Multilateralism is waning, and one of the world’s leading multilateral institutions, the World Trade Organization, is in crisis, because the United States has been blocking new appointments to its dispute settlement mechanism’s Appellate Body since 2018. In the run-up to the WTO’s 13th Ministerial Conference last month, some optimists hoped to see progress on specific issues, such as an agreement not to impose tariffs on digital commerce, but expectations were generally low.

The pessimists were right. India led the charge against extending a moratorium on e-commerce tariffs, and only a last-minute deal prolonged it for another two years. After that, it is expected to expire. India and its allies celebrated the outcome as a victory. For the first time in years, the culprit undermining the WTO was not the US but developing countries (including Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and others).

True, what happened with digital commerce is characteristic of the usual conflicts that play out during trade negotiations. Free trade always produces winners and losers. Digital commerce may be in the interest of businesses in advanced economies as well as consumers and businesses in low- and middle-income countries; users of an app, game, or other software product made in a different country may pay lower prices in the absence of tariffs. But domestic producers will reliably demand protection from imports, and governments will see tariffs as a promising way to boost revenues.

While these issues are typical, developing countries’ opposition to an extended digital-tax moratorium is emblematic of a deeper problem: namely, the growing impression that the WTO has nothing to offer them anymore. The assumption is that it unilaterally serves the interests of big businesses rather than of the average person in a low- or middle-income country.

But is this true? In fact, recent research shows that poverty reduction in the past three decades has been more likely in developing countries that are well integrated into the international trade system – as measured by the number of signed trade agreements and access to large, lucrative export markets. In this sense, the multilateral trade system has indeed benefited the developing world.

International integration is particularly important for smaller economies. Unlike India and China, countries such as Thailand, Kenya, and Rwanda cannot fall back on large domestic markets. No wonder opposition to trade deals so often comes from larger developing countries such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil. They can afford to turn their back on international trade if the terms of the proposed deal are not enticing enough.

But even these countries appreciate the benefits of participation in global trade. India, for example, used the closing of the Ministerial Conference to reaffirm its commitment to negotiation and multilateralism, in principle. The question, then, is why developing countries have such a negative view of the WTO specifically.

Their dissatisfaction dates back to 1995, when the WTO succeeded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. At the time, developing countries felt that they had just been pressured into signing a trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) agreement that would yield big payoffs for multinational corporations without offering many benefits to their own populations.

Another ongoing source of tension is agriculture, where developing countries traditionally have a comparative advantage. Existing trade agreements continue to permit high-income countries to subsidize local producers and impose tariffs on imports. Various other rules, escape clauses, and notification requirements have created de facto loopholes that only countries with abundant resources are able to exploit.

For example, fishing subsidies (another area of major contention) are permitted under certain conditions. But monitoring fishing stocks to prove that such conditions are being met is prohibitively expensive for most developing countries. They therefore have good reason to complain that international trade rules are biased against them.

Looking ahead, a potentially bigger issue concerns advanced economies’ efforts to link trade agreements to labor and environmental standards, such as through the European Union’s proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). While well-intentioned, advanced economies must recognize that their efforts to address climate, labor, and human-rights issues could have serious distributional consequences, potentially coming at the expense of many developing countries.

This is especially true of climate change. Low-income countries may have the most to lose from the consequences of climate change, but they are understandably reluctant to impede their own growth to fix a problem caused by richer countries’ past sins. Combine these concerns with high-income countries’ push toward “friend-shoring” (which implies more trade among rich countries, given the current geopolitical map), and today’s world starts to look even more like one where advanced economies are pitted against developing ones.

Ironically, the obvious way to avoid such division is to revive multilateralism. Now more than ever, the challenges we face are global in nature, and thus call for global solutions. But shared objectives, by definition, must account for the concerns of developing countries. That is what successful multilateralism has always demanded.

Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, a former World Bank Group chief economist and editor-in-chief of the American Economic Review, is Professor of Economics at Yale University.

To read the full commentary as it appears on Project Syndicate’s website, click here.

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Amid these divisions, climate negotiations are entering a new and challenging phase. Many countries need to do more to lower greenhouse gas emissions to keep the targets in the 2015 Paris agreement alive. At COP26 in Glasgow last year, the participating countries agreed to step up their commitments on climate action (nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) before COP27. Few have done so. Countries have pledged to develop closer scrutiny of national measures to implement reductions, but agreement on how is likely to prove contentious. Disagreements are also becoming increasingly fraught over the degree to which wealthy countries should pay for climate-related harms in the developing world.

Against this background, questions arise about whether the multilateral track on climate can deliver at the required scale. Some European policymakers doubt the Paris agreement could be signed today and wonder if its approach needs to be reviewed in a more competitive and distrustful world.[1] European policymakers are increasingly looking to supplement the UNFCCC’s collective approach with further initiatives developed among smaller groups of like-minded states, such as the Breakthrough Agenda (a UK-led clean technology initiative signed by the European Union and 41 states) and the ‘climate club’ Germany has put forward during its presidency of the G7.

