Search the archive.

It has long been fashionable to assert that improved education is the answer to our growing inequality problem. But even if increasing educational attainment reduced inequality of opportunity between the disadvantaged and the middle class – and reduced wage differentials within the middle class – this does not imply an acceleration of the rate of average income growth of the bottom 99 percent.

Educational initiatives are notorious for long time lags. Even an all-powerful leader with a magic wand that could instantaneously revolutionize primary and secondary education in 2015 would have to wait 12 years to see, in 2027, the full impact of this policy on high school graduates. [pullquote] Educational initiatives are notorious for long time lags. [/pullquote] To improve education over current levels, some post-secondary education would then be needed, pushing graduation back to 2031 or later – by which time the income gaps projected in Figure 1 would already have fully emerged.

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

I recently attended the China Development Forum (CDF) in Beijing, an annual gathering of senior foreign business leaders, academics, former policymakers, and top Chinese officials. This year’s conference was the first to be held in person since 2019, and it offered western observers the opportunity to meet China’s new senior leadership, including new premier Li Qiang.

The event also offered Li his first opportunity to engage with foreign representatives since taking office. While much has been said about the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, appointing close loyalists to crucial positions within the Communist party of China (CPC) and the government, our discussions with Li and other high-ranking Chinese officials offered a more nuanced view of their policies and leadership style.

This article critically examined the promise of superb precision and accuracy that widely features in accounts of digital agriculture. It showed that weak GPS reception, sensor errors, as well as spatially or temporally incomplete and self-learning algorithms that are still early in their learning process can all cause inaccuracies that are easily hidden by a high volume of data and sophisticated maps (with high granularity). As a result, digital agriculture is often ‘precisely inaccurate’ (McFarland and McFarland, 2015), giving a false sense of accuracy.

In the AgTech sector, the inadequate or inaccurate functioning of technologies, if acknowledged, is portrayed as a transitory problem as technologies will constantly become more powerful and precise. This view can also be encountered in the social science literature, where inaccuracies are labelled, for instance, as ‘teething problems’ (Jakku et al., 2019: 6). We do not contest that technologies will advance further. However, assuming that they are on a steady and steep curve towards evermore hyper-accuracy is problematic in several ways.

Carbon taxes are one aspect of , where a price is placed on emitted CO2 in order to internalize the external costs of greenhouse gas emissions. These  include damages caused by climate change: sea level rise, temperature rise, and increased occurrences of extreme weather events.

“Carbon Pricing: an instrument that captures the external costs of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—the costs of emissions that the public pays for, such as damage to crops, health care costs from heat waves and droughts, and loss of property from flooding and sea level rise—and ties them to their sources through a price, usually in the form of a price on the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted.”

Legalizing marijuana nationwide would create at least $132 billion in tax revenue and more than a million new jobs across the United States in the next decade, according to a new study.

New Frontier Data, a data analytics firm focused on the cannabis industry, forecasts that if legalized on the federal level, the marijuana industry could create an entirely new tax revenue stream for the government, generating millions of dollars in sales tax and payroll deductions.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett, the third richest person in the world, argues in a new interview that the best way to address income inequality is through the Earned Income Tax Credit.

"[I] think the Earned Income Tax Credit is the best way to put money in the pockets of people that don't fit well under the market system, but that are perfectly decent citizens," Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B), said in a wide-ranging interview with Yahoo Finance's editor-in-chief, Andy Serwer.

16/09/2021 - Governments should boost their investment in education in order to tackle the sources of inequality of opportunity. This would help create a more level playing field for people of all ages to acquire the skills that power better jobs and better lives, according to a new OECD report.

Education at a Glance 2021 says that one in five adults across the OECD has not attained upper secondary education and in some countries, a significant share of children leave school early. In 2019, at least one in ten school-aged youth were not in school in about a quarter of OECD countries. But some countries have made progress: between 2005 and 2019, the out-of-school rate at upper secondary level dropped by more than 15 percentage points in Mexico, Portugal and the Russian Federation.

If Colorado wants to proactively decrease poverty levels and the income gap between white communities and communities of color, it should invest in education, the judiciary, health care and human services — instead of the corrections system.

That’s the conclusion of a recent study conducted by a Colorado State University economics professor and one of her master’s students. The ensuing report, “Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families in Colorado: The Need for Increased Targeted Public Investment,” was released Jan. 22 by The Bell Policy Center and finds that education tops the list of priorities for state funding if Colorado wants to boost the financial well-being of its low-income populations and communities of color.

