Managing a world of great powers
It has taken the international institutions some time to catch up with the changing world order
Today great-power competition is a fact: The United States now competes with an increasingly active Russia and a rising China. The Middle East, the South China Sea and Ukraine are just three theatres where this new reality is playing out.
Upon rereading former US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott’s book The Great Experiment, I was left with the impression that the seeds of some of the dynamics at play today were sown some time ago. The book describes a conversation that took place in December 2000 between the then US president Bill Clinton and president-elect George W. Bush. Clinton says that, judging by Bush’s electoral campaign, the security issues that seemed to concern him most were Saddam Hussain and the construction of a large-scale antimissile defence system. “That’s absolutely right,” Bush responds.
These issues were put on hold when tragedy unexpectedly struck, in the form of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US, which brought a period of international cooperation, during which solidarity against terrorism reigned. It was a time when Bush described Vladimir Putin as “very straightforward and trustworthy”.
The winds began to change that December when the US announced that it was withdrawing from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, in order to build an antimissile defence system to protect itself from a potentially nuclearised Iran. This did not go unnoticed in Russia.
In a 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin made this plain, vehemently rejecting the intervention in Iraq and especially US plans to expand antimissile defence systems to Europe, calling this an act of aggression toward Russia and a breach of common European security.
In the summer of 2008, three events placed the new multipolar order in stark relief. China dazzled the world as host of the Olympic Games, reinforcing its status as a significant international player. Russia’s military actions in Georgia — in the midst of the Games — showed the world that the concept of spheres of influence was still alive and well in the Kremlin. And the collapse the following month of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers unleashed a global financial crisis from which the world economy has yet to recover fully.
With a new sense of confidence in its great-power status, China seemed to qualify the concept of a “peaceful rise” that its leaders have invoked since the era of Deng Xiaoping, adopting a more muscular foreign-policy approach within its neighbourhood. Drawing on alleged historical rights, China began to expand its territorial claims, along with its military presence, in the South and East China Seas. In 2013, tensions peaked when China unilaterally declared an Air Defence Identification Zone (Adiz) covering territories in the East China Sea that it claims, but Japan controls.
Many of the countries affected by China’s actions in the South and East China Seas have security treaties with the US, which has been the major maritime power in the Pacific region since the Second World War.
Renewed foreign-policy ambitions
It has taken the international institutions some time to catch up to the changing world order. The 2010 G20 summit in Seoul produced an agreement to increase the emerging countries’ quotas in the International Monetary Fund by 2014. But the US Congress refused to ratify the changes, so nothing came of the agreement.
China then took matters into its own hands, spearheading the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Fragmentation of the international institutions seemed imminent — that is, until European countries decided to join the AIIB.
Though the US resisted at first, and has still refused to join, that decision was lent some nuance in a later conversation between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, Russia was exposing its own renewed foreign-policy ambitions in Ukraine by violating the Helsinki Final Act in the spring of 2014.
Today, the world is very different from what some might have imagined at the end of the last century, a decade after the Berlin Wall came down. During the last 15 years of mounting great-power competition and renewed instability in the Middle East — including the Arab Spring, the rise of the brutal Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and unspeakable human suffering — change has been very intense, to say the least.
If there is one lesson to be learned from all of this, it is that well-executed, tenacious diplomacy still holds extraordinary power to resolve conflicts. It remains the best instrument to produce those cooperative outcomes that confrontation impedes.
Javier Solana was EU high representative for Foreign and Security Policy, secretarygeneral of Nato, and foreign minister of Spain. He is currently president of the ESADE Centre for Global Economy and Geopolitics and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
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