Tailored use of ad hoc agreements empirically solve multilateral issues

A fourth approach to multilateralism places its faith not in universal treaty-based bodies, an alliance of democracies, or an apex global concert but in flexible coalitions whose focus, size, and membership can be tailored to specific contingencies. Indeed, this is already occurring. As Alan Alexandroff of the University of Toronto observes, we inhabit a “G-x” world, in which the number of parties (“x”) involved in collective action increasingly varies with the precise issue or dilemma at hand and the interests and competencies of relevant countries.91 The future of global governance, in this view, lies with informal, nonbinding, minilateral arrangements.92 From a U.S. perspective, the coalitional impulse has obvious attractions. Still the world’s most powerful country according to most measures, the United States has fewer short-term incentives than weaker nations to invest in formal multilateral organizations—as well as greater opportunities to pick and choose among frameworks that promise to expand its freedom of action and policy autonomy in pursuing its preferences. Rather than accept the constraints of the UN or even formal alliances, the United States can sometimes enjoy greater maneuvering room and control over outcomes by working through issue-specific coalitions—adopting (as the old British idiom recommends) a “horses for courses” approach. The George W. Bush administration took this strategic logic to the extreme after the September 11, 2001, attacks. As then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld told radio host Larry King on December 5, 2001, the United States was cooperating with “dozens and dozens of countries” on different aspects of the “war against terrorism,” from cracking down on terrorist financing to mobilizing troop contributions in Afghanistan. Instead of a single coalition, Rumsfeld explained, “There are multiple coalitions. . . . And that’s the way it ought to work. I’ll tell you why. The worst thing that you can do is allow a coalition to determine what your mission is. . . . It’s the mission that determines the coalition.”93 Rather than a true multilateral undertaking, the U.S. antiterrorism campaign by design was a hub-and-spoke arrangement based on bilateral deals with a heterogeneous group of countries, in which an American sheriff largely determined the actions of its posse. The Bush administration repeated this pattern after the UN Security Council refused to authorize enforcement action against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, launching Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003 with the diplomatic backing of forty-nine countries. Journalists noted the distinctiveness of this tactic. “You seem to be equating an ad hoc coalition that the United States has been able to form around one issue and one task with permanent bodies, like the UN and NATO, which have charters formed by treaties,” one reporter challenged White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. “Does the president believe that international affairs can be conducted entirely through ad hoc bodies like the one he’s putting [together]?” In response, Fleischer said, “The point I’m making here is that there are many ways to form international coalitions. The United Nations Security Council is but one of them.”94 The Bush administration’s preference for ad hoc arrangements was embodied most fully in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). The brainchild of then undersecretary of state John Bolton, this innovative partnership was designed to intercept illicit air and maritime shipments of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles and related technologies. By Bush’s second term, administration officials were touting PSI as a general model that might be extended to promote collective action in confronting other global threats. Unlike the UN or other formal bodies that placed an American Gulliver at the mercy of Lilliputians, the United States could determine the agenda for collective action from the outset. Washington would issue invitations to a small, like-minded group; draft principles that narrowly circumscribed the coalition’s mandate and scope of activities; and—once the core group had signed on—lead a global campaign to get others to join on its terms.95 Although president Barack Obama dispensed with Bush’s unilateralist rhetoric and committed the United States to updating existing multilateral organizations, his administration also employed ad hoc arrangements. The most prominent was the Coalition to Defeat ISIS, which involved dozens of partner nations spanning all regions of the globe and levels of development.96 It was hardly the sole example. To prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of nonstate actors, for instance, Obama sponsored the Nuclear Security Summit, a biennial gathering of the fifty-odd countries possessing nuclear weapons and/or fissile material. To combat Somali piracy, it encouraged a multinational armada including vessels not only from traditional U.S. treaty allies but also from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other nations. To address climate change, it sponsored the Major Economies Forum (MEF), comprising the seventeen largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Even the nationalist Trump administration, despite its avowed determination to pursue U.S. “dominance” in outer space, embraced a similar minilateral logic in May 2020 