The odds of his escaping a poverty-ridden lifestyle, despite innate intelligence and drive, were long. So how did he help mold his own narrative and triumph over baked-in societal inequality? Through education.

“Education has been the path to better opportunity for generations of American strivers, no less for me,” Patrick said in an email when asked how getting a solid education, in his case at Milton Academy and at Harvard, changed his life.

Effectively Selecting Partners for Ad Hoc Initiatives As new forums are created to champion a particular policy agenda, it must be determined which partners will participate in each. The CRI cast a wide net, given the need for broad cooperation in bringing cybercriminals to account in far-flung parts of the world. Conversely, for Open RAN activities, the Quad has arguably been the multilateral center of gravity, as the ambition of allies in APEC has not yet been matched by those in the EU. Such a flexible approach has clear benefits, but risks leaving some partners feeling shunned by the choices made. Conversely, it reduces the ability of the US government to encourage partners to make difficult but necessary choices when they know that an a la carte option is available. Navigating a Lack of Bureaucratic Resources and Buy-In Multilateral bureaucracies are often maligned, but fulfill a critical function in catalyzing the work toward the objectives of the institution. Ad hoc coalitions, and even nascent multilateral organizations such as the Quad, have no secretariat responsible for the day-to-day execution of the mission. As a result, activity can be sporadic and oriented around periodic high-level meetings (and the need for national-level bureaucrats to show progress at those meetings) rather than a targeted action plan. Many of the more challenging tasks the US and its partners want to achieve cannot be executed in a 30-day scramble, risking trading tangible progress for statements of intent. Giving Strategic Objectives Primacy over Tactical Initiatives The plethora of workstreams will ensure a steady stream of activity to keep bureaucrats busy under pre-existing forums such as APEC, G7, G20, ITU, UN, WTO, as well as new or revamped forums such as the CRI, Declaration on the Future of the Internet, IPEF, Quad, UN Cybercrime Treaty and Open-Ended Working Group. In the drive to find tactical wins in each forum, however, the administration must ensure that its strategic objective – limiting the presence of “untrustworthy” companies in critical technology networks – remains paramount. After all, "strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Fourth, overreliance on purely ad hoc approaches can be ethically and normatively problematic, raising concerns and dilemmas about legitimacy, equity, and accountability. To begin with, informal multilateralism risks undercutting public international institutions that have traditionally sought (or aspired) to provide global public goods, replacing them with new governing frameworks that may restrict access to those same benefits. Since it was created in 2008, the G20 has been criticized by other UN member states—the G175, if you will—for making decisions that affect the rest of humanity. Successive G20 chairs have tried to ameliorate these concerns through elaborate outreach efforts. But the inherent tensions between effectiveness, which implies modest size, and legitimacy, which implies broad representation, persist. Ultimately, this raises an ethical quandary that the UN’s founders had sought to address in 1945 by creating the UN General Assembly: namely, how to prevent poorer countries from being excluded from global decisionmaking processes that affect them directly. A purely coalitional approach to world order risks accentuating the global inequity and injustice that already pervades world politics. Although power shapes the design and dynamics of all institutions, large-membership, treaty-based organizations typically possess some internal checks and balances. They also provide opportunities for weaker actors to have a voice, dampening the naked exercise of power and fostering bargaining and consensus building. Standing bodies also possess independent secretariats staffed by international civil servants and technocrats, creating an institutional identity distinct from member states. For all these reasons, formal multilateral organizations are better placed than narrower groupings to advance the agendas and interests of the otherwise powerless.111 Accountability is also a problem for coalitions. As hard as it can be to hold formal multilateral bodies to account, the task is even greater when it comes to minilateral ones. A comparison between the G20 and the World Bank is instructive. The lack of a robust G20 mutual accountability mechanism makes it hard to determine whether its members are fulfilling pledges made at successive summits. Meanwhile, the World Bank, which is under increased pressure from civil society groups to embrace transparency, has taken positive steps in the direction of accountability. Finally, coalitions present financial and logistical challenges. The proliferation of ad hoc groupings, with their attendant summits, work streams, and reporting requirements, tests the bandwidth of all national governments with demands on scarce personnel, resources, and time. This is true even for an institution the size of the U.S. State Department. For smaller, poorer countries, the burden is even heavier.