By mixing collective and like-minded initiatives on climate, Europeans are adopting the kind of twin-track strategy on multilateral cooperation that ECFR has recommended in previous publications. Such a strategy, we argued, should aim to preserve the space for collective processes as far as possible, given their reach and legitimacy, but seek to complement them with more far-reaching initiatives by smaller groups of states. To contribute to global solutions, like-minded initiatives should not undermine wider institutions and should be open to any country that accepts their ground rules, regardless of wider ideology.

This policy brief explores how Europeans can best pursue a twin-track strategy in climate policy. It examines the barriers to progress within the UNFCCC process and other broad-based multilateral forums, as well as their continued relevance and importance. Since the signing of the Paris agreement, the drivers for action to limit greenhouse gas emissions have shifted significantly, thereby changing how international policy can best support the agreement. The paper outlines the steps that the EU and its member states should take with like-minded partners to promote international action on climate change, and how they could fit within the wider multilateral framework.

Climate change and Multilateralism

Climate change is the archetypal global challenge, as greenhouse gas emissions from each country have global impacts. Hence, international efforts to address it tend to be framed as ways to overcome a collective action problem. The central goal has been to prevent states from freeriding on other states’ emissions-cutting efforts, on the assumption these efforts would involve significant economic and social costs. This understanding mandated a multilateral response to climate change organised on a collective scale. And, from an institutional perspective, climate cooperation can be seen as a something of a multilateral success story.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established at the end of the cold war, with both the United States and Soviet Union as participants. The UNFCCC, agreed in Rio in 1992, provided a global framework. Discussions at the COPs have often been difficult – but have still achieved important results.

Nonetheless, climate change is accelerating. The global multilateral system has so far been unable to impede catastrophic effects that will become far more serious over the next decades. Already, extreme weather is causing enormous harm in many parts of the world.

Crucial questions for the current moment are how to promote progress in climate talks, given that Russia’s war on Ukraine is one of the factors causing tension, and how climate ‘coalitions of the willing’ might work best alongside the UN processes, and help strengthen them.

Today’s climate governance can be seen as a ‘regime complex’: an overlapping collection of different regimes of varying kinds rather than a single, comprehensive, and integrated system. The UNFCCC sits at the centre, but other elements include multiple UN institutions, cooperation between like-minded countries, sectorial cooperation, and public-private partnerships.

COP26 produced important results. The Glasgow meeting largely accomplished its formal agenda: the completion of a ‘rulebook’ with guidelines on how to implement the 2015 Paris agreement. The conclusions, basically in the form of a decision on the 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact, included promises on climate finance and commitments to “phase down unabated coal power and inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels”.

The UK also succeeded (with co-chair Italy) in paving the way for the ‘Glasgow Breakthroughs’, important voluntary commitments on, inter alia, phasing out coal, electrifying transport, and decarbonising industry.

However, progress on delivery has proved difficult. In Glasgow last year, the idea was to transform the pledges that had been made into a ‘mitigation work programme’ within the UNFCCC process. Since then, negotiators have faced resistance to what some countries – including China – see as too much interference in domestic policymaking. The Bonn conference in June saw acrimonious disputes between the global south and high-income countries over funding to mitigate the harm caused by climate change. Not many new, more ambitious NDCs have been forthcoming.

At COP27, adaptation to climate change will be in focus, and lack of trust between the global north and south is a major obstacle to progress. Adaptation covers such topics as stronger flood defences: a need starkly demonstrated in Pakistan – where monsoon rains up to five times heavier than average have submerged vast areas, leaving 33 million people requiring emergency aid. It is hardly surprising that the global south is demanding wealthy nations fulfil their promises of more finance for climate adaptation.

Among the commitments at COP26 was a pledge from richer nations to provide $40 billion a year for low- and middle-income countries to finance climate adaptation. However, only half this amount has actually been allocated. At a high-level meeting on adaptation in Rotterdam in early September, there was widespread disappointment over the lack of serious engagement from the governments of developed countries.

Controversy also surrounds compensation for ‘loss and damage’ (harms that have already occurred because of climate change). Developing countries are demanding a specific fund for this purpose. Germany has launched the ‘global shield’ as an alternative solution. The G7 and the most vulnerable countries have endorsed the proposal, which aims to make money rapidly available in a crisis – including by creating a pool of insurance funds against damage. Critics of the initiative argue that insurance is rarely available to the poorest, and that the proposal does not include funding for adaptation.

Meanwhile, the EU and others are trying to move the mitigation agenda forward and find a path towards new, more ambitious climate action, a ‘global stocktake’ within the climate convention of NDC pledges, and a fresh round of commitments for 2025.

Geopolitical tensions are also complicating the preparations for COP27. Russia’s war on Ukraine has amplified divisions between Russia and the West, and given rise to food and fuel inflation that is having a devastating impact on low- and middle-income countries. At the same time, the competition for influence between the West China and is becoming sharper, limiting both sides’ willingness and capacity to work together.

