Responding to and Managing ‘America First’

Posted on October 17, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

It is not obvious what the responses should be. I am talking about responses to President Trump’s policymaking and his frequent and loud declarations. It is difficult because we don’t know what the political forces acting on him are and where his own head is at, on a particular issue. Unfortunately, shifts are frequent and from one moment to the next it is not clear what the future policy may need to be. Consistency is not his strong companion to this President. On an issue you might be responding to today’s immediate political forces; or you may not. You can see all this with how President Trump has dealt with Russia and Ukraine – Zelenskyy and Putin – over the last few months. Mind boggling. And it’s not over yet.

With all this confusion, I was drawn to think about current commentators and what they appear to recommend to respond to Trump’s inconsistency and dare I say it – his bullying. There are a variety of voices – political and expert, offering their views on the best way to manage Trump. One strong view is expressed by observer and commentator David Brooks – my Friday night companion on most Fridays at PBS, and his weekly commentary along with others. As he describes himself at the New York Times: “I’m an Opinion columnist at The New York Times.”. He is further described “as a “moderate Republican“, others have characterised him as centrist, moderate conservative, or conservative, based on his record as contributor to the PBS NewsHour, and as opinion columnist for The New York Times.” Bottom line, I suppose, is he may see himself as a Republican but he is no MAGA Republican that’s for sure.

Recently he provided a longform piece in The Atlantic titled: “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now”. He poses the question: how to react, and where required, oppose Trump and the ‘America First’ efforts:

“For the United States, the question of the decade is: Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here? The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.”

Is this autocracy? Well apparently not according to David but:

“I am not one of those who believe that Donald Trump has already turned America into a dictatorship. Yet the crossing-over from freedom into authoritarianism may be marked not by a single dramatic event but by the slow corrosion of our ruling institutions—and that corrosion is well under way.”

“If you think Trumpism will simply end in three years, you are naive. Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation. This could be the rest of our lives, and our children’s, too.”

Geez that’s bad. But he goes on:

“By this past spring, Trump’s actions had become so egregious that I concluded that the time for a mass civic uprising had arrived. On April 17, I published a column in The New York Times arguing that all sectors of America needed to band together to create an interconnected resistance coalition.”

But it doesn’t appear that such a clarion call has raised much in the way of a civic response:

“But for the most part, a miasma of passivity seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. Institution after institution cuts deals with the Trump-administration extortion racket. In private, business leaders will complain about the damage Trump is doing—but in public, they are lying low. University presidents were galvanized by Harvard’s initial decision to stand up for itself, but many other schools (including now possibly Harvard) have agreed to pay what are in effect compulsory bribes to the Trump administration.”

Not surprisingly, one reason for the passivity is ‘intimidation’ apparently. As David goes on to say:

“We all understand the first reason many people and institutions have remained quiet: intimidation. Leaders say, If I speak out, it will cost my organization millions. Acquiescence to the government begins to seem prudent. So instead of a mass movement, we have separate institutions each drawing up a self-preservation strategy. In the absence of a broad social movement to support and protect them, leaders all face the same collective-action problem: If I stand alone, I’ll be crushed. … All around me, I see civic leaders not saying what’s really on their mind. And over time, self-censorship can lead to internal spiritual and moral collapse.”

But a second reason for the lack of a wide civic response is described by David:

“But a second reason people are quiescent is that they don’t understand the fight we are in. They’re still thinking in conventional political terms. This crisis is not about election cycles. It’s about historical tides.”

So David sees the Trump political era in political and social waves:

“Since 2010 or so, the tide of global populism has risen, a movement that has brought us not just Trump, but Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, the revanchist version of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Brexit. Drowning in this historic tide, conventional parties and politicians, whose time horizon doesn’t stretch past the next election, are hapless. Conventional politicians don’t have the vision or power to reverse a historical tide. Chuck Schumer is not going to save us.”

“Trumpism, like populism, is more than a set of policies—it’s a culture. Trump offers people a sense of belonging, an identity, status, self-respect, and a comprehensive political ethic. Populists are not trying to pass this or that law; they are altering the climate of the age. And Democrats think they can fight that by offering some tax credits?”

“To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful. If we fail to build such a movement, authoritarian strongmen around the globe will dominate indefinitely.”

Now, David doesn’t think that this ‘culture’ movement, the MAGA world will ultimately succeed. As he describes it:

“Americans will eventually reject MAGA, not only because it’s like a foreign implant in the body politic but also because over time, it will become clearer that Trump’s ethos doesn’t address the real problems plaguing his working-class supporters: poor health outcomes, poor educational outcomes, low levels of social capital, low levels of investment in their communities, and weak economic growth.”

Meanwhile, though, such a broad-based cultural force, as urged by David, doesn’t seem to me to warrant another such a cultural counterforce, assuming you could construct it, which doesn’t seem all that clear to me:

“To counter this, an anti-populist social movement must create a competing cascade of mini-dramas. Every day, the Trump administration’s statements and actions provide abundant material for such drama. In July, for instance, we learned that the administration was going to incinerate 500 tons of emergency food aid because the administration was too callous and incompetent to distribute it to starving people. An effective social movement would shove that story in everybody’s faces repeatedly.”

“Trumpism is ascendant now, but history shows that America cycles through a process of rupture and repair, suffering and reinvention. This process has a familiar sequence. Cultural and intellectual change comes first—a new vision. Social movements come second. Political change comes last.”

It is hard to orchestrate mini-darmas and I don’t see the organization for this. Instead, it seems to me, pointed small scale but collective opposition is where one can make progress. For example it might be useful for the University sector. I have been surprised by the lack of collaboration in this sector. The attack on Universities has been all too evident. The Editorial Board of the the FT has examined recently the Trump attack in an editorial titled, “Trump’s compact threatens to quash US academic freedom”

“The Maga movement’s campaign to remake the US’s institutional and social fabric intensified this month, when the White House issued a handful of universities — now extended to the whole sector — with a “compact for academic excellence”.”

“The compact, which people associated with the initiative describe as open to feedback from the universities themselves, prescribes a range of reforms from the Maga wish list, on the penalty of losing federal funding. The demands range from the micromanaged — such as requiring single-sex toilets and a price cap on tuition for US students — to the ideological, including “merit-based” admissions with no consideration for historically oppressed groups.”

What has been the effort? As the FT Board describes it:

“The compact, which people associated with the initiative describe as open to feedback from the universities themselves, prescribes a range of reforms from the Maga wish list, on the penalty of losing federal funding. The demands range from the micromanaged — such as requiring single-sex toilets and a price cap on tuition for US students — to the ideological, including “merit-based” admissions with no consideration for historically oppressed groups.”

And the results to date:

“Of the initial nine recipients of the proposal, two — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University — have rejected it as an assault on free speech and enquiry. The most powerful universities, and those with the deepest pockets, should rally behind them. That would make it easier for the more exposed ones to do the same. With little sign of Trump letting up, however, they must steward their affairs tightly: prepare for funding cuts and address any problems that give the administration the pretexts it needs.”

But I concur with the FT Board. The attack should give rise to collective university efforts to face the Trump administration united both in rejecting the current Trump demands and to present a united front as to possible solutions. I am surprised by the failure to gather collaboratively by universities. I can only assume that such collective effort is uncommon and may take some effort among the university presidents to act together. We shall see.

Finally, another piece of the effort to oppose Trump but seek some degree of accommodation is displayed by Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney. A very serious negotiation is at hand on trade and tariffs with Trump and Canada. Now, it could be retaliation time but notwithstanding the urging of some premiers notably Ontario’s Doug Ford, Carney has followed a very methodical difficult negotiation. As described by Tonda MacCharles, Ottawa Bureau Chief for the The Toronto Star and a senior reporter covering federal politics:

“Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected Premier Doug Ford’s call to revive retaliatory counter-tariffs against the United States, citing sensitive negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump aimed at securing tariff relief for the steel, aluminum and energy sectors.”

““There’s times to hit back and there’s times to talk, and right now is the time to talk,” Carney said Thursday.”

Moreover the view from the provinces differs and complicates matters even further for the federal Canadian Prime Minister:

“Alberta Premier Danielle Smith applauded Carney’s “very pragmatic approach” to the U.S. negotiations.”

“Carney reiterated Canada is in a relatively better position than any other U.S. trading partner when it comes to most tariffs. That’s due to Trump’s exemption from his 35-per-cent so-called “border emergency” tariffs for Canadian-produced goods that comply with North American or American content rules. Canadian energy and potash products that don’t comply with Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) rules of origin face a lesser 10 per cent “border emergency” tariff.”

In the end Carney is hoping to conclude a reasonable set of trade measures but knows that in the longer term a diminution of Canadian dependence on the US is required. But that takes time and meanwhile US-Canada trade must be secured:

““Premier Ford and I are both interested in results for, in my case for workers and families across Canada, of course, in his case for the province of Ontario, and we’re looking to work to those ends as constructively as possible,” Carney said.”

“Canada learned tough lessons in the past year from the U.S. and China about “the danger of overdependence on single trade partners,” and must now address trade relations with both those partners with eyes open to the potential impact of trade actions on each relationship, he said.”

‘Wild responses’ may feel good for a short time but can’t achieve longer term results.

Credit Image: UPI and CBC News

Middle Powers and Their Impact on the Global Order

Posted on October 10, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

Back in August I penned a Substack Post in Alan’s Newsletter titled,

Turning Back to Middle Powers – The Contrasting Character of Middle Powers?. It is probably worthwhile to highlight some of those August reflections, and then bring it up to date as we prepare for another CWD season. Originally called the ‘China-West Dialogue’, now called the ‘Changing World Dialogue’, thanks in part to our colleague from CCG, the Center for China and Globalization, founder Henry Huiyou Wang. Our first CWD session is now scheduled for October 23rd and its focus – ‘A CWD Session on the Role of Middle Powers and Middle Power Diplomacy’.

