Category Archives: Global Order

So Many Lose-Lose Propositions – ‘Shaking the Global Order’

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We are beginning to understand the consequences of an ‘America First’ leadership of the Global Order. And to just about any observer of it, it isn’t pretty.  As we wait here today for President Trump’s announcement on the Paris Accord – and whether he pulls the United States officially out or not –the US is surely out at least for the next four years. 

The retreat of US leadership from the Liberal international order continues. Maybe the most startling recent statement actually comes from two Trump officials. In an opinion piece in WSJ assessing the success of Trump’s first overseas trip to the Middle East, to NATO and to the G7 in Italy, H.R. McMaster, the White House national security advisor and D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, described the America First view of the Global Order:

The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.

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‘America First’: American Foreign Policy in the ‘Age of Trump’

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Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy  is only very slowly being revealed.  But this week will see an important addition.  On Thursday and Friday President Trump will be meeting China’s President Xi Jinping.  This meeting represents a crucial first meeting of the leaders though we have seen Secretary of State Tillerson in Beijing recently.  But Tillerson remains an enigma and it is not at all clear that he has the ‘ear ‘ of President Trump. This week we will see Donald Trump at the center of American foreign policy making with arguably the most relationship in the global order.

We have been working hard at the Global Summitry Project to chronicle and evaluate the impact of Trump on the Liberal Order.  Much of our effort can be seen at the Oxford’s journal, Global Summitry: Politics, Economics and Law in International Governance. The Journal is a partnership of the Munk School and the Rotman Management School.  I am one of the Senior Editors there. We have just launched a new podcast series – ‘Shaking the Global Order:  American Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump. Our first podcast episode, this an interview with Rory MacFarquhar a former Obama official, has just appeared. In celebration of the series, we have added the podcasts to iTunes and Soundcloud. Also, take a look at our analysis of Trump foreign policy: “Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy that its impact on the Liberal Order” that just recently appeared at the OUPBlog, 

Where will Trump take the United States? And where will he take the Liberal Order?  It remains an open question. Former Prime UK Minister, Tony Blair writing recently in the NYT about the politics of the centre and the challenges and pressures being experienced to both centre right and centre left parties raised the key issue:

The question is, will this be a temporary phase, perhaps linked to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and Sept. 11, and will politics soon revert to normal, or has a new political age begun?

 

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‘Shaking the Temple’ – Trump and the Liberal Order

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With the change in US Administrations we face possibly the most dramatic change in US foreign policy since the end of World War II.  The global leader has seemingly become the rogue seeking dramatic change in the Liberal Order the US has as much or more responsibility for over the last seventy years plus.

As has quickly become clear, however, we do not know if President’s Trump rhetoric of the campaign will be followed by actions matching the rhetoric.  There is some reason to think that his and his administration’s actions will not match some of the more highly nationalist expressions of his ‘America First’ rhetoric.  One need only look at Trump’s early statements and actions on China – phoning the Taiwan President, then questioning the ‘One China Policy’ only to reaffirm the policy in a call with China President Xi Jinping – to raise questions even doubts over the election rhetoric. But even without dramatic foreign policy actions it is not hard to see Trump and his Administration as possibly the greatest challenge to the Liberal Order that any of us have witnessed.

I will be periodically examining US foreign policy, and the policy toward the Liberal Order it and by key actors -supporters and detractors alike – hoping to assess the impact of the policies and actions on the Liberal Order. The first entry is the piece I was invited to post at the US-China Focus website.  There will be others. In addition, as Senior Editor of Oxford’s Global Summitry: Politics, Economics, and Law in International Governance, I intend to post a series of podcast interviews with experts and former officials on: ‘Shaking the Global Order: American Foreign Policy in the Age of Trump’.   I will back to you on additional posts and the podcast series.

 

 

Image Credit: abcnews.go.com

Looking at a Different ‘World Order’

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It is evidently a result of the distemper of our immediate circumstances – brought on by President-Elect Donald Trump about to become President of the United States – that my colleagues are not unreasonably contemplating alternatives to the current Liberal Order.  Being apocalyptic is in; optimism out.  As my Cornell colleague and political economist friend, Jonathan Kirshner recently wrote in an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books: 

And so the election of Trump will come to mark the end of the international order that was built to avoid repeating the catastrophes of the first half the twentieth century, and which did so successfully — horrors that we like to imagine we have outgrown. It will not serve us well.

We have lost, we are lost. Not an election, but a civilization. Where does that leave us? I think the metaphor is one of (political) resistance.

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So Much Talk of ‘Disorder’!

