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For all its surface advantages, the club model of world order has drawbacks.60 First, cooperation among democracies, even on matters of security, is hardly guaranteed.61 The most obvious example is the transatlantic rift over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a decision that U.S. president George W. Bush’s administration took over the objection of close U.S. allies. It is hardly the only occasion when European and American leaders have not seen eye to eye. Over the past two decades, transatlantic solidarity has been repeatedly tested by disagreements over trade, digital privacy, climate policy, defense burden-sharing, and Iran’s nuclear program, among other matters. Even under the Atlanticist Biden administration, U.S. industrial policy and protectionism have raised European hackles and charges of American hypocrisy regarding the “rules-based” international order.62 Biden has pledged to restore America’s free world leadership, but U.S. partners are still reeling from his predecessor, who shook the foundations of Western solidarity by questioning the G7’s relevance, casting doubt on the United States’ commitment to collective defense within NATO, treating alliances generally as protection rackets, and expressing fawning admiration for despots.63 Given the distinct possibility that Trump or another so-called America First Republican could secure the presidency in November 2024, U.S. allies would be wise to hedge their bets against a mercurial superpower whose very commitment to democratic principles (much less to the concept of a so-called free world) is so tenuous.64 Second, in the eyes of countless foreign observers, the United States has frittered away its historical standing to speak as the leader of the democratic world, given both the selectivity of its support for freedom abroad and the fragility of its own democracy at home. Biden’s “us-versus-them” rhetoric may be bracing for some Americans; it is less persuasive to potential U.S. partners in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East who are aware of democracy’s subtle gradations and of the cold-blooded realism of actual U.S. policy, which often includes embracing (or at least fist-bumping) strongmen like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.65 Most damningly, the Trump era exposed glaring weaknesses in the constitutional guardrails against tyranny in the United States itself. For four years, Trump sought to hollow out the institutions of U.S. democracy, including checks and balances on executive power, an independent judiciary and media, and free and fair elections.66 These efforts culminated in his refusal to accept defeat and his encouragement of the January 6, 2021, insurrection to block the peaceful transfer of power to his legitimate successor. America’s radiance as a global beacon of freedom has dimmed.67

Russian aggression toward Ukraine continues. The nations of the world, and their current alliances, have so far proved ineffective at curbing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambitions. Right now at the United Nations, dictators and theocratic rulers get an equal voice with democratically elected governments. For almost anything urgent or relating to international security to get accomplished, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and the U.S. must all agree. Imagine the U.N. without them, and the NATO military alliance expanded across the globe, not dependent on one or two powerful nations to effectively prevent war and build democracy. How the global community responds to its new challenges may well decide the future of democracy and the cause of human rights in the 21st century. After years analyzing Putin’s rise and the existential threat he poses, former Russian chess grandmaster and human rights advocate Garry Kasparov summed up the situation this way in late 2021: “We can either be the generation that renews democracy, or loses it forever.” My research finds that new alliances may be needed to replace, or at least expand and support, the familiar ones built to keep global peace in the wake of World War II, when global politics were very different. That is why in my 2018 book, I suggested that the leading democratic nations all across the world join their economic, military, technological and moral power into “A League of Democracies.” This concept built on ideas from U.S. Sen. John McCain and others such as foreign policy experts Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay. Developed democracies could work together to effectively counter not only the influence of Russia and China, but also creeping despotism and mass atrocities. This group could discourage military coups, support protest movements demanding democratic rights, prevent new arms races and help developing democracies strengthen their civil services.