So what have I been examining on Middle Powers (MPs) and Middle Power Diplomacy (MPD). One of our colleagues on these subjects is Dr. Djalal who is the founder and chairman of the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI) and chair of Middle Power Studies Network (MPSN). In government Djalal served as Indonesia’s ambassador to the United States and Vice Foreign Minister of Indonesia. Recently he produced the first edition of “Middle Power Insights.

As I wrote back in August:

“Dr. Djalal has offered an extensive definition built on objective features as the foundation for understanding MPs:

“In this article, I refer to middle powers as countries that, by virtue of their considerable size (population and geography), weight (economic, diplomatic, and military strength), and ambition, are placed between the small power and great power categories. (Think of the middleweight division in boxing.) The combination of these three “SWA” metrics – size, weight, ambition – narrows down to a handful of middle powers, and covers those in the North and the Global South.”

“Based on the extended definition above, the following list appears to be the MPs identified and mentioned by Dr. Djalal:

Mexico

Canada

Australia

Indonesia

Saudi Arabia

UAE (possibly)

South Korea

former ‘major powers’ of the 20^thcentury now ‘pivotal middle powers’ including: possibly Germany,France, UK and Russia

Iran

Egypt

Turkiye

Brazil

India

South Africa

Vietnam

We probably should likely add at least some of the Scandinavian countries – traditional MPs, along with Canada and Australia, including:

Norway

Sweden

The Netherlands

And, I would suspect that these additional states would also likely be recognized as MPs by most:

Singapore

New Zealand”

“Of the 193 countries in the world today”, according to Djalal, “around two dozen qualify as middle powers – some are in the Global North but the majority”, as the list above shows, “are in the Global South.”

While Amb. Djalal does not provide a definitive list, the above constructed one identifies those MP countries at least mentioned by Djalal in his Report. As you see there are about two dozen as suggested by Dr. Djalal.

Now, I also reflected on the remarks over MPs and MPD expressed by Gareth Evans the former foreign minister of Australia [from 1988-96] and long an advocate of MPs, especially Australia, but certainly not only Australia. It is also worth noting that he was also President and CEO of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) from 2000 to 2009.

Gareth, as I discovered, has for some time written on, and spoken about MPs. In particular I want to reference remarks he gave in 2011 on MPs and MPD in a speech titled, “Middle Power Diplomacy Inaugural Edgardo Boeninger Memorial Lecture” [Edgardo Boeninger, as described by Gareth was “… a key player in Chile’s transition back to democracy after the harrowing years of military dictatorship, not only playing a central internal political role in the first post-Pinochet administration, of Patricio Aylwin, and in the Concertacion negotiations leading up to it, but also, during the transition period and subsequently, being a lucid voice in Foreign Affairs and other major international publications explaining Chile to the world.]

It is evident from even a cursory reading of the literature that MPs and MP analysis is entwined with the politics of World War II, and post World War II behavior and particularly the policy actions of what are seen as traditional MPs, Canada and Australia. In a piece by Adam Chapnick in the late 1990s, (Canadian Foreign Policy, ISSN 1192-6422, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 1999), 73-82) Chaptnick wrote:

“In 1942, Canadian diplomat Hume Wrong articulated what became the first philosophy of Canadian engagement in international affairs, calling his idea the functional principle. In discussing Canada’s right to a voice in Allied war deliberations, he argued that Canada’s influence should be based on three functional criteria: the extent of its involvement, its interests, and its ability to contribute to the situation in question. J.L. Granatstein (1970:2) has argued that the functional principle “was really the first enunciation of the ‘middle power’ concept”.

Now returning to Gareth he seems to concur with this Chapnick view of Canadian actions as the analytic origin of MPs. As he says:

“The idea of “middle powers” – as distinct from great or major powers on the one hand, and small powers on the other – being potentially significant actors in international affairs, has been traced back to Jan Smuts writing about the League of Nations in 1918 (and more adventurously to the Archbishop of Milan in the 16th century, or even Thomas Aquinas in the 13th) but it really only came into its own with Canada’s firm embrace of the concept after1945. Since then it has waxed and waned in political useage, and in the academic literature.””

“The high point for academic attention was a flurry of books and journal articles in the 1980s and 1990s – largely stimulated, it seems, by the very visible activism of Australia, Canada and Norway in those decades – but not much has been written in more recent years about either middle powers, or the accompanying concept of “middle power diplomacy”.”

So it would seem that there have been ebbs and flows in the examination of MPs attendant in part by the purposeful actions of these states. What makes examination rather tricky, however, is that it seems that MP attention and more significantly MPD is determined in part by the changing structural dynamics of the global order – the demise of the Cold War, the emergence of US hegemony and now its decline along with the rise of geopolitical tensions – US and China especially but also the impact of serious regional conflicts – the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. All seem to condition MPD though I’m not sure it is clearly enough described. It remains difficult in the end to determine who are the MPs and beyond that what impact and influence they maintain in today’s global order.

Let me end this piece by underlining what Gareth Evans sees as MPs and what impact these MPs have on today’s global relations.

Not surprisingly Gareth believes that MP characterization and action is relevant to contemporary international politics and to understanding the global order. But interestingly he makes clear that he is rather skeptical of the efforts to try and use objective criteria to describe MPs. As he says in his 2011 remarks:

“Objective criteria like GDP, population size, physical size and military capability can be no more than starting points. … Given the problems of balancing out these competing wholly objective criteria, one approach (as adopted for example by the Middle Powers Initiative) is to supplement these metrics with more subjective criteria, such as perceived economic and political significance, or perhaps – much more normatively – the degree of general respect such countries command. But such criteria, particularly any normative ones, by their very nature, are wholly unlikely to command general consensus.”

“As I for one argued at the time, a more intuitively acceptable approach would be to distinguish middle powers not just from “great” powers but from “major” powers, which list would include China, France and the UK at least because of their permanent membership of the Security Council, and Japan, India and Germany as well. If I were writing that now I would have to add at least Brazil to the “major powers” category, and perhaps – although rather more arguably – South Africa and Nigeria as well. But again there is never likely to be ready consensus achievable about any such judgement.”

So he acknowledges, it seems to me, Ambassador Djalal’s turn to Global South Middle Powers when it comes to contemporary analysis of MPs though it is just not clear who the Global South MPs are according to various analysts and experts. I anticipate there would be rather interesting debate over whether Brazil, India, South Africa are, or are not today’s Global South Middle Powers.

As to MPD he sees a rather complex picture. But as he suggests:

“But difficulty in defining middle powers does not, and should not, stop us talking about “middle power diplomacy”.There is real utility in doing so, both descriptively and prescriptively: this language accurately describes the way in which a number of states have in fact conducted themselves, and I believe it is a useful way of encouraging some states who don’t normally think of themselves as international movers and shakers to do more.”

“Middle power diplomacy, is, in short, the kind of diplomacy which can, and should, be practised by states which are not big or strong enough, either in their own region or the wider world, to impose their policy preferences on anyone else; but who do recognize that that there are international policy tasks which need to be accomplished if the world around them is to be safer, saner, more just and more prosperous (with all the potential this has, in turn, to affect their own interests); and who have sufficient capacity and credibility to be able to advance those tasks.”

“The characteristic method of middle power diplomacy is coalition building with “like-minded” countries. It usually also involves “niche diplomacy”, which means concentrating resources in specific areas best able to generate returns worth having, rather than trying to cover the field. Countries which are not powerful enough in most circumstances to impose their will may be persuasive enough to have like-minded others see their point of view, and to act accordingly.”

“The characteristic motivation for middle power diplomacy is what I have long described as “good international citizenship”, a belief in the utility, and necessity, of acting cooperatively with others in solving international problems, particularly those problems which by their nature cannot be solved by any country acting alone, however big and powerful. The crucial point to appreciate about good international citizenship is that this is not something separate and distinct from the pursuit of national interests; it is not some kind of foreign policy equivalent of boyscout good deeds. On the contrary “being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen” should itself be seen asa third category of national interest, right up there alongside the traditional duo of security and economic interests.”

Now this MPD characterization, it seems to me, is derived principally from what I think is the traditional MPD action of the Australias and the Canadas. I am not sure that it too necessarily fits the emerging world of today’s MPs including those from the Global South.

We will need to dive further into that inquiry in the near future.

Image Credit: YouTube

The Struggle for Renewal at the UN

Posted on October 3, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

Well, okay, one final note as we view the UN80 anniversary, the General Assembly High-level Week, a Climate Summit, all in the rearview mirror.

I guess I start with the thought, not happily, that other than the gridlock in the streets of Manhattan and us ‘fussy’ observers and such, there is little optimism in the actions taken and not much positive to report on the recently concluded UN meetings. As Colum Lynch reported in Devex from these events:

“But the question lingering in United Nations corridors remains the same as it was when the U.N.’s 80th anniversary summit began: What does the future hold for the United Nations, particularly its development, humanitarian, and human rights operations? And what will it look like without the financial support of the American taxpayer?”

Now it’s not that there weren’t numerous announcements. In a new UN Newsletter on the UN Pact for the Future, here a small sample:

“In this issue you’ll find:

New platforms on artificial intelligence mandated by the Pact

Highlights from the first Biennial Summit on financing for development

Findings from the UN report on military expenditure and the SDGs

A snapshot of Pact-related events during UNGA80”

So efforts continue but the crisis is upon the institution. I start with the current crisis and in the immediate circumstances, a liquidity crisis. As Lynch writes:

“But the U.N.’s current financial crisis has little to do with its own bureaucratic shortcomings. The U.N. is straining under a massive liquidity crisis, brought on by $1.5 billion in unpaid U.S. dues to the world body. Complicating matters, the U.N.’s two largest contributors, China and the United States, pay their dues late in the year, squeezing the U.N.’s cash reserves.”

