“America is back.” That was the message from U.S. President Joe Biden, the most internationalist of recent U.S. presidents, speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February 2021. There is a “dire need to coordinate multilateral action,” he declared. But his administration’s fixation on bilateral and regional agreements—at the expense of globally coordinated action—is underplaying the potential of our international institutions, all while undermining any possibility of a stable and managed globalization. Without a new multilateralism, a decade of global disorder seems inevitable.
The great irony, of course, is that the world’s preeminent multilateral institutions—from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to the United Nations—were all created by the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through U.S. leadership, these institutions helped deliver peace, reduce poverty, and improve health outcomes. Now, with America aloof, cracks in the world order are becoming canyons as we fail to design global solutions for global challenges.
No one but Vladimir Putin is to blame for the war in Ukraine, which, to America’s credit, has brought the whole of Europe together. But elsewhere, the world is suffering from self-inflicted wounds: failures to address mounting debt; famine and poverty afflicting low- and middle-income Africa; an inability to coordinate an equitable response to COVID-19; and an impasse on finding the money to deal with the biggest existential crisis of all—climate change. These crises have left the developing world not only reeling but also angry at the West for its failure to lead.
Anything the international community has done, it has done by halves—and usually too late. It has let people die for lack of vaccines, let them starve for lack of food, and let them suffer because of inaction on climate change and on the catastrophes that follow. Just look at U.N. humanitarian aid or the World Food Program, both of which have received far less than half of the funding they need for this year. World Bank funding for poorer countries is being cut back this year and next, at a time when demands for it to add climate investment to its human capital interventions are growing.
To their credit, U.S. leaders have recognized that old approaches cannot work. The once dominant Washington Consensus now has little support, not least in Washington. In an April speech that the economist Larry Summers accurately called the “most carefully intellectually developed exposition of the administration’s philosophy,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan rebuked crumbling, Parthenon-like global structures. Rather, he saw more promise in targeted, precision-guided actions such as the proposed Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, and the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity. Sullivan made only passing reference to the need to reform the World Bank—despite the fact that U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has devoted speeches to this—and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and no mention at all of the IMF, United Nations, or the World Health Organization (WHO). And the premier forum for international economic cooperation, as the G-20 was designated in 2009, did not even merit a name check.
As a statement of a modern industrial policy that recognizes America’s increased need to make security a decisive factor in setting its economic direction, the Sullivan synthesis cannot be faulted. But his intervention was pre-advertised as a statement of “international economic policy” and not just of domestic industrial policy—and in this respect something was missing. This comprehensive speech on U.S. international relations fell short of any plan for a managed globalization. The United States, the undisputed leader of the nearly 80-year-old global institutions designed to enhance international cooperation, seems to be absenting itself from a serious debate about their relevance and potential reform. And as trade wars become technology wars and capital wars and threaten to descend even further into a new kind of economic cold war marked by competing global systems, an America that was, generally, multilateralist in a unipolar world is closer to unilateralism in a multipolar world.
We cannot reduce international policy to merely the sum of regional and bilateral relationships. What happens if there’s another global financial crisis? What happens if there’s again a worldwide contagion? What happens when droughts, floods, and fires reveal a global action that needs to be taken? What happens if, as U.S. President Ronald Reagan once mused to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, an asteroid is hurtling toward Earth?
A ship in stormy seas needs steady anchors, and today there are none. The world used to be anchored by U.S. hegemony. Those unipolar days are now behind us. But after a unipolar age comes a multipolar age, which requires a multipolar anchor. This anchor—and the stability it provides—must be built on reformed multilateral institutions. Indeed, such an overhaul of the global architecture is the only way to repair a global liberal order that is now neither global nor liberal nor orderly—and to overcome a geopolitical recession that has given us a global no man’s land of ungoverned spaces.
A multilateral reform agenda is all the more important because alternative world orders envisaged by commentators are hardly inclusive and thus not viable. A U.S.-led free trade zone is likely to be opposed not only by those excluded from it but by the more protectionist U.S. Congress. A coalition of democracies would, by definition, have to exclude U.S. allies from Rwanda and Bangladesh to Singapore and Saudi Arabia, which Washington would be loath to do. And a Concert of Great Powers—akin to the post-1815 Concert of Europe—or a G-2 comprising just the United States and China would also provoke an angry response from most of the world’s other 190-odd countries. Clubs, large or small, will not give the world the stability it needs, making a reinvigorated multilateral system a far better way to arrest the slide toward a “one world, two systems” future.
Chinese President Xi Jinping understands well the benefits that can accrue to Beijing from shifts in geopolitical power. Just as the United States has moved from multilateralism to bilateralism and regionalism, China has introduced its own new overarching idea onto the global stage.
A decade ago, China focused on professedly regional structures such as the Belt and Road Initiative, which has succeeded in attracting 149 members, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with 106 members, including most of Europe, the U.K., and Canada—and which the United States has refused to join, giving the impression it will not join any club it does not lead.
Buoyed by this, China’s focus has shifted toward joint international initiatives, including the New Development Bank and the BRICS group of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Now, China has gone global, reaching out on its own with the boldly named Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative. With their focus on joint action on crime, terrorism, and domestic security, they follow on from what China considers to be the success of its first fully independent global program, the Global Development Initiative (GDI). All three interventions are far more Parthenon-like and certainly more structured and ambitious in their rhetoric, if not in reality. All told, some 60 countries have already joined the GDI’s Group of Friends. As detailed in Dawn C. Murphy’s China’s Rise in the Global South, China is using these global initiatives to build spheres of influence that could one day become a competing global order.
And this surge in Chinese global engagement is not passing propaganda from China but an enduring endeavor on Xi’s part—a deliberate display of political ambition and an attempt to present China as the true defender of the international order. Having just brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations, and potentially end the war in Yemen, Xi has now been sufficiently emboldened to push a peace settlement proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, not to mention murmurings of a leading Chinese role in a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, all under the umbrella of upholding the U.N. Charter.
There’s fine print, of course. While China supports the Charter’s commitment to the territorial integrity of states and noninterference in the domestic affairs of member countries, it is silent on the sections of the Charter and subsequent U.N. resolutions that focus on human rights, the responsibility to protect, and the principle of self-determination—and China does little to uphold rulings made by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court or, for example, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The logical response is clear. Rather than retreating further, the United States must respond to a changing global order by championing a new multilateralism—not the old hub-and-spoke multilateralism that assumed unchallenged U.S. hegemony and could be upheld by instructing allies and suitors. A new multilateralism powered by persuasion and not dictation, and founded on the realities of our global economy, would bring people together through reforming the international institutions that the United States has the potential to once again lead.