The club approach to multilateralism posits that the most promising foundation for global order and cooperation is not UN universalism but a league of advanced market democracies committed to an open, liberal, and rules-based international system. It assumes that established democracies constitute a distinctive “security community” dedicated to shared political and economic principles—namely, support for representative and accountable governance, open markets, and the rule of law at home and abroad—and among whom armed conflict has become inconceivable.34 Such collective identity commitments encourage these countries to define their national interests and policy preferences similarly, narrowing the range of potential disputes and increasing the prospect that any disagreements that do arise are resolved through diplomatic consultation and mutual adjustment. Grounded in liberal internationalism, the club approach promises to advance both the material ends and aspirational purposes of its democratic members. The heyday of the club approach was during the Cold War, when the United States sought to consolidate an alliance of like-minded democracies as the core of its grand strategy to contain the Soviet Union. This was not the orientation the Roosevelt administration had anticipated during World War II. Indeed, U.S. postwar planners laid the groundwork for a new structure of international peace and security based on the UN, complemented by new multilateral bodies to manage the world economy, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and an envisioned international trade organization.35 To be sure, Roosevelt did not envision a pure system of collective security; he understood that the victor powers must jointly guarantee the postwar order. Still, he expressed confidence that the creation of the UN would “spell an end to the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.”36 Unfortunately, the Soviet Union found this universalist vision—and the priority it accorded self-determination over spheres of influence—deeply threatening. As Moscow tightened its grip over Eastern Europe, the United States deferred its “one world” dreams to build a narrower “free world” community capable of deterring Soviet aggression and subversion. Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, signaled this dramatic reorientation in U.S. grand strategy seventy-six years ago, in response to perceived Soviet designs in the eastern Mediterranean, Moscow’s hardening of control in Eastern Europe, and communist efforts to seize power in war-ravaged European democracies. Enunciating the doctrine that would bear his name, Truman committed the United States to a sweeping new global mission: “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”37 The United States bolstered Western Europe economically, politically, and, with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949, militarily. Of course, actual U.S. Cold War policy often fell far short of these high-minded ideals, particularly in the (post)colonial and developing worlds, where the United States repeatedly aligned with right-wing despots who proved their anticommunist bona fides.38 As the Manichean logic of containment took hold, the so-called free world came to include many countries where actual freedom was in short supply. Despite this hypocrisy, successive U.S. administrations continued to treat solidarity among market democracies as the core of U.S. grand strategy. When the bipolar confrontation suddenly ended, many in the U.S. foreign policy establishment dreamed that this community would expand gradually to encompass the entire world.39 In 2000, then U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Polish foreign minister Bronisaw Geremek cosponsored a ministerial conference in Warsaw where delegations from 106 nations signed the Warsaw Declaration, titled “Towards a Community of Democracies,” pledging cooperation in advancing democratic governance within their own countries and helping consolidate fragile transitions from authoritarian or totalitarian rule.40 These visions of a democratic renaissance have since been dashed by a combination of resurgent geopolitical rivalry pitting China and Russia against the West, the retreat of democracy in many other parts of the world, and the erosion of democratic norms within the United States itself. For proponents of the club approach to international order, however, these trends merely warrant a doubling down on the ties that bind established democracies. In the July/August 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs, foreign policy experts Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay assert that unifying the world’s community of advanced democracies is the only way to rebuild an international system based on “the rule of law rather than the law of the jungle.”41 This is not a new argument—Daalder and Lindsay have been making it since at least 2004.42 In 2008, the U.S. State Department policy planning staff proposed establishing a strategic dialogue among ten leading democracies.43 The vision of a league of democracies goes even further back, however. It draws on the late eighteenth-century writings of Immanuel Kant, who saw a confederation of liberal republics as one precondition for “perpetual peace,” as well as on the thinking of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who was convinced that enduring international stability after World War I would require a majority of nations (especially great powers) to be democracies.44 According to its current champions, a league of democracies offers open societies the best chance to defend themselves against authoritarian and totalitarian antagonists and to reinforce rules of international conduct conducive to an open world. In A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, Princeton political theorist G. John Ikenberry posits that the fate of the liberal international order depends on whether democracies stand together or apart in confronting their common security, political, and economic dilemmas.45 Among U.S. think tanks, the Atlantic Council houses the most vocal supporters of the club approach, expressed through the creation in 2018 of the Democratic Order Task Force. The next year, that body published the “Declaration of Principles for Freedom, Prosperity, and Peace.” Its seven pillars included the right of all peoples to freedom and justice; democracy and self-determination; peace and security from aggression, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction; free markets and equal opportunity; an open and healthy planet; external assistance against oppression; and collective action to safeguard these rights.46 Subsequently, two Atlantic Council scholars, Ash Jain and Matthew Kroenig, proposed creating “a formal Democracies Ten” (or D-10) by enlarging the current G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) to include Australia, South Korea, and the European Union (EU, which already participates in the G7 process). The resulting body would serve as a steering committee “aimed at fostering strategic alignment and coordinated action among a group of like-minded, influential democracies to advance a rules-based democratic order.” The authors held out the possibility that this club could open its doors to other major democracies that are both “strategically likeminded” and demonstrate a “capacity for global influence.”47 Potential candidates could even include developing countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa, provided that “concerns over like-mindedness”—not least in their attitudes toward China and Russia—“can be overcome.”48 Well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden had signaled his own affinity with the club approach. After just two months in office, he proclaimed the “battle between the utility of democracies . . . and autocracies” to be the defining struggle of the twenty-first century.49 A key factor behind this stance was growing alarm in Washington over the perceived failure of the United States’ decades-long, bipartisan effort to persuade Beijing to behave as a “responsible stakeholder.”50 Biden pledged to revive Western solidarity as a bulwark against Chinese and Russian efforts to subvert free societies and upend the rules-based international order. Indeed, this became a leitmotif of the G7, NATO, and U.S.-EU summits in June 2021.51 The U.S. president and UK prime minister Boris Johnson underscored this message by releasing a so-called New Atlantic Charter, modeled after the original that Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had issued in August 1941 shortly before the U.S. entry into World War II.52 Biden warmed to this theme in his first UNGA speech in September 2021. “We stand . . . at an inflection point in history,” he declared. “The future will belong to those who give their people the ability to breathe free, not those who seek to suffocate their people with an iron hand.”53 This same conviction informed the administration’s Summit for Democracy in December 2021, intended to rally and enhance the resilience of free societies confronting a slew of internal and external threats.54 Adversaries reinforced Biden’s gravitation to the club model. In early February 2022, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a bilateral partnership with “no limits”—a club of their own, in effect, intended to make the world safe for autocracy. Their global vision was deeply at odds with the U.S. notion of an open, liberal, rule-bound international system.55 Not three weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. The conflict, pitting an authoritarian aggressor against an (admittedly imperfect) democracy, confirmed Biden’s conviction that the globe was splitting into two blocs, much as Soviet aggression and U.S. responses to it had done three quarters of a century before.56 Speaking in Warsaw soon after, the president framed Ukraine as part of a larger “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.”57 The Russian invasion indeed galvanized the community of advanced market democracies, reinvigorating a transatlantic alliance that French President Emmanuel Macron had pronounced “brain dead” only three years earlier.58 Putin’s brazen effort to subjugate Ukraine reminded the citizens of free societies of the foundational values underpinning their security community—and how much they could lose if they allowed Russian aggression to go unchecked and unpunished. Over the ensuing year, the Biden administration has led a unified Western response to Russian aggression, coordinating the stances of other democracies, keeping NATO’s thirty members united in resisting Russian demands and intimidation, orchestrating punishing economic sanctions, supporting the forward deployment of allied troops, and engineering the alliance’s imminent enlargement to add Sweden and Finland. To Daalder and Lindsay, the Ukraine war reaffirms the imperative of consolidating the free world’s democratic core. Like Jain and Kroenig, they propose expanding the G7, but with a couple of tweaks: tiny New Zealand (population 5 million) would also join and, of greater significance, NATO would gain “a seat at the table for all security-related discussions.” This notional “G-12”— encompassing nearly one billion people and accounting for more than 60 percent of global gross domestic product and military spending—would promote ongoing policy coordination across a range of foreign, security, economic, and global spheres, from resisting Russian and Chinese aggression to combating climate change, preparing for pandemics, halting nuclear proliferation, and harmonizing approaches to trade and investment. “Establishing a G-12,” the authors declare, “is the last best hope to reinvigorate the rules-based order.”59