Nevertheless, there are real drawbacks and risks in creating a new arrangement for every challenge. First, it is unclear whether ad hoc mechanisms are more effective than formal intergovernmentalism at delivering results, particularly when it is difficult to enforce compliance with voluntary commitments. Consider, for example, the multiple, flexible frameworks that constitute the regime complex for climate change. To date, the actual achievements of the MEF have been negligible, just as follow-through has been underwhelming on the nationally determined contributions pledged at the Paris climate conference in 2015. A similar problem has afflicted the G20’s mutual assessment process, which commits governments to submit to one another and the IMF a summary of their national economic plans, including potential negative impacts of those choices on other countries. Instead of a peer review mechanism that holds G20 governments’ feet to the fire, this framework has been impotent, particularly as G20 members have limited the IMF’s independent surveillance and monitoring role. More generally, there is little evidence that flexible minilateralism can overcome tough cooperation problems, particularly in the context of intense geopolitical competition. In 2020, deepening Sino-U.S. frictions paralyzed a more robust G20 response to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and global debates over whether Russia should be ejected from the forum—have again hamstrung much of the G20’s work.105 In his address to the UN General Assembly in September 2022, Secretary-General Guterres poured cold water on the notion that à la carte multilateralism can replace the hard work of formal multilateral diplomacy or the standing capabilities of UN agencies. “No major global challenge can be solved by a coalition of the willing. We need a coalition of the world.”106 Second, the ad hoc approach to international cooperation risks undermining international organizations. At times, informal bodies can revitalize formal ones, including by encouraging them to adopt new standards. The creation of the G20, for instance, revived the IMF and World Bank and spurred the replacement of the Financial Stability Forum with a more robust Financial Stability Board. Likewise, the money-laundering standards of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) coalition were subsequently adopted by the IMF, as well as formalized in UN Security Council resolutions. At other times, however, the emergence of alternative institutions has come at the expense of existing bodies, diluting the coherence of the multilateral system. This is particularly true when dissatisfied or revisionist powers seek to challenge the mandates, rules, and practices of established international institutions. Such “contested multilateralism” can take one of two forms.107 The more moderate is when states unhappy with the status quo try to shift the setting for multilateral deliberation and policymaking to an alternative, existing institution whose mandate and decision rules they find more congenial. The more radical is when dissatisfied powers try to create an entirely new and competitive arrangement. This brings us to the third potential downside of the coalition approach. It can contribute to rampant forum shopping—and not just by the United States—as governments flit among alternative institutional frameworks based on situational circumstances and exigencies. For decades, the United States seemed best positioned to play the game of contested multilateralism, picking and choosing among flexible frameworks as the situation demands. Although Washington retains a significant ability to pivot among institutions, the diffusion of global power and influence means that other countries can increasingly avail themselves of similar opportunities.108 Indeed, they are already doing so. China has sponsored or cosponsored a slew of new institutions, ranging from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and (more recently) the Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative.109 In short, other major players are “perfectly capable of playing the same game of ad hoc ‘minilateralism’ to their own advantage and America’s detriment.”110 Over time, such dynamics could undermine the coherence of international cooperation and accelerate the world’s fragmentation into competing geopolitical blocs.

By any measure, the US has done a remarkably effective job of winning over like-minded governments to its view of limiting the presence of “untrustworthy” (read: Chinese or Russian-developed) companies in critical technology networks. In 2020, the UK announced it would not ban Chinese vendors from all parts of its 5G network in a move that frustrated US counterparts and risked undermining the US strategy at its outset. Following steady lobbying from the US government and the implementation of sanctions against Chinese entities, however, they reversed course. Today, the UK government is among the most ardent advocates for the Prague Proposals – a set of recommendations on technical and non-technical risks to 5G infrastructure that aligns with the US view. Canada, France, and Germany all deliberated for a long time, eager not to upset relations with China, before ultimately acquiescing to the view that our digital infrastructure cannot be owned and operated by companies that function at the whim of authoritarian governments. Alignment on restricting autocratically controlled technology is now moving more rapidly, with cooperation among likeminded states on everything from ransomware to AI to quantum computing. While the Trump Administration embraced bilateral pressure, the Biden Administration has embraced international coalition-building. But its approach is not merely a reversion to the status quo. More so than any administration before, Biden’s is largely looking to ad hoc coalitions rather than traditional forums for international engagement to drive its agenda. This is due in part to the realities facing the administration: most existing forums were designed with the mindset that economic integration would drive all countries toward the US’s democratic, capitalist model. Now that the “end of history” has been debunked and decoupling critical supply chains from China has superseded integration as the preferred approach, many pre-existing multilateral forums are no longer viewed as feasible settings for implementing multilateral technology policy initiatives. Take the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum as an example. Its raison d’etre is “championing free trade and open investment, promoting and accelerating regional economic integration, [and] encouraging economic and technical cooperation.” While the US may share these objectives with many APEC member economies, APEC’s sweeping membership includes governments such as Russia and China, with whom such integration is no longer desired. At the same time, APEC undermines its utility by excluding major regional partners such as India. APEC is not unique in this regard. The G20, United Nations (UN), and the World Trade Organization (WTO) all face similar challenges. In response, we saw the US first pivot away from APEC to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), then to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) as its preferred mechanisms for driving regional economic discussion and integration. Similarly, the recently established Counter Ransomware Initiative (CRI) has become the preferred mechanism for addressing legal and policy issues around cybercrime, rather than the UN. And the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) has risen from dormancy to become a highly active environment for Australia, India, Japan, and the US to cooperate on issues ranging from technology policy to vaccines. The center of gravity has shifted. The deadlock resulting from traditional methods of international cooperation has forced a call for new bargains, new coalitions, and new forms of international cooperation.