““The cash shortage that the secretariat is facing right now [is primarily] the result of two member states, the top two financial contributors, the United States and China, who collectively provide 42% of the regular budget,” said Eugene Chen, a former U.N. official and senior fellow at the U.N. University Centre for Policy Research, who fears the cuts will further undermine U.N. ability to fulfill its mission. “If the problem you’re facing is that you are missing 42% of whatever your budget is, shrinking the overall budget is actually not the solution,” Chen said in a discussion at the Devex Impact House.”

Which isn’t to say that there is not an organizational crisis. As explained by Norway’s minister of foreign affairs, Barth Eide:

“[the] Guterres’ plan, which calls for hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts, “points in the right direction. But we could do much more.”

“You need to instill a sense that it’s a real crisis,” he said.

“Our resources are not at all aligned with the number of mandates. So you need to deal with the mandates, which is either to scrap them, to consolidate them, to merge them. … I would say I’m sure you could do with cutting one third of the organization in principle.”

“This is not a magical number, but it’s just like [an] order of magnitude,” he said”.

So a serious ‘reorg’ is required – what should the UN and its agencies be doing and what can be foregone? However, agreement on what should be this effort and agreeing on the elimination or consolidation of current mandates needs to be attacked and not just talked about.

Serious reform of the mandate process and what the UN should and can be addressing in this geopolitical multilateral environment hangs over the organization no matter what some optimistically describe. Still, there are innovations, serious proposals, that are being suggested that warrant attention at this moment. Let me start with my CWD principal, Huiyao (Henry) Wang. Henry is the founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization, a think tank in China and he joins us asa principal at CWD. Just recently Henry tackled a festering issue, the failure of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to be able to act particularly with respect to peace and security issues – today, most notably, Gaza and Ukraine. Now calls for reform of the UNSC go back for many years. But I was caught by the insight Henry recently addressed though Henry sourced it from Xi Jinping. The proposal in FP:

“At the 80th United Nations General Assembly high-level debates last week, a host of global leaders called for a more effective and representative Security Council. In the words of Finnish President Alexander Stubb: “If countries from the global south, from Latin America, from Africa, from Asia, do not get agency in the system, they will turn their backs against the United Nations.””

“But despite the Security Council’s flaws, there is no real substitute for it. If it drifts into irrelevance, this would simply remove the last vestiges of effective global coordination. The challenge, then, is not whether to reform the council, but how to do so.”

The proposal:

“It is against this backdrop that Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a new Global Governance Initiative. Xi is calling for a fairer and more inclusive multilateral system, one without double standards that places the United Nations at its core.”

“To that end, all current G-21 (formerly G-20) members should be given a seat on an expanded Security Council. This would eliminate the 10 existing rotating seats and create 16 new permanent associate seats. These new states would not have an individual veto, but together with the other four permanent members, they could override the use of the unilateral veto.”

“Previous reform efforts have stumbled over the question of how to allot new seats in the council. Here, the G-21 offers an elegant solution. It is comprised of an even mix of developed and developing countries. Using it as the basis for reform addresses some of the underrepresentation of the global south while still recognizing the enduring power of incumbents. Today, the G-21’s members comprise over 85 percent of global GDP, and has already helped coordinate multilateral responses to some of the world’s most pressing economic challenges. Under this new model the expanded U.N. Security Council would consist of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, along with the African Union and the European Union, which would each have one collective vote.”

“But a more substantial fix is required. To solve the problems created by the unilateral veto, we must weaken it by instituting a supermajority override. Under this proposal, if over two-thirds of the expanded Security Council, that is to say 15 of its members, and two-thirds of the General Assembly voted to override the veto of a single P5 member, the resolution in question would pass.”

“After all, if two-thirds of both bodies can agree to override a single P5 member veto, it clearly represents a broad international consensus. A singular P5 member should not be able to block a UNSC resolution passed by all other permanent members, two-thirds of the other 16 permanent associate members, and two-thirds of the 193 members in the General Assembly.”

The value of the proposal is in its easy solution to representation. The members of the G20 is so valuable – key developed and developing states, especially Global South states. And it is a way to move beyond a single veto at least as currently exists at the UNSC.

It is a very useful insight(s). Will it gain traction – given the current multilateral politics – not likely. But the insights are very helpful. And who knows, maybe not far into the future and in a healthier multilateral environment, Hmmmm.

Image Credit: Modern Diplomacy

First posted at Alan’s Newsletter – https://globalsummitryproject.substack.com/p/the-struggle-for-renewal-at-the-un

UN at 80

Posted on September 26, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

This week it was all about the multilateral institutions – namely the UN – but it was also about the key multilateral proponent, or at least it was – the United States. Both seem hopelessly at odds with multilateral progress at the time of UN80. It’s a very busy week in New York as both the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA80) High-level Week and Climate Week NYC have been launched.

As Elliot Waldman, now the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review, WPR, gloomily expressed:

“Somewhere in a parallel universe, the United Nations’ 80th birthday is a tempered but joyous occasion: A time to toast accomplishments and take stock of the long road ahead. To celebrate milestones reached and learn from opportunities missed. Above all, to recommit to a collective push to overcome global challenges.”

“Instead, on planet Earth in the year 2025, the mood is bleak—uniformly so.”

“If the U.N. isn’t “in free fall,” it’s suffering “a crisis of irrelevance.” Perhaps it’s “no longer fit for purpose.” The organization’s top humanitarian aid official, Tom Fletcher, [Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the UN] summed it up best: The U.N.-led international system is facing a “perfect storm: underfunded, overstretched, and under attack.””

The near despair was underlined at the UN NYU Newsletter:

“This year, at the start of the 80th UNGA, the pendulum has swung all the way to deep despair. In addition to the ongoing conflicts noted above, 2025 witnessed conflagrations between India and Pakistan; Iran, Israel and the United States; and, more recently, Cambodia and Thailand. Worse, the discernible rise in the use of the veto means that the UN Security Council (UNSC) is being rendered ineffective in dealing with critical peace and security matters. Indeed, in the past year while Moscow exercised its veto six times, Washington used it five times — the latest on 18 September — on the question of Palestine. This takes the total number of vetoes cast by the permanent members in 80 years to 318.”

And in terms of US actions. Well, Waldman targets the current Trump administration actions:

“A decade later, the world has instead learned just how much it can no longer count on the United States. Not only has President Donald Trump dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development and pulled funding from the United Nations, his administration has also denounced the [Sustainable Development Goals] SDGs as a “globalist endeavor,” beset by “‘gender’ and climate ideology” and “inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty.” Indeed, much of the current handwringing over the state of the U.N. has to do with whether it can survive Trump’s second term. … the cracks in the foundational assumptions of the SDGs—not to mention the Western-led international order that backed them—go far beyond Trump, even if he was the wrecking ball that brought it all crashing down.”

The dreary perspective for the UN, the Sustainable Development Goals and even more from the Trump administration did not commence with the UN High Level Week but Trump’s pointed distaste for the UN and multilateralism was on dramatic display on Day 2 of the UN gathering with Trump’s speech before the General Assembly.

As Colum Lynch at Devex, quoted and described the Trump speech which was placed on Day 2 as the convening country:

“U.S. President Donald Trump delivered an often disparaging, grievance-filled address to the 80th United Nations General Assembly, blaming the U.N. for facilitating uncontrolled migration, denouncing the Europeans’ energy policies, calling climate change a hoax, and outlining a long list of the greatest things in history he claims he has achieved for America and the world.”

““Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said in a nearly one-hour speech to the 193-member U.N. General Assembly yesterday, claiming to have personally ended seven wars in his first seven months in office, a claim questioned by many.”

“Trump provided few details on his specific plans for the U.N.’s role in the world, and offered little clarity on whether the U.S. intends to press ahead with further draconian budget cuts. But he underscored the need for other countries to follow his lead and crack down on migration.”

“Uncontrolled migration, he warned in his first address to the U.N. since his reelection, is “the number one political issue of our time,” he said. “Your countries, they’re being destroyed.””

““It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now,” he said. “Your countries are going to hell.” The President also made it clear earlier in his term that the US would cut funding to the World Health Organization, the U.N. Population Fund, UNESCO, and withdraw American participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council.”

This upfront attack on the UN by President Trump is the ‘icing on the cake’ to a now unleashed financial crisis at the UN impart, of course, created by the United States. As described by J. Alex Tarquinio, who reports on the UN, at the FP:

“Many thorny issues could be discussed when Trump sits down for a bilateral meeting with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Tuesday. The United States is the largest financial contributor to the United Nations, but Trump has withheld even mandatory contributions to the U.N. budget—a decision that has plunged the organization into a fiscal crisis with existential implications.”

“The one thing that might please the U.S. delegation is talk of deep reductions in the U.N. budget. The last-minute preparations for this high-level week took place amid a frantic belt-tightening process. The United States usually pays 22 percent of the regular U.N. budget and around 26 percent of the peacekeeping budget, thus Trump’s decision not to provide even obligatory contributions this year has left a big hole.”

“Ahead of the high-level week, Guterres sent a revised U.N. budget to member states and an advisory committee. Preliminary figures released last week reveal that more than 18 percent of the U.N.’s staff positions are slated for elimination. Years of hiring restrictions mean that some of those posts are vacant. Furthermore, another 262 positions are being proposed for relocation. A senior U.N. official said that they were no longer talking about doing more with less but rather “doing less with less.””

“As the plan for downsizing, euphemistically dubbed UN80, drags on, many diplomats in New York seem to be experiencing a loss of purpose. “I think a lot of diplomats are frustrated that the current UN80 process has not involved much discussion of what the U.N.’s main goals should be, rather than how many jobs to cut,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group.”