A global organisation like the United Nations (UN) reflects the seminal challenges and achievements of its times. In 2020, on the organisation’s 75th anniversary, UN Secretary-General António Guterres identified some of the challenges and achievements that currently confront the organisation. Averring that the world had a surplus of multilateral challenges and a deficit of multilateral solutions, he regretted that the UN lacked scale, ambition, and teeth. He noted that institutions with authority, such as the UN Security Council (UNSC), do not have the appetite to bite, indicating a lack of political will and unity of purpose among the member states. Additionally, he urged the member states to strive to preserve the great achievement of having gone so many years without a nuclear conflict or a military confrontation between the major powers.[1] As it attempted to recover from the systemic hammer blows caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the lightning takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, and the end of the much-vaunted ‘War on Terror’ in August 2021 left the UN picking up the pieces of human rights and humanitarian crisis. Now, the ongoing Ukraine war—the first real European conflict since the Second World War that has put the major Western powers in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia on the path of direct confrontation—is proving to be a new litmus test for the UN. As an organisation created after the Second World War by the victors and charged with the task “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,”[2] will this be the crisis that breaks the proverbial camel’s back? The UN is a little more than the sum of its member-states’ volition and power dynamics, especially of the ones that matter most—the largest budget contributors and the five permanent members (P5) of the UNSC; the US, the UK, and France are the Western group and are counterbalanced by Russia and China. But Russia’s war in Ukraine has deepened the divide even further. Indeed, Russia sees the US and Europe drawing the fight out “to the last Ukrainian,” with a view “to suppress Russia” and “create an antipode” of it.[3] It is no secret that the West and NATO want to make Russia bleed, deplete, and pay for its misadventure. Some see this as the West’s quest for a ‘End of History 2.0’ (as first conceptualised by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama) with Russia and a possible ‘Cold War 1.5’—if not 2.0—with China. These new geopolitical and geoeconomic chasms make it ever more difficult for the UN to hold together and drive a viable and effective global governance and crisis response system in its four projects of peace and security, sustainable development, human rights, and humanitarian response.

