Adapting to a possibly more fragmented Order: Are interests now driving the Order?

Just in time for the weekend a new Post on the growing complexity, if not confusion, over the Global Order. Comments welcome

It is hard at times to discern the driving force of today’s international relations. Some still dwell on and debate the structure and its consequences for the international system - is the order unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar. A lot of my colleagues are still there. A focus on contending politics and numerous efforts to achieve national interest, however, leads to a different narrative. The game today is assuredly multilateral, not multipolar, and possibly just as troubling, increasingly fragmented. The ramifications to global summitry and the key Informals including the G7, G20 and the BRICS, are all there if one just looks, and more than slightly unnerving.  

As a lens into this changing order let’s start with President Biden and his appearance before the UN General Assembly this past week. It is noticeable that Biden, of all heads of state of the Permanent 5 - China, France, Russia, UK and the US - those folks that carry the veto in the all crucial Security Council - was the only leader to attend in person the opening of the UNGA. It has got to say something of how these governments regard the importance of the UN, and the Security Council in particular, that only President Biden of the Five actually thought it valuable enough to appear before the UNGA to deliver a message to the world’s delegations. 

Let me add an additional telling feature of the Biden speech - though it is a separate issue. But it is worth noting. This year’s UNGA week was important in part because of a number of important summits planned for the week: the HLPF, or  the High-level political forum on sustainable development; the Climate Ambition Summit; and the preparatory ministerial meeting for the Summit of the Future (SOTF) that is set for September 2024. None of these meetings were probably more important than the HLPF. This was the second summit for the sustainable development goals (SDGs). In previous Posts I have raised the SDGs and their importance to understanding the health, or not, of multilateralism and in particular the impact of the UN and its specialized agencies. So, the Global Summitry Project (GSP) has paid some attention to the collective multilateral effort and will continue to do so going forward. The SDGs are at the half-way point in the 15-year effort to achieve the 17 goals. The Secretary General has repeatedly urged accelerated effort and was highly vocal before and during this special UN week. And there is a reason. The member states are failing to reach the goals. And Biden’s reflection in his remarks on this growing possible failure: of a 13-page BIden speech, one paragraph was dedicated to the SDGs. So much for collective US participation. But I’ll come back to the SDGs in future posts. 

But back to the Biden speech. The remarks were notable for one feature in particular that revealed some potential modifying of the current US  geopolitical framing. For some time now Biden is prone to emphasizing the ‘values’ division in the current order. Biden and his officials have emphasized repeatedly the division of the current order between democratic and non-democratic states - in other words, ‘autocracy versus democracy’. But there was an interesting resiling, it seemed, from this Biden framing of the global order. David Leonhard of the NYTimes  recognized the subtle, maybe not so subtle, reshaping of Biden’s framing: 

President Biden has made it a signature phrase of his administration: The world is engaged in “a battle between democracy and autocracy.”

He publicly expressed a version of this idea at least a dozen times during his first year in office and a dozen more during his second year, according to Factba.se, an online database that tracks his remarks. But Biden has used it less often during his third year in office — and he notably did not use the phrase when speaking to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday. Last year in the same setting, he did use it.

Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security advisor helps understand this apparent revision to the Administration’s framing. Again, David Leonhard: 

“In June, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, acknowledged the tension. “I do think we are dealing with the gathering and march of autocratic forces in ways that are not in the United States’ national interest, and that we do need to rally the values, norms and forces of democracy to push back against that,” Sullivan said. But, he added, Biden “has also been clear that in that larger effort, we need constructive relationships with countries of all different traditions and backgrounds.

All of this may help explain the approach Biden took at the U.N. yesterday. He continued to celebrate the virtues of democracy, saying that it “can deliver in ways that matter to people’s lives” while describing programs to build infrastructure in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Yet he did not use any versions of the words “autocracy” or “authoritarian.

In a dangerous world, the U.S. evidently wants to woo many kinds of allies.