As for Climate Week, even the Europeans, and many others, found it possible to disappoint. As Anna Gawel at Devex described:

“Usually, NDCs [National Determined Commitments] are submitted long before UNGA, but this year, only 36 out of 197 countries have published their NDCs, writes my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz, who will be at Climate Week. Still missing from the list are some of the world’s biggest emitters, including India, Saudi Arabia, the European Union, and Indonesia.”

Now the rationalization for yet to be announced NDCs and described by Marcos Neto from the UN Development Programme, as quoted Anna Gawel was to accept that it would be better to be late but significant:

““This is an important moment,” Marcos Neto, assistant administrator at the U.N. Development Programme, tells Jesse.”

“He’s not especially worried about the number of NDCs still to be submitted — pointing out that there has been a consensus throughout the U.N. that “quality and ambition is more important than doing it in a hurry” and that so far the NDCs submitted are “fundamentally a better set of NDCs.””

Yes, maybe, but national politics remains a big worry. As Suzanne Nossel urged in her piece, “It’s Not Too Late to Fix the U.N.”at FP, she expressed what many were hoping for that might yet turn the current UN crisis around:

“Rather than muddling through the current crisis in its present form, the U.N. must use this momentum to remake itself as a body fit for purpose in the second quarter of the 21st century.”

But as she herself argued in an earlier piece in FP that was titled, “The Great Dismantling”:

“Even as ongoing court challenges could salvage some vestiges of the internationalist system, foreign-policy idealists must begin to envision new futures. It is time to collectively reckon with Trump’s great dismantling of the liberal internationalist project and the internal weaknesses that made it possible. Only then can the liberal beliefs that underwrote the old order find new life.”

“The United States has not ratified a human rights treaty since 2002. Russia and China have grown increasingly opportunistic, seeking to remake international institutions by installing their personnel and agendas across United Nations bodies. The U.N. Security Council’s outdated composition and deadlock over sensitive issues have made it an afterthought in major conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Gaza.”

“Such tensions have made it nearly impossible to confront new challenges, including climate change and COVID-19. The U.N.’s 2024 Summit of the Future, heralded as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine the multilateral system,” ended with a whimper as stalemated negotiations culminated in a watered-down pact that garnered scant global attention.”

There is no hiding from it, multilateralism and its key institutions are in deep crisis. Multilateralism can be renewed but not with the current national leaders, especially Donald Trump.

Are there people of good will determined to reform the UN system? Of course there are. Does Trump speak for the majority of Americans, I don’t think so. But without concerted collective national efforts to reform and enhance the multilateral institutions we remain “whistling in the dark”. There are reform minded folk. As Ravi Agrawal of the FP noted in his time in New York:

“The less obvious take—the bit that has made my U.N. week polarized in a personal sense—is that I came across a surprising number of hopeful doers and thinkers.”

Hopeful, yes, but much more is required for success.

Image Credit: CFR

Glancing Back; But Also Looking Forward

Posted on September 19, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

So, we are rolling into an important time for multilateral and regionally strategic action, though realistically it always is an important time. On the multilateral front, notably there is the annual high-level week of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Here a sort description as expressed by John Haltiwanger and Rishi Iyengar at FP:

“World leaders and diplomats will flood into New York City in the coming days for the annual high-level week of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which kicks off on Monday. This year marks the 80th session of UNGA—and it comes at a challenging moment for the world and the U.N. itself.”

I suspect it will give us a ‘temperature reading’ on the UN as it enters UN80.

On the regional front there was the meeting this week between Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney. Closer trade and economic relations were the agenda as both advance to renegotiate USMCA – the United States-Mexico-Canada free trade arrangement – and yes with Donald Trump. Past bilateral agreements make stronger Canada-Mexico ties slightly fraught.

But in setting this discussion up, let me take the temperature on the effectiveness of the Informals – that is the G7, the BRICS and most importantly, the G20. This year’s G20 gathering is hosted by South Africa in November and there has been more than enough friction between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. It currently appears as though President Trump will not attend the summit, but the US will be represented by his Vice President J.D. Vance. There is real tension, especially as the United States is scheduled to take hosting of the G20 for 2026.

Thinking about the role and impact of the Informals, most notably the G20, I turned to good colleagues, Colin Bradford and Johannes Linn both from Brookings and elsewhere. Both have long been observers of the Informals but especially the G20. Indeed both were early advocates, along with Canada’s former Finance Minister and then Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin for a G20 and then a G20 leaders-led multilateral institution. To reflect on the Informals and particularly the G20, I reviewed several pieces from Bradford and Linn but most particularly the piece these colleagues wrote after the first of several summits ending with the Cannes Summit in 2011 – “A History of G20 Summits: The Evolving: Dynamic of Global Leadership”. Journal of Globalization and Development (2):2. The piece enabled my colleagues to reflect on what had been accomplished with the early G20 summits and what the challenges ahead were.

The two, Bradford and Linn were, as the piece reveals, keen observers and strong advocates for a leaders-led multilateral collaborative institution. As they initiated this piece they wrote:

“The G20 summit of key world leaders emerged as a significant institutional component of the global governance architecture from its first surprise gathering in Washington, D.C. in November 2008 to the most recent summit meeting in Cannes in November 2011.”

And the purpose as they saw it of the creation of the Informals starting with the G7:

“Over nearly 40 years the annual G6/7/8 summits dealt with a wide array of issues, ranging from short term financial, economic and political crises, to longer term economic, social, environmental and security issues.”

But the challenges were evident from the commencement of the Informals:

“However, less progress was made in the area of macroeconomic management and coordination, including effective surveillance, resolution of balance of payments and exchange rate imbalances among major economies, and progress on trade liberalization.”

Though the US expressed little interest in moving the G20 to the leader level, the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC), and the threat it posed to global finance, changed minds:

“Just prior to the US election ending the presidential term of George W. Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as president of the European Union, and Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, visited Camp David, a presidential retreat in Maryland, at the invitation of US President George W. Bush. On Saturday afternoon, October 18th, they announced their intention to call a summit involving nations from around the world to reflect the world-wide nature of the financial crisis but they did not indicate which configuration they would choose.” …

“The first G20 Summit was held in Washington, DC, on November 15, 2008, at the National Building Museum, with ministers of finance joining the leaders for each G20 nation, plus the Netherlands and Spain, which President Sarkozy had pushed to include, in addition to the heads of various international institutions. This made for a huge summit table, exacerbating the problem of size of an enlarged summit grouping. But the purpose and the outcome of the summit was to discuss “principles of reform” – coordinated stimulus to prevent a deep recession and reform of the global financial system to prevent a recurrence of the crisis –, rather than to reach specific agreements, and to set in motion processes among G20 ministers of finance, which would develop a more specific and ambitious agenda.”

And something like a conclusion went like this:

“The good news is that the G20 embraces a much broader group of countries, cultures and economies than the G8. The G20, for all its flaws, is a realistic and broadly representative meeting of the world as it is and will increasingly be, not the world that was. In addition, the G20 has a strong foundation in the ten-year history of the G20 ministerial meetings, developing a strong network among officials of communication, consultation and concertation. The strength of this network of senior officials is the foundation of G20 Summits and provides the means of moving the global agenda forward continuously from one presidency to the next.”

“The bad news is that the G20 summits appear to the public around the world to be more conflictive than cooperative, and hence less effective. But if the idea of G20 Summits is also to connect leaders to their publics in providing global leadership on issues that are simultaneously domestic and international, then the embodiment of the domestic political conflicts in the global treatment of those issues makes summits more real and less rarified.”

“The G8 Summits were exercises in diplomacy and international cooperation. The G20 Summits thus far into their history are more complex exercises embodying contradictory forces arising from domestic political struggles to deal with the new inter-connectedness of challenges and the new nexus of the global and domestic dimensions of economic problems affecting the ordinary citizen.”

The challenges were, and are, real. In a sneak peak over the impact and influence of the Informals, let me identify a small snippet of a very large edited volume by by Andreas Freytag and Peter Draper, as editors for, The Elgar Companion to the G7, being published by Edward Elgar Publishing, in the near future. I was fortunate enough to participate with a chapter entitled, “The rise and decline of the First Informal: the changing character of the G7 summit”. Notwithstanding the lead the chapter examines all the key Informals. From my perspective the Informals are close to unique for the fact that they are leader-led:

“Much has been made by observers and experts of the informal nature of these bodies in contrast to conventional formal institutions. And indeed this was a quite different institutional construction, as early observers like Nicholas Bayne and other diplomats were quick to point out. But even these early observers of the Informals did not make enough of the fact that these Informals were annual summits, yes, but also, and pointedly, that these particular forums, the G7, G8 and G20 were, and are, leader-led.”

“Beyond the question of representation, however, there is the continuing, crucial question about the effectiveness of all these Informals. What impact have these Informals had in fashioning policy and, most critically, in advancing collaboration and global governance policymaking?” …

“Without giving the “story” away at this point in the narrative and analysis of the Informals, it is evident in reviewing the life of the Informals that international relations forces have had a dramatic impact on all the Informals and their capacity to advance collaborative global governance policymaking. And examination of their structures and processes shows that they have not led to the desired policy leadership that was hoped for by early political leaders. This, then, is not just a story of the rise of the Informals, but equally, it would seem, their “fall”.”

Multilateral collective action remains a promise unfulfilled in the global order. Global leadership continues to fall short in the maelstrom of geopolitical tensions of the leading states.

And it is then not surprising that I turn to bilateral and regional actions in the midst of all this geopolitical rivalry, especially in the context of Trump 2.0. I was, therefore, attracted to the consequences of the meeting of the leaders of Mexico and Canada. As described in the Daily Review of WPR:

“Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum hosted Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney this week for a summit in Mexico City that likely would not have happened if not for the ongoing challenge posed by Donald Trump’s return to the White House.”