A fourth approach to multilateralism places its faith not in universal treaty-based bodies, an alliance of democracies, or an apex global concert but in flexible coalitions whose focus, size, and membership can be tailored to specific contingencies. Indeed, this is already occurring. As Alan Alexandroff of the University of Toronto observes, we inhabit a “G-x” world, in which the number of parties (“x”) involved in collective action increasingly varies with the precise issue or dilemma at hand and the interests and competencies of relevant countries.91 The future of global governance, in this view, lies with informal, nonbinding, minilateral arrangements.92 From a U.S. perspective, the coalitional impulse has obvious attractions. Still the world’s most powerful country according to most measures, the United States has fewer short-term incentives than weaker nations to invest in formal multilateral organizations—as well as greater opportunities to pick and choose among frameworks that promise to expand its freedom of action and policy autonomy in pursuing its preferences. Rather than accept the constraints of the UN or even formal alliances, the United States can sometimes enjoy greater maneuvering room and control over outcomes by working through issue-specific coalitions—adopting (as the old British idiom recommends) a “horses for courses” approach. The George W. Bush administration took this strategic logic to the extreme after the September 11, 2001, attacks. As then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld told radio host Larry King on December 5, 2001, the United States was cooperating with “dozens and dozens of countries” on different aspects of the “war against terrorism,” from cracking down on terrorist financing to mobilizing troop contributions in Afghanistan. Instead of a single coalition, Rumsfeld explained, “There are multiple coalitions. . . . And that’s the way it ought to work. I’ll tell you why. The worst thing that you can do is allow a coalition to determine what your mission is. . . . It’s the mission that determines the coalition.”93 Rather than a true multilateral undertaking, the U.S. antiterrorism campaign by design was a hub-and-spoke arrangement based on bilateral deals with a heterogeneous group of countries, in which an American sheriff largely determined the actions of its posse. The Bush administration repeated this pattern after the UN Security Council refused to authorize enforcement action against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, launching Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003 with the diplomatic backing of forty-nine countries. Journalists noted the distinctiveness of this tactic. “You seem to be equating an ad hoc coalition that the United States has been able to form around one issue and one task with permanent bodies, like the UN and NATO, which have charters formed by treaties,” one reporter challenged White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. “Does the president believe that international affairs can be conducted entirely through ad hoc bodies like the one he’s putting [together]?” In response, Fleischer said, “The point I’m making here is that there are many ways to form international coalitions. The United Nations Security Council is but one of them.”94 The Bush administration’s preference for ad hoc arrangements was embodied most fully in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). The brainchild of then undersecretary of state John Bolton, this innovative partnership was designed to intercept illicit air and maritime shipments of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles and related technologies. By Bush’s second term, administration officials were touting PSI as a general model that might be extended to promote collective action in confronting other global threats. Unlike the UN or other formal bodies that placed an American Gulliver at the mercy of Lilliputians, the United States could determine the agenda for collective action from the outset. Washington would issue invitations to a small, like-minded group; draft principles that narrowly circumscribed the coalition’s mandate and scope of activities; and—once the core group had signed on—lead a global campaign to get others to join on its terms.95 Although president Barack Obama dispensed with Bush’s unilateralist rhetoric and committed the United States to updating existing multilateral organizations, his administration also employed ad hoc arrangements. The most prominent was the Coalition to Defeat ISIS, which involved dozens of partner nations spanning all regions of the globe and levels of development.96 It was hardly the sole example. To prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of nonstate actors, for instance, Obama sponsored the Nuclear Security Summit, a biennial gathering of the fifty-odd countries possessing nuclear weapons and/or fissile material. To combat Somali piracy, it encouraged a multinational armada including vessels not only from traditional U.S. treaty allies but also from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other nations. To address climate change, it sponsored the Major Economies Forum (MEF), comprising the seventeen largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Even the nationalist Trump administration, despite its avowed determination to pursue U.S. “dominance” in outer space, embraced a similar minilateral logic in May 2020 when it announced the Artemis Accords. These