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Though Trump’s rhetoric and actions in office have accelerated and exacerbated the fraying of the multilateral system, the crisis of multilateralism has much deeper roots as the UN and Bretton Woods Institutions approach or embark on their 75th years. Richard Gowan, an expert on the UN, sees three crises in particular: first, a crisis of power in which the shift of power from the U.S. to China has diminished America’s ability to shape the international agenda and drive collective action; second, a crisis of relevance in which antiquated and sometimes sclerotic international institutions struggle to tackle the critical global challenges, from Syria to cybersecurity; and, third, a crisis of legitimacy as frustrated regional powers and nationalist leaders withdraw from multilateral organizations or erode them from within. In this depressing brew, Gowan, who is with the International Crisis Group, sees an opportunity for the EU to become a third pole in geopolitics (along with the U.S. and China) as the practical champion of multilateralism. Considerable thinking has gone into how middle powers from the Americas to Europe to Asia can bolster the so-called rules-based order. The €64,000 question, however, is whether any of this has a prayer without the United States. Almost certainly not.

If you listen to Trump-administration officials, 2020 candidates, members of Congress, and pundits, there seems to be only one bipartisan consensus in Washington: We are living in a new era of great power competition. For the United States to win (whatever that means), it must compete—economically, militarily, technologically, and politically. Yet this paradigm, fed by President Trump’s zero-sum worldview and the anti-China hysteria sweeping Washington, has buried a key to America’s once and future success in the global arena: cooperation.