Notwithstanding these advantages, the UN has obvious handicaps. First, it often seems built for frustration, not least for its most powerful member. Although U.S. negotiators in the World War II–era administration of president Franklin D. Roosevelt spearheaded the drafting of the UN Charter, the blueprint they created virtually guarantees occasional outcomes that are less than ideal from a U.S. perspective.22 The veto provision lets other permanent Security Council members, notably China and Russia, thwart U.S. preferences. In the case of Ukraine, Moscow has blocked universal sanctions and other Chapter 7 enforcement actions against itself. From an ethical perspective, this is outrageous. “Where is this security that the Security Council needs to guarantee?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded in April 2022. “It’s not there.”23 Likewise, the General Assembly’s one-state, one-vote format allows ideological coalitions and regional blocs to engage in theater rather than exercise real responsibility. Finally, the UN’s budgetary processes and labyrinthine reporting structures, which empower the UNGA and ECOSOC rather than major donor states, is a constant aggravation to Washington. These are facts of life that U.S. administrations and diplomats can ameliorate but never eliminate. Second, the UN and its agencies do not spring magically to life, even in crises, nor are they immune from geopolitics.There is a natural temptation to blame UN organs like the WHO for failures in international cooperation like the haphazard and uncoordinated response to COVID-19. In reality, the performance of multilateral institutions tends to mirror the preferences of their main members. It is unrealistic to expect UN multilateralism to deliver when—as during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic—the world’s major powers treat it as a geopolitical football or abandon the field altogether. It was the decisions by China and the United States to prioritize strategic rivalry over practical problem-solving, above all else, that guaranteed the UN’s pandemic failures.24 If a fully-fledged Sino-U.S. cold war erupts in the future, one should anticipate an enduring collapse of Security Council cooperation, akin to the period from 1947 to 1989 when it was marginal to many major security issues. Already, geopolitics has paralyzed much of the council’s work. We risk moving toward a world, as Guterres warned in September 2022, of “no cooperation, no dialogue, no collective problem solving.”25 Third, holding the UN accountable to member states and (ultimately) taxpayers remains difficult. All formal multilateral organizations create what academics call “principal-agent dilemmas,” because they require governments (in this case, the principals) to delegate authority to international secretariats (the agents) that may pursue their own agendas rather than respond to the principals’ desires. Compounding this oversight dilemma, member states typically pool their authority within the governing boards of UN agencies. Even when voting is weighted to account for relative financial contributions (as in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund), national influence is diluted. The dynamics of delegation and pooling mean that global bodies can easily go off track—and that the White House and U.S. Congress must remain vigilant to this possibility.26 Finally, Security Council reform is both imperative and unlikely. In a perfect world, its composition would adjust automatically to power shifts, such as India’s emergence as a major strategic player and imminently the world’s most-populous nation—much like football (soccer) clubs rise to and fall from the English Premier League. A Security Council whose permanent membership continues to overweight Europe while ignoring the developing world is courting a legitimacy crisis. In a nod to this reality, Biden, in his September 2022 UNGA address, not only reconfirmed U.S. support for expanding the council to include new permanent and elected members but also for the first time endorsed new permanent seats for Africa and Latin America.27 While his audience was receptive, the odds of realizing such a reform are long. Absent a global catastrophe, it is unclear what can break the long-standing, three-way diplomatic logjam that pits the chief aspirants to permanent membership, their main regional competitors, and a united African bloc with ambitious demands of its own.28