agreements commit each signatory to reaffirm established legal principles of outer space governance, including to pursue only peaceful purposes, provide emergency assistance, share scientific data, avoid activities that might interfere with each other’s lunar operations, and respect UN guidelines on space debris. In effect, the Trump administration used a minilateral mechanism to try to consolidate an international legal foundation for the next phase of space exploration.97 The Biden administration, upon taking office, endorsed this approach. More recently, the Biden administration has pursued a similar course on the governance of cyberspace. In April 2022, it persuaded more than sixty nations to associate themselves with a Declaration for the Future of the Internet. The signatories adopted several common principles, including to defend human rights and fundamental freedoms, preserve an open and global internet, promote inclusive and affordable access, protect trust and privacy, and embrace a multistakeholder model of cyber governance.98 In sum, “G-x” arrangements are now well established on the global scene. A few are multipurpose groupings like the G20, which has served since 2008 as the premier forum for global economic coordination. Others are more specialized, such as the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, which was created jointly by France and Costa Rica in late 2020 to advance global biodiversity conservation, including by permanently protecting 30 percent of Earth’s land and ocean by 2030. By October 2022, more than a hundred governments had publicly endorsed this target.99 In part, the rise of à la carte multilateralism reflects the frustrations of operating through outdated, formal intergovernmental bodies that have proven all-too-resistant to reform. In retrospect, the U.S. officials who helped lay the institutional foundations for the post-1945 multilateral order were fortunate, at least with respect to their self-appointed task. They operated in a time of extraordinary crisis that facilitated institutional change, faced a relatively blank institutional slate, negotiated with fewer foreign players, and operated at the height of U.S. primacy. None of these factors apply today. There has been no major catastrophe on the order of the Great Depression nor World War II. Rather than a tabula rasa, policymakers face a world that is dense and encrusted with often-outdated international institutions, each with vested interests. Since the UN was established, the number of sovereign states has nearly quadrupled, in part as former colonized countries became independent. More people around the world achieved their self-determination, but multilateral diplomacy has also become more complicated. U.S. and Western dominance are not what they once were, and there is increasing global divergence on fundamental norms of world order, such as the appropriate boundaries of sovereignty, the criteria that justify intervention, the proper role of the state in the market, and where to strike the balance between political stability and human rights.100 Compounding matters, many of today’s cross-border problems are even harder to manage than in the past, since they address behind-the-border matters (such as data privacy laws) or require (as in the case of arms control agreements) intrusive methods for monitoring and verification. The implausibility of sweeping institutional reform makes coalitions attractive. Their main advantages include speed, flexibility, modularity, informality, opportunities for discrimination, and possibilities for experimentation.101 Whereas negotiations in large- or universal-membership bodies tend to be protracted and inconclusive, ad hoc approaches can allow a limited number of parties—including at times nonstate actors—to move with dispatch. Unlike conventional intergovernmental organizations, which often seek to address issues comprehensively, coalitions permit governments to bite off digestible chunks of the global agenda (a disaggregated form of multilateralism that can be described as “global governance in pieces”).102 Such modularity is a driving force behind the emergence of so-called regime complexes, which arise when different institutions (such as, in global health, the WHO, the Global Fund, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance) share space in the same general policy sphere but focus on discrete problems.103 Informality is another appeal. Instead of spending years negotiating binding international conventions, coalition participants can rely on voluntary codes of conduct and pledge-and-review sessions, in which they commit to certain nationally determined actions. Given the hurdles to renegotiating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, for instance, some established spacefaring nations have advocated for an International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities, specifying basic norms to address new challenges.104 Purpose-built frameworks can also help participants—including, in principle, great powers—compartmentalize different aspects of their bilateral relationships, so they can cooperate in some realms while competing in others. Finally, ad hoc coalitions can offer opportunities for experimentation, including for networked, transnational cooperation among technical ministries of different sovereign governments. Given these advantages, coalitions seem destined to become even more prominent in international politics.