There is, therefore, a stark contrast between the geopolitical backdrop to COP27 and the run-up to Paris 2015. The landmark 2015 agreement owed much to strong cooperation between the EU and groups of developing countries, such as the most vulnerable countries and the small island states, under the name of the High Ambition Coalition. Such cooperation remains essential for further progress in multilateral forums, but it will be harder to carry out in the current global context.

While progress in implementing the Paris agreement has not been quick enough, the 2015 Paris commitments set the ‘gold standard’ for what governments and others should do. As Charles Sabel and David Victor argue in “Fixing the Climate”, holding global warming “well below 2 degrees C” and achieving net-zero emissions by mid-century is now axiomatic for many companies and sectors, and sustainable finance and corporate governance. Pledges from governments also create opportunities for public scrutiny. Annual COPs focus global attention and serve as forums for a broad range of initiatives from states and non-state groups. In all these ways, the UNFCCC process necessarily remains at the core of global efforts on climate change, but developments in international politics and the need for more urgent action make it desirable to look for a wider range of approaches.

Drivers of national action on climate have changed
The Paris agreement model assumed that peer pressure would incentivise states to set increasingly ambitious targets for emissions reductions, and national policy would then strive to meet those targets. To some extent this has happened. For example, President Joe Biden announced new national targets in April 2021 as a way of re-establishing US leadership on climate policy. Biden’s targets set an ambitious goal that his administration has since taken steps to achieve through recent climate legislation. Strikingly, however, China and India, two of the three largest greenhouse gas emitters, are projected to exceed the modest emissions targets they announced under the Paris agreement process. In their cases, NDC pledges have not served to raise ambition, but instead to reflect climate policies that are driven at least partly by other factors.

To develop an effective global policy on climate change, Europe needs to understand the full range of factors spurring national decision-making. In a recent academic paper, the political scientists Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger argued that government climate policies are determined more by domestic politics than by concerns about global freeriding, and especially by distributive conflicts between pro- and anti-climate reform interest groups.

Commercial advantage has moved centre-stage since dramatic falls in the costs of renewable energy components transformed the economics of carbon-neutral power generation. Switching to renewable energy now looks like a self-interested decision. In the words of a leading Indian parliamentarian, “net-zero is net positive”. The emergence of green energy as the basis of the economy of the future means that states such as China and the US are competing to capture and control the critical supply chains on which clean energy sources rely and set the standards underpinning the technologies.

Beyond economic advantage, the ever-harsher impact of climate change on daily life around the world is also a spur to action. Finally, renewables offer the prospect of greater energy security at a time when countries are more aware than ever of the dangers of energy dependency. But despite these advantages, the initial costs of green transitions and the difficulty of raising capital stand in many countries’ way. The availability of finance to power green transitions is a vital enabler in national calculations, a point actively pushed in the global south’s efforts to redefine equity and responsibility in the global order.

The major players
As the landscape for global climate policy is determined by the range of national calculations, it is important to identify the main considerations of the major players: the US, China, the EU, Russia, emerging markets, and low-income countries.

The US: The Biden administration’s policies are shaped by the need to manoeuvre in the polarised environment of US politics. A significant part of the US public supports the policies of former president Donald Trump, marked by hostility to the green agenda and to international cooperation. Biden has sought to reposition the US as a global climate leader. Yet, political constraints are evident in his determination to avoid penalising the use of fossil fuels and his emphasis on the domestic economic advantages of the green transition (for example, by limiting tax credits to electric vehicles assembled in North America).

Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, only won Senate approval because it took an industrial strategy approach to fighting climate change. The scale of the act ($374 billion in tax credits) means bodog sportsbook review it will likely transform the US economy and make American solar and wind power the cheapest in the world. However, Biden’s climate policy has a national focus that raises big questions about the extent to which the US will be supportive towards energy transitions in other countries. Notably, his administration has not yet won congressional support for a major increase in international climate financing.

China is now the world’s largest emitter, accounting for 27 per cent of global greenhouse emissions in 2019. But China has embraced climate action as a core part of its domestic and foreign policy. It spent no less than $381 billion on clean energy in 2021, and President Xi Jinping pledged the country would stop building coal-fired power plants overseas in his 2021 video address to the UN General Assembly. China’s climate policy reflects a desire to appear a credible participant in the UNFCCC process. However, China is also powerfully invested in leveraging its position as a leading player in green technology industries, a sector in which its industrial strategy has already yielded strong results (for instance, China controls more than 80 per cent of the global supply chain for solar panels). Moreover, China is highly vulnerable to climate change, with 900 million people suffering under record-breaking heat waves last summer.

China has cooperated with both the US and EU on climate in recent years – its involvement was central to the conclusion of the Paris agreement, and it agreed a joint declaration with the US at COP26 in 2021 that promised to accelerate efforts to reach a global net zero economy. However, China has pulled back from climate cooperation with the West recently, suspending its climate dialogue with the US after house speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in early August. China then reportedly refused to recommit to pledges already made in Glasgow at the August meeting of G20 environment and energy ministers. With China apparently reluctant to appear to make concessions to the West on climate, competition over green technology is emerging as the primary driver of climate policy in both China and the US.

