Will Moreland | Vox

To compete with China and Russia, America needs a new era of multilateralism

2020-10-27T13:50:44-04:00

An image of Chinese President Xi Jinping appearing by video link at the United Nations 75th anniversary is seen on an outdoor screen as pedestrians walk past below in Beijing on September 22, 2020. | Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images

With Election Day looming, American progressives yearn for an about-face from President Trump’s foreign policy — perhaps nowhere more so than when it comes to US multilateralism.

Multilateralism — working with other countries both through large international institutions and looser coalitions toward common goals — has been a pillar of American foreign policy since World War II.

From the creation of the United Nations and NATO to President George W. Bush’s Iraq War “coalition of the willing” and President Barack Obama’s negotiations alongside Russia and China on the Iran nuclear deal, America has rarely operated alone.

But Donald Trump changed all that.

The Trump administration’s approach truly has been America First equals America Alone. Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate agreement, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He’s in the process of exiting the World Health Organization (WHO). He’s repeatedly questioned the value of NATO and mused about withdrawing from it.

Yet, amid calls to reprioritize “international cooperation, not competition,” progressive aspirations cannot paper over the real geopolitical frictions that will persist post-Trump. Just as conservative efforts to desert multilateral institutions are self-defeating, so too is the belief that international cooperation will blossom after November 3.

American progressives should seek to reengage in multilateral institutions, from the WHO to the UN. But they cannot forget that those institutions remain competitive zones where democracies must defend their values against authoritarian rivals.

Multilateral cooperation has never seemed more urgent — or more lacking

Covid-19 is only the latest instance in which the Trump administration is truculently set against the world, not just withdrawing from the WHO but also refusing to join the Covax initiative, a historic, global multilateral effort to ensure that all countries, rich and poor, will have access to a novel coronavirus vaccine if and when one or more become available.

Amid the pandemic-induced economic crisis, congressional Republicans seek to dismantle the World Trade Organization (WTO), all while a trade war batters American consumers and farmers. The last of the major US-Russia nuclear arms control agreements teeters on the verge of collapse, and both North Korea and Iran continue to improve and expand their nuclear and missile programs.

Given this bevy of undoubtedly self-injurious policies, it is understandable that some progressives are calling on a potential Biden administration to undertake a “fundamental re-envisioning of the United States’ role in the world,” emphasizing international cooperation.

But a desire for the United States to rejoin international institutions and agreements should not be synonymous with a belief that global cooperation will define a post-Trump world.

That belief naively and recklessly ignores a stark reality that has become all too apparent in recent years: Multilateral institutions have become one of the primary battlegrounds where the unfolding international clash of systems between democratic and authoritarian regimes is being waged.

Authoritarian countries like China and Russia know this fact well and are skilled at manipulating and exploiting international institutions to serve their own ends. The United States used to understand this fact, too, once upon a time, but it seems to have forgotten it lately.

It’s time for America to remember. It’s time for America to start using these institutions to punch back.

Hope that shared threats will outweigh geopolitical divides is not new

An American belief that international organizations could “help depoliticize controversial issues by treating these as neutral, technical challenges” underlaid the building of global institutions following World War II.

More recently, the early Obama administration viewed the “challenges of a new century” — countering violent extremism, nuclear nonproliferation, climate change, economic growth, and pandemic disease — as common ground around which international stakeholders would rally.

In both instances, however, cooperative visions foundered on the shoals of geopolitical differences.

Neither in 1949 nor in 2009 could shared “problems without passports” outweigh the equally immediate threat posed by liberal, democratic norms to authoritarian regimes. As the Brookings Institution’s Thomas Wright has written, a resurgence in geopolitical rivalry was “rooted in a clash of social models — a free world and a neo-authoritarian world — that directly affects how people live.”

That clash stemmed not only from traditional military frictions, but even more basically from the threat that open, democratic societies pose to the stability of authoritarian regimes.

Increasingly, those authoritarian regimes are striking back. Senator Elizabeth Warren has described a “belligerent and resurgent” Russia and a China that has now “weaponized its economy,” both of which seek to undermine open, democratic societies. Similarly, Sen. Bernie Sanders has outlined a future contested between “a growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy” and “a movement toward strengthening democracy, egalitarianism, and economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.”