“Trump has imposed tariffs of 35 percent on Canada and 25 percent on Mexico, ostensibly as punishment for failing to address cross-border drug trafficking and illegal migration, though many goods are exempt due to the U.S.-Mexico-Canda Agreement, the free trade deal that the three countries signed during Trump’s first term as a replacement for NAFTA.”

But the future of USMCA is unclear. Again from WPR a view of the future:

“With the USMCA coming up for a mandatory review next year, Trump is expected to use that occasion to seek further concessions from Canada and Mexico—perhaps not only on trade but also on other issues like migration and security cooperation. Sheinbaum and Carney know that they will have more leverage in those negotiations if they forge a united front, but first they have some repair work to do in their own bilateral relationship.”

In the first negotiation severe tensions were created by a bilateral dael between Mexico and the US:

“Canadian officials were taken aback when, during negotiations over the USMCA in 2018, Mexico struck a preliminary bilateral trade deal with the U.S. that threatened to leave Canada out in the cold.”

So, this brings us to now: “As part of their bid to mend ties, Carney and Sheinbaum signed a new “comprehensive strategic partnership,” which they said would “complement” the USMCA. They also agreed to strengthen direct commercial links between the two countries, including through maritime trade that doesn’t rely on crossing U.S. territory.”

“At next year’s review, the three countries will need to agree on whether to renew it—potentially with updated provisions. Failing to do so will trigger a series of annual reviews beginning in 2027 for ten years, before its scheduled expiration in 2036.”

“Given Trump’s penchant for unpredictability and chaos, nothing can be ruled out. For Canada and Mexico, steering the talks to a mutually beneficial outcome will mean first overcoming the mistrust between them.”

So there we are: ‘glancing back; but looking slightly askew at the immediate future.

Image Credit: Observer Research Foundation

The Fate of the SDGs and indeed Global Development

Posted on September 12, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

So as you will read a slightly truncated Alan’s Newsletter Substack Post, but there is a good reason.

So this week’s Post will be a wee bit truncated. Why you ask? Well, I am with many other political science and international relations colleagues in Vancouver for the APSA (American Political Science Association) Annual gathering. How many, I am not yet sure but I suspect fewer than had originally been planned for by the Convention. I had organized a Roundtable on Middle Powers and several of my colleagues were unable to actually join us because their institutions had cut all travel grants for faculty and colleagues. Rather sad.

But I couldn’t sign off for this week before commenting on a very good piece published by Adam Tooze from Columbia University and Director of the European Institute and nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe. Tooze does a Substack named Chartbook. He is quite prolific and insightful. And because he was commenting on the SDGs I couldn’t resist examining his analysis. The fact is we have the UN80th gathering and the High-Level week for the UNGA is just about upon us from September 22-30th. And the SDGs are an important feature. As described by the UN:

“The 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly – under the theme Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights – comes at a pivotal moment to renew global commitment to multilateralism, solidarity and shared action for people and planet. This year’s high-level week highlights the urgency of delivering on the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals and reinvigorating global cooperation. Two key platforms will spotlight action and solutions: the flagship SDG Media Zone produced by the UN Department of Global Communications with dynamic interviews and panel discussions on SDG solutions held from 22–26 September; and the Goals Lounge, convened by the UN Deputy Secretary-General and hosted by the UN Office for Partnerships from 20-26 September, featuring unscripted dialogues, deep dives into vital issues and interactive experiences. All events are live streamed on UN WebTV.”

And while there is determination by many associated with the UN, or committed to UN multilateral reform to spur renewal the UN finds itself at its 80th anniversary deep in crisis as I noted in previous Posts.

And here is where Adam Tooze comes in with his recent FP article, “The End of Development”. Not surprisingly Tooze focuses on the Trump administration and its reaction to the SDGs. As described by Tooze:

“In the letter, the U.S. government categorically rejected the entirety of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. This wasn’t simply a withdrawal, as from the climate commitments of the Paris Agreement; it was an unambiguous denunciation of the collective ambition to improve the material condition of humanity. American voters, the letter claimed, had delivered a clear mandate in the last election: Their government must put America first, caring first and foremost for its own.”

“Yet the justification did not stop at nationalism. It expanded into a broader geopolitical critique.The letter argued that the resolution’s language—specifically, its reference to “peaceful coexistence”—could be read as an endorsement of China’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.Similarly, the United States objected to the resolution’s phrase “dialogue among civilizations,”interpreting it as a nod to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative.”

“While the rest of the world proceeded with the vote, the Trump administration’s intervention laid bare the fact that the apparent consensus around the SDGs—touted since 2015 as a universal blueprint for development—had collapsed.”

While Tooze focuses on this depressing, though not surprising, Trump administration take on the SDGs and more broadly on development, he identifies a goal that was always a very far reach. As Tooze notes:

“The broader vision of the SDGs was always a gamble at long odds, and in practice, it has delivered so little that it raises the question of whether it was ever anything more than a self-serving exercise on the part of global elites. For the sake of their own collective vanity, they needed to convince themselves and the world that they had a comprehensive and bold vision. But it’s something else to mobilize and sustain an effort to realize the SDGs.”

“And this, in turn, reflects a refusal to admit what development actually means or to anticipate how the status quo powers will react once it happens. With hindsight, the SDGs, for all their capaciousness and generosity of spirit, seem like an effort to craft a world organized around a spreadsheet of universal values rather than politics and around a happy blend of public and private economic interests.”

And as Tooze then suggests:

“In retrospect, the SDGs now look less like a new dawn than the final gasp of a unipolar, end-of-history fantasy. Rather than billions leveraging trillions, the track record of blended finance is dismal. It is rare to see more than cents on the dollar mobilized in private money. In key areas of innovation such as green energy and artificial intelligence, the developing world, far from catching up, is left even further behind.”

“Whatever happens to the individual components of the SDGs—worthy objectives such as reducing child mortality and digital inclusion—one thing is for sure: The age of a politically neutral, universally endorsed development agenda is over.”

“The passing of the SDGs should be a cause for real regret. Theirs was an extraordinary and comprehensive vision. Along with the Paris Agreement, they marked a high-water mark of a certain kind of universalism.”

Tooze turns approvingly to what he sees as the successful national effort of China:

“China is the world’s greatest development success. On that basis, it has emerged as a lender and as a development power. At its high point in 2016-17, lending under the Belt and Road Initiative for a while matched that by the World Bank. Though Belt and Road subsequently slowed, China’s strategic direction remains clear. The CCP believes that material transformation is the key to legitimacy and peace. The phrase often repeated by the Chinese leadership, quoting from Xi, is that development is the “master key.””

“Xi’s Global Development Initiative was China’s answer to the SDGs. It was not an overall rejection, let alone a point-blank denunciation, but a rewriting so as to focus on just eight key areas, including poverty alleviation, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, development financing, climate change and green development, industrialization, the digital economy, and connectivity in the digital age, all under the sign of “results-oriented actions.””

And Tooze then concludes that there is a way forward but far distinct from this universal approach of the SDGs as set out by the UN and with lessons learned from the success of China development:

“The bland box-ticking vision of 2015 is no longer our world. But in its rejection of the shared U.N. agenda in the name of strident sovereignty, the United States is indulging in a politics of denunciation more becoming of a downtrodden developing country than a former unipolar hegemon. By contrast, China’s blend of realpolitik with ideology and national interest cannot help but seem rational and balanced as well as being backed up by an unparalleled national record of development and huge resources.”

The outstanding question is where does the UN effort go and in turn at some point the US likely post Trump.

Image Credit: APSA

This Post originally appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter – https://substack.com/home/post/p-173380329

The Confusing New Global Order

Posted on September 5, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

It was a confusing past couple of weeks if you were trying to understand the ‘emerging’ global order. Maybe the confusion was best captured by colleague Daniel W Drezner at Tufts University and he is also responsible for the very good Substack, Drezner’s World. Dan just recently wrote in WPR about what is, or isn’t, today’s shape and leadership behavior of the international order. Such an understanding is important as much has been written in the past week about China’s apparent emergent global role in the face of its leadership at Tianjin of the SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and then President Xi’s determined display of power at the 80th celebration in Beijing of the victory over Japan in World War Two.

I will get to the China leadership assertion in just a moment but let’s get a grip on the current shape of the order. Now, Dan suggested:

“The death of the post-Cold War era has been proclaimed many times now, only for those reports to have been greatly exaggerated. After the 2008 global financial crisis, many observers declared the end of neoliberalism, which had underpinned the post-Cold War global order—but it persisted. Similar predictions were made after the populist shocks of 2016, and yet the global order remained largely unchanged. Even the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic failed to change things all that much.”

“What makes 2025 interesting is that for the first time, both critics and supporters of the liberal international order seem ready to deliver its eulogy. For example, it’s no surprise that Jamieson Greer, the current U.S. trade representative under President Donald Trump, would characterize the neoliberal order as “untenable and unsustainable.” Lauding what he dubbed the “Turnberry system”—after Trump’s golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland—based on high tariffs and macroeconomic rebalancing, Greer bragged, “What was long dismissed as heresy by the free-trade fundamentalists in Brussels, Geneva and Washington is now becoming conventional wisdom.””

And there is no question that the behavior of this second Trump administration is in contrast, stark contrast in some cases to administrations of the past promoting or at least declaring support for a liberal international order led, not surprisingly, by the United States.

But as Dan declares:

“Undeniably, U.S. policy preferences have shifted dramatically. That is reflected in a variety of Trump administration policies that have torched the norms that defined the liberal international order. On trade, Greer valorized a system “that is fair, balanced and oriented toward serving concrete national interests rather than vague aspirations of multilateral institutions,” while taking a gratuitous swipe at the World Trade Organization and its “old guard of trade bureaucrats.””