Europe stands out for its strong domestic political commitment to climate action. European countries have gone further than those in any other region to contain carbon emissions through market mechanisms such as carbon pricing and an emissions trading system. In this way, the EU has sought to become a global leader through the power of example, but its commitment to carbon pricing sets it apart from the US and other global powers. More significantly, the EU’s initiative to set up a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) has provoked global concern.

The logic behind the CBAM is to allow European industry to invest in low-carbon technologies at higher costs without being undercut by cheaper, higher-carbon imports. However, the proposal to levy a tariff on imported goods with a high carbon content has provoked charges of protectionism amid fears that poorer countries less able to undertake a quick green transition will be penalised. Carbon border adjustment mechanism reporting on imports of iron and steel, fertilisers, aluminium, cement, and electricity is due to start in 2023 to lay the groundwork for payments from 2026. The CBAM’s unpopularity may therefore hinder the EU’s climate diplomacy.

Equally uncertain is how economic warfare over Russian gas will test European consistency on climate policy, given the urgent need to secure additional energy supplies. Last year, several European countries and the European Investment Bank signed a pledge to halt funding for overseas fossil fuel projects. European countries have since sought additional gas imports from the developing world, provoking charges of hypocrisy.

Russia, the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has historically disdained international climate talks but switched course ahead of COP26 in 2021.[2] Russian president Vladimir Putin announced the goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. Analysts suggest Putin’s shift was prompted by a mix of concern about the EU’s looming CBAM strategy and visible climate damage such as melting permafrost. However, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, climate policy has disappeared from its political discourse. Russia is unlikely to act as an outright spoiler at COP27, but it cannot be expected to take any further steps to cooperate on climate policy or scale back its emissions.

Emerging markets are among the major challenges for international climate policy. Excluding China, these countries are responsible for a rising share of global emissions – estimated at 34 per cent in 2021. The proportion will increase as their economies continue to grow and developed countries scale back on fossil fuels. Emerging markets such as India, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, and Vietnam are falling well short of the share of reductions necessary to meet the Paris agreement goals, according to the Climate Action Tracker monitoring organisation. Focused on completing their industrial development, they lack resources to undertake green transitions and currently struggle to attract investment due to poor credit ratings or perceived instability. The availability of climate finance is a key factor in emerging markets’ ability to set more ambitious targets.

Finally, lower-income countries are increasingly feeling the effects of heatwaves, floods, and droughts that are killing people and destroying their livelihoods. Loss of faith in multilateral institutions is widespread, alongside growing resentment over global inequality (not helped by being last in the queue for covid-19 vaccines). For them, the need for climate funding to deal with adaptation and mitigation is now at least as high a priority as limiting future emissions.

Green coalitions of the willing
In this variegated and competitive landscape, there is a strong case for supplementing collective processes with more flexible initiatives by ambitious countries. It is a strategy with honourable antecedents: for example, the ‘Toronto Club’, whose early measures to protect the ozone layer led to the Montreal Protocol; and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition – which arose out of cooperation between developed countries and the global south to tackle short-lived air pollutants, such as soot, that harm air quality and climate.

Like-minded initiatives permit countries to move ahead at a faster pace than in the UNFCCC – which operates by consensus – and strike partnerships based on shared interests or concerns. There are three areas in particular in which such coalitions of the willing are taking shape in climate policy: the implementation of commitments made in connection with the COP26 in Glasgow (including the Breakthrough Agenda), the G7’s proposal for a climate club, and just energy transition partnerships (JETPs) between developed and developing countries.

The Breakthrough Agenda
The Breakthrough Agenda – a series of initiatives taken at COP26 to accelerate a shift to green technology in five sectors (power, hydrogen, road transport, steel, and agriculture sectors) – has acquired significant momentum. More than 40 governments are now working together with the private sector to achieve goals such as making affordable, renewable, and low-carbon hydrogen globally available by 2030. The initiatives include measures on standards, research and development, public procurement, and support for developing countries. Most major economies have signed up to the Breakthrough Agenda, including the US, China, India, the EU, and the UK.

After the first annual report was discussed in Pittsburgh in September 2022, it was decided to take the agenda forward together with the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) and Mission Innovation (MI), two initiatives that include International Energy Agency (IEA) members, but also other countries such as India and Brazil. It is likely that the IEA Secretariat will play a central role in coordinating efforts to decarbonise the agenda’s five sectors of focus.

However, although many governments have signed the Breakthrough Agenda and participate in CEM/MI, these initiatives still do not include most countries in the global south. It is not clear if an ‘institutional home’ at the IEA will be enough to bring the agenda global credibility. Linking the current processes better to include organisations such as the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) would give them greater legitimacy in all parts of the world.

The climate club
Low-carbon transitions are also supported by cooperation in the G7 and G20. The G7 climate, energy, and environment ministers agreed on an industrial decarbonisation agenda in May 2022, including public procurement of low-carbon products and joint standards for development. However, the most ambitious G7 climate initiative is the climate club – which was launched in June 2022 at the G7 leaders’ summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, Germany. According to the G7 communique, the club aims to address the world’s shortfall on ambition and implementation towards meeting the Paris agreement targets. Hence, the club aims to “support the effective implementation of the Paris Agreement by accelerating climate action and increasing ambition, with a particular focus on industry, thereby addressing risks of carbon leakage for emission intensive goods, while complying with international rules”.