A world dominated by totalitarian states would be more incompetent, more war-prone, less cooperative, and more inhibitive of progress than one dominated by democratic states. Our current world is not particularly competent, peaceful, cooperative, or progressive—a totalitarian-dominated world would be worse. It would increase the risk of another collapse and extinction and could shape the future toward less desirable trajectories (Beckstead, 2013). Totalitarian states are incompetent. They are bad at forecasting and dealing with disasters (Caplan, 2008).16 This can be seen most clearly in the great famines of Communist China and the USSR, in which millions died (Applebaum, 2017; Becker, 1996; Dikotter, 2010; Snyder, 2010). In comparison, functioning multiparty democracies rarely, if ever, experience famines (Sen, 2010). “Established autocracies” (or “personal”/“sultanist”) are particularly bad, as there are few checks or restraints on arbitrary rule and the whims and ideology of the single individual, even from other elites (Svolik, 2012). From the inside, the “inner circle” around Mao, Stalin, and Hitler seems incredibly chaotic, with elites strongly incentivized to conceal information and encouraged by the autocrat to squabble and feud—so they are divided (Conquest, 1992; Kershaw, 2008; Zhang & Halliday, 2006). If totalitarian states are worse at addressing social, environmental, and technological problems, then a world dominated by them would likely be worse at responding to risks of collapse and extinction. A world dominated by totalitarian states is more likely to have major wars. States with near-universal adult suffrage rarely (if ever) go to war with one another (Barnhart et al., 2020), so a world dominated by democracies has fewer wars. Miscalculation might be a particular problem for totalitarian states due to personalization and disincentives for accurate information, leading to well-known strategic disasters such as Hitler and Stalin’s blunders in World War II (Bialer, 1970; Noakes & Pridham, 2001), or at a smaller level, Saddam Hussein’s rejection of diplomacy (Atkinson, 1993). War makes collapse and extinction more likely, by raising the chance of weapons of mass destruction being used. Linked to this, totalitarian states are less cooperative than democratic states. While cooperation is possible (Ginsburg, 2020), their internal norms are characterized by paranoia and treachery, and their lack of transparency limits their ability to credibly commit to agreements. This is bad for all risks that require cooperation such as pandemics or climate change (Tomasik, 2015). Finally, continued social and scientific progress is likely to reduce risks of collapse and extinction. Social progress could reduce global inequality and other risk factors. Scientific progress could help address natural risks and climate change (Sandberg, 2018), differentially increase defensive rather than offensive power (Garfinkel & Dafoe, 2019), and solve safety challenges in AI or biotechnology (Russell, 2019). However, as we will now discuss totalitarian states would likely inhibit social progress. A central question from a longtermist perspective is: Which values should shape the future? I would argue that we should prefer it to be shaped by liberal democratic values. This is not to say that the current democracy-dominated world is perfect—far from it. The fate of billions of factory-farmed animals or hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty makes that abundantly clear. However, democracies have two advantages. First, democracies have space for cosmopolitan values such as human rights, plurality, freedom, and equality. These are better than those that characterize life under totalitarianism: Fear, terror, subjection, and secrecy. Second, they have within themselves the mechanism to allow progress. In the last 100 (or even 50) years, the lives of women, LGBT people, religious minorities, and non-white people have dramatically improved. Our “moral circle” has expanded, and could continue to expand (Singer, 1981). The arc of the moral universe is long, but given the right conditions, it might just bend toward justice (King, 1968). A global society dominated by these values, and with the possibility of improving more, has a better longterm potential. A totalitarian-dominated world, on the other hand, would reduce the space for resistance and progress—distorting the human trajectory. We should be particularly concerned about “bottlenecks” at which values are particularly important—where there is a risk of “locking-in” some particular set of (possibly far from optimal) values. While they are currently far-off, future technologies such as artificial general intelligence, space settlement, life extension (of autocrats), or much better surveillance could enable lock-in (Caplan, 2008).17 Conditional on them avoiding new catastrophes, world orders dominated by totalitarians could be quite long-lasting (Caplan, 2008). Democracies can undermine authoritarian and totalitarian regimes through the following ways: Control, including conquest; contagion through proximity; and consent, promoting receptivity toward democratization (Whitehead, 2001). Democracies can actively undermine these regimes through war, sanctions, hosting rebellious exiles, or sponsoring internal movements. Passively, through contagion, they offer a demonstration that a better, more prosperous life is possible. For example, in the final years of the USSR, ordinary Soviet citizens were able to see that the West had a higher standard of living—more innovation, more choice, and more consumer goods. The elites were able to read books from the outside, and travel—Gorbachev’s contacts and friendships with European politicians may have made him more favorable to social democracy (Brown, 1996). Democracies can undermine the will and capacity of the coercive apparatus (Bellin, 2004). However, in a world not dominated by democracies, all these pressures would be far less. A world in which, say, totalitarian regimes emerged as dominant after World War II (for example if the USA was defeated) could be self-reinforcing and long-lasting, like the self-reinforcing relationship of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (Orwell, 1949). Orwell’s fictional world is characterized by constant low-grade warfare to justify emergency powers and secure elites, and with shifting alliances of convenience as states bandwagon and balance, thereby preventing any resolution. A totalitarian-dominated world order could be rather robust, perhaps for decades or even centuries. A long-lasting totalitarian-dominated world would extend the period of time humanity would spend with a heightened risk of collapse or extinction, as well as increased potential for distortion of the human trajectory and the possibility that a “lock-in” event may occur. This example illustrates the possibility of a “negative recovery,” resulting in a trajectory with less or no scientific and social progress and a less favorable geopolitical situation, which would threaten the destruction of humanity’s longterm potential.

The current coronavirus crisis –the most synchronous and global crisis– could make the illness afflicting multilateralism more acute (due not only to Trump, although it has much to do with the pre-existing loss of US leadership, and with the rise of China) or overcome it, with more international cooperation beyond global health. It is not yet clear. So far, the crisis has not strengthened multilateralism, which seems exhausted. But it is one of the major subjects of international debate, for example in the T20 (the G20’s network of think tanks, this year under Saudi presidency), and various other forums and institutions, some of which Elcano contributes to.

Multilateralism is the alliance of powers in search of common goals. It is opposed to unilateralism (acting alone), to a-lateralism, which can lead to global anarchy and chaos, and to ‘Every man for himself!’. It involves agreements where failure to agree would leave everyone worse off. It is usually linked to a set of international institutions that emerged from the Second World War, some of which, the Bretton Woods economic institutions, served to lay the foundations for what is known as the liberal multilateral order, although it was later followed by other, more global, steps. Multilateralism, while requiring leadership, needs collective intelligence. In some respects, in the midst of confrontation between blocs during the Cold War, there were major doses of multilateralism. It tends to be that more multilateralism is proposed because more problems are global and because it enables conflicts of interest to be managed and overcome peacefully. Multilateralism had, and has, its goals and champions certain values, which are now being cast in doubt. The race to stockpile Remdesivir, a drug used to treat COVID-19, is a clear example of the failure of multilateralism, and does not bode at all well for the management of an eventual vaccine.