Consequently, while dangers like Covid-19 threaten everyone, differences between democratic and authoritarian regimes can yield contrasting responses. Take, for instance, something as basic as using technology like smartphones and apps to aid in contact tracing in the fight against Covid-19. As Vox’s Dylan Scott explains:

In the United States and across the world, smartphone applications are seen as a promising option to automate some of the work that health workers have traditionally been asked to do. Namely, they could silently track which people we’ve been in contact with, and if one of those people tests positive for Covid-19, our phone would send us a notification letting us know about our potential exposure.

But the data collection needed to do this quickly becomes entangled in concerns surrounding “digital authoritarianism,” where illiberal regimes employ such tools to “surveil, repress, and manipulate domestic and foreign populations” alike. The Chinese Communist Party’s use of this public health crisis to expand the scope of its surveillance and control shows that even when the world can agree on a common challenge, solutions may diverge based on a regime’s values.

Thus, even amid areas of international cooperation, a degree of vigilance is required to defend democratic interests. By no means is cooperation entirely foreclosed — which is why the Trump administration’s rejection of the Covax initiative is misguided. Nonetheless, democracies should not mistakenly believe that unalloyed cooperation in the face of every shared challenge advances their interests.

How to stand and compete from within …

While the United States cannot be starry-eyed about multilateral engagement, it also can’t afford to be cavalier as to its value — as Republican leaders increasingly are.

Not only does the United States confront a true peer competitor in China, making allies more necessary than ever, but the key domains of that competition — from trade and investment flows to advanced technologies and communications infrastructure — are already deeply enmeshed in multilateral institutions.

Authoritarian leaders understand this emerging dynamic.

Russia, long skilled in multilateral diplomacy, has amplified its efforts to shape international institutions, as President Vladimir Putin declares “the liberal idea” has “outlived its purpose.” Likewise, China, in seeking “reform of the global governance system,” looks to realign the world to better support the CCP’s illiberal rule at home — including its persistent surveillance of its citizens and the internment and forced “reeducation” of Uighur minorities.

Thus, rather than use cooperative mechanisms like Interpol for the intended purpose of catching criminals, Russia and China have focused on abusing the system to pursue political dissidents. Authoritarian leaders do not hesitate to twist international institutions to defend illiberal behavior beyond their own borders, such as the Russian head of the UN Counterterrorism Office striving to legitimate Chinese human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

As Beijing and Moscow lead the charge to redefine global norms, democracies must meet that challenge. From privacy rules for artificial intelligence to norms for combating transnational corruption, international standards set abroad will not remain overseas.

As the 2020 Hong Kong National Security law demonstrates, if authoritarian actions at the national level can reach into democracies around the world, so will global rules set by illiberal states. Consequently, the United States and like-minded partners must compete in international institutions to defend the values that underpin open societies.

That competitive posture does not necessitate withdrawal from international organizations, as some conservatives have preached. As Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute recently argued, “it is a ridiculous solipsism…to believe that if we stop participating in international cooperation and institutions that that cooperation stops happening.”

Instead of shifting the locus of competition to more advantageous ground, by withdrawing from these institutions, the United States merely cedes influence in the very arenas where the essential debates are occurring. Rather than isolating authoritarians to increase democratic states’ leverage, the United States is cutting itself off from the partners it needs.

So long as more universal forums, such as the UN International Telecommunications Agency, are where relevant standards are set, then active participation is called for. Abandonment only opens space for authoritarian powers to press their agendas.

This is perhaps nowhere clearer than the juxtaposition of the sidelining of Taiwan in the WHO against the March 2020 election for head of the obscure, but important, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Despite Taiwan’s robust performance in managing Covid-19 — with only seven deaths thus far — Beijing has continued to block Taipei’s participation in WHO meetings, hampering sharing from that success. The Trump administration’s response? Only to throw up its hands and complain about China’s influence as it heads for the WHO’s door.