A potential benefit of the climate club is that – to the extent that all partners are on board – it prevents the EU unilaterally imposing its carbon pricing mechanism, which could spark negative reactions around the world. Ideally, key trade partners such as the US, the UK, Japan, and Canada would agree similar measures, easing the way towards lower emissions from, for example, steel and cement plants. Cooperation among major economies could also facilitate the creation of markets for low-carbon products such as ‘green steel’, which Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz has stressed must be WTO-compliant.

However, there are risks to this approach as emerging markets and less developed countries may fear it is the start of a ‘rich countries club’. Given existing criticism of the EU proposal for the CBAM, the impression that rich countries are ‘ganging up’ could play into the hands of China and Russia, whose leaders may try to drive a wedge between the EU and developing countries in climate negotiations and elsewhere. Unless significant steps are taken to help green transitions in other countries, a club that incorporated any form of carbon border tax could replicate the backlash against the CBAM on a larger scale.

Germany, which holds the current G7 presidency, invited Argentina, India, Indonesia, Senegal, and South Africa to the Schloss Elmau summit to counter such opposition. Success was partial. Brazil and China – as well as summit participants South Africa, India, and Senegal – have expressed grave concern at unilateral carbon border adjustments, calling them “discriminatory” and arguing that the CBAM is against the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities. Senegal’s president has urged the EU not to target Africa with the new instrument.

The EU has also had limited success in convincing the US and other G7 states to introduce national carbon pricing similar to that in the union. As a consequence, the follow-up to the G7 summit is now focusing on cooperation in other fields such as joint standards for development and criteria for public procurement. So, the agenda is partly converging with what is already being done within the Breakthrough Agenda, and CEM/MI initiatives.

Just energy transition partnerships
With slow progress in the formal UNFCCC negotiations, many pin their hopes on Just Energy Transition Partnerships (JETPs). The first such cooperation with South Africa received much attention in Glasgow, and was seen as a way of building alliances between the global north and south. Recently, South Africa decided on an investment plan for how the $8.5 billion of promised financing can best be used. Talks on similar arrangements are ongoing with India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Senegal.

However, the JETP agreement with South Africa will not be easy to implement, and other prospective JETPs are at an early stage. To succeed, JETPs should start from the needs of the country concerned, and the EU and other actors need to have enough to offer. South Africa, Indonesia, and Senegal are all stressing domestic industrial development and added value, rather than new extractive agreements on materials like critical minerals and green hydrogen. EU actors need to show they understand these countries’ development needs – for example, to rapidly shift car production to electric vehicles. Recipient countries need to be willing to reform institutions with vested interests in resisting low-carbon transitions. Negotiations may take two or three years, followed by a two-way long-term commitment to implementation.

In JETPs and other bilateral deals, the EU and G7 could include more cooperation on green innovation (including on intellectual property) and joint demonstration projects, as outlined in earlier ECFR publications. The EU could, for example, set up a ‘co-innovation and green-tech diffusion fund’, partly financed from the CBAM and the existing emissions trading system. It could also better mainstream industrial transformation in action plans under the NDICI/Global Europe cooperation strategy. Enhanced possibilities for researchers and institutes in the global south to participate in EU-funded research and development programmes would also be a positive step.

Linking like-minded initiatives to broader multilateral processes
These initiatives offer the chance to create a new momentum among states willing to take ambitious steps to embrace a green transition. But they will only be seen as legitimate and contribute to addressing the global dimension of climate change if they sit within a broader collective framework. To bridge the current trust gaps, especially between the global south and north, it is vital that countries are not left behind. It will therefore be necessary to address the following three areas in particular: finance, sectorial transformations, and institutional structures.

Delivering on climate finance
Climate finance forms a scattered landscape that is not easy for recipient countries to navigate. Coordination is badly needed, and is to some extent taking place through joint platforms such as JETPs. Multilateral banks also play a key role as major actors in this field.

Redeeming trust will cost rich countries money – and a precondition for better cooperation is rapid delivery of financial support, including the promise of $100 billion annually which was meant to be achieved by 2020.

Finding substantial funds will not be easy in an economic downturn with public finances strained by Russia’s war on Ukraine and its consequences. Leaders of OECD countries need to recognise the linkages between geopolitics and climate promises: climate funding is an important way to secure a global public good, but it is also a vital step towards maintaining strong and supple alliances in the global south, when Russia and China are stepping up their quest for influence.

Developed countries need to commit to new financing as well as meet existing obligations, specifically to support the ‘new collective quantified goal’ from 2025 – funds COP21 had agreed to find after the annual $100 billion target. But quality is as important as quantity. More funding is needed for adaptation, and this should involve more grants. (Loans made up 71 per cent of public climate finance in 2020.)

