Barack Obama and the nation he leads owned the Copenhagen summit, and the administration used its commanding position to achieve some vital national goals. In many ways this summit shows the outlines of an emerging world order in which the form of American leadership has changed and the chief challenges it confronts have changed, but one in which the fact of America’s unique international role remains the foundation of the international system.
The diplomacy was breathtaking and fresh. Obama stormed into closed meetings, reshaped the goals of the summit and found a formula that more or less accurately reflected the balance of forces on the issues at hand. He did all this without committing the United States beyond what he can realistically hope to achieve at home. Better still from the administration’s standpoint, to the extent that anyone is being blamed for the summit’s shortcomings, it is China, not the United States that is attracting the greatest ire from frustrated greens.
That folks, is how these things are done, and the performance at Copenhagen is convincing evidence that in foreign policy the Obama administration is coming of age.
The summit also shows how American leadership may work in the emerging world system. There were four main agendas at Copenhagen. One can be called the Euro agenda. Reflecting the interests of aging populations and mature economies, it is above all a small ‘c’ conservative agenda. It does not want change. It is happy to trade off economic growth for environmental stability; rich countries with declining populations don’t attribute the same importance to economic growth that poor countries with population explosions do. The Euro agenda is also institutionalist and legalist. Europeans want strong world institutions that operate in a framework of international law and binding precedent. This represents both European interests and European values. European states are heavily over-represented in international institutions from the UN and the World Bank on down. The more powerful these institutions are, the more likely Europe is to exert influence over world developments. Additionally, the modern network of international institutions and the very concept of international law emerge from European history and culture; Europeans are comfortable with these ways of handling and settling disputes.
Then there’s the agenda of the successful developing countries. Call this the ADC agenda (for actually developing countries). Many of these powers are Asian, although other countries like Brazil should be included. They are much more growth oriented than Europe, and they are much less interested in institutions and western-based legal norms. They would generally prefer a world of high growth, mostly weak institutions, and flexible understandings between powers rather than binding public law. They are suspicious that European attempts to regulate global industrial activity in the name of stopping climate change actually reflect a protectionist agenda. These countries are looking to transform the international system and overall their outlook is optimistic. They think that, all things being equal, they can look forward to a future of rising affluence and influence. Their chief interest in the world system is ensuring that these opportunities don’t go away.
Third comes the bad boy agenda. I’ve called them the ‘axis of anklebiters’ although some (like Iran) are more worrying than that. These countries believe that the existing international system of liberal capitalism is completely stacked against them; they want to bring it down. This is an unrealistic ambition given their limited size and declining weight in the world; failing that they mostly want to make trouble and get their names in the news. These were the countries at Copenhagen that were vociferously calling for a binding declaration to be made. The reason is less that they are in the habit of keeping treaties than that international processes that require unanimous consent allow people like the presidents of Iran and Venezuela great opportunity to strut their stuff on the world stage. It is like being the 60th senator on a cloture vote; you get a lot of attention and concessions that way that you never otherwise would.
Finally there is the NDC agenda — the agenda of the non-developing countries. These states, some failed and some failing, just hope they’ll get some scraps from the table. In some cases they are desperately resource poor countries whose governments are doing the best that they can; more often one of the chief reasons they aren’t developing is because they are governed by murderous, rent-seeking creeps. The axis of panhandlers agrees with the anklebiters on some points; they love unanimous consent rules because they can sell their votes. On the other hand, their governments are very often for sale and can generally be quieted with a small fraction of the outrageous sums they propose.
Obama’s task in Copenhagen was to find a compromise between the Euro and the Asian agendas that fit U.S. interests reasonably well, and marginalize the bad boys. This is pretty much what he did; he got the Europeans some incremental progress on their green agenda, but he did it without pushing the Asians into the kind of legal agreements and binding rules that make them nervous. The bad boys were shut out; once the idea of a binding declaration endorsed by all members of the United Nations dropped off the table, their power at the conference shrank to something like their real weight in the international system: a near-zero experience.
That’s our recipe for the future: split the difference between Europe and Asia in a way that works for us while opening the door to bad boys to come in from the cold — but otherwise freezing them out. (The NDC’s are a tougher call; their poverty cries out to our consciences, but their abusive and incompetent governments make them exceptionally hard to help. Figuring out how to encourage real growth and change in these countries will be one of the biggest challenges of the new international system.)
Obama played this game like a pro at Copenhagen; future presidents should take note. Ultimately we will need to do more than this; the emerging world system will have to deliver the goods, not just produce communiques. But it’s a start. American leadership is making the transition to a post-western world.