But as Dan suggests:

“There is a difference, however, between declaring one global order dead and declaring that a new global order has arisen to take its place. In international relations, it is a truism that destruction is far easier than creation.”

Some analysts have announced that multipolarity and the support for realpolitik, realist foreign policy, is now what drives leading and great power action. But as Dan points out:

“A more realpolitik-based grand strategy cares less about norms, values, alliances and partnerships, and more about strictly advancing the national interest. One could argue that the shift in U.S. policy preferences merely reflects the conclusion that in a multipolar world, the U.S. should behave as other states do. In other words, if Russia and China are pursuing their interests in an amoral, astringent manner, why shouldn’t the United States?”

“Concluding that the new international order is now a realist one, however, would be inaccurate and incomplete. And it is worth explaining why, to make sense of the world to come.”

So then where are we according to Dan when it comes to understanding the dynamic of the current global order. His conclusion:

“But while Carr [E.H. Carr, a British historian of the interwar years] did warn against an excessively utopian worldview, he also cautioned against a strictly realpolitik-based approach as well. As he noted, most actors in world politics need power, but they need social purpose as well.”

“Perhaps the new social purpose of today’s emergent world order will be a revised definition of sovereignty or a belief that nationalism trumps all other global values. But the point is that this remains an area of contestation. And until the great powers can either agree—or at least agree to disagree—on what comes next, the new world order will remain radically incomplete.”

And the notion of a global order where at least the leading and “great powers can agree or at least agree to disagree”, using Dan’s language, is clearly not upon us yet.

Meanwhile, China has taken the recent moment to display its leadership and proclaiming a world order distinct from that expressed by Washington. Now Xi took the opportunity of the SCO Summit to advance a different order from that expressed by Washington. As described by Sergey Radchenko at FP – Radchenko is Wilson E. Schmidt distinguished professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS:

“Splendidly dressed dancers moved about the stage swiftly in a colorful performance as nearly 30 world leaders looked gravely on. Gathered in Tianjin for the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), these assembled dignitaries were also taking part in Beijing’s carefully choreographed pageantry. Their presence was meant to proclaim China’s glory as the center of the non-Western world.”

Especially highlighted was the presence of India’s Narendra Modi with much attention paid by observers to the souring of relations between Trump and Modi after years of work by US leaders to draw India more closely to the West. Though much was made of this sparkling gathering, the SCO remained as it largely is a performance setting. And what was less well noted by observers was that Prime Minister Modi did not remain to share the dias at the 80th anniversary with Xi, Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the so-called ‘axis of autocracy’. As for the strategic value of the SCO gathering, Radchenko suggests there was less to conclude from this gathering than urged by some:

“The reality is more complex than the optics might suggest. The SCO has always been less than the sum of its parts. It formerly served a very specific function: helping China and Russia manage their differences in Central Asia. The addition of India; Pakistan; Iran; and, most recently, Belarus has diluted the SCO’s mission. Now, it provides little more than a glamorous opportunity for multilateral banquets.”

And as for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, according to Radchenko:

“Unlike Xi’s vision for a happy world of win-win cooperation, the military parade suggests the possibility that someone might well lose and that it won’t be China.”

“In place of the banalities and broader vision of the SCO meeting, Beijing offered a more provocative message endorsed by a smaller core of countries. Putin, along with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and even North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were on hand for the roaring spectacle.”

“Planes flew overhead. Tanks, armored personnel carriers, laser guns, and nuclear missiles—carefully labelled in English for ease of reference—rolled across the square to the sounds of a military orchestra.”

If the intent was to underline a growing close axis of friendship opposed to the US it did, according to Radchenko, catch Trump’s attention:

“May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration,” Trump tweeted. “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”

At its most strategically opportune, it would seem that Trump’s strategy of splitting Russia from China, hence the Alaska Summit, has seemingly failed. Now let’s see if Trump works in the other direction and tries to split China from Russia with recently suggested discussions over a pending grand bargain between Xi and Trump and a possible Summit.

Meanwhile, though, one cannot ignore the US lawlessness exhibited by this current Administration. The US has in many respects become the locus of disruption. Take for instance the US attack on a Venezuelan vessel in the Caribbean. As described by Rishi Iyengar and John Haltiwanger at FP:

“U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that destroying the boat rather than intercepting and seizing it was intended to deter other “narcoterrorists.” “What will stop them is when you blow them up,” Rubio told reporters during a visit to Mexico. “And it will happen again.””

“Tuesday’s strike is the first operationalization of Trump’s secret order to the U.S. military last month to begin directly going after drug cartels, which was reported by the New York Times but still has not been made public.”

It was startling to see, especially for those concerned over adherence to international law. The United States blew it up – what the Administration breezily declared was a boat loaded with drugs and a further declaration that the vessel was filled with terrorists as opposed to seizing the vessel and its occupants. Such lawlessness is shaking and the fact that it comes from the United States with dramatic silence from US domestic voices -in Congress especially, is just dismaying.

It underlines the current disorder but little else.

This Post first appeared at my Substack, Alan’s Newsletter

https://globalsummitryproject.substack.com/p/the-confusing-new-global-order

Image Credit YouTube

Discussion about this post

Faltering Multilateralism Continues

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

Well, it is kinda the end of the summer – now that we have the Labor Day weekend upon us. Wow!

It seemed reasonable to try to assess where we are on a number of issues that we have been following recently. These examinations all target the state of health of multilateralism. First the state of the Plastics Treaty, or not. I have looked at this before in a Post. The negotiation and the failure to move toward a Treaty underscores the diplomatic difficulty in achieving multilateral success in the current global relations context.

Then, there is the state of the UN – the central multilateral institution. Here too, I have looked at it previously in an earlier Post. What is at the heart of the failure of the UN; and is it fixable. We are examining the UN of course in the toxic context of Trump policymaking but the problems are real, with or without Trump. Now I was going to extend today’s Post to view the impact of Trump diplomacy on the international environment but I think I’ll save that for a later Post.

The Plastics Treaty

Well bluntly the Treaty, for the moment, is nowhere. As described by Joshua Lincoln at WPR:

“Negotiations on a treaty to limit global plastic waste ended last week not with a bang, but with a whimper. In the early hours of Aug. 15, after two compromise draft texts were rejected by various groupings within the 183 negotiating countries, the chair of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee simply adjourned the talks.”

“Beyond these substantive problems, there were thorny implementation and design issues: the voting threshold, scientific input, and other features needed to make the treaty’s implementation mechanisms effective, and the financing mechanism.” …

“But when China—the world’s largest producer of plastics—as well as India and Brazil put their thumbs on the scale in favor of a text with no global obligations and subject to a rigid consensus requirement at every future step, any remaining room for agreement evaporated.”

So, is it dead! Maybe not but new diplomatic paths need to be taken. This will take some daring by states but its time to consider different diplomatic strategies. As Lincoln suggests:

“When it comes to a plastics treaty, the divisions among states are now likely too wide to bridge via consensus, but other pathways may be available. A majority of states could seek a new negotiating mandate through a vote at the U.N. General Assembly, as was done for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2016-2017. Or the same group could go outside the U.N. entirely, which has precedent in the 1997 Ottawa Convention on land mines. In both of those cases, a coalition of states forged ahead on their own, trusting that more countries would sign on over time, as they eventually did.”

Like-minded states need to suck it up and attack these global problems starting with ‘coalitions of the willing’.

UN at 80

At the upcoming 80th General Assembly session which will be held from September 22-30th, the UN will, according to the UN, devote itself to:

“The 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly – under the theme ‘Better together: 80 years and more for peace, development and human rights’ – comes at a pivotal moment to renew global commitment to multilateralism, solidarity and shared action for people and planet. This year’s high-level week highlights the urgency of delivering on the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals and reinvigorating global cooperation.”

But reality is about to intrude, I hope. The UN needs to ‘face the music’ when it comes to its future. As Helen Murphy describes at Devex, here is the world the UN faces:

“Under pressure from U.S. funding cuts, Secretary-General António Guterres is rolling out sweeping reforms through the UN80 Initiative. China, now the organization’s second-largest financial contributor, is pressing for more jobs and influence as Washington retreats.”

“The United Nations is bracing for sweeping change. Facing massive U.S. funding cuts, it has floated slashing 20% of its secretariat’s 33,000-strong workforce. And China — now the U.N.’s second-largest contributor — isn’t shy about seizing the opening. Chinese diplomats have pressed for more jobs for their nationals and even argued American staff should bear the brunt of any layoffs.”

Well the Chinese actions may be annoying but that is hardly the heart of the UN problem. Murphy goes on to describe the real future facing the UN:

“Launched in March by Guterres and led by U.N. Undersecretary-General for Policy Guy Ryder, UN80 boils down to three main prongs: belt-tightening in the secretariat, reviewing the 40,000 mandates handed down since 1945, and possible mergers across U.N. agencies with overlapping roles.”

“Behind it all is a brutal money crunch, writes Colum. Washington owes the U.N. more than $1.7 billion, mostly in unpaid peacekeeping dues. But “this is not simply a cost-cutting, downsizing effort,” Ryder insists. “The objective is to make the U.N. better.”

“Critics aren’t buying it. “Basically, [the current funding crisis is] because the U.S. stopped paying,” says Ian Richards, head of the U.N. staff union in Geneva. Meanwhile, Stewart Patrick of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace calls it “a slash-and-burn approach,” adding, “they are basically unwittingly replicating a DOGE experiment at the United Nations.””

Yes, the fiscal crisis is real and needs to be addressed but it may require reducing the size of the UN as noted above. But that isn’t the end of it. As pointed out by Suzanne Nossel in a recent article in FP:

“The emergence of alternative multilateral bodies, great-power deadlocks, and global reductions in development assistance all threaten the U.N. in its current incarnation.”