Beyond climate finance as defined in the UNFCCC decisions, there should be a clear link to greening all financial flows, as foreseen in the Paris agreement. Global coordination is needed on standards for sustainable finance (such as the EU taxonomy), green bonds, mandatory disclosure of climate risks in the financial sector, active use of instruments for de-risking green investments, and more. Countries such as Indonesia should be assisted so they can break long-term contracts on building new coal plants. And developing countries need support to be able to make better use of the income from their natural resources.

Within the IMF, rich countries need to make more effort to redistribute special drawing rights to the global south. Debt relief through multilateral financial institutions is essential to ease the pressure on many vulnerable countries. Renewed impetus for the ‘Debt Service Suspension Initiative’, and well-designed ‘debt-for-climate swaps’ can be part of the solution. European governments and institutions should give effective support to the ‘Bridgetown Agenda’, an initiative unveiled in September by Barbados’s prime minister Mia Mottley. This advocates a programme of debt relief and World Bank reforms to enhance climate resilience in poor countries that was devised jointly with the UN and civil society groups.

Calls for the reform of World Bank structures and programmes have grown stronger, as has criticism of the present leadership. The bank has a central role and should increase funding for climate mitigation and adaptation measures, adopt stricter ‘do no harm’ principles for all its actions, and become more transparent on how money is used.

At multilateral development banks, lending that de-risks climate investments should be significantly increased, as described in a G20-commissioned independent expert report. US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, recently said she could see a case for multilateral development bank funds “to help middle-income countries transition away from coal in the context of accelerating the clean energy transition”.

Better horizontal mechanisms for cooperation on low-carbon transitions are needed to avoid complicated country-by-country agreements. Smaller and ‘weaker’ countries in the global south fear they will not get the same support for low-carbon transitions as JETP countries. A twin-track approach could include stronger action by the World Bank and the multilateral development banks, including the European Investment Bank.

Scaling up carbon pricing cooperation could also feature in a twin-track approach. Current cooperation between like-minded countries, such as the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action and the International Carbon Action Partnership, could benefit from strengthening multilateral institutions such as the current small group in the World Bank that supports governments in this area.

Pushing sectorial transformations forward
While sectorial transformation is a major focus of the flexible initiatives discussed above, it also needs to be taken forward at a global level.

The energy crisis poses a challenge for the climate agenda as, unlike climate and food, there is no global institution for energy governance. The IEA’s membership is limited in principle to OECD countries. Many facets of energy cooperation are dispersed within the UN system, but no single agency pulls them together. The UNFCCC process on its own is ill-equipped to address the complex linkages between climate and energy policies.

In many countries without domestic oil and gas reserves the economic situation is deteriorating and energy poverty is increasing. This puts increased pressure on large parts of the global south, already facing rising debt.

Although there are already important programmes to support energy transitions in the global south, such efforts need to be reinforced. Multilateral banks in particular have a responsibility to increase their efforts to de-risk investments, as discussed in the previous section. The EU and other parts of the global north also need to step up short-term support to countries that are especially vulnerable to the present energy crisis. This could include far bigger efforts to jointly promote energy efficiency.

But the salience of high energy prices and energy scarcity also presents opportunities for progress on climate change.

Already, coordination of international assistance for low-carbon transitions in the power sector has improved through initiatives such as the Climate Investment Platform. The World Bank bodog online casino has taken on other projects such as the Accelerating Coal Transition Investment Program and many shareholders are demanding more action. Philanthropic investors and development banks have together launched the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, with significant resources.

In addition to accelerating renewable energy investments, now is also the time to do more for energy efficiency at the global level. IEA and Clean Energy Ministerial programmes for efficient appliances can, for example, be developed into international agreements on ambitious minimum standards. Increased development finance in this area would facilitate consensus. In the long run, global energy governance needs to become more inclusive, which will require reforms to the IEA.

In addition to getting rid of fossil fuels, many countries in the global south aspire to achieve their own green industrial development. Alongside like-minded initiatives in this area, Europe should promote the strengthening of UN bodies (such as UNIDO) in this field, including the Industrial Deep Decarbonisation Secretariat and the Climate Technology Centre and Network. EU and G7 members should also increase their contributions to the industrial decarbonisation fund within the World Bank’s Climate Investment Fund.

Standardisation is another crucial area. Global agreements are needed on such things as measuring the carbon content of products and on hydrogen safety. This is a potential task for an international hydrogen alliance. Current public-private projects are important, but stronger government-to-government cooperation is also necessary. Developing countries need economic support to participate actively.

There could also be further international steps on the transport sector. Near-zero-emission vehicles are a growing part of the global market. Coalitions of the willing aim to accelerate the deployment. One of the goals for the Breakthrough Agenda is to ensure that “zero-emission vehicles are the new normal and are accessible, affordable, and sustainable in all regions by 2030”.

However, global governance on the decarbonisation of transport is less developed than in the power sector. Scope exists to scale up cooperation on developing countries’ low-carbon transitions: for example, by investing in charging infrastructure, financial and technical support for local industrial development (such as electric vehicles in South Africa), and coordinated actions on sustainable supply chains (such as batteries). Most major car producing countries (though not China) are members of the Zero Emission Vehicles Transition Council. Its ambitions to work closely with developing countries are encouraging.