Finally, there is a third limitation to the global concert proposal that advocates of the club approach to international order would be quick to point out: it represents the premature surrender of liberal internationalism.89 Today, illiberal forces are on the march; democracies are on the defensive. This is arguably the very moment, however, to reinforce Western solidarity in defense of an open, rules-based order—a vision grounded in shared interests and values that has traditionally animated U.S. foreign policy since the days of the Atlantic Charter.90 Haass and Kupchan imply that the United States, Europe, Japan, and other Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) partners should subordinate their principles for the sake of great power comity and practical cooperation in managing common challenges. There is little indication, however, that China and Russia share such qualms or are prepared to abandon their aggressive regional ambitions and interference in Western political systems so that a new concert can address the shared vulnerabilities of interdependence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, and the grinding war that has since unfolded, expose the shortcomings of a concept of world order that depends on great power self-restraint and collective crisis management. Any new concert system would likely permit major powers great leeway in managing political order in buffer zones on their immediate borders, at potentially unacceptable moral costs. If taken to its logical extreme, the concert approach would also delegitimize U.S. and Western condemnation of authoritarian powers for violating human rights in contravention of the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and multiple international conventions.

The logic behind this old-school vision is hard-nosed and clear. Transnational challenges do not sort themselves by regime type. They require concerted actions among all major powers—democracies and autocracies alike. A case in point is the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Any effort to negotiate and enforce a successor to that agreement would need to involve not only the United States and its Western allies France, Germany, and the UK, but also Russia and China.81 As a result of Western opposition to its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has withheld any such cooperation. Without some accommodation for its interests, the Kremlin has essentially said there will be no successor deal. Climate change provides an even sharper dilemma, since China emits a third of the world’s greenhouse gases.82 In November 2021, Washington and Beijing negotiated the U.S.-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s. Unfortunately, as Sino-U.S. relations deteriorated in 2022, this initiative largely ground to a halt, with Chinese officials suggesting they would link climate cooperation to other sensitive items on the bilateral agenda, not least Taiwan.83 The notion of a concert of powers is an alluring prospect for anyone craving a return to simpler times, when a handful of foreign ministers could meet in gilded palaces to determine the fate of the world consistent with the pitiless calculus of realpolitik. Such an anachronistic vision, however, is out of step with the current moment and unrealistic in its assumptions. It would not cure what ails global governance and could well create more problems than it resolves.84 The biggest problem with resurrecting a formal concert is that it would lack political legitimacy in the current global context. Over the past two centuries, the international system has swollen to include nearly 200 independent sovereign nations and, under the auspices of the UN, has developed a dense array of multilateral bodies and treaties that regulate everything from the use of force to the allocation of orbital slots in outer space. This vast institutional architecture is imperfect, but its utility should not be ignored. As was already noted, the UN retains unmatched global authority by virtue of its universal membership and legally binding charter. It is hard to imagine that any new global concert would enjoy the same respect. A case in point is the body’s envisioned crisis response function. Even if Russia were brought back into the fold after the Ukraine war, such a role would compete directly with the purpose of the UN Security Council—and without the latter’s grounding in international law. Most UN member states already consider the G20 (let alone the G7) as unrepresentative and illegitimate. Creating a new, self-appointed global directorate of the United States, China, the EU, Russia, Japan, and India—effectively a G6—would elicit much louder howls from those left outside, not least from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.85 Haass and Kupchan propose to mollify them by granting regional bodies like the African Union, Arab League, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Organization of American States periodic audiences before the new concert. But this would simply reinforce a global caste system pitting the dominance and privilege of great powers against the submission and supplication of weak ones—and, unlike the UN Security Council, it would do so outside of the UN Charter’s legal basis. The concert would also likely encourage the world’s fragmentation into at least tacit spheres of influence, as each great power asserts a right, and is even granted leeway, to police its respective neighborhood, a scenario likely to encourage even more unilateral intervention and the emergence of closed regional blocs. Haass and Kupchan suggest that the new concert “would promote regional integration and look to existing regional bodies to encourage restraint.”86 But history provides few precedents for such self-control. The scheme’s second shortcoming is its unwarranted optimism that a standing concert will somehow overcome the fundamental differences of interests and values that currently stymie great power cooperation in existing formal bodies like the UN, the World Trade Organization, or even informal ones like the G20. The expectation seems to be, essentially, build it and they will agree. That a mere change of venue will smooth things over sounds like wishful thinking. Haass and Kupchan posit a socialization process of sorts, whereby “genuine and sustained dialogue” will induce diplomatic flexibility. But it is unclear why this specific framework would be any more successful at bridging entrenched disagreements over, say, desirable norms of contingent sovereignty, new rules for cyberspace, or priorities for WHO reform. Haass and Kupchan note that the concert would be more likely than the UN Security Council to reach compromise, since participants in the new arrangement “would not wield vetoes.”87 The absence of a formal veto, however, would do little to stop an aggrieved power from blocking consensus in practice.88 The concert scheme also raises questions of follow-through. Assuming that major powers can actually agree to something of global significance, they would still need to bring other countries onboard with their decisions, as well as ride herd on them to ensure implementation. It is unclear, in this regard, how a concert would leverage the expansive infrastructure of multilateral cooperation that already exists—or surmount the accountability dilemmas that already plague the G20. The problem here is not the idea of a nominal G6, per se, but rather the aspiration to make this single arrangement, or some variation on it, the apex institution for international cooperation and coordination. Obviously, there is value in having powerful nations meet informally to explore new rules of global governance, which can then be negotiated and ratified in more encompassing bodies. It also makes sense to have contact groups for specific regional challenges, such as the P5+1 talks on Iran’s nuclear program, which include the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany. Instead of creating a new great power concert, a more pragmatic approach (discussed in more depth in the next section of this paper) would recognize that the precise identity and number of players who need to be around the multilateral table will often vary with the issue at stake. The United States and other great powers need flexibility to adjust such minilateral mechanisms to specific circumstances.

