The logic of multilateralism

IMPLICIT IN all the issues highlighted by Prime Minister Andrew Holness in his United Nations General Assembly speech last week – from debt initiatives for poor countries to battling climate change – was Jamaica’s appreciation of the logic of multilateralism. In that regard, he is in step with most of the rest of the world.

The circumstances, though, demanded an explicit and robust embrace of the ideals of global partnership and the institutions thereof, and thereby a repudiation of those who would wilfully unravel the global architecture of the last seven decades in favour of the Greater Power assertion of the 19th and 20th centuries. In that regard, France’s Emmanuel Macron and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern were on point.

There is, of course, much in the global arrangements that require reform, including, this newspaper believes, the Security Council and the power of veto enjoyed, in perpetuity, by its five permanent members. But those concerns notwithstanding, there is unassailable logic of Jamaica and the other small, developing countries of the Caribbean being in accord with the global system that emerged from the wreckage of the Second World War.

They haven’t eliminated tensions, prevented military conflicts, or always solved problems with the efficacy their founders hoped. They, however, provide rules-based mechanisms for the conduct of international relations and for the adjudication of disagreements, other than by the dictates of power. And over the past seven decades, they have helped to prevent the kinds of global conflagrations that erupted twice in the last century.

The multilateral arrangements, however, are threatened with dismantlement, instigated by the leader of the country, the United States, which was their main architect. Donald Trump, the American president, took his anti-multilateralist, inward-looking Greater Power rivalry spiel to the General Assembly last week, urging the world to follow suit.

EMBRACING THE DOCTRINE OF PATRIOTISM

Having repelled most institutions aimed at holding countries and their leaders accountable, Mr Trump declared: “America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism. Around the world, responsible nations must defend against threats to sovereignty, not just from global governance, but also from other, new forms of coercion and domination.”

Suggestions of an incompatibility between patriotism and global partnerships are, undoubtedly, ludicrous, as are old notions about the rectitude of power in the exercise of sovereignty. President Macron’s rebuke of the “law of the strongest”, his warning that “nationalism always leads to defeat”, and his plea for the world not to “accept our history unravelling” were important and timely. For President Macron, no doubt, has another and deeper interpretation of history than Mr Trump. The history taught by the experiences of Somme and Verdun and the cemeteries of Normandy and elsewhere.

Indeed, as Ms Ardern observed, it was out of the catastrophe of war that countries, collectively, established, through conventions, charters and rules, today’s multilateral arrangements. “All of these are an acknowledgement that we are not isolated, governments do have obligations to their people and each other, and that our actions have a global effect,” said the New Zealand PM. She is correct in that, as well as in her observation that these arrangements ought not to be “consigned to the history books”, but to acknowledge problems “and seek to fix them”.

Woodrow Wilson, the president who took the United States into the First World War, understood the dangers of the “retreat ... to isolationism”. It compelled him to work for the creation of the League of Nations, whose failure, and another global war later, didn’t deter F.D.R., and his successor, Harry Truman, from pursuing the creation of the United Nations and the architecture of today’s multilateral system. As President Truman said of the UN’s founding in 1945: “If we fail to use it, we shall betray those who died so that we might be here in safety, and in freedom, to create it. If we use it selfishly – for the advantage of any one nation, or small group of nations – we shall be equally guilty of betrayal.”

Therein lies a hopefully not impenetrable message for Donald Trump. And, for that matter, Jamaica.