NINE

Conclusion

American Sovereignty and International Cooperation

A century after Lodge and Lowell squared off in Boston over the United States’ membership in the League of Nations, the country faces the same enduring dilemma: How can it reconcile its defense of national sovereignty with the imperative of international cooperation? This predicament has only grown since 1919, as the problems of an increasingly interdependent globe collide with an America that often seeks to chart its own course, unencumbered by the outside world.

The ascent of Donald J. Trump to the White House brought these long-simmering U.S. sovereignty concerns to a boil. During the president’s first few months, journalists documented repeated clashes between “nationalists” and “globalists” within the administration.1 As often as not, the former emerged victorious. The most prominent example was Trump’s fateful decision on June 1, 2017, to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord—the most important multilateral agreement of the twenty-first century. This step was necessary, the president insisted, to defend the foundations of American democracy. “Foreign leaders in Europe, Asia, and across the world should not have more say with respect to the U.S. economy than our own citizens and their elected representatives,” Trump told his Rose Garden audience. “Thus, our withdrawal from the agreement represents a reassertion of America’s sovereignty.” As he explained, “Our constitution is unique among all nations of the world. And it is my highest obligation and greatest honor to protect it.”²

This was a red herring if ever there was one. The Paris agreement is a purely voluntary arrangement among its 195 state parties. It is not a legally binding treaty but a collection of “intended, nationally determined contributions.” Rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach, each country chooses for itself what it will bring to the climate change fight, tailoring these commitments to its unique national circumstances. Indeed, the Obama administration had insisted on such an approach precisely to avoid raising sovereignty hackles in the U.S. Senate. Perhaps aware of the thin ice on which he was skating, Trump also offered up that all-purpose justification beloved of self-styled defenders of U.S. sovereignty—the slippery slope. Sure, the Paris Accord might be voluntary. But who knows where it could lead? “The risks grow as historically these agreements only tend to become more and more ambitious over time,” he warned. “In other words, the Paris Framework is a starting point—as bad as it is—not an end point. And exiting the agreement protects the United States from future intrusions on the United States’ sovereignty.”3

Trump’s slippery slope thesis was alarmist and, if taken seriously, would rule out U.S. participation in virtually any international agreement. It also ignored the multiple avenues the United States possessed to prevent nonbinding commitments from acquiring the status of international law—much less allowing foreign governments and international organizations to meddle in U.S. constitutional processes. But if Trump’s argument was a canard, it was also savvy. By playing the sovereignty card, the president hoped to short-circuit more sober-minded discussion of the actual balance of costs and benefits of the Paris Accord, both for U.S. competitiveness and for the survival of the planet. By invoking this sacred touchstone, Trump was reassuring the public that the best way to keep America free, prosperous, and “great” was through complete freedom of action.⁴ The president wagered that his argument would resonate with many Americans.

Whether his bet would pay off over the long term was unclear, for the contemporary American public is actually more internationalist than the president assumed. To be sure, as this book has argued, a reverence for sovereignty is deeply rooted in U.S. political culture. It dates from the nation’s origins as the first modern republic based on the consent of the governed, a principle anchored in the U.S. Constitution. As Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s, “If there is a country in the world where the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people can be fairly appreciated, where it can be studied in its application to the affairs of society, and where its dangers and its advantages may be judged, that country is assuredly America.”⁵ The powerful myth of American exceptionalism likewise depicts the United States as an inherently righteous nation, possessing a special destiny. To serve as the hope of the world, the United States must be vigilant in preserving its precious liberties at home and its room for maneuver abroad.

And yet despite these inherited instincts and its complicated political system, the United States emerged in the mid-twentieth century as history’s most prolific architect of global institutions. The genius of U.S. leaders in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations lay in persuading a majority of their fellow citizens that the United States—a traditionally inward-looking nation—should embrace an internationalist vocation and lead the creation of an open, rule-bound international system. America established an array of international organizations and committed itself to a panoply of multilateral treaties that narrowed its range of action and imposed certain external obligations. Admittedly, the U.S. conversion to internationalism was partial and incomplete. The United States often chafed at the real and imagined constraints to its constitutional authorities and freedom of action, and it often insisted on opting out of rules that were binding on others or obtaining special treatment to preserve its prerogatives.6 But the overall trend was clear: Thanks to U.S. exertions, a latticework of international cooperation arose to govern—or at least shape—virtually every field of international activity.