The Biden Administration’s Opportunity Amid increasing global power competition that has stunted the UNSC’s basic ability to manage international peace and security, Secretary-General Guterres launched the “Action for Peacekeeping” initiative to renew the international commitment to peacekeeping. Guterres’ efforts culminated in 2018 with a multilateral pledge to build collective action to strengthen U.N. peacekeeping operations. The United States endorsed the declaration in 2018; the Biden administration should take several steps to demonstrate American support for Guterres’ effort and advance policies to support more flexible and responsive peacekeeping deployments. Pay up: It seems relatively straightforward, but simply paying its dues will go far to repairing frayed U.S. credibility on multilateral issues. Doing so would help to restore U.S. leverage on the Security Council and rebuff criticisms from China and other permanent members about U.S. freeloading, an argument used in favor of reducing the perceived outsized weight of the United States on the Security Council. At the same time, the United States should continue to make the case that, relative to the world’s other major economies, Washington shoulders too much of the burden of multilateral peacekeeping operations. The upcoming review of the U.N.’s assessed contributions is an opportunity to right-size expectations of the United States and move forward with Congress, the U.N., and international partners on the same page. Build support for regional organizations like the AU to access U.N. funding for peace operations: Regional organizations, particularly the AU, have shown leadership and willingness to combat extremist and terrorist groups (e.g., in Somalia and the Sahel) and deploy troops to halt ongoing atrocities (e.g., Central African Republic in 2014)—situations for which U.N. peacekeeping is ill-equipped. Yet regional organizations lack the necessary funding and logistical capacity to sustain these deployments and must constantly solicit money and other resources from individual member states, despite the positive progress made by AU reforms and the establishment of the AU’s Peace Fund. The United States has been generous in cobbling together ad hoc financial and logistical support for regionally led operations, but without consistent funding, regional bodies will struggle to keep forces on the ground paid and adequately equipped (and therefore motivated) to take on well-armed belligerents. The United States could signal support by appointing a senior diplomat to secure buy-in from other UNSC members and the AU for a related Security Council resolution, one that commits to providing sustained financing to support regionally led operations, assuming they meet a set of agreed conditions. Equip U.N. peacekeepers to fulfill their mandates in a counterterrorism or counterinsurgency context: While regional organizations and ad hoc regional coalitions like the G5 Sahel have stepped up to take on violent extremists and terrorist organizations, the Security Council has also mandated blue-helmeted troops to conduct offensive military operations against insurgents in the DRC and to work alongside French and regional forces fighting terrorist groups in Mali. Indeed, most new peacekeeping deployments are in active conflict zones, where peacekeepers are themselves frequently targeted by armed groups. Yet the debate between member states around whether and how the U.N. should operate in these contexts is unresolved, leading to ad hoc experiments (e.g., the Force Intervention Brigade within the DRC mission) or reducing blue helmets to cannon fodder (e.g., in Mali and the Central African Republic). The bottom line is that U.N. forces are consistently unable to protect themselves, much less protect civilians or support peacebuilding efforts in active conflict zones. The United States could work with DPO to anticipate when a surge is needed to manage a potentially destabilizing moment (e.g., in the run-up to a contentious election) and plan accordingly. Better align and resource political and peacekeeping functions: Despite the deficit between what U.N. peacekeepers have and what they need, DPO is relatively privileged within the U.N. system—assuming member states pay their dues, funding is guaranteed. That is not the case for U.N. Special Political Missions, designed to support peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery, which rely on voluntary contributions. Restoring political stability to societies ravaged by violence is a long and arduous process, and Special Political Missions have played a pivotal role in helping countries like Sierra Leone, Colombia, and Timor-Leste successfully manage these transitions. The United States could use its Security Council Presidency in March 2021 or July 2022 to lead a discussion over how to ensure these missions are adequately and sustainably funded, including through the possible use of assessed contributions. U.S. leadership was critical to the success of peacekeeping summits in 2014 and 2015, but that support has waned. South Korea will hold a ministerial-level peacekeeping summit in December 2021, and the United States could signal a recommitment to strengthen current and future missions by sending a Cabinet-level official to lead its delegation.