I will gain more ‘comfort’ that the Administration has shifted from a ‘hard’ values oriented system of partnership and collaboration to a wider set of partnerships if we see Sullivan dropping his persistent framing of the G7 - an evidently key Informal for the Biden Administration - as “the steering committee of the free world”. A jarring cold war throwback for sure. 

Gideon Rachman, a close observer of the order and the consequences of major power politics, expressed it this way in the FT: 

Sullivan’s phrase — “the steering committee of the free world” — tells its own story about the strategic thinking underpinning the summit. The use of the phrase “free world” is redolent of the cold war and accurately conveys the mood in Washington. As in the cold war, the US is rallying democratic allies in Europe and Asia for a generational struggle against adversaries that are familiar from the first cold war: Russia and China.”

The American emphasis on the G7 — as opposed to the broader-based G20, which will have its own summit in Delhi in September — is also telling. It marks the transition from a period of world affairs dominated by economics and globalisation to a new era, in which politics and strategic rivalries set the tone.

Strategic rivalries for sure. And indeed much of the talk at the G20 and the BRICs raised the prospect of blocs. For the G20 much of the commentary targeted an inability of this wider grouping of significant economic members to act in concert and to advance global governance policies in the face of geopolitical divisions.  Our colleague from BU, and former Chilean Ambassador to China, South Africa, India suggests a more positive outcome. As he argues in The Conversation: 

And yet, the assembled leaders did release a joint declaration on giving a new impetus to the World Bank, fighting climate change and dealing with infectious diseases, among other issues. One of the main outcomes was the admission of the African Union as a full member, much as the European Union has been from the start.

With G20 summits held in Indonesia in 2022 and India in 2023 – and set for Brazil in 2024 – rising powers from the Global South have been able to set an agenda, stressing the priorities of the developing nations’ development, debt financing, food security and climate change. This is in contrast to the Group of Seven, or G7, which in recent years has focused on geopolitics and the war in Ukraine. …

The G20 has its faults, but it still performs a useful function to help the world economy navigate perilous waters, as globalization beats a retreat and the dangers of a fractured international system loom larger. I believe the G20 should be further built up and nurtured, not cavalierly dismissed. The world would be poorer without it.

And then how does one assess the expansion of the BRICS. Is it a strong anti-western coalition being shaped through this - might I suggest - this major expansion. Here one of my colleagues, Oliver Della Costa Stuenkel, from Brazil has an interesting take on the expansion in the FP. The expansion included the following Global South countries: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. A part of his examination was targeted on Argentina’s hesitancy in accepting the BRICS invitation. Argentina has a presidential election underway. The leading contenders for the presidency are split over whether to join the BRICS, or not. It is possible that if Javier Milei - the far left candidate, or Patricia Bullrich, the center right contender, win they might reject the BRICS invitation. But he also examines the tensions between Brazil and India, who were concerned over loss of influence as a result of the expansion and Russia and China, especially China, who seemed determined to press forward on building a wider anti-western grouping, or at least a pro-China coalition:

All this suggests the overall environment for countries such as Argentina and Brazil, keen to strengthen ties to China but also eager to preserve ties to the West, is becoming more challenging. It may be only natural that China would like to gain greater control over the BRICS grouping in response to a far more unified G-7. At the same time, platforms that seek to build broader consensus, such as the G-20, are struggling enormously—and middle powers such as Argentina are getting stuck, well, in the middle.

Finally, in the emergence of a growing number of coalitions we return to President Biden and his efforts to woo partners, especially from the Global South. Dan Drezner in Drezner’s World, his Substack Post, identified two groups. The first is the ‘Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation’. As the White House Fact Sheet identified:

Thirty-two coastal Atlantic countries across four continents adopted a Declaration on Atlantic Cooperation launching the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation today on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This new multilateral forum brings together an unprecedented number of coastal Atlantic countries across Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean. 

The second gathering was what is referred to as the C5+1. The C5+1 is a diplomatic grouping with the U.S. that includes all five Central Asian governments including: Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

These are evidently Informals and may fade away. However, it underlines the growing range of coalitions in an increasingly geopolitical world. We will return to this multilateral and possibly fragmented order emerging in the current geopolitics and its politics.