But also there is more to it than just US ‘financial pressure’ and its determination to undermine multilateral organizations as well as all the problems identified by Nossel above. The UN has to face up to its dramatic inefficiency:

“This wavering support comes as the U.N. faces considerable organizational challenges. In recent decades, the U.N. has taken on a dizzying array of tasks and projects, many of which are out-of-date, overlap, or fail to achieve much.”

“Although the U.N. does irreplaceable and lifesaving work, it is saddled with ever-proliferating mandates that distract and detract from those essential endeavors. As part of a strategic review for the institution’s 80th birthday, Guterres commissioned an analysis of U.N. mandates, which was released in August. The study lays bare the organization’s inefficiency and mission creep, making the case for radical streamlining.”

“The new Report of the Mandate Implementation Review revealed an organization run amok. The U.N. has 22 distinct intergovernmental bodies; just the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council, and Human Rights Council alone issue a total of more than 600 mandates.” per year, adding to a groaning total of more than 40,000 still-active mandates.”

“Mandates—which refer to U.N. bodies’ decisions, requests, and directives for action, such as creating a committee, conducting a study, or preparing a report—define the organization’s work. They can do everything from authorizing the deployment of thousands of peacekeepers, to requiring the preparation of a report on discrimination, to directing the work of a four-person accounting office, to adding to the existing list of more than 200 U.N. commemorative days (such as the International Day of Yoga). Regardless of its scope, each mandate demands effort from the U.N. Secretariat staff, who must carry out the mandate and report back to the entity that authorized it.”

“While the report did not appraise the value of individual mandates, it pulled no punches in exposing inefficiencies and waste. In fulfillment of these mandates, in 2024 alone, the U.N. held 27,000 meetings, incurring more than $360 million in direct costs associated with conference services and reports. Because there is no central registry of mandates, new ones are created without awareness of what is already being done. Since 1990, around 20 subjects have appeared every year in both General Assembly resolutions and ones adopted by either the Human Rights Council or the Economic and Social Council.”

So all these problems have accumulated over many years and it would appear that it is time, past time probably where the organization and its members have to tackle these critical problems. As Nossel concludes:

“The organization must seize the current cash crunch as a historic opportunity. Indeed, there are already sweeping proposals to remake the global body—including a leaked internal document that lays out an array of ideas to merge, eliminate, and relocate major U.N. functions.””

Really tough problems for multilateralism and its institutions with no guarantee that the organizations and its national members and staff and leadership have the will to tackle these very difficult problems.

This Post first appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter https://substack.com/home/post/p-172213259

Turning Back to Middle Powers – The Contrasting Character of Middle Powers?

Posted on August 21, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

I ended a recent Post – “Can we foresee Middle Power Action in a World of Geopolitical Tensions?” indicating I wanted to examine further Middle Powers (MP) and Middle Power Diplomacy (MPD.) My hope: explore further what experts have suggested identifies MPs and characterizes MPD. I wanted to further look into views and insights from former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans. We were fortunate enough to have him as one of the discussants in the webinar gathering on Australia and New Zealand as MPs. He subsequently kindly so we could quote him and then later provided us with remarks he delivered to a course at the Australian War College in Canberra last June.Let me therefore reel things back to MPs and MPD after examining the disempowering of multilateralism with the currently failed Plastics Treaty.

As it turns out I thought it might prove useful to expand the lens I had on Gareth Evans and to include insights as well from another discussant from a CWD session, Dr, Dino Patti Djalal. We were very fortunate to have such a wide set of discussants examining MPs and their behavior during our previous sessions on MPs and MPD. Dr. Djalal is the founder and chairman of the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI) and chair of Middle Power Studies Network (MPSN). In government Djalal served as Indonesia’s ambassador to the United States and Vice Foreign Minister of Indonesia. Recently he produced the first edition of “Middle Power Insights”.

Dr. Djalal has offered an extensive definition built on objective features as the foundation for understanding MPs:

“In this article, I refer to middle powers as countries that, by virtue of their considerable size (population and geography), weight (economic, diplomatic, and military strength), and ambition, are placed between the small power and great power categories. (Think of the middleweight division in boxing.) The combination of these three “SWA” metrics – size, weight, ambition – narrows down to a handful of middle powers, and covers those in the North and the Global South.”

Based on the extended definition above, the following list appears to be the MPs identified and mentioned by Dr. Djalal:

Mexico
Canada
Australia
Indonesia
Saudi Arabia
UAE (possibly)
South Korea

former ‘major powers’ of the 20^thcentury now ‘pivotal middle powers’ including: possibly Germany,France, UK and Russia
Iran
Egypt
Turkiye
Brazil
India
South Africa
Vietnam

We probably should likely add at least some of the Scandinavian countries – traditional MPs, along with Canada and Australia, including:

Norway
Sweden
The Netherlands

And I would suspect that these additional states would also likely be recognized as MPs by most:

Singapore
New Zealand

“Of the 193 countries in the world today”, according to Djalal, “around two dozen qualify as middle powers – some are in the Global North but the majority”, as the list above shows, “are in the Global South.”

While Djalal does not provide a definitive list, the above constructed one identifies those MP countries at least mentioned by Djalal in his Report. As you see there are about two dozen as suggested by Dr. Djalal.

We were fortunate enough, as noted above, to include as one of our CWD discussants in our Australia session, the former foreign minister of Australia Gareth Evans. It is probably not all that surprising that Evans has a strong interest in MPs and MPD given he was foreign minister of Australia and a well known traditional MP . In his remarks later provided to us for our use he expressed an extended definition of MPs:

“There is no standard definition, or agreed international list, of ‘middle powers’, and no lack of continuing argument about not only the coverage of the concept, but its operational utility, and in some cases its acceptability to those so labelled.”

“For me, there are three things that matter in characterizing middle powers: what we are not, what we are, and the mindset we bring to our international role. ‘Middle powers’ are those states which are not economically or militarily big or strong enough to really impose their policy preferences on anyone else, either globally or (for the most part) regionally. We are nonetheless states which are sufficiently capable in terms of our diplomatic resources, sufficiently credible in terms of our record of principled behaviour, and sufficiently motivated to be able to make, individually, a significant impact on international relations in a way that is beyond the reach of small states.”

Unlike Dr. Djalal, Gareth Evans suggested some skepticism on relying on the objective measures that Dr. Djalal promotes. As he suggested in remarks he delivered at the War College last June he expressed this view:

“Focusing on objective measures of physical size – of population, GDP, landmass, defence expenditure or the like – doesn’t take the definitional argument very far.”

According to Evans MPD as practiced by these states provides:

“cooperation and coalition-building with like-minded countries in individual or niche issues that no single power can solve by acting alone.”

Evans then expands on this:

“I would describe ‘middle power diplomacy’, in turn, as having both a characteristic motivation and a characteristic method:

• “The characteristic motivation is belief in the utility, and necessity, of acting cooperatively with others in addressing international challenges, particularly those global public goods problems which by their nature cannot be solved by any country acting alone, however big and powerful; and

• The characteristic diplomatic method is coalition building with ‘like- minded’ – those who, whatever their prevailing value systems, share specific interests and are prepared to work together to do something about them.”

And as he describes it in his early remarks to CWD, this is how Evans sees MPD operating:

“For middle power diplomacy, as I have described it, to be effective, requires a number of factors coming together: practical opportunity, often limited given the realities of great and major-power dominance; available diplomatic resources, energy and stamina; intellectual creativity, seeing opportunities which others have missed; and credibility, practising what you preach and being seen as genuinely independent, nobody’s deputy sheriff…”

For Djalal with his focus on the active Global South MPs and their growing plurilateral coalitions:

“The world’s middle powers are changing the playbook in the international system.”

“The growing cooperation involving the middle powers – within the Global South, between the Global South and the North, between the Global South and the United States and China – is reshaping the international order.” …

“More and more, middle powers are positioning themselves to be a driving force in shaping regional architecture, thus compelling them to step up their response to the challenges inherent in their neighborhood. They are also spearheading various minilateral initiatives that can potentially supplement the provision of global public goods and also enhance the space for meaningful dialogue.”

So while these two experts do not exactly see ‘eye to eye’ they both see the influence of MPs and their diplomatic action on global relations. They do point to regional action and collaboration on the provision of public goods.

All this discussion of MPs leaves a couple of intriguing questions. Can we identify current action that we can subscribe to MP action? Can we describe the coalitional aspects of such MPD and is the behavior one way only, that is efforts to build coalitional effort to achieve effective global governance in a world of growing disorder?

As a start, the characterization we’ve just seen for MPs by both previous experts does contrast with a far more ‘realist perspective’ on MPs and MPD proposed by a set of scholars at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. In their 2022 article, “Middle Powers in the Multipolar World” by Moeini, Mott, Paikin and Polansky they target first the emergence of what they see as as a declining unipolarity and an emerging structure of multipolarity:

“With the international system shifting away from Pax Americana and toward a more multipolar world, a class of state actors usually called ‘middle powers’ is the subject of increased attention in policy and academic debates. Despite their rising prevalence, however, references to middle powers are often imprecise, inconsistent, surface level, and ad hoc—reflecting a general bias toward great powers and/or universalism that privileges systemic (global) analysis in mainstream international relations.”

For these experts the core understanding comes from the fact that these MP are regionally embedded:

“We show that middle powers are better defined by their 1) enduring regional presence and geographic rootedness, 2) considerable economic and military capacity relative to neighbors, 3) historical and cultural pedigree as civilizational states, and 4) the regionally-focused, limited extent of their ambitions — they seek not world domination but a sphere of influence in their near-abroad matching their historical range and scope.”

