US, not China, is threatening the foundations of multilateral cooperation just when unity is needed most
- Apec nations starting with the US, the erstwhile champion of multilateralism, are failing to deliver on commitments to cooperate on the pandemic and climate change
- Unless the US relaxes its grip on global institutions and allows China to play a bigger role, Beijing will go its own way
Where has multilateralism gone when you most need it? Where has international cooperation gone when the world’s most severe challenges cannot be addressed without it?
Just as the global Covid-19 pandemic has made all international meetings virtual, so too multilateralism has become virtual: lots of lip service, but an almost absolute withdrawal of substantial commitment.
Hypocrisy has bled to the heart of all international discourse, with calls for cooperation matched only by an alarming and counterproductive absence of cooperation.
Perhaps the hypocrisy has always been there, and the commitments to cooperation hollow. But now, when cooperation really matters, its absence threatens us all.
At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, leaders have called for a “free, open, fair, non-discriminatory, transparent and predictable trade and investment environment” across the 21 countries, “seamless connectivity” and a coherent regional framework.
As Martin Wolf at the Financial Times complained last week: “The most important thing has now become the most difficult: to cooperate actively and effectively. If a crisis as global as a pandemic and a challenge as global as the climate cannot shift us out of today’s foolish introspection, nothing will.”
China’s energy crunch and the high economic costs of going green
Note also the complaint last week by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, head of the World Trade Organization, that there are more than 60 different carbon pricing schemes worldwide, with prices ranging from less than US$1 per tonne in Ukraine to more than US$130 per tonne in Sweden, as economists estimate that prices between US$50 and US$100 per tonne are needed to meet the Paris Agreement carbon emission reduction targets.
Absent such an agreement, the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development “share a duty to work together to find solutions”, she concluded. She might add the World Health Organization, the International Energy Agency, and a host of UN institutions.
As Edward Luce at the FT noted: “Since their inception, such bodies have been dominated by the United States, which has been happy to apply its rules to others while exempting itself when it suits.”
Irresponsible US submarine exercises threaten South China Sea safety
Luce added: “America faces a choice between relaxing its grip on global bodies to encourage Beijing to stay in the game, or refusing to acknowledge China’s rise and risk it exiting parts of the system altogether.”
The awkward reality is that if the world’s second-largest economy cannot gain appropriate recognition within the Bretton Woods institutions, then it will nurture its own.
As America has undermined the authority of the multilateral organisations that have underpinned our post-1940s stability, so it has demonstrated its unwillingness to participate internationally unless it sets the rules.
The challenge that underlies its reluctance to realise its commitments to multilateralism is its unwillingness to allow others a meaningful role in setting multilateral rules. It is the challenge of reconciling national sovereignty with the imperative to cooperate globally on the growing number of issues that transcend national boundaries.
Are our governments up to the challenge of accepting the constraints on national power that true multilateralism involves? The challenge of cooperating on global warming may be a first true test, but it is at the front of a long queue of challenges that will depend on global cooperation. “Virtual” commitment will not suffice.
David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view