Today, the open, rule-bound international order that the United States helped to create is deeply vulnerable. Rapid geopolitical shifts and clashing preferences among major world powers are partly to blame. But an even more important factor is domestic: growing skepticism in some quarters of the United States that the liberal global order that America built is compatible with the U.S. Constitution, national security, domestic prosperity, and popular sovereignty. These anxieties helped propel Trump, who promised once again to place “America first,” to the White House. And they are likely to persist long after he departs the scene.

At the same time, one should beware of overgeneralizing from a closely fought election in which the winning candidate got fewer votes than the loser. Based on Trump’s victory, it is tempting to conclude that the entire U.S. electorate favors isolationist, protectionist, and unilateralist policies; is resistant to international commitments and anxious to throw up walls; and is determined to preserve absolute U.S. freedom of action. In reality, polling data suggests that most Americans are less obsessed than their leaders with matters of national sovereignty and more comfortable than U.S. elites with national participation in robust international organizations and treaties.

Two months after Trump’s election, in January 2017, the Program for Public Consultation released a major poll that “found no evidence that the American public has tired of international engagement and is going through a phase of isolationism.” Fewer than one in ten Americans endorsed “withdrawal from most efforts to solve international problems,” while 82 percent wanted the United States to “play a shared leadership role.” Moreover, respondents agreed overwhelmingly with the proposition that the United States should “look beyond its own interests and do what’s best for the world as a whole” when formulating and conducting its foreign policy.7

While pollsters have not asked the public about U.S. “sovereignty” directly, their surveys on related topics are telling. Americans by large majorities support a global order based on international law, believe that the nation should abide by international law even when it conflicts with U.S. national interests, and are prepared to contribute U.S. military force to uphold it. Americans strongly support U.S. collective security obligations under the UN Charter, want the United States to work through the UN more than it does, and, indeed, endorse giving the UN expanded powers.⁸ In sum, U.S. citizens support multilateral cooperation as a realistic means to mitigate transnational threats, resolve global challenges, and achieve shared aims.⁹

At the same time, Americans want the United States to play a less dominant (or hegemonic) global role than it has since 1945, one that involves other countries doing their fair share. In an April 2016 poll by the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of respondents wanted the United States “to deal with its own problems and let other countries deal with their own problems as best they can.”¹⁰ This sentiment should not be confused with isolationism, however. After years of war overseas, Americans are understandably tired of being the world’s policeman, and they have little appetite for invading and trying to rebuild other nations. But they remain committed to internationalism and multilateral cooperation, provided that other countries are prepared to share the burden of global leadership in a more balanced fashion.

One logical conclusion to draw from polling data is that self-appointed defenders of U.S. popular sovereignty are out of step with what American citizens actually think.¹¹ None of this is to say that public opinion is always coherent or correct in its judgments, or that determined leaders cannot shape these attitudes. But it does suggest that internationally minded U.S. leaders should not buy into the notion of an isolationist citizenry or believe that they are more constrained than they are. There is no sovereignty-obsessed American majority (though vocal minorities may be). And while elites often fear the public as an irrational force, its opinions on global affairs have tended to be more rational and less volatile than the dramatic policy shifts we have seen over the past two and a half decades across the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Intuitively, the American public seems to understand that sometimes it makes sense to trade some U.S. freedom of action (and on rare occasions even a bit of authority) for the prospect of effective global influence.

That intuition complements the thesis of this book, which has argued that the trade-off between sovereignty and cooperation is not as zero-sum as is often imagined—and that multilateralism is frequently the best avenue for expressing U.S. sovereignty and advancing U.S. interests. This becomes clear once we recognize that sovereignty has three different dimensions. The first is supreme political authority, including the right to make decisions about the nation’s international obligations. The second is autonomy, or freedom of action in pursuing foreign and domestic policies. The third is influence, or the nation’s ability to shape its destiny, by achieving outcomes consistent with its interests and preferences.