For most of the past fifty years, U.S. foreign policymakers have largely viewed the promotion of human rights and the protection of national security as in inherent tension. Almost without exception, each administration has treated the two goals as mutually exclusive: promote human rights at the expense of national security or protect national security while overlooking international human rights. While U.S. policymakers have been motivated at times by human rights concerns, such concerns have generally been subordinate to national security. For example, President Bush’s 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy speaks of a “commitment to protecting basic human rights.” In the same document, President Bush makes it clear that “defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government.”1 This subordination of human rights to national security is both unnecessary and strategically questionable. A more effective U.S. foreign policy would view human rights and national security as correlated and complementary goals. Better protection of human rights around the world would make the United States safer and more secure. The United States needs to restructure its foreign policy accordingly.

This Article presents a strategic--as opposed to ideological or normative--argument that the promotion of human rights should be given a more prominent place in U.S. foreign policy. It does so by suggesting a correlation between the domestic human rights practices of states and their propensity to engage in aggressive international conduct. Among the chief threats to U.S. national security are acts of aggression by other states. Aggressive acts of war may directly endanger the United States, as did the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, or they may require U.S. military action overseas, as in Kuwait fifty years later. Evidence from the post-Cold War period [*250] indicates that states that systematically abuse their own citizens' human rights are also those most likely to engage in aggression. To the degree that improvements in various states' human rights records decrease the likelihood of aggressive war, a foreign policy informed by human rights can significantly enhance U.S. and global security.

A regional civil society Initiative for Human Rights in Fiscal Policy in Latin America calls on States to undertake broad fiscal redistribution, and on multilateral institutions to free up fiscal space, in order to avoid dire human rights consequences.

Bogotá/New York/Buenos Aires/Mexico/Brasilia, April 23—If countries in Latin America and the Caribbean do not undertake an unprecedented redistributive effort to respond to COVID-19, they may face a profound human rights crisis, says the Initiative for Human Rights Principles in Fiscal Policy (comprised of six human rights organizations and the regional fiscal justice network).

The Biden administration has ditched Trumpian unilateralism and embraced a contradictory multilateralism based on the foreign policy organizing principle of democracies versus autocracies — more a recycled logic of the Cold War than a guide for navigating U.S. interests in a complex global situation where regime types may not necessarily be the determining factor of many foreign policy choices.

This state of affairs is most dramatically evident in U.S.-led support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, where much of the Global South remains neutral, as seen in the February 2023 G-20 meeting where finance chiefs failed to agree on a joint communiqué criticizing Russia. The recent Saudi-Iranian rapprochement brokered by China shows that today even a traditional U.S. partner like Saudi Arabia does not feel bound to work with Washington.

Today’s global challenges require a revitalized international cooperation that is effective, representative and inclusive, Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council today during a day-long open debate on a new orientation for reformed multilateralism.

Calling strengthening multilateralism his highest priority since assuming office, he said that his report Our Common Agenda and the process it initiated are aimed at reinvigorating multilateralism to deal with today’s interconnected threats. Despite an imperfect system of collective security, United Nations peacemaking and peacekeeping has helped to end conflicts, saving millions of lives, he added.

The public narrative has become so saturated with these general terms that there is often no reflection on what they actually mean. Multilateralism is a method of coordinating national policies in groups of three or more states through ad hoc arrangements or institutions. It relates to globalization as does a method to a process. Multilateralism is the sine qua non of globalization, as it is of the UN convention on genocide or the European Parliament, but not vice versa.

Blaming multilateral approaches for the deficiencies of globalization or the spread of the pandemic is politically dangerous because it diminishes social trust in international cooperation, the only tool capable of addressing a special category of threats: the global existential ones.

The pandemic, war in Ukraine, the threat to food security, and the resurgence of global poverty. Heatwaves, droughts, and other extreme weather events. These are not random shocks. Nor are they a perfect storm in the conventional sense, a one-off conjuncture of bad events. We face instead a confluence of lasting structural insecurities—geopolitical, economic, and existential—each reinforcing the other. We have entered a perfect long storm.

We cannot wish away these insecurities or hope that problems that occupy one part of the world will not rebound on others. COVID-19 and its repeated mutations have brought that reality home, at immense human and economic cost everywhere. We can only restore optimism by recognizing the gravity and collective nature of the threats we face and organizing ourselves more effectively to address them.