In parallel, established international organisations need to do more: the World Bank’s Global Facility for Decarbonizing Transport needs replenishment. The World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulation is another important arena. More can be done on standardisation of charging.

Outside the road transport sector, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) have been slow to respond to climate change. It is laudable that they have now made some progress, but fundamental issues such as the strong influence of vested commercial interests urgently need to be addressed.

Conditions for agriculture and forestry are changing because of climate change, while the sectors themselves are significant sources of emissions. More is required at the global level to promote climate-resilient agriculture with lower environmental impacts. This puts new demands on the Food and Agriculture Organisation and other international organisations such as the UN development programme (UNDP). Efforts to combat deforestation need to be intensified. Multilateral banks and other donors should prioritise these areas and international cooperation on research and development should be intensified.

Institutional reforms
There is also scope to strengthen international institutions active on climate change. It is necessary to provide the UNEP, the UNDP, the UNFCCC Secretariat, and other UN institutions with better possibilities to act. Multilateral organisations in the climate and development fields are often understaffed and in need of stronger leadership at various levels. The EU can strengthen trust in multilateral systems’ ability to deliver by contributing to institutional capacity-building.

Work should continue on an UNFCCC work programme on mitigation, based on the Glasgow Climate Pact. If the formal COP27 decision in Egypt on this topic turns out to be mostly procedural, the ministerial roundtable and other activities around COP27 could be used to give some momentum to further action in 2023. It would also be helpful to support developing countries in the measurement and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. Without good systems, companies in the global south might be disadvantaged, for instance, under the CBAM. While the EU’s NDICI/Global Europe programme can support this bilaterally, member states can contribute more to existing multilateral initiatives within the WTO.

The ‘coalitions of the willing’ commitments in Glasgow on low-carbon steel, zero-emission vehicles, and green hydrogen will be taken forward through Mission Innovation, in which many – but not all – governments participate. As discussed above, it would be useful to strengthen UNIDO to facilitate green industrial development in developing countries.

As the UNFCCC secretariat has only a limited mandate to review and draw conclusions from countries’ NDCs, it is useful for other actors to do so (non-state actors like OECD/IEA/UNEP) and help to ensure the ‘global stocktake’ yields more ambitious NDCs in the next round. Better use could be made of the IPCC in this regard.

The OECD has already contributed to enhanced climate action ambitions in Latin American countries through its accession process and cooperation with emerging markets. The OECD’s analytical capabilities could be of considerable use to advance mutual learning on mitigation action plans, if coupled with cooperation with UN institutions.

Aligning trade and climate action and defusing tensions
Tensions over the CBAM proposal show that trade is an increasingly pressing question in climate multilateralism. This is true both globally and in bilateral or plurilateral relations.

The US-EU steel agreement of October 2021 envisages cooperation on promoting low-carbon steelmaking and tariffs towards other countries with higher emissions. However, as one senior EU official expresses it,[3] there is no established “landing zone” on trade in steel if the US does not introduce federal carbon pricing or equivalent measures.

There are also other hazards for the EU-US relationship. The US relies largely on subsidies to promote low-carbon technologies: the new Inflation Reduction Act includes financial support for green products such as US-made cars. Carbon pricing at the federal level seems a long way off. However, the EU has questioned whether some of the new US green subsidies are compatible with WTO rules.

Templates for the discussion of green subsidies exist in many bilateral and plurilateral trade agreements, such as the EU-Japan and EU-UK agreements. The EU and the US need to prevent trade conflicts over the CBAM and the Inflation Reduction Act by agreeing on a common approach to subsidies in sectors such as steel and autos.

China, Japan, South Korea, and some other countries with financial heft are also using subsidies to promote low-carbon production, while many developing countries lack such financial muscle. To ease tensions, richer countries need to step up support for green economic development in the global south, for instance by increasing Aid for Trade.

It may be helpful to consider reforms to the WTO agreement on subsidies and countervailing measures to state more clearly that environmental protection is a viable reason for subsidies and agree under which conditions this should apply. Reducing trade barriers for environmental goods and services is another important area.

A crucial role for the European Union
The EU should take a leading role in all of this. As argued in an earlier ECFR publication, the union is uniquely positioned to act as a ‘midwife’ for stronger global climate action.

To do so, the EU needs to repeat the success story of the Paris agreement negotiations and forge alliances with the global south. The EU should renew its relations with the group of least developed countries and small island developing states, amid growing criticism of insufficient European action.

In addition to the measures discussed above, to bridge the current trust gap, the EU needs to deliver on its own commitments, including Ursula von der Leyen’s promise that the EU’s Global Gateway infrastructure programme will lead to massive (€150 billion) investments in Africa. Making this a reality will require better ‘Team Europe’ thinking between member states and with the European Commission.

It is not always easy to show immediate benefits from emissions cuts in poor countries with many investment needs – including more transportation and power generation. The EU should transpose its (domestic and international) leadership on air and water pollution to demonstrate co-benefits such as how curbing coal-fired power or diesel fuels produces swift reductions in both respiratory problems and carbon emissions.