Once we disaggregate sovereignty, we can see that there is both less and more at stake in the sovereignty debate than one would glean from contemporary discourse. It is sovereignty’s first dimension that generates the most heated polemics. Self-proclaimed defenders of American sovereignty protest that the United States, by entering into international treaties and multilateral organizations, risks sacrificing its constitutional authority on the altar of global governance. This alarmist view is not credible. As previous chapters have demonstrated, the United States remains adept at resisting encroachments on the U.S. Constitution. Prominent strategies include placing conditions on U.S. treaty ratification, insisting on the ultimate right to use military force unilaterally, and remaining alert to freelancing international organizations.

There is no reason to imagine that this vigilance will decline in the future. In rare but important instances—as in the WTO—the United States may decide to offer limited grants of sovereign authority to an international organization in exchange for the benefits of a rule-bound international system within which it can prosper. But critics of international organizations must do a better job distinguishing between actual and imaginary incursions on U.S. sovereign authority, lest the United States forsake the benefits of multilateral cooperation for specious reasons. In sum, constitutional authority is rarely at stake in the nation’s multilateral engagements.

By barking up the wrong tree, would-be defenders of U.S. sovereign authority distract us from a far more common, and real, trade-off that pits sovereignty’s other two dimensions against each other. Autonomy and influence often work at cross-purposes in managing globalization. To get what it wants—from stemming nuclear proliferation to expanding global trade—the United States often must make commitments, enter into treaties, or support multilateral bodies that simultaneously constrain its options and also promise the United States greater influence over outcomes than it could ever achieve on its own. The need for such sovereignty bargains is clear in a globalized world. After all, there is no purely unilateral (or bilateral) approach to stabilizing volatile financial markets, containing global pandemics, curtailing the spread of WMD technology, or reducing greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels. Not all problems can be solved multilaterally, of course, but even fewer can be solved by going it alone.

The dilemma for the United States is that international cooperation requires sacrificing some notional (though often impractical or ineffectual) freedom of action for the hoped-for benefits of a multilateral approach. It is often hard for U.S. political leaders, so steeped in a political culture of self-reliance and insistence on maintaining a free hand, to envision America becoming a more “normal” country in this fashion. It can be more tempting to hunker down, taking unilateral steps to insulate the United States from the pressures and incursions of globalization, than to embrace collective approaches to shared challenges because these limit its room for maneuver.

To be fair, though, the hurdles to this adjustment are not simply psychological. They are also practical. As chapter 8 described, formal international organizations are vulnerable to recurrent pathologies. Too often, global bodies are hard to monitor and hold to account. They frequently take refuge in lowest-common-denominator policymaking. They sometimes pursue agendas at odds with the preferences of their sovereign state masters. And they resist reforming their memberships, governance, and mandates, even in the face of sweeping global change. The limitations of international organizations can generate frustration and impose costs on the United States.

“MULTILATERALISM À LA CARTE” AS A SOLUTION?

Fortunately, the United States can avoid many of the pathologies of formal bodies and treaties by making greater use of more flexible forms of international cooperation. Besides permitting more nimble responses to many transnational challenges, ad hoc arrangements preserve the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution (sovereign authority) and expand U.S. freedom of action (sovereign autonomy), while still holding out the promise of achieving U.S. objectives (sovereign influence).¹² The good news is that the United States is no stranger to this form of cooperation—and indeed has pioneered it in the early twenty-first century. Frustrated by inefficiencies in current international organizations, U.S. policymakers and their counterparts abroad have since 2000 begun adopting a messier form of multilateralism that also happens to be sovereignty-friendly.13

This à la carte approach to multilateralism, as Richard N. Haass has christened it, has three distinctive aspects.¹⁴ The first is a growing U.S. reliance on flexible, often purpose-built coalitions of the interested, capable, or like-minded. During the Obama years, pundits debated whether we lived in a G-2 (United States–China), G-8, G-20, or even G-zero world. In truth, ours is a G-x world in which the identity and number of parties at the head table (that is, x) varies by issue area and situation.¹⁵