when it announced the Artemis Accords. These agreements commit each signatory to reaffirm established legal principles of outer space governance, including to pursue only peaceful purposes, provide emergency assistance, share scientific data, avoid activities that might interfere with each other’s lunar operations, and respect UN guidelines on space debris. In effect, the Trump administration used a minilateral mechanism to try to consolidate an international legal foundation for the next phase of space exploration.97 The Biden administration, upon taking office, endorsed this approach. More recently, the Biden administration has pursued a similar course on the governance of cyberspace. In April 2022, it persuaded more than sixty nations to associate themselves with a Declaration for the Future of the Internet. The signatories adopted several common principles, including to defend human rights and fundamental freedoms, preserve an open and global internet, promote inclusive and affordable access, protect trust and privacy, and embrace a multistakeholder model of cyber governance.98 In sum, “G-x” arrangements are now well established on the global scene. A few are multipurpose groupings like the G20, which has served since 2008 as the premier forum for global economic coordination. Others are more specialized, such as the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, which was created jointly by France and Costa Rica in late 2020 to advance global biodiversity conservation, including by permanently protecting 30 percent of Earth’s land and ocean by 2030. By October 2022, more than a hundred governments had publicly endorsed this target.99 In part, the rise of à la carte multilateralism reflects the frustrations of operating through outdated, formal intergovernmental bodies that have proven all-too-resistant to reform. In retrospect, the U.S. officials who helped lay the institutional foundations for the post-1945 multilateral order were fortunate, at least with respect to their self-appointed task. They operated in a time of extraordinary crisis that facilitated institutional change, faced a relatively blank institutional slate, negotiated with fewer foreign players, and operated at the height of U.S. primacy. None of these factors apply today. There has been no major catastrophe on the order of the Great Depression nor World War II. Rather than a tabula rasa, policymakers face a world that is dense and encrusted with often-outdated international institutions, each with vested interests. Since the UN was established, the number of sovereign states has nearly quadrupled, in part as former colonized countries became independent. More people around the world achieved their self-determination, but multilateral diplomacy has also become more complicated. U.S. and Western dominance are not what they once were, and there is increasing global divergence on fundamental norms of world order, such as the appropriate boundaries of sovereignty, the criteria that justify intervention, the proper role of the state in the market, and where to strike the balance between political stability and human rights.100 Compounding matters, many of today’s cross-border problems are even harder to manage than in the past, since they address behind-the-border matters (such as data privacy laws) or require (as in the case of arms control agreements) intrusive methods for monitoring and verification. The implausibility of sweeping institutional reform makes coalitions attractive. Their main advantages include speed, flexibility, modularity, informality, opportunities for discrimination, and possibilities for experimentation.101 Whereas negotiations in large- or universal-membership bodies tend to be protracted and inconclusive, ad hoc approaches can allow a limited number of parties—including at times nonstate actors—to move with dispatch. Unlike conventional intergovernmental organizations, which often seek to address issues comprehensively, coalitions permit governments to bite off digestible chunks of the global agenda (a disaggregated form of multilateralism that can be described as “global governance in pieces”).102 Such modularity is a driving force behind the emergence of so-called regime complexes, which arise when different institutions (such as, in global health, the WHO, the Global Fund, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance) share space in the same general policy sphere but focus on discrete problems.103 Informality is another appeal. Instead of spending years negotiating binding international conventions, coalition participants can rely on voluntary codes of conduct and pledge-and-review sessions, in which they commit to certain nationally determined actions. Given the hurdles to renegotiating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, for instance, some established spacefaring nations have advocated for an International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities, specifying basic norms to address new challenges.104 Purpose-built frameworks can also help participants—including, in principle, great powers—compartmentalize different aspects of their bilateral relationships, so they can cooperate in some realms while competing in others. Finally, ad hoc coalitions can offer opportunities for experimentation, including for networked, transnational cooperation among technical ministries of different sovereign governments. Given these advantages, coalitions seem destined to become even more prominent in international politics.