“The two countries are now on a fast track of cooperation, even though neither side has announced it, internally, they are committed (to this),” Shen said, noting that it was likely both sides in the recent visits had listed out concerns for the other to consider while working toward the next round of exchange. And despite tough talk from Chinese leaders like Wang Yi, Shen said Beijing was open to cooperate on issues where it was possible, like climate, even amid broader tensions. As Kerry closed out his trip earlier this week, the climate envoy, too, seemed hopeful. Though they “realized that it’s going to take a little bit more work to break the new ground,” the two sides would be meeting on a regular basis in the coming weeks, said Kerry. Speaking from a security conference in the US on Sunday, Blinken told CNN the US is attempting to strengthen “lines of communication” with China to avoid conflict between the two superpowers. “We weren’t doing a lot of talking before. Now we are. We have different groups that are engaged, or about to engage, on discrete issues … that are problems … in the relationship where I believe we can, I think, get to a resolution,” Blinken said, adding “the proof will be in the results.” Observers will also be watching whether China reciprocates with its own high-level visits to Washington in the coming weeks – especially as leader Xi may visit the US when it hosts the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November. The world is big enough for US and China, Yellen says as she concludes Beijing trip The most obvious first step for a first follow-up – a visit to Washington from Foreign Minister Qin Gang, whom Blinken invited during his Beijing visit last month – has been complicated, however, by Qin’s mysterious disappearance from public view in recent weeks. Meanwhile, both sides will need to carefully weigh the optics of their diplomacy for their domestic audiences, where neither government wants to look soft on the other, especially as the US moves toward its presidential election season. “The expectation is to continue and strengthen the channels of communications and strive for practical, specific steps to address issues in bilateral relations,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center in Washington. “Military-to-military (communication) and fentanyl (drug control) are high on the US agenda and I think the Chinese are likely to work something out later this year … (But) the Chinese will demand reciprocity, which will induce more domestic criticism on US policy,” she added. And while the prospect of further communications is a positive development, observers warn the situation remains fragile. “The relationship is on firmer ground, but its still brittle,” said Chong in Singapore. Any number of incidents related to flashpoints in the relations “could still derail things,” he said.