Consider global economic coordination. In the depths of the global financial crisis, in November 2008, the leaders of the world’s major economies met for the first time in Washington to create the Group of 20 (G-20). Within a year, they had designated the G-20 as the world’s premier forum for macroeconomic coordination. But contrary to expectations, the preexisting Group of 8 (G-8) did not wither away. It actually gained a new lease on life as the United States became disillusioned with the diverse and unwieldy G-20. Indeed, the body became even more important to the United States when the G-8 members suspended Russia after its seizure of Crimea in 2014. The resulting Group of 7 (G-7) offered Washington a narrower grouping whose members shared broadly similar values, strategic interests, and major policy preferences, as well as assets to deploy in the service of these convictions.

At other times, informal “minilateral” groupings can create strange bedfellows. For example, the multinational armada that emerged around 2010 to combat Somali piracy in the Indian Ocean included vessels not only from the United States and traditional U.S. treaty allies (including NATO, Japan, and South Korea) but also from countries with which the United States has more complicated relations, including China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

A second aspect of the new multilateralism is a preference for voluntary codes of conduct over binding conventions. After two decades of fruitless negotiations over a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, for instance, parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted a looser “pledge and review” system. As noted earlier, the historic December 2015 Paris Accord left it to the sovereign discretion of each national government to determine how it would contribute to global emissions reductions. The Obama administration’s biennial Nuclear Security Summit process involved something similar, with governments expected to arrive with “gift baskets” enumerating separate national commitments to lock down the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons and fissile materials.16 We are likely to see greater American reliance on voluntary commitments in the years ahead.

The third noteworthy aspect of the new multilateralism is the search for piecemeal rather than comprehensive approaches to international challenges. Instead of trying to solve a complicated global puzzle like climate change in one fell swoop, as if it were a Rubik’s Cube, the United States and other governments are more often pursuing “global governance in pieces,” breaking complex problems down into their component parts.¹⁷ Given the WTO’s moribund Doha Round of trade negotiations, any future breakthroughs in global liberalization will likely also be disaggregated, taking the form of so-called plurilateral agreements—or sector-specific accords among a subset of WTO members who opt in to (or out of) commitments in areas like public procurement or investment rules. American negotiators may well pursue similar approaches in cyberspace, with different institutions tailored to specific issues like cybercrime, data protection, cyberwarfare, technical standards, and Internet governance.¹⁸ In addition to making global challenges more tractable, thus expanding U.S. sovereignty-as-influence, this approach poses a less frontal assault on U.S. sovereignty-as-autonomy.

To be sure, other aspects of the “new” multilateralism can test traditional models of state sovereignty. One is a shift away from purely intergovernmental negotiations among foreign ministries toward new forms of networked cooperation. Faced with complex globalization challenges, for instance, U.S. national regulators and technical experts are becoming more likely to engage their counterparts abroad directly, on an ongoing basis. A case in point is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which during the Obama administration spearheaded the creation of an informal “global coalition of medicines regulators” intended to ensure the safety and reliability of medicines in an era of complex supply chains and major new producers like China and India.¹⁹ Such technocratic networks can expand U.S. freedom of action (sovereign autonomy) in dealing with complicated threats, allowing the United States to better shape its own destiny (in this case, sovereign influence over public health). At the same time, such arrangements could in principle undermine U.S. sovereign authority if Congress fails to oversee and scrutinize the commitments made by U.S. technocrats and their foreign partners.