The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, advocated today for reform of the multilateral tax system in the framework of the United Nations, during the Jobs Reset Summit, organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

ECLAC’s highest authority participated in a session entitled “A New Global Tax Agenda,” debating how a reform of the international tax system can contribute to a sustainable and egalitarian economic recovery, along with Alex Cobham, Chief Executive of the Tax Justice Network, and Stephen Carroll, Business Editor at France 24.

The dynamics of socio-economic inequality and technical solutions geared toward addressing it have been well identified. The inability of many societies to deploy those solutions nonetheless is of a political nature. The focus of the debate should therefore be to understand the political dynamics around the subject and to learn to navigate the interests of key stakeholders. Throughout modern history, countries would transition back and forth between progressive, income-neutral, and sometimes even regressive fiscal systems. In doing so, they responded to shifting global and domestic contexts. This policy paper demonstrates that the decision on the progressivity of a tax system and fiscal spending is at its core a political rather than an economic or a technical one.4 When there is enough political momentum to address economic inequality, appropriate policies are usually found.

Classical arguments of political economy do not properly capture the essence of inequality dynamics. When confronted with evidence, many standard assumptions around what political developments exacerbate or curb inequality do not hold water. Counterintuitively, democracy does not seamlessly translate to less inequality. Moreover, even when a democratic society is free of elite capture and has a left-leaning government at its helm, it might still be not enough to achieve sizeable and lasting changes in socio-economic distribution. Assumptions about the inevitability of inequality under certain circumstances are also often wrong. Globalization, while driving countries to enter the race to the bottom in terms of corporate taxes, does not create pressure to slash personal income taxes.

The policy cornerstone of a better recovery is income redistribution, which can be achieved by putting full employment and real wage growth at the centre of both macroeconomic and sectoral policies.

While this is already the case in some developed and developing economies, fiscal austerity continues to repress aggregate demand in many countries while the limits of monetary policy as an expansionary instrument have become evident after a decade of record credit creation.

First, fighting rampant inequality cannot be achieved without fiscal redistribution and increasing the progressiveness of income taxation schedules. Adequate enforcement of corporate taxation, especially multinational enterprises (MNEs), is equally important. Better taxation can redistribute a portion of the rents accruing to big corporations and help build up tax bases, especially in developing countries. Nonetheless, this does not solve structural problems, such as the persistent productivity gap between small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large firms, which is an important driver of the observed rise in inequality, including wage inequality.

The COVID-19 pandemic not only has increased inequality within countries, but it has also upended public budgets in many developing economies, exposing their sovereign debts to global financial instability. These economies have faced more limitations than developed countries in their efforts to mobilize domestic fiscal resources to respond to the pandemic. This, too, is one more example of the dangerous global divide between the haves and the have-nots. One first step in overcoming this divide was made by the decision of the G20 and the Paris Club to suspend bilateral debt service repayments for a select number of vulnerable developing countries. A much more ambitious multilateral approach to debt restructuring and relief is needed. This should aim at substantial redemption schedules for public external debts of developing economies, along with expanding the use of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to support national development strategies. As stated by Pope Francis, “it is important that ethics once again play its due part in the world of finance and that markets serve the interests of peoples and the common good of humanity2 ”. In fact, we should reaffirm that facilitating good global governance is an essential ingredient for an international environment capable of promoting sustainable development.

Ups and downs in the lives of individual international institutions are not new, but the malaise that now afflicts multilateralism is unprecedented in range and depth. It transcends issue-areas, and occurs at a time when the need for sensible rules of international cooperation has greater urgency than ever before. Even as trade wars rage outside, the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO) finds itself paralysed due to the blocked appointments/re-appointments of judges in its Appellate Body. Public awareness of climate change as a global emergency may have increased, but the United States has at the same time delivered a serious blow to the mitigation regime by moving to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In his remarkable interview with The Economist in November this year, French President Macron declared the “brain-death” of the NATO and pointed to the fragility of Europe. Impending Brexit is one thorn in the side of the European project; the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany is another. Multilateralism, in both its universal and non-universal versions, and across economic and security issues, is under severe strain.