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So it appears just about everyone has joined in. There are of course insightful views of the current global order from some of my IR colleagues, including but not limited to by Thomas Wright at Brookings or Joe Nye at Harvard.  But it would appear that many others have joined in as well. And it is understandable.  The rise of populist forces, especially in Europe, the surprise election of Donald Trump in the United States and the continuing global economic slowdown, the decline in trade and the incomplete recovery from the financial crisis of 2008 leave an attractive political and economic landscape to contemplate the future of the global order,   

This is not to suggest that folks other than my IR colleagues don’t have the necessary insights to assess the implications of current actions and events.  Many do.  For there is after all a need to assess the political actions, the military capabilities and the economic trends in the global order.  And it remains, after all, that it it is still unclear how to determine great power capability, power and dominance.  Depending on who you read, it is all about military assets; others suggest it is economic capability; and still others introduce soft power aspects as well.  Thus, it is probably not very surprising that as well known an economist as Nouriel Roubini finds he is able to analyze the ‘disorder’ presented by recent events.  As he declares in a recent Project Syndicate article : 

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The Threat is Real – The Global Order and Its Travails

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Donald Trump greets supporters during his election night rally in Manhattan. REUTERS/Mike Segar

Donald Trump greets supporters during his election night rally in Manhattan.

There is no doubt today about the threat to the Liberal Order.  For decades we thought the the greatest threat to the Liberal Order was posed by those outsiders, the bad Russians, Mao’s China, other authoritarian adversaries.

But we were wrong!

The election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States poses the greatest challenge yet to the Liberal Order the United States and its allies built after World War II.  Gideon Rachman in the FT , yesterday, November 8th, expressed it well:

Mr Trump’s proposed policies threaten to take an axe to the liberal world order that the US has supported and sustained since 1945. In particular, he has challenged two of the main bipartisan principles that underpin America’s approach to the world. The first is support for an open, international trading system. The second is the commitment to the US-led alliances that underpin global security.

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Enhancing Global Order: Is It Not Possible With the Great Powers?

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The Law of the Sea claim the Philippines commenced against China in 2013 came to an end last week with the award from the UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) tribunal. The award was a setback to the expansive claims by China in the South China Sea (though the Tribunal made clear it had no jurisdiction to determine the sovereignty claims asserted by China or any other country).

A number of conclusions were reached by this UNCLOS panel.   First, with respect to the historical rights China claimed through the 9-dash line (China has never made clear the actual claims arising from the 9-dash line), the Tribunal acknowledged the historical claims of China but as Taylor Fravel suggested, “the tribunal reasoned that whatever historic rights or high-seas freedoms China enjoyed were “extinguished” when it acceded to the convention.”

Second, the Tribunal set out a 4-part test to determine whether a ‘feature’ – rock, or protruding reef, or islet, is an island thus providing for expanded maritime rights.  The Tribunal utilizing this newly enunciated test rejected that any features in the Spratly Island chain brought with it a 200 mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ), as opposed to a 12 mile maritime territorial limit.  This ruling is likely to have a significant impact on a variety of maritime claims asserted by other states. It also would suggest that Mischief Reef, part of the Spratly Islands and where China has carried out reclamation work, is located within the EEZ claimed by the Philippines.

Finally, the Tribunal acknowldeged that the Philippines held EEZ rights in the Scarborough Island’s Second Thomas Shoal, where China has denied access to Philippine fishing boats.

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Take a Deep Breath – Not Yet the End of the Global Order

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Gloom and despair have accompanied the Brexit vote, especially for those concerned about the wider Atlantic alliance.

Mr. Obama, after meeting with leaders of the European Union attending the Warsaw NATO Leaders’ Summit, tried to play down fears that Britain’s exit would weaken European resolve. He acknowledged that the “Brexit” vote had “led some to suggest that the entire edifice of European security and prosperity is crumbling. But he added, “Let me just say that as is often the case in moments of changes, that this hyperbole is misplaced.”

As Kathleen McNamara of Georgetown succinctly put it in her recent Foreign Affairs article, “the answer to the breathless question posed in the New York Times on Sunday—“Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?”—is simple. No, it is not. And yet the emotions and cultural chasms brought to bear in the Brexit vote cannot, and should not, be ignored.

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“Burning the International Order to the Ground”

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Image Credit:  en.wikipedia.org

 

There is shock and incredulity following the victory of the ‘Leave’ vote in Britain.  I will let my colleagues who follow closely the EU to pick up the threads of both this negotiation and the future of this supranational institution.  There will be much analysis over this difficult exit and the reduction of the EU from 28 to 27, though it may well be that it will return to 28 if Scotland decides it unprepared to leave the EU.

But let’s turn to the implications of the British exit on larger global order questions. The vote to leave immediately brought to mind the phrase that adorns this post that my colleague at Brookings, Tom Wright used to describe Donald Trump’s foreign policy. The post from Brookings (June 3, 2016)  was using Hilllary Clinton’s San Diego speech to examine Trump’s foreign policy ideas.  As Tom concluded:

So he will double down. And as he does, he will reinforce every word of Clinton’s San Diego speech and further alienate those voters who may be skeptical of an activist foreign policy but do not want to run the experiment of deliberately burning the international order to the ground.

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