For some, the COVID-19 pandemic is yet another reason why the postwar international order, built around multilateral institutions and U.S.-led alliances, is obsolete. There is a lot to criticize, starting with China’s influence over the World Health Organization, which ignored early warnings from Taiwan and allowed the virus to spread around the world in the critical early weeks of January.
In Europe, too, it’s been the nation-states, not the European Union, that have been at the forefront of responding. That is not necessarily the EU’s fault since the bloc’s powers in the area of public health are extremely modest, but the extent to which its rules, on budget deficits or the free movement of people, have been tossed aside is striking.
Yet to give up on international institutions that the United States helped to build after World War II would be highly damaging to U.S. interests. International agencies, international standards, and globalization are here to stay in some shape or form. They will continue to shape the lives of Americans whether or not President Trump and his successors decide to leave them or defund them, much like the United Kingdom continues and will continue to be affected by EU rules and regulations after Brexit.
A U.S. withdrawal from, say, the WHO means giving up on any input into how the organization reacts to future emergencies, which, just like COVID-19, may not stop at U.S. borders. Giving up on the World Trade Organization means allowing other nations to write the rules of the game, which will eventually affect American companies. Needless to say, abandoning NATO invites conflicts into the European continent and potentially, like in the two world wars, great losses of American lives and treasure.
Withdrawal from and neglect of international organizations and alliances only compound the problems that rightly worry skeptics of global governance. “Since 2017,” former French Ambassador in Washington Gerard Araud and the Atlantic Council’s Benjamin Haddad note, “Washington has expressed such indifference and even hostility to the multilateral fora that it’s unsurprising competitors like China are filling the vacuum and exerting a growing influence in the UN and elsewhere.” Instead, the international institutional infrastructure needs updating and reform, which only the U.S. can lead.
The starting point of the U.S. strategy should be recognizing that multilateralism is neither an elitist cabal against America’s working class nor a post-national kumbaya that some on the progressive Left once dreamed of. It is simply a tool that allows governments to pursue their interests, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes in a more adversarial fashion.
In any international organization, big or small, global or regional, there will be countries that are more closely aligned with America’s interests than others. As a rule of thumb, those will be, in most cases, other advanced democracies. The U.S. has to work with them and build cohesive, regional blocking minorities to stop China and Russia. It has to push for change whenever appropriate and, when necessary, lead smaller coalitions of the willing toward the goals that agencies of the United Nations system are failing to achieve.
Active engagement works. Thanks to Ambassador Andrew Bremberg’s efforts, for example, the U.S. succeeded this year in electing a Singaporean candidate, Daren Tang, as the new director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization over loud opposition from China. Perhaps Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus would not have been elected to lead the WHO if France, Italy, and the U.K. had not each presented their own candidates in 2016, but instead acted in a coordinated fashion, under U.S. leadership. Yet the administration did not even bother to appoint a representative to the WHO’s executive board until March of this year.
The pursuit of a policy of active engagement instead of haughty dismissals of “unaccountable bureaucracies” requires a vision and the ability to sell that vision to our partners. After all, the main pillar of Europe’s security, NATO, is basically a U.S.-run organization. Yet while the Trump administration cajoled European allies into increasing their defense spending, it failed spectacularly at outlining a new sense of purpose for the alliance and making the (now increasingly obvious) case for why acting together to contain China was also in the interest of Europeans. Despite essentially underwriting the alliance, Washington has also done little in response to authoritarianism in Turkey and Hungary, a major liability for an alliance that needs shared values for its long-term survival.
Scaling up a policy of engagement requires resources and human talent in Foggy Bottom, especially in positions of responsibility. Yet except for 18 months between March 2018 and November of last year, the position of assistant secretary for international organization affairs has been unfilled during the current administration.
An active approach requires a willingness to seize opportunities. There are already international organizations that encompass like-minded, mostly democratic nations, such as the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation. It makes sense to empower such organizations to do more and prioritize them in U.S. funding commitments going forward. And if things do go badly in the one-country-one-vote agencies of the U.N. system, why not consider, for example, “a global health organization made up only of responsible, transparent, democratic nations,” as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Danielle Pletka suggests?
Many examples of international cooperation take place outside of the scope of formal international organizations. Standards and policies for air travel around the world are set by the International Air Transport Association, a trade association of air carriers from 117 countries. Technical standardization, both within Europe (CEN/CENELEC) and globally (ISO/IEC), has been spearheaded by the private sector, in cooperation with national standardization bodies. Responsible Care, encompassing chemical firms in 67 countries and accounting for nearly 90% of global chemical production, sets voluntary safety standards.
Numerous financing platforms in the areas of health and humanitarian assistance, such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, rely on private-sector participation as much as on national governments. And, obviously, the current pandemic has catalyzed an extraordinary amount of cooperation and information-sharing among scientists around the world. Regulators would do well to follow, relying on mutual recognition of standards to make new treatments and vaccines available as soon as possible. One lasting consequence of the crisis might not be a rush of countries to repatriate their pharmaceutical industries, as many have predicted, but rather a new wave of globalization in medical and pharmaceutical research. “Making America Great Again” requires policymakers to embrace this reality and make sure that America retains its competitive edge, including by continuing to attract the world’s scientific talent.
The sense of frustration with the failures of international organizations and “globalism” to live up to their lofty ambitions has a basis in reality. But instead of toying with the sirens of closure, protectionism, and nationalism, it is time to channel that impulse toward a new policy of global engagement that leverages America’s founding principles and its entrepreneurial spirit. Not only because doing so is good for the world, but also because it is in the best interest of the American public.
Dalibor Rohac is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. You can find him on Twitter @DaliborRohac.
