Even ‘effective’ multilateralism fails to resolve rivalries---great power dynamics outweigh.

Some hope that multilateral institutions can subdue geopolitical rivalries. Le Drian and Maas hint at this potential in asserting that “some [international] players are increasingly engaging in power politics, thus undermining the idea of a rules-based order with a view to enforcing the law of the strong.”33 If the return of geopolitical competition is a choice made by states, then investing in multilateral systems could stymie power politics — it just requires rallying the determination to collectively will our way out of the adversarial mindset.34

Unfortunately, this is a misdiagnosis. Great-power politics, particularly their relative absence, always have been the foundation underlying the multilateral order. If great-power competition is returning, reshaping states’ baseline assumptions, then it is a driving, structural force in international politics to which nations must respond. Multilateral tools must adapt to function within those parameters, not try to master them. A danger, therefore, lurks for those advocates of multilateralism who try to preserve the post-Cold War multilateral order in amber. Relying on multilateralism defined by the hallmarks of the post-Cold War era — universal in membership, focused on existing institutions, and centered primarily on maintaining broad cooperation on shared challenges — falsely assumes the past quarter-century as the historical norm, rather than an aberration. 35

Faith in the capacity of multilateral institutions to tame geopolitics is not new. Such a belief was once distinctly American. As Stewart Patrick details, U.S. post-war planning during the 1940s drew on an optimism that “just as the New Deal innovations had helped to stabilize the U.S. domestic political economy by bolstering democracy and market capitalism, so new international agencies could assist nations in managing practical social, economic, and political problems and avoiding the descent into political extremism, geopolitical rivalry, and zero-sum economic competition.”36 The hope that “functional agencies” in international organizations could “help de-politicize controversial issues by treating these as neutral, technical challenges” was not entirely unfounded; but nor could it eliminate the frictions of international high politics.37 As Bruce Jones and I recount in “The Marshall Plan and the Shaping of American Strategy,” rising tensions between the Soviet Union and Western nations soon scuttled this universalist, cooperative vision.38 Similarly today, seemingly “neutral technical challenges,” such as the spread and advancement of telecommunications standards and technologies, are proving to harbor deeply politicized questions — ones with considerable consequences for the future of the liberal democratic model.39

This argument for neutralizing geopolitics by reframing challenges as “technical issues” retains understandable currency in Europe. For many, the heart of the European Union project has been just that. As former European Commission President Romano Prodi once highlighted, the “genius of the [EU] founding fathers lay in translating extremely high political ambitions…into a series of more specific, almost technical decisions.40 Presently, Maas speaks of a multilateralism that “is not directed against anyone, but instead strives to reach joint solutions to global problems.”41 However, such rhetoric should be employed cautiously. While preserving space for multilateral cooperation is a worthy, and necessary, objective, any suggestion that multilateralism can overcome great-power rivalry risks fueling a perception that multilateral advocates are falling prey to the same illusions that confounded post-war statesmen.