In many cases, the international community turns to multilateral peacekeepers. Despite U.N. peacekeeping’s track record of relative success and its role in shouldering a burden that might otherwise be borne by the United States and other powerful member states, U.N. peacekeeping faces constant financial pressure and logistical challenges. As the Biden administration begins to put its imprint on U.S. foreign policy, it should demonstrate its commitment to multilateralism by reinvigorating American support for effective peacekeeping and leading other member states in doing the same. As a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) and the largest funder of the Department of Peace Operations (DPO)—which oversees U.N. peacekeeping—the United States plays an important leadership role in authorizing and shaping U.N. missions. With increasingly assertive rivals like Russia and China seeking to erode U.S. leadership, the Biden administration should work to resolve the thorny issues being debated in New York, including whether and how the U.N. should support regionally led peace operations, the role of the U.N. in counterterrorism, and how to mainstream and adequately resource peacebuilding as a core function of U.N. peacekeeping. Peacekeeping Works, But the Context is Changing Since the first blue-helmeted U.N. troops were deployed in the Middle East in 1948, the Security Council has authorized 70 peacekeeping missions and deployed more than one-million peacekeepers from 110 nations to help countries navigate the difficult path from conflict to peace. Today, about 95,000 peacekeepers serve in 13 operations worldwide and remain largely committed to the cardinal rules defined at peacekeeping’s inception: impartiality, consent of the host country, and the use of force as a last resort. Over 72 years, U.N. peacekeeping missions have supported political transitions, disarmed hundreds of thousands of combatants, facilitated free and fair elections, and helped new countries—such as Timor Leste—come into being. While many of the post-World War II international institutions are under increasing strain, U.N. peacekeeping has proven resilient and remains a centerpiece of the U.N. system and a critical conflict management tool—despite inconsistent member state support, logistical and bureaucratic restraints, and multiple cases of sexual abuse and other high-profile scandals. Two of the international community’s most devastating atrocity prevention failures—the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the Serbian army’s 1995 massacre of Muslim civilians in Srebrenica—exposed structural deficiencies within U.N. peacekeeping and their human cost. The United Nations and member states have spent more than two decades working to prevent a repeat of these shameful episodes, with positive results. Numerous peer-reviewed studies have shown that more peacekeepers in conflict areas correlates with fewer civilian deaths, less violence, and a better chance at lasting peace. The Effective Peace Operations Network’s (EPON) comprehensive reports on the U.N. missions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Mali—two of its most criticized—present evidence that U.N. peacekeeping had a positive effect on reducing levels of violence and providing some measure of protection to civilians. Another EPON report on an African Union- (AU) led peacekeeping operation in Somalia reached a similar conclusion. Yet, despite peacekeepers’ best efforts, violence continues or worsens (e.g., in Mali), civilians are still dying, and the prospects for peace look bleak. However, these harsh realities suggest more about the fundamental limitations of U.N. peacekeeping than its overall efficacy. Peacekeeping is a conflict management and mitigation tool, not a solution to the complex underlying drivers of conflict. The United States and other U.N. member states therefore have a responsibility to reinforce peacekeeping missions with robust diplomacy and accountability measures to encourage conflict actors to adhere to their commitments (e.g., cease-fires) and obligations under international humanitarian law.

