Richard Gowan
Economists fret about a recession. American commentators worry that President Donald J. Trump is increasingly erratic and unconstrained. Their European counterparts are bracing for a very hard Brexit indeed. Is the outlook for multilateral institutions equally bleak, or even worse?
The United Nations and other international organizations face two major strategic challenges, plus multiple subsidiary crises, over the next year. The main challenges are an intensification of competition between the U.S. and China in multilateral forums, and a rapid deterioration of the once-sturdy nuclear arms control framework. These twin threats could exacerbate many of the crises already roiling global politics, from the North Korean nuclear question to the struggle for power in the Middle East.
The U.S. and China have been on a collision course in the multilateral system since the beginning of the Trump administration. The president and his advisers seem to share two basic preconceptions about global affairs. The first is that China is an out-and-out economic and strategic competitor that must be countered. The second is that international organizations and law are inherently biased against the United States and need to be rolled back or just ignored.
Unsurprisingly, senior American officials now conflate these two alleged problems into a single working assumption: China is using the multilateral system to outmaneuver America. While the U.S. aims to push against Beijing on many fronts, from power projection in the South China Sea to the development of artificial intelligence, limiting its rising influence in multilateral bodies is an immediate priority.
This has been a constant theme in recent speeches by senior U.S. figures. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has lumped China, Iran and Russia together as “bad actors” that exploit international bodies. “We welcomed China into the liberal order, but never policed its behavior,” he declared in a speech in Brussels in early December.
On the eve of 2019, there are worrying signs that the U.S. and its main competitors no longer see eye-to-eye on the rules of the game.
National Security Adviser John Bolton has argued that the U.S. should stop investing in under-performing U.N. peace operations in Africa and refocus on cutting back China’s influence on the continent. Dennis Shea, the U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organization, earlier this month accused China of maintaining a “non-market economy [which] is simply incompatible with WTO norms.” Previous administrations, Democratic and Republican, invested in drawing an increasingly powerful China into the global system. Trump’s team is turning this on its head.
There is no doubt that China has gained a lot of influence in multilateral bodies of late. One of the reasons is, ironically, that the Trump administration’s disengagement from large tracts of the U.N. system has created political space for Beijing to fill. Chinese officials insist that they have neither the desire nor the clout to supplant the U.S. as a global leader. But if Washington attempts to undermine China’s multilateral position, the resulting diplomatic dogfight could paralyze international cooperation on everything from trade arbitration to trouble spots like South Sudan.
In parallel, tensions between the U.S., Russia and other powers over nuclear weapons imperil much of the architecture of international security. Diplomats in Washington and Moscow are despairing of the arms control frameworks their predecessors built during the Cold War and in the 1990s. The U.S. will soon quit the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF Treaty, over alleged Russian violations. While Moscow rejects these accusations, both sides are busy modernizing their nuclear arsenals.
On top of this bilateral competition, the major powers are also divided over how to handle, through multilateral mechanisms, the challenges of nuclear proliferation by North Korea and Iran. European officials are struggling to keep the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal alive after the U.S. quit the bargain in May. While the Security Council worked together to contain the North Korean nuclear threat in 2017, China and Russia are unconvinced of the need to maintain full U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang while U.S. and North Korean officials discuss denuclearization.
There is a risk that 2019 will see a series of fierce nuclear debates unfolding in parallel. The U.S. withdrawal from the INF Treaty could precipitate a broader unraveling of cooperation between Washington and Moscow on arms control. The corrosion of the Iran deal under the Trump administration’s pressure may raise the specter of Tehran returning to its nuclear program, further dividing the U.S. and other major powers on how to respond. If the often-bizarre North Korean nuclear talks implode, the Trump administration may struggle to get China and other players to punish Pyongyang any further.
In combination, as I argued in a recent paper for the U.N. University Centre for Policy Research, these developments could fundamentally undermine governments’ faith in established frameworks to manage nuclear proliferation. There could also be negative knock-on effects for how the U.N. and other bodies handle specific local and regional crises. It is hard to see the U.S. crafting a deal with Russia over the war in eastern Ukraine if nuclear tensions increase, let alone reach a final bargain over the future of Syria with Iran and Russia. Indeed, one pretty good bet for 2019 is that high-level major power tensions will seep into, and poison, peacemaking more generally.
Experts on the conflicts and crises that dot the globe often question whether the U.S. or any other big power has the ability to bring them under control. Local rivalries and grievances are often much more important than whatever view Washington or Beijing has. But the continued existence of a multilateral system that is able to engage with these crises at all requires the system’s biggest players to more or less agree on the basics of cooperation. On the eve of 2019, there are worrying signs that the U.S. and its main competitors no longer see eye-to-eye on the rules of the game.
That doesn’t mean a major power war is looming in 2019. But it could make it a very ugly year.
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