Eurasia Press & News
Multilateralism is at a dead end, but powerful blocs are getting things done.
When was the last time the nations of the world reached a major accord? You’d have to go all the way back to 1994 and the World Trade Organization’s Uruguay Round. Forget the Paris Agreement, which contains no binding commitments to cut emissions. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are commendable, but the deadline of 2030 to eliminate global poverty and other scourges is likely to pass with little notice. Even as the list of transnational challenges grows—pandemics, debt, climate change—the ability to arrive at collaborative solutions is at an ebb.
In the 21st century, the old multilateral institutions, many of them created in the wake of World War II, are beset by paralysis. The return of systemic rivalry—between a core group of liberal democracies on the one side and China and Russia on the other—has turned a swath of global bodies, from the U.N. Security Council to the ostensibly apolitical World Health Organization, into ugly battlegrounds of influence competition and mutual suspicion. As former U.N. and World Bank official Mark Malloch-Brown recently told Foreign Policy, “I worry that the political gridlock, and the gridlock on security issues, is so great that the U.N. is going to hibernate on politics, security, and human rights in the coming years.”
It doesn’t help that the United Nations, World Bank, and other institutions often look like relics of the past. The rising states of the global south sense that a system constructed during the colonial era might not serve their needs, and they rightfully want a bigger seat at the table. Nothing better symbolizes the system’s anachronisms than the U.N. Security Council, where only the victors of World War II (plus France, added at the insistence of British wartime leader Winston Churchill) have the right to veto decisions. It’s an odd way to organize the world in 2023.
Unfortunately, there are no easy fixes. For all its flaws, the system embodied a universal conception of progress and human rights. It was constructed with rules that, in theory if not always in practice, applied to all and protected the weak from the depredations of the strong. If the West has violated some of these principles in the past, China has made clear that it doesn’t accept the idea of constraints on its actions at all, at least not in fundamental domains such as the international law of the sea or the U.N. principle to not change borders by force. Instead, Beijing, Moscow, and their authoritarian friends are working hard to flush notions of liberalism and human rights out of the U.N. system, making the world safe for autocracy. Some countries might reject the rulebook because so much of it was written by the West, but it is unclear whether a better set of rules is on offer.
Facing a shape-shifting world with no novel way of global cooperation in sight, countries have turned to other forms of collaboration, as we explore in the Fall 2023 issue of Foreign Policy. We seem to be at another historic inflection point: The global order is defined neither by post-Cold War Western predominance nor by the universal vision of global integration that underpinned the multilateral system but rather by fragmentation into larger and smaller blocs. It is these blocs where the global order is now shaped.
Though many of these trends aren’t new, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created a sense of urgency that new forms of cooperation were needed. Russia’s grab for its neighbor—and the assault on the post-1945 peace order it represents—galvanized the West. It also put the spotlight on Taiwan, which, as Hal Brands describes, faces a similar threat from China. In the global south, the war exacerbated food and energy shortages. With the United Nations incapacitated by the veto powers, a unified response was out of reach.
Unsettled by Russia’s war and the growing challenge from China, the West and its partners have turned to traditional power blocs to coordinate a collective response. The most obvious development is the revival, enlargement, and possible globalization of NATO, the 74-year-old Euro-Atlantic alliance that had been languishing without a purpose since the end of the Cold War. The G-7, belittled for decades for its ineffectual talk, has emerged as what U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called the “steering committee of the free world,” perhaps soon with an expanded, more representative membership of the world’s leading democracies. In the Fall 2023 issue of Foreign Policy, G. John Ikenberry and Jo Inge Bekkevold outline the unexpected centrality of these two Western institutions.
Russia’s war has also accelerated the emergence of new partnerships. As Bonny Lin describes in our issue, China and Russia are moving closer together, even if they have yet to strike a formal pact. Similar to the West, they are building structures to tie in allies and partners, including a newly expanded BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The most creative and dynamic form of international cooperation is the new minilateral groups, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the Australia-United Kingdom-United States pact. As C. Raja Mohan argues, these are nimble, pragmatic coalitions that overcome multilateral paralysis while avoiding more formal alliances. This flexibility is particularly attractive for countries such as India, which is keen to preserve its strategic autonomy even as it shifts into closer alignment with the West.
Of course, there are many pieces still missing, as multilateralism struggles, old alliances are revitalized, and new forms of cooperation emerge. Global problems still require global collaboration. Large parts of the world remain outside both old and new power blocs. But the weakness of alliances in the global south may be a feature, not a flaw: As long as countries are focused on development, it may be in their interest to avoid alignment and let the two geopolitical camps bid for their favors. Intra-African and intra-Latin American cooperation is relatively weak perhaps because ambitious strategic actors capable of organizing regional cooperation and shaping transnational institutions have yet to emerge. After India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, the list of power players gets thin.
An illustration shows the Statue of Liberty holding a torch with other hands alongside hers as she lifts the flame, also resembling laurel, into place on the edge of the United Nations laurel logo.
An illustration shows the Statue of Liberty holding a torch with other hands alongside hers as she lifts the flame, also resembling laurel, into place on the edge of the United Nations laurel logo.Lamenting the decline of multilateral action is understandable. But there is no reason a world reshaped around blocs and coalitions will inevitably be worse.
Competition between the greater West and a China-Russia bloc could yield unexpected benefits: To woo swing states in the global south, for example, each side will have to hone an attractive vision for development, security, and governance, likely backed by greater resources than before. As pragmatic new formats such as minilaterals prove their worth, they can be constructed around other urgent issues in ways that transcend ideological and geopolitical divides. Parts of the creaking multilateral system will need to be salvaged—read Gordon Brown’s proposal on how best to do that—even as new forms of cooperation are layered on top. In the end, though, what matters is getting things done.