The charter conception of world order treats the United Nations, on account of its binding charter and universal membership, as the ultimate foundation for international peace and security and the first port of call for cooperation on global challenges. The UN Charter’s most important function is establishing rules governing the use of force, which is prohibited in all but two cases: when it is conducted in self-defense or when it is authorized by the UN Security Council. The UN is not a pure system of collective security, in which an attack on any state is automatically considered an attack on all. Rather, the framework balances egalitarianism and hierarchy. All member states participate in the UN General Assembly (UNGA), which makes decisions on a one-state, one-vote basis, but ultimate authority over peace and security, particularly enforcement action, is vested in a Security Council dominated by five veto-wielding permanent members, which can pass resolutions creating legal obligations for all member states. This bargain recognizes that the world’s major powers must inevitably play a custodial role in safeguarding world order—and that the price of their acquiescence to the UN is a guarantee that the council can never act against their perceived vital national interests.7 The charter conception of world order treats the United Nations as first port of call for cooperation on global challenges. Beyond its fundamental purpose of “sav[ing] future generations from the scourge of war,”8 the UN has an additional mandate to advance economic development and human rights as well other social purposes, including the activities of UNGA, the UN Secretariat, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and any subsidiary bodies it may create. In the nearly eight decades since they established the world body in 1945, member states have made full use of these authorities. New UN departments, programs, specialized agencies, and treaty bodies have been created to manage and govern an expanding array of global challenges, from humanitarian emergencies and peace operations to nuclear proliferation, terrorism, outer space activities, cyber conflict, pandemic disease, climate change, and more. Along the way, the definition of what constitutes “security” has continued to expand, even as the Security Council continues to debate how much to broaden its own remit.9

Tackling chronic and infectious diseases depends to a large extent on the ability to develop innovative and affordable medicines that are available to patients in need. The ability to achieve this hinges partly on how the financial ecosystem governing medicines research and development (R&D) functions.

The factors influencing medicines R&D financing are complex. Money matters, of course, but so do issues of supply—those influencing the attractiveness of investing in a particular area of R&D—and demand—those influencing the markets for pharmaceuticals.

Multilateral platforms including MDBs, intergovernmental forums and international treaties, provide a potential avenue for the US and China to engage in promoting RE finance abroad, as detailed below. Benefits of multilateral engagement include the ability to leverage existing platforms and mechanisms, and the ability to coordinate in a public and more neutral space, relative to bilateral engagement.

MULTILATERAL DEVELOPMENT BANKS Multilateral development banks (MDBs) in which the US and China are both shareholders, including the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), provide an existing channel for coordination on RE finance. All of these MDBs have policies or programs in place to support increasing RE investment, particularly in developing countries (Ray, Bhandary, et al. 2021).

, Klaus Oppermann, Caroline Ott, Charis Lypiridis, Pablo Benitez, Tambi Matambo (all World Bank Team), Christine Gruening, Ulf Moslener and Menglu Zhuang (all Frankfurt School- UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance) /// SMS MA

, Klaus Oppermann, Caroline Ott, Charis Lypiridis, Pablo Benitez, Tambi Matambo (all World Bank Team), Christine Gruening, Ulf Moslener and Menglu Zhuang (all Frankfurt School- UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance) /// SMS MA

• Results-based Finance (RBF) provided specifically for climate mitigation or adaptation results

The SCF can support a country’s climate action plans and Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the  by helping to build capacity of host country institutions, improve coordination among domestic entities, and align climate change policy goals with sectoral ones. Taken together, these support mechanisms can help countries to participate in emissions reduction crediting and to access results-based climate finance. Examples of the SCF in action in Rwanda and Senegal can be found .