Conversely, in the March election to lead WIPO, the UN organization charged with protecting intellectual property, the United States chose to show up and take a stand. Recognizing the impact of Chinese-based intellectual property theft and cyberespionage, the Trump administration, in a rare moment of diplomatic engagement, rallied a near 2-1 vote in favor of the US-supported candidate against the Chinese alternative.

The message is clear: The United States leaning into a coordinated diplomatic push can make all the difference.

… and from without

Simultaneously, continuing to participate in universal institutions like the UN or WTO does not preclude pursuing new multilateral innovations to better defend democratic societies.

A decade ago, proposals for a “concert of democracies” or a “global NATO” stalled. Mistrust in the wake of George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” in Iraq coupled with a fear that being seen to push the expansion of Western-style democracy would alienate rising powers from India to Brazil, scuttling such efforts. Why needlessly stir the pot in a world where cooperation on shared transnational threats seemed critical and the march of liberal democracy appeared inevitable?

However, the current international landscape differs vastly from then. New institutions to enhance democratic societies’ defensive coordination may have seemed unnecessary a decade ago but should be seen in a different light today, when authoritarian regimes pose a real challenge to the liberal model.

Thus, today’s version — what Edward Fishman of the Atlantic Council and Siddharth Mohandas of the Center for a New American Security have called “councils of democracies” — would aim to protect democracy at home, rather than justify its forcible expansion abroad. In doing so, the United States and its democratic partners should neither pull up the drawbridge from universal bodies that include authoritarian actors nor remain beholden to those institutions, as they constrain democracies’ ability to better cooperate in their own defense.

Fortunately, US Cold War strategy offers lessons on managing that balance. Importing a Cold War strategy lock, stock, and barrel for current challenges would undoubtedly be mistaken. Nevertheless, that history reveals democracies are not forced to choose between more universal organizations like the UN and more values-based ones like NATO. Rather, working at times through narrower groups grounded in a shared belief in liberalism and democracy can enhance the position of open societies in those larger bodies.

For instance, instead of being caught between abandoning the WTO — a folly few other states would join in — and continuing to struggle along with the system’s real limitations and abuses, the United States could work outside the system to build leverage within it.

Here, as Jake Sullivan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Kurt Campbell of the Asia Group have outlined, a forum convening democratic states to build shared norms and standards on 21st-century economic issues — digital tax, data privacy rules, etc. — could be “layered over the WTO system.”

Such a combination would not only create a space to build the norms that democratic societies need for managing 21st-century governance challenges, but also maximize their leverage within the WTO to raise standards across a global economy.

At the same time, democracies should work in values-based coalitions to promote democratic security in increasingly strategic areas of international finance, advanced technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence, and battling transnational corruption. To protect democratic ideals, there will be times when it is necessary to exclude those who would seek to undermine them.

Today’s threats and circumstances may not require a global expansion of a formal alliance like NATO. Nonetheless, deepening ties between democratic societies will be essential on issues from sharing best practices on countering disinformation to maintaining information systems that appreciate values of transparency, accountability, and respect for individual privacy.

Here, the United Kingdom is an example of an early mover on what’s possible. Against rising concerns over cybersecurity and espionage from Chinese 5G leader Huawei, London has begun exploring a potential democracies-only grouping to better secure 5G communications technology, alongside other national security supply chains.

5G is only one illustration of a range of issues at the intersection of advanced technologies and the evolving digital economy where democracies must set the international rules if they are to maintain values such as privacy and free speech for their own citizens.

Thus, steps such as closer transatlantic coordination on investment security — reviewing foreign purchasers and investors in US or European companies — and export controls for new technologies emerge as essential in maintaining a lead in tomorrow’s technologies, in order to shape their use around liberal principles.

Fundamentally, as democracies increasingly compete with an economically powerful China and revanchist Russia, their best defense rests in recognizing that not only are democracies more competitive together, but that a gap in the armor in one is likely a gap for all.

A contest that cannot be wished away

In only four years, President Trump has left the United States embattled on nearly every front. An urge to trumpet international cooperation as a departure from his administration’s ceaseless antagonism is understandable.

However, in considering a world post-Trump, progressives must separate his disastrous policies from the structural reality of a growing clash between open and authoritarian societies — a contest that cannot be wished away.

