagues have had a chance to weigh in on his world view and I thought I’d double back to look at their perspectives and revisit my own.

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Struggling with World Order

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Alan Alexandroff

Who said geopolitics went away? Well a number of international relations experts imply this in their various announcements that geopolitics has returned. One of those most loudly trumpeting this view is Walter Russell Mead, the Editor-at- Large of the American Interest. In his most recent piece in Foreign Affairs he declares:

But Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant” But geopolitics never went away, notwithstanding there was a great deal of attention focused on the global economy – particularly in the light of the 2008 global financial crisis.

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Rising BRICSAM

'Breaking' Knowledge, Information and Commentary on Rising BRICSAM and Global Governance Summitry

Category Archives: Global Summitry

‘High Season’ for Global Summitry

Struggling to Understand ‘Order’ in the International System

Geez Globalization is Dying Too!

Is this Really the Demise of ‘Liberal Internationalism’

It’s Broken Too! Or Is It?

It is Tough Exercising Global ‘Concert Diplomacy’ Leadership – Part II

Where’s the ‘Number Two’?

Engaging in the Review of Global Summitry

A World in Flux II

Struggling with World Order