Due to these successes, Ci-Dev donors have agreed to offer the SCF to the other countries and regions where the Ci-Dev portfolio is active: Ethiopia, Kenya, Lao PDR, Madagascar, Mali, Uganda, Senegal, Rwanda and Burkina Faso.

The Standardized Crediting Framework (SCF) is a streamlined, country-owned emissions reduction crediting framework that improves transparency of national crediting decision making, reduces transaction costs, and shortens the time it takes to generate those emissions reductions. Developed and supported by the Carbon Initiative for Development (Ci-Dev), the SCF builds on the lessons learned from experiences with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) model, which was developed and used under the Kyoto treaty. This means that the SCF can help countries to access climate finance, lower transaction costs for emissions reduction crediting operations, and encourage private sector engagement in energy access.

Focusing on results creates incentives to take action -- from planting trees on degraded land or expanding access to clean energy, to enabling energy efficiency in industries. The promise of future payouts drives transformative change in many settings and among many stakeholder groups. The Carbon Initiative for Development (Ci-Dev) is making it easier for countries to access this versatile tool.  

Rebuilding economies after the COVID-19 pandemic will put enormous strain on countries’ fiscal budgets and finance flows from development partners. Results-Based Climate Finance (RBCF) — payments made for achieving agreed-upon climate-related results, particularly reducing carbon emissions — can offer an important source of liquidity at this critical moment and support a resilient, equitable, low-carbon recovery.

The U.S. sulfur dioxide trading program, established as part of the , is a pioneering example of using the market to drive down pollution. Carbon cap-and-trade programs are already working successfully in  and the nine Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states that participate in the  (RGGI). These states also have complementary renewable energy and energy efficiency policies that work together with the carbon price to cut emissions. Many more states are considering carbon trading programs as part of their compliance plans for the .

The world’s first carbon cap-and trade program, launched in 2005, is the  (EU-ETS). The Canadian province of  implemented a carbon tax in 2008. China has also launched a number of pilot cap-and-trade programs at the provincial level and intends to launch a  within the next few years.

Under a cap-and-trade program, laws or regulations would limit or ‘cap’ carbon emissions from particular sectors of the economy (or the whole economy) and issue allowances (or permits to emit carbon) to match the cap. For example, if the cap was 10,000 tons of carbon, there would be 10,000 one-ton allowances. A declining emissions cap would help reduce emissions over time.

Every source of emissions subject to the cap (for example, power plants or refineries) would be required to hold allowances equal to the emissions they produce. Power plant operators could acquire allowances through an auction (where they bid for the allowances they need) or allocation (where they are given a set number of allowances for free).

Carbon taxes and carbon pricing are two of the highly debated methods by which we can put a price on carbon emissions in order to mitigate climate change and create a more sustainable planet for future generations. So, we had to ask: What’s the difference between carbon taxes and carbon pricing?

Carbon taxes are a price tag put on fossil fuel emissions to disincentivize their use and promote a switch to green energy. Carbon pricing captures the external costs of greenhouse gas emissions and ties them to their sources, typically by placing a price on carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon pricing is widely considered a powerful, efficient, and flexible tool for helping to address climate change, and is supported by an array of experts, businesses, investors, policymakers, civil society groups, states, and countries. Carbon pricing programs are already in use in many states and countries, including in , the nine Northeast states that belong to the , and .

“Carbon pricing” is a market-based strategy for lowering global warming emissions. The aim is to put a price on carbon emissions—an actual monetary value—so that the costs of climate impacts and the opportunities for low-carbon energy options are better reflected in our production and consumption choices. Carbon pricing programs can be implemented through legislative or regulatory action at the local, state, or national level.