Council fails, cooperation impossible and lacks political legitimacy

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.