Democracies must reengage multilaterally, but without losing sight that shared challenges do not necessarily beget shared solutions. Good-faith efforts at cooperation must be tempered by vigilance against authoritarian leaders who will not hesitate to use multilateral institutions to roll back and undermine liberal values in order to “make the world safe” for authoritarianism.

Given that reality, assertive measures are necessary to close ranks with other like-minded partners to defend democratic values in a more interconnected, but more contested, world. A post-Trump foreign policy may open the door for the pursuit of progressive goals; but they will have to be fought for abroad as much as at home.

Will Moreland is a foreign policy analyst focusing on US alliances and multilateralism. Previously, he served as an associate fellow with the Brookings Institution’s Project on International Order and Strategy. Find him on Twitter at @MorelandBW.

The last Russian leader to mess with a US election? Josef Stalin.

2016-10-26T07:30:10-04:00

Portrait of Soviet leader Josef Stalin. | Ullstein Bild/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

“We’ve never had anything like this happen in any of our elections before,” said Hillary Clinton at the final presidential debate, referring to the Russian-directed hacks aimed at influencing the US election. She was right in the narrow sense: 2016 is witnessing a new combination of Russian cyber and political warfare directed at the United States.

However, it is not Russia’s first attempt to interfere in a US presidential election. Moscow has trod this ground before — back in 1948.

Though the election of 1948 is best remembered for the Chicago Tribune newspaper’s embarrassing, incorrect “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline, its forgotten story is of Henry Wallace, a liberal dreamer who, though unlike Donald Trump in nearly every respect, shares Trump’s fate of being too blinded by his self-messianic vision to realize he too had become a Kremlin pawn.

Wallace: Stalin’s unwitting pawn

While some may remember Strom Thurmond’s “Dixiecrats,” most have no memory of the Progressive Party, led by Franklin Roosevelt’s previous vice president, Henry Wallace.

Rising tensions with the Soviet Union greatly troubled this internationalist dreamer. The early hardening of Cold War relations threatened to undercut his dream of taking the New Deal global, embracing trade, commerce, and cooperation to enhance global peace and prosperity (ironic given Donald Trump’s stance on trade).

In a September 12, 1946, speech titled “The Way to Peace,” Wallace, even as secretary of commerce, called for a repudiation of President Harry Truman’s “get tough with Russia” policy, asserting, “‘Getting tough’ never bought anything real or lasting — whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world powers.”

In Wallace’s mind, responsibility for the acrimonious relations between the United States and the Soviet Union fell on Washington. Like Trump, Wallace saw Russia as a partner. Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s actions in Eastern Europe and his authoritarian reign at home could be patched over for common goals.

American actions were to blame for the downward spiral. As pro-Wallace campaign literature would argue in 1948, “The bi-partisan Marshall Plan, under the guise of a ‘recovery’ program is actually the first step toward the formation of a Western military bloc aimed at Russia.”

Wallace sought to portray himself as a candidate for “good relations” with Russia. On May 11, 1948, before a full crowd at Madison Square Garden, he called for a new dialogue with the USSR. Reading aloud an open letter to Stalin, he offered a six-point plan. It had laudable elements, including arms reductions and a ban on weapons of mass destruction.

However, it also problematically asserted that “neither the USA nor the USSR should maintain military bases on other UN countries.” Wallace, like Trump is today, was proposing an effective American withdrawal from Europe.

A week later, Stalin replied. In an open letter broadcast on radio and then reprinted in the American press, the Soviet leader painted Wallace as the candidate of peace. The importance of Wallace’s letter, explained Stalin, was that it “proposes a concrete program for the peaceful settlement of the differences of opinion between the Soviet Union and the USA.”

The Soviet leader stated that while he did “not know whether the government of the USA acknowledges the program of Wallace as a basis for understanding between the USSR and the USA … we believe that the program of Wallace could be a good and fruitful foundation for such understanding and for the development of international cooperation. …” Stalin’s message was clear: For the peace candidate, pick Wallace.

Of course, as history tells us, Wallace’s candidacy concluded in abject failure. The former vice president captured only 2.37 percent of the popular vote. As Howard Norton of the Baltimore Sun reported at the time, there emerged “a growing and spreading conviction among New Dealers and other ‘liberals’ that Wallace, wittingly or unwittingly, is playing Moscow’s game and is hurting rather than helping the cause of peace.”