“Given the decline of unipolarity, growing disruptions and backlashes to globalization, and the fracturing and realignment of the global financial and political-economic system, region-based economic and political dynamics are likely to become ever more central to international politics. Understanding future geopolitical trends will depend on recognizing the reality and centrifugal force of multiplicity at the regional or sub-system level to which middle powers are anchored in a cohesive unity—with each civilizational node, the fulcrum of a regional security complex (RSC).”

“One could not speak of ‘middle powers’ without taking into account their symbiotic relationship with the geographical regions wherein they are located and recognizing that “security interdependence is normally patterned into regionally based clusters: security complexes.””

For these scholars, MPs are:

“In our scheme, middle powers emerge as anchors to these regional complexes, and the regional security complex forms around them. But the question remains: what distinguishes a middle power from other nation-states in a particular regional security complex, and what differentiates it from a great power?”

So what are the differences identified? According to these folks this is it:

Great powers are, practically speaking, global players—nations with the ability, or at least the potential, for global force projection and international action.”

“Middle powers, in contrast, are confined—both in intent and their activities—to their designated regional security environments due, for the most part, to their relative resource constraints.”

MPs then, according to the authors are:

“A major reason for this necessary paradigm shift is that middle powers are civilizational states, firmly rooted to a particular land, tradition, and culture and possessing a powerful historical memory.”

“In sum, a middle power is best defined by its relative power and superiority within the regional security complex it anchors, a well-developed cultural tradition and sense of identity that are the wellspring of relative solidarity, aspiration and capacity for regional—though not global—dominance, and ability to chart a course of import vis-à-vis great global powers while retaining its autonomy.”

“The regional requirement is thus a sine qua non for the category of middle powers, but the domestic health of a state matters too. Internal socio-political considerations, including regime stability, social cohesion, self-confidence, a common purpose, and effective leadership are the basic building blocks for all power: middle powers are no exception.”

Who then do these authors identify as today’s MPs:

“Therefore, based on our established criteria, we propose that Japan, Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Indonesia, India, Germany, France, the Anglosphere (the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand when & where they work in tandem), Nigeria, and South Africa are all better understood as middle powers in the current global landscape.”

Certainly an identifiable subset of the MPs identified both by Djalal and Evans. But in contrast to both these MPs a regionally anchored set of states:

“In short, the multipolar world will greatly increase the geopolitical relevance of regions and enhance the ability of middle powers to lead them, with great powers less inclined to intervene from ‘above’.”

Now I am not doing ‘true justice’ to the very developed perspective presented by these experts but hopefully it does enough to present a strong contrast between the several visions presented. So then the question left is: Are we bound to focus on the collaborative efforts of MPs to press forward in advancing global governance initiatives; or are MPs embedded in conflict structures of the geopolitical world of great powers?

To that question I will return in the near future

Image Credit: MPSN (Middle Power Studies Network)

This Post was first published at my Substack Alan’s Newsletter:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-171565248

Looking Again at Middle Powers – but first ‘Plastics Forever’

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Alan Alexandroff

I ended my last Post – “Can we foresee Middle Power Action in a World of Geopolitical Tensions?” indicating I wanted to examine further Middle Powers (MP) and Middle Power Diplomacy (MPD.) I think it is very important, in the current global disorder with Trump 2.0, to explore further, MP and MPD. It is valuable to dig further into the remarks expressed by Gareth Evans, Australia’s former foreign minister at a CWD session. We were fortunate enough to have him join CWD as a discussant in that webinar gathering on Australia and New Zealand as MPs. He subsequently provided us with a written set of his remarks from the session and then later on he was good enough to provide remarks he delivered to a course at the Australian War College in Canberra last June.

But before tackling MPs again, I had to turn my focus on the ‘impending’ Plastics Treaty and to take the measure of the state of multilateralism by focusing on this negotiation. The several delegate gatherings reflect the current difficulties of multilateral negotiation and more importantly reaching multilateral agreement – moving the yardsticks on critical global governance issues.

As pointed out by Madeleine Speed at FT:

“Delegates from more than 170 countries have gathered in Switzerland over the past two weeks in a final attempt to reach a globally binding treaty. The fifth round of talks collapsed in South Korea last year after oil-producing nations blocked the inclusion of measures that would regulate plastic production.”

“The Geneva talks scheduled to conclude on Thursday [August14th] were extended into another day for the presentation of a second draft of the treaty. But a heated final plenary meeting on Friday morning appeared set to end without agreement.”

This is of course a failure after a previous failure in Busan South Korea to conclude a Plastics Treaty. Negotiations to conclude a Plastics Treaty has been ongoing since 2022.

In fact just a few hours later Hiroko Tabuchi, who covers pollution and the environment for the NYTimes wrote:

“Negotiations over a global plastic pollution treaty collapsed on Friday [August 15th] as countries failed to bridge wide gaps on whether the world should limit plastic manufacturing and restrict the use of harmful plastic chemicals.”

“Environmental groups accused a small number of petroleum-producing nations, which make the building blocks of plastic, of derailing an ambitious effort to tackle plastic waste. “We are leaving frustrated,” Edwin Josué Castellanos López, chief negotiator for Guatemala, told the delegates. “We have not come up with a treaty that the planet so urgently needs.””

And Madeleine Speed at the FT appeared to confirm the immediate Treaty failure:

While the majority of more than 170 countries were prepared to compromise to secure a treaty in Geneva on Friday, the US refused to agree to anything beyond voluntary measures, national delegates told the Financial Times. This followed the long-running opposition of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and a number of other petrostates which would not budge from their refusal to agree measures that address the production of plastic, rather than only waste management.

So where to from here, and why are we seeing yet again multilateral negotiating failure. On what’s next Tabuchi wrote:

“It was unclear what next steps might follow the latest round of negotiations in Geneva which were supposed to be the last. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which is hosting the talks, said countries needed time to regroup after failing to reach consensus over draft treaty texts.”

And why the difficulty. The problem is the goal set by those seeking a binding treaty in the face of oil producers. Looking forward the continued production and use of plastics leads here according to the OECD:

“The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that, without global action to curb plastic pollution, plastic production will grow by 70 percent between 2020 and 2040, totaling 736 million tons a year by the end of that period. Overall as of 2020, less than 10 percent of global plastic waste was estimated to have been recycled, with the rest disposed of in landfills, incinerated or released into the environment.”

There is dramatic tension between those focused only on recycling, notwithstanding the poor track record for recycling and those determined to place a cap on plastic production and dealing with plastic toxicity:

“A coalition of nations had aimed not only to improve recycling and clean up the world’s plastic waste, but also to curb plastics production. That would put measures like a ban on single-use plastics, a major driver of waste, on the table, some said at the time.”

“A group of nations also pushed for the treaty to include controls on toxic chemicals in plastic products.”

In addition to those determined to tackle the toxic chemicals in plastics there are those slow walking efforts to place a cap on production especially Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and other oil producing states. Now that group has been augmented by a number of others:

“The United States, which supported the idea of a broad treaty under the Biden administration, has now turned against production caps, proposing in the most recent round to strike a mention addressing “the full life cycle of plastics” from the treaty.”

Trump 2.0 now joins Russia and China in opposing limits on production.

Clearly, part of the dilemma faced by delegates seeking a binding treaty here is the determination of the negotiating group to use a rule of agreement that limits the group’s ability to move forward:

“The talks’ collapse “proved that there’s no way we can proceed with consensus,” said Bjorn Beeler, executive director at IPEN, an international network of nonprofits focused on addressing pollution. “The result was the chaos you saw.””

As pointed out by Tabuchi in an earlier NYTimes piece:

“On Thursday, delegates continued to demand a new draft, even as they contemplated various outcomes: a weak treaty, a continuation of talks or no treaty at all. Getting all of the world’s nations to agree using U.N.-sanctioned consensus-based negotiations seems increasingly out of reach.”

Rather than employing a majority decision rule the negotiation faces consensus agreement. And it appears the results are all too obvious. It is evident that majority of nations favor a production cap and dealing with toxic chemicals as well as recycling management:

“But the majority of nations at the talks have supported curbs on plastic production, saying the plastic waste problem needs to be addressed at the source.” …

“And at the treaty talks, more than 80 countries had signed onto a proposal led by Switzerland and Mexico to include controls on toxic chemicals in plastic products.”

As pointed out in Al Jazeera:

“Valdivieso’s [the chair, Luis Vayas Valdivieso, Ambassador of Ecuador to the United Kingdom and Chair of this negotiation] draft text does not limit plastic production or address chemicals used in plastic products, which have been contentious issues at the talks.”

“About 100 countries want to limit production as well as tackle cleanup and recycling. Many have said it’s essential to address toxic chemicals. Oil-producing countries only want to eliminate plastic waste.”

“More than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced globally each year, half of which is for single-use items.”

“Nearly half, or 46 percent, ends up in landfills, while 17 percent is incinerated and 22 percent is mismanaged and becomes rubbish.”

What the next steps for the Plastics Treaty negotiation are, at the moment unclear, but it is evident that Middle Powers in Europe, Latin America and Indo-Pacific are not yet capable of forging collaboration in the face of a consensus rule.

Let us see where the negotiation goes from here, if at all. Meanwhile, let’s turn back to MPs and to situations where consensus does not govern.

Image Credit: AP

This Post first appeared as a Substack Post at Alan’s Newsletter -https://substack.com/home/post/p-171066675

Rising BRICSAM

'Breaking' Knowledge, Information and Commentary on Rising BRICSAM and Global Governance Summitry

Responding to and Managing ‘America First’

Middle Powers and Their Impact on the Global Order

The Struggle for Renewal at the UN

UN at 80

Glancing Back; But Also Looking Forward

The Fate of the SDGs and indeed Global Development

The Confusing New Global Order

Faltering Multilateralism Continues

Turning Back to Middle Powers – The Contrasting Character of Middle Powers?

Looking Again at Middle Powers – but first ‘Plastics Forever’