International cooperation is also more often multilevel, involving substate political units, notably in the growing global activism of cities. As humanity urbanizes, networks of cities are emerging as vibrant centers of policy innovation. Among the most dynamic forces in combating climate change today is the so-called C40 coalition, a global confederation of cities founded in 2012 by then-mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and foreign counterparts to combat pollution and sustain green growth. More recently, in September 2016 the Global Parliament of Mayors met for the first time, agreeing to collaborate on two issues that disproportionately affect urban populations: climate change and migration.20 Meanwhile, in the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord, individual U.S. states like California and New York are sidestepping the federal government to pursue their own climate change diplomacy.²¹

Finally, effective international cooperation today depends on innovative partnerships among national governments, private companies, and civil society that leverage the capabilities of different stakeholders.²² Perhaps the most well-known arrangement is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an independent, nonprofit entity. But private actors play a prominent role in other regulatory and standard-setting bodies, such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The challenge for the United States is to expand its sovereignty-as-influence by drawing on the expertise, resources, and leverage that such nonstate actors provide, without allowing U.S. sovereignty-as-authority (namely, the will of the American people, as expressed through elected representatives) from being distorted or hijacked in the process.

Overall, à la carte multilateralism has a lot going for it. It imposes few costs on U.S. sovereignty-as-authority and widens U.S. sovereignty-as-autonomy. It also implies speed and flexibility. Rather than engaging in painstaking, drawn-out negotiations within formal, binding, universal (or large-membership) organizations, the United States can design nimble coalitions of nations (and other actors) that matter. Another benefit is modularity. Instead of trying to digest an entire complex global problem, like mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, governments can bite off manageable chunks, such as reforestation or controls on methane. Yet another advantage is discrimination: purpose-built frameworks may help the United States compartmentalize its bilateral relationships so that it can cooperate with geopolitical rivals like China and Russia in some forums to advance common security and economic or ecological or other interests—even as it competes in other arenas. Finally, diverse forms of collective action can in principle allow the United States to experiment with and glean lessons from alternative design solutions to cooperation problems (much as it was assumed the fifty U.S. states provide distinct “laboratories of democracy,” in the famous formulation of the Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis).²³

At first blush, a world of à la carte options seems tailor-made for the United States, allowing it to maximize its sovereign freedom of action and domestic policy autonomy by picking and choosing among diverse international institutions, as its situational interests warrant. The “G-x” world, after all, rewards nations well positioned to play simultaneously on different chess boards and in different groupings, thanks to their military, economic, diplomatic, and technological weight, as well as the vitality of their private sector, civil society, and universities. On all these criteria, the United States reigns supreme.24

For all its advantages, however, ad hoc multilateralism is no panacea. Although an à la carte approach can protect U.S. sovereign authority and expand U.S. sovereign autonomy, its implications for American sovereignty-as-influence cannot be taken for granted. There is no guarantee that such institutional workarounds will actually deliver what formal organizations cannot.

Putting aside for the moment the U.S. withdrawal, the jury is out on whether the voluntary national pledges on climate change made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference will amount to much, since the agreement lacks any credible enforcement mechanism. And even if fully implemented, it would still almost certainly fall well short of the scope of international effort required to stave off the dangers identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Moreover, flexible minilateralism is unlikely to resolve tough cooperation problems that pit great powers against one another. À la carte arrangements are most promising when participants’ interests and preferences are broadly congruent, but more encompassing bodies are blocked. If interests diverge significantly—as in the clashes between Russia and the West over Syria or Crimea, or between China and its neighbors in the South China Sea—simply shifting forums may make little difference.

A second concern is that ad hoc-ism, if carried too far, could undermine formal organizations whose legitimacy, resources, and technical capacity the United States and its partners need over the long haul and cannot easily replace. The hope, of course, is that the opposite will be true. In 2005 the international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood argued that it was “time to give the UN a little competition.” Experimenting with alternative forms of collective action, she implied, might give the UN an incentive to raise its game.²⁵ Proponents of preferential trade agreements likewise argue that they might actually spur the WTO to make greater progress on liberalization. But skeptics warn just as vigorously that the proliferation of minilateral arrangements will create a fragmented system of redundant institutions that are stumbling blocks (rather than building blocks) to global cooperation, as well as undercut the capabilities, credibility, and legitimacy of standing international organizations.²⁶

