CP solves and establishes council approach with global powers, key to solve

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.