In chapter 9 of Patrick, Stewart, The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World, Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2018, he talks about the United States being at a crossroad on multilateralism. On one side Americans are still leaning toward having respect for international institutions and it meaning the United States is not giving up its sovereignty. On the other side, Americans feel they need to preserve the United States’ sovereignty and withdraw or limit the order of the international institutions. They seek an American mostly interest while still participating in international institutions.
The way Stewart describes the United States multilateralism currently is he states the a la carte approach christened by Richard N. Haass. Depending on the situation the United States interests it uses it in different ways. An aspect he explains is the U.S.’s growing reliance on flexible, often purpose-built coalitions of the interested, capable, or like-minded. An example is during the Obama years experts debated whether we live in a G-2 (United States-China), G-8, G-20, or even G-zero world. In reality, ours is G-x world in which the identity and number of parties at the head table, which is x, varies by issue area and situation. The second aspect he states is the preference for voluntary codes of conduct over binding conventions. One such example of this is the Nuclear Security Summit where there will be more American reliance on other countries for voluntary commitments to lock down the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons and fissile materials. The third aspect he noted is the search for piecemeal rather than comprehensive approaches to international challenges. An example of this is the U.S. and other governments breaking complex problems down into their component parts such as climate change, in other words, “global governance in pieces” instead of all at once.
In this regard, it means the U.S. uses multilateralism as a means for comfort and convenience. It uses multilateralism for seeking and protecting its own interests and every other government should follow. Then the U.S. uses unilaterism without regard for the international institutions when it is for its own interests and disregarding multilaterism in such instances. An example of this is the invasion of Iraq which France and Germany, both NATO members, both land neighbors Canada and Mexico, and China a permanent member of the UN Security Council and other countries opposed the invasion.
One reply on “Week 2 Blog Post”
Krste,
Your blog post gets at the heart of the subject for this week’s class. The United States, still the only global hegemonic power (though probably not for long) has faced a dilemma since it emerged as the un-challenged power of the post-Cold War world: should it use its power and authority to act in its own unilateral interest or should it continue the process it started at the end of WWII of building and sustaining multilateral organizations and agreements? As you suggest, the US has actually tried to have it both ways, acting unilaterally when necessary but also working to maintain multilateral approaches.
Of course, the exception was the period of the Trump administration. Whether out of sheer ignorance of history and US foreign policy (which was well documented) or for other, more nefarious reasons, the former President was openly hostile to virtually ALL multilateral organizations and agreements. And he withdrew the United States from a number of important ones. His understanding of foreign policy and international relations was so limited that he appeared to think that the US could–and should–act in its unilateral interests virtually always and that there would not be any consequences. The reality was clearly to the contrary. –Professor Wallerstein