The Cluster of Copenhagen, the chaotic and orgiastic assembly of the representatives of 192 countries plus uncountable throngs of NGO leaders and miscellaneous activists, is, as Les Gelb notes this morning over at The Daily Beast, a window into the future. In many ways, it’s not a very nice future.
In the first two posts, I looked at how power is flowing away from Europe and towards the developing world, led by Asia. The United States remains the leading actor in the international system, but the context for this leadership has changed. In the old days of the Cold War we mostly had to think about getting western Europe (which is to say Germany, Britain and France) on board to rally the ‘international community’ behind us. That task was made easier because, especially during the earlier phases of the Cold War, those countries were even more worried about the Soviet Union than we were. For us, the Soviets were a menacing problem many thousands of miles away; for the Europeans they were right next door, and growling.
These days, the United States needs partners and allies as much as ever if not more, but they are going to be harder to get. Over the decades we worked through a lot of our problems with the Europeans and both we all managed to work with each other pretty well, most of the time. Now we will be dealing with many more countries and groups of countries. Their objectives are going to be different from ours — and different from each other’s. We won’t just have to strike one or two deals here and there; we will have to cut dozens of agreements to move any issue ahead.
This won’t be easy; in many cases it will be impossible. The Doha round of trade talks at the WTO is an example; we have been struggling with this one for more than a decade, and no end is in view. Copenhagen was another; the result of years of negotiations was a minimal statement of intentions, plus an agreement to keep talking. More and more effort goes in to these negotiations; fewer and fewer results comes out.
This is excellent news for the world’s professional diplomats and those who hope to join their ranks. There are going to be lots of long-running, career-enhancing negotiations that will allow you to pay off your student loans, buy a house, put the kids through college and build a stable retirement. You won’t solve many of the world’s problems, but your bankers and your realtors will be happy.
The United States won’t just be the greatest power in this new and confusing world system. We are going to be the country with the greatest interest in making the system work. The United States is the global country par excellence. That doesn’t mean we are the most knowledgeable or the wisest country in the world. Far from it. But our economic and security interests are inevitably and inextricably tied to the well being of the world system.
As a trading country, for example, we don’t just depend on one part of the world. Our trade can be divided into three roughly equivalent flows: hemispheric trade, Atlantic trade and Pacific trade. It’s the same with our investments — both those we make and those we receive. We depend on the whole world, not just a few pieces of it. We need all the world’s oceans to be safe for our commerce. We need diplomatic and security arrangements in all the world’s major markets and political theaters that safeguard our investments and ensure the continuing flow of our trade. And given the rise of new threats (terrorism, environmental problems, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction) we have more reasons than ever before to concern ourselves with global issues.
Before the 1940s we mostly left all this stuff up to England. They did the heavy lifting, we complained about what a bad job they were doing and how imperialist and colonialist they were. Now we’ve switched places; we make the big decisions and pay the big costs and England complains about how selfish and stupid we are. But ever since Britain’s world power melted like a wet witch in Oz, we’ve been stuck with the big jobs.
So: just as we had to find a way to make this global system work after World War Two, we are going to have to do it again in a post-European era. We can divide the jobs into three baskets. Basket One is keeping our own economy and society healthy and strong. If we can’t do that, we will end up like England no matter how smart our diplomats are. (On the whole, British diplomats are often still smarter than ours, and there are parts of the world they understand much better than we do — but they don’t have any power to speak of, and so no one, including us, listens to them very much.)
Basket Two is working out regional arrangements in turbulent regions like East and South Asia and the Middle East to ensure on the one hand that they don’t melt down into destructive wars and on the other that they aren’t dominated by a single hostile power. It also involves promoting the kind of social, economic and political growth in these regions plus Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa that ensures that the rest of the world agrees with us about the benefits of a global system.
Basket Three is about the global problems: trade, rule of law, global governance, the environment and so on.
What America needs to do is very simple in outline, very complex in practice. We have to get the Basket One tasks right so we are rich, powerful and united enough to work on the next two. We have to get Basket Two right so we don’t get distracted by great power rivalries and regional wars, and also so that the world’s regions are willing and able to work together towards the compromises and structures we will need to address Basket Three. And then we have to get Basket Three right if we are going to solve the big problems that we can all see looming on the horizon.
Copenhagen was an attempt to solve a Basket Three problem (the environment) when Baskets One and Two weren’t in good shape. The United States was too worried about our own deficits and economic issues to come to Copenhagen with the kind of confident, visionary approaches we needed. At the same time, Basket Two was in a mess: the conflicting agendas and ambitions of the world’s regions and regional powers made it negotiating progress harder than it had to be. Under these circumstances, it isn’t surprising that the results were so messy and inconclusive.
We are never going to get any of these baskets as organized as, in a perfect world, they would be. But we can and must do better than we are doing now.