The evidence is mixed. At times, informal multilateral frameworks can reinvigorate formal institutions, helping them to adapt to new conditions. A case in point is the G-20. During its first two, activist years (2008–10) the G-20 engineered the replacement of the weak Financial Stability Forum with the stronger Financial Stability Board. It also revitalized, increased funding for, and negotiated governance changes to the IMF and the World Bank. At other times, however, the rise of alternative institutions has reflected less a desire for partnership than antagonism: specifically, the conscious decision by a coalition of dissatisfied states to challenge the mandates, rules, and practices of established international institutions, and to try to shift the setting for multilateral deliberation and policymaking to an alternative existing institution whose mandate and decision rules they find more congenial.27

This brings us to the third potential downside. A world of à la carte multilateralism lends itself to rampant forum shopping—and not just by the United States.²⁸ Emerging powers are moving swiftly to sponsor alternative institutions of their own, ranging from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to the BRICS Bank, the BRICS Contingency Fund, and—most dramatically—the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The inability of the Obama administration in 2015 to dissuade even its closest European allies from joining the AIIB as founding members offered a stark lesson that others can play this game too. The U.S. defeat was rich in symbolism, suggesting how quickly the center of gravity of international economic cooperation could shift.²⁹

The AIIB episode also signaled what might be called the limits of American “exemptionalism.” Particularly since the end of the Cold War, the United States has adopted an ambivalent and selective attitude toward formal multilateral commitments, particularly treaty obligations. The U.S. attitude has been one of the main driving forces behind the trend toward minilateral cooperation. While this stance has brought some external freedom of action and domestic policy autonomy, the United States is discovering that it is not the only nation capable of cherry-picking among international commitments. If the United States is unwilling and unable to revitalize the institutions it founded to accommodate new players, other countries will build new ones in their place. More recently, the Trump administration’s repudiation of the TPP mega-trade deal has cleared the field for China to push forward with its alternative vision of a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that excludes the United States. As major non-Western players learn to play the game of flexible multilateralism, the risk increases that the world could fragment into competing, self-contained, and discriminatory blocs.

In sum, enthusiasm for flexible multilateralism should not blind the United States to the potential risks of overreliance on ad hoc solutions. To persist, a rule-bound international order is likely to depend not only on flexible coalitions of the moment, tailored to particular exigencies and issues, but also on revitalized, formal, international bodies grounded in international law.

The trick for the United States is to combine the best of both strategies, designing à la carte mechanisms that complement and reinvigorate, rather than undermine and marginalize, the prix fixe menu of formal international organizations on which the world continues to depend. The first step is to think more soberly about the comparative advantages and trade-offs of these alternative forms of collective action, not least for American sovereignty. Coalitions bring the benefits of flexibility, agility, and exclusivity. They are most compelling when standing bodies do not exist or are paralyzed by divisions, or when bureaucracy slows responses to immediate threats. But they typically lack the capacity, legitimacy, and legal status of formal, permanent organizations like the UN (or NATO, for that matter). The UN can offer distinct advantages when the challenge is enduring and requires protracted burden sharing, specialized technical capacities, and broad international legitimacy. Going forward, the United States should align its forays into minilateralism with parallel diplomacy at the United Nations and World Bank, as well as within NATO and other standing alliances.

AMERICA AT HOME IN THE WORLD

A century after World War I, the struggle to reconcile American sovereignty with the demands of international cooperation persists. The sovereignty wars are a battle between two very different conceptions of the United States—and of the U.S. global role. The first, suspicious and inward-looking, regards international commitments with mistrust, as threats to America’s beloved Constitution and unwarranted infringements on U.S. freedom of action. The second, more optimistic and outward-looking, envisions an America at home in the world. It recognizes that international institutions and law pose little threat to America’s sovereign authorities. It also understands that shaping America’s destiny will frequently require sovereignty bargains, whereby the United States judiciously trades off some notional autonomy for the promise of effective multilateral action.

The sovereignty wars will no doubt persist, for they are a struggle for the heart and soul of America, drawing sustenance from the nation’s identity, ideals, institutions, and experiences. In the face of a complicated and sometimes dangerous world, the United States will face constant temptations to strike out on its own, to wall itself off, and to hunker down in pursuit of national greatness. Meanwhile the world will keep moving and the planet will keep getting smaller. The future will belong to a confident America—and confident Americans—who are prepared to lead, rather than retreat from, the world.