Wallace was unwitting, at least vis-à-vis the larger agenda behind Stalin’s endorsement. As with Trump today, the Kremlin was adroitly manipulating Wallace. Shortly before Wallace’s May 11 speech at Madison Square Garden, the US ambassador to Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith, met in a secret dialogue with Stalin.

Smith’s objectives were twofold. First, as the postwar settlement of Europe, especially around peace with a divided Germany, remained deadlocked, Smith sought to test the waters for any potential diplomatic progress.

Simultaneously, Smith intended to draw a line in the sand following the tumultuous events of early 1948; only months earlier, a February coup in Czechoslovakia had toppled the last non-communist-controlled government in Eastern Europe. With Western Europe under increasing pressure, seemingly from the USSR, Washington worried Moscow was on the march.

The United States, Smith relayed, had “no hostile or aggressive designs with respect to the Soviet Union.” Nonetheless, Smith emphasized, Moscow should not believe that “domestic considerations, such as the forthcoming elections, would in any way weaken the determination of this country to stand up for what it believes to be right.”

Stalin wanted to test that point.

Radio Moscow declared that the United States had proposed a secret Soviet-American conference, taking the diplomatic world by surprise. Washington’s allies were furious at apparent secret unilateral negotiations.

Later that same evening, as Secretary of State George Marshall raced to reassure various European delegations of US intentions, Wallace took the stage for his Madison Square Garden speech.

Stalin’s response to that speech and open letter, selecting that exact moment to answer Wallace’s repeated messages, was timed for this strategically advantageous moment.

Where Smith had averred the elections would have no impact on American resolve in Europe, the Soviet leader desired to plant seeds of doubt – in the US government, with the public, and with nervous European allies in these pre-NATO days. Wallace, in a fervent hope to work with Moscow, was blind to the machinations in which he was a pawn.

Trump: Kremlin pawn 2.0

Today, in Donald Trump, America finds another presidential candidate who mistakenly believes a partnership with the Kremlin can supersede fundamental geopolitical divisions. But the United States and the Putin regime have starkly different visions for international order — divisions stemming from Truman’s time.

Since World War II, the United States has defended an open, rules-based global system; one where big states cannot use force to intimidate small ones, where trade and commerce work toward prosperity for all peoples, and where we support the spread of the rule of law.

Putin’s Russia values none of these things. It desires a return to spheres of influence where great powers decide the future of their neighbors, the use of trade as a tool to coerce others, and the erosion of democratic norms that challenge his regime’s legitimacy.

For Trump, this Russian vision is attractive. “Getting along” with Russia lets the United States dump European allies that don’t pay for protection. Moscow may use trade and energy as a club, but Americans will be safe behind large walls. And Putin may be ruler with little respect for the rule of law or the notion of separation of powers, yet that’s a kindred spirit for a candidate who threatens to jail his opponent.

Trump’s policy, like Wallace’s, would not bring peace and stability. If anything, it would sacrifice the considerable successes that came with the Cold War’s end. Europe today, unlike in 1948, is not divided into competing blocs, requiring a significant investment of American money and manpower to keep the peace.

The European Union may not be perfect, but since 1991 Europe has experienced a growth in democracy and prosperity that has benefited both Europeans and Americans. When functioning at its best, Europe has been a partner for the United States on the global stage.

The Trumpian foreign policy is to sacrifice these gains — ones unheard of in European history — for the illusion of good relations with Russia.

Instead, we should continue the model of presidents from Truman to Reagan of standing by our allies when confronted with aggressive states that seek to dominate their neighbors rather than live with them. Our longstanding alliances should not be boiled down to transactional relations. Nor in this roiling global climate will America find security in shirking our bonds with fellow democracies.

It is a time for engagement, not retrenchment, and for a leader with the judgment to recognize friends from adversaries — a judgment Donald Trump, like Henry Wallace before him, clearly lacks.

Will Moreland works at a Washington, DC, think tank where he specializes in US foreign policy and American grand strategy. He holds a master’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.