Given the imperative of great power cooperation, the shortcomings of universal collective security, and the pitfalls of an alliance of democracies, some self-identified realists in the U.S. foreign policy community argue that the United States should promote a global concert of major powers, modeled after the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe, as the foundation for world order. Two of the most prominent proponents are Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.76 Their argument is straightforward and, initially, beguiling.77 The era of Western material dominance and ideological supremacy is over, they suggest, making it futile to defend the liberal international order. At the same time, a daunting array of transnational threats and challenges, from climate change to nuclear proliferation to cyber insecurity, demands great power cooperation, regardless of regime type. The shrewd and prudent response is to resurrect a modern, global version of the historical Concert of Europe, in which five nominal rivals—the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria—consulted and coordinated on a regular basis. Haass and Kupchan nominate six powers as their twenty-first-century heirs: the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, Japan, and India. The Concert of Europe helped return stability to the continent after a turbulent quarter century that began with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, encompassed the Napoleonic Wars, and ended at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. As Henry Kissinger explains in A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822, the peacemakers in Vienna succeeded in creating a new form of international order based on comity among, and collective crisis management by, the European great powers.78 This was not simply a return to the classical eighteenth-century balance of power. It also entailed a balance of rights and satisfactions among the five major players, with all agreeing to avoid steps that endangered the continent’s “equipoise”—Europe’s state of equilibrium.79 Members were expected to manage major disputes jointly, which they did in a series of congresses and conferences. The Concert of Europe also rested on the tacit agreement between its liberal and conservative wings (comprising Britain and France on the one hand, and Austria, Russia, and Prussia on the other) not to interfere with each other’s political systems or, more generally, to devolve into armed ideological camps. The result was what Kissinger defines as a “legitimate” international order—that is, one whose members accept the identity and roles of the great powers and embrace basic conventions governing state conduct.80 The concert succeeded in limiting the incidence of—though not entirely eliminating—great power war in Europe during the nineteenth century. Haass and Kupchan seek to revive such a permanent structure for the twenty-first century. Its purpose would be to reach consensus on basic norms of peaceful coexistence, negotiate new rules of state conduct on shared problems, and address regional security crises on an emergency basis. They concede that the resulting normative order would be shallower than what adherents of UN universalism or liberal internationalism might desire, but they insist this is inevitable. In a world of political pluralism, they say, liberal and authoritarian powers must simply agree to disagree on matters like democracy and human rights. A standing secretariat, with accredited representatives, would support this new global concert’s work.

Third, too great an emphasis on democratic solidarity as a foundation for world order risks being geopolitically divisive, splitting the world into democratic and nondemocratic camps while undermining prospects for pragmatic cooperation with authoritarian powers including on crucial issues of peace and security, climate change, and the global economy. In practice, global problems do not coincide with ideological boundaries, and managing them requires cooperation with adversaries as well as like-minded fellow travelers. The United States and its allies are deeply entwined economically with China, and they need to coordinate with Beijing and (over the medium and longer term) with Moscow to address a slew of transnational threats that pay little heed to regime type, such as the dangers posed by climate change, pandemic disease, and nuclear proliferation.68 In response to this critique, proponents of a democratic alliance retort that an East-West geopolitical competition is already well under way, and the culprits are authoritarian China and Russia, who are pursuing revisionist, aggressive, and subversive policies. Neither Beijing nor Moscow, they are quick to add, has allowed the objective need to collaborate with democracies on global challenges temper their own national efforts to overturn the existing rules-based order or interfere in the internal political systems of free societies.69 In other words, if international cooperation is deteriorating, autocracies are the ones to blame. Even if this is true, there is a fourth and more serious problem with the club approach: it oversimplifies the global landscape and does not resonate with pressing developing country concerns. To begin with, a strict distinction between democracies and nondemocracies ignores the world’s messier realities, including the large and growing number of quasi- or flawed democracies, like India, whose independence and weight in world affairs is increasing. These dilemmas came to the fore in the guest list for Biden’s 2021 Summit for Democracy, which included the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Pakistan, for example, but not Singapore or Turkey.70 The effort to assign countries into one of two categories risks alienating important if problematic partners and, in the process, undermining other U.S. diplomatic goals. Compounding matters, when U.S. officials invoke the concept of democratic solidarity, many in the developing world understand this to imply a focus on wealthy, rather than poor, democracies.71 The West’s perceived inattention to development challenges in the Global South reinforces this sentiment. The war in Ukraine has accentuated this conundrum. While Western nations have thus far maintained a united front in opposition to Moscow’s aggression, many emerging economies and developing countries are leery of choosing sides in a new cold war or rallying to democracy’s banner. This is true even for democracies like Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and South Africa—all of which have chosen, for an amalgam of historical, ideological, nationalist, and pragmatic reasons, to pursue various degrees of nonalignment. (In India’s case, the practical motivations include preserving Russia as a source of military materiel and low-cost energy and as a strategic counterweight to China.)72 At the G20 foreign ministers meeting in July 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken failed to enlist these nations (as well as China, of course) in isolating and punishing Moscow.73