Explaining the malaise

A series of policy papers published by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung's European Union and Washington, DC offices that gives voice to civil society experts from countries with developing economies and the most vulnerable people and communities suggests the answer is a worrisome no. From trade to climate finance to digital governance – and the human rights, equality, and equity breakdowns that run through all of those global issues – the authors paint a troubling picture. They argue that the world’s richest nations have not only sidelined their poorer counterparts and profited from their resources with little return, but that they have failed to deliver on repeated pledges to remedy even their acknowledged wrongs and shortcomings, whether at home or abroad. At the same time, poorer countries have often been caught in the vice of geopolitical and geo-economic competition.

The result is growing frustration, even outrage, among ordinary citizens over the mounting injustices and cascading calamities of the pandemic. The spread of Covid-19 quickly disrupted global supply chains and bred labor rights violations as economies grew to rely even more heavily on the service sector, with delivery services, for example. The pandemic also has increased everyone’s exposure to a monopolistic, Big Tech-led economy with all its negative consequences for societies and individuals, such as rampant disinformation on social media and privacy violations even in Covid-tracing efforts. Climate change and the difficulties of rescue efforts amid pandemic precautions exacerbated the impacts of an array of natural disasters and extreme weather.

The multilateral system has never been more needed. Conflict, pandemics, and international economic coordination were all concerns of the founders of the post-World War II multilateral system – and climate change is a classic global public good that they would have recognised as needing collective action. The UN and some other international organisations continue to garner quite high levels of trust around the world. Yet the multilateral system is failing to act. Why?

First, public opinion in different regions trends in the same direction on some challenges, but varies greatly on others: similar patterns on climate, quite different on the war on Ukraine. This affects how people see the problems the multilateral system should resolve. As a Western diplomat at the UN put it to me: “We say to developing countries that Ukraine is a global problem; but when they put issues of debt or food security on the table, we say that these are national problems.”

- Cash transfers, personal income taxes and social security contributions mitigate slightly more than one quarter of market income inequality among the working-age population, on average across the OECD. Yet this average figure masks a great deal of heterogeneity even among advanced economies: from around 40 per cent of market income inequality reduction in Ireland to around 5 per cent in Chile.

- In all OECD countries, cash transfers account for the largest proportion of redistribution. Personal income taxes play a relatively large role in reducing income inequality in countries that achieve comparatively little redistribution overall like Japan, Korea, Israel and the United States. Social security contributions have a weak yet non-negligible disequalising effect in a number of countries.

Since reconstruction of the world economy was the priority, the rest of the world was happy with the unipolar multilateralism, focusing on trade, finance and development. Geopolitics was constrained during the Cold War since the Soviet bloc was strong militarily but weak economically. Development went reasonably well under Pax Americana.

Ironically, the success of this system gave rise to new population powers that now threaten its viability. China, Russia, India and other players began to challenge the order.

The global COVID-19 pandemic is plunging the world into a socio-economic and financial crisis of an unprecedented scale, in addition to the acute health crisis. Many of the gains achieved under the banner of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are under threat. The crisis has exposed and exacerbated vulnerabilities and inequalities in both developing and developed countries, deepening poverty and exclusion and pushing the most vulnerable even further behind. This is a watershed moment. A sustainable, equitable and peaceful future hinges on the right national and international policy decisions.

For many, the impacts of this crisis are more tangible—given their immediacy and proximity—than the similarly severe damage and threats of climate change or the persistent plight of poverty, hunger and insecurity from which large numbers of people suffer chronically. Even before the pandemic, inequalities in income and multiple other dimensions of well-being, including security of employment and exposure to violence and crime, were rising. The abundant scientific evidence of the catastrophic potential of climate change contrasted sharply with the weak global response. Failure to address these mutually reinforcing problems was pushing people behind and threatening to reverse the already insufficient advances on the 2030 Agenda.1

International observers of US foreign policy can be excused for feeling disoriented. Just four years ago, Donald Trump entered the White House promising to put “America First” and repudiated seven decades of US internationalism. Since January, his successor, Joe Biden, has reasserted American global leadership and rededicated the United States to multilateral cooperation, including at the United Nations and other major international bodies. This new orientation is most obvious in global health, climate change, nuclear weapons, the Western alliance, and the defence of democracy. Although things are more complicated when it comes to trade, even here the president’s instinct is to work with others.