Cooperation within the UNEP and UN Conventions in areas other than climate shows how ‘coalitions of the willing’ can work well alongside multilateral processes. The goodwill the EU has in such contexts could be better deployed for international climate action.

Effective policies depend greatly on action in sectors that fall outside the remit of ministries for climate and environment. When it comes to energy, the EU already has a strategy for its relations with other parts of the world. In a similar way, external relations strategies for industry, transport, and financial services need to be developed, both to facilitate climate cooperation and build the necessary trust to secure critical supply chains.

Finally, the EU needs to deliver at home to be convincing in international forums. Rapid agreement between the European Parliament and Council on the Fit for 55 package to facilitate 55 per cent emissions cuts by 2030 would enhance the EU’s legitimacy and show its partners that low-carbon transitions offer answers to the energy crises in many parts of the world.

Conclusions and recommendations
The global context for climate policy is changing amid growing geopolitical tensions. To adapt, the EU should do more to understand and engage with the domestic political concerns surrounding climate politics elsewhere in the world. It needs to take a more varied approach to promote international action against global warming. Indeed, it has already started doing so. This paper has assessed efforts by the EU and its member states to put in place a twin-track strategy on climate multilateralism and identified how it might best be developed and implemented. Here, we identify a few priorities for future action.

Despite public finances being under strain everywhere, it is crucial to deliver on climate financing and the broader issue of financial flows. This spending cannot be delayed, as the next few years represent a critical moment in the effort to limit climate change. Moreover, the EU needs to see climate finance in a geopolitical perspective, as one of the necessary steps to counter Chinese and Russian influence in the global south. Specific measures should include further efforts to redistribute the special drawing rights within the IMF.

In particular, there need to be concrete steps towards increased finance for adaptation, which has become a political flashpoint – encapsulating perceptions of wealthy nations’ indifference and unfairness. Specifically, the German and G7 climate ‘loss-and-damage’ proposals and plans for a climate insurance and resilience ‘umbrella’ (‘global shield’) will lack sufficient appeal without more grants for investments in resilience.

To gain trust and forge true north-south alliances, the EU and member states should support low-carbon industrial transitions, not just the deployment of renewable energy. JETPs should proceed from the industrial development ambitions of countries in the global south. More steps should be taken on co-innovation and technology diffusion promotion: the EU should set up a specific fund for this purpose.

The same applies to the G7’s climate club, if implemented: efforts to accelerate decarbonisation need to be truly inclusive of other parts of the world. Voluntary commitments to climate action by governments in ‘coalitions of the willing’ need to be more clearly linked to the UNFCCC, including through a substantial work programme for mitigation up to 2030. It will not be easy to agree on such a programme, even if it does not entail additional commitments, but the EU should make it a requirement for compromise in other areas.

The EU and member states should be prepared to manage the fallout from a potentially conflict-ridden COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, and find pathways in 2023 towards progress at COP28 in Qatar and COP29 in Europe or Australia. This should include the ‘global stocktake’, and support for the UN secretary general’s preparations for the Summit of the Future in September 2024. Progress on JETPs and on climate finance will also be vital.

To strengthen the institutional capacity of the multilateral climate regimes, UN bodies such as UNEP, UNIDO and the UNFCCC need appropriate resources. Sectorial bodies such as ICAO for aviation and IMO for shipping need to make climate action a real priority. Reform of the World Bank is urgently needed. Existing financial instruments such as the Climate Investment Funds need replenishment and access to the Green Climate Fund should be facilitated.

The risk of ‘trade wars’ over carbon border measures and national subsidies should be taken seriously. It is important to hold the G7 together by finding common guidelines on subsidies to ‘green industry’ – preferably within the WTO, but between the OECD countries as a first step.

The current energy crisis threatens global climate cooperation. The EU needs to increase short-term support to developing countries that are vulnerable to high global energy prices. In the longer run a more inclusive global governance on energy needs to be developed, in part by giving the global south greater influence in the IEA.

The EU should find a more constructive strategy for WTO negotiations on all topics related to climate, including intellectual property rights. To facilitate agreements, green ‘Aid-for-Trade’ programmes should be expanded.

The EU should also strengthen its climate diplomacy in the widest sense, improving coherence between policy areas and developing external sectorial strategies for climate-related topics in areas such as industrial policy, the financial sector, and food.

This paper was made possible by a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the authors would like to thank the foundation for its generous support. A draft version of the paper was discussed at an online workshop in September 2022, the participants’ comments were extremely helpful. The authors are also grateful for the help of their ECFR colleagues Susi Dennison, Kadri Liik, and Janka Oertel. Thanks also to Mary Hennock for editing the paper.

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The most important legacy from the 20th century for international relations, next to the Allies winning the Second World War, was the creation of the liberal international economic order. The postwar economic structure that the Allies put into place underwrote the ensuing peace. It provided a foundation and made room for the creation of the European Economic Community and the European Union, which has now become the largest trading Member of the World Trade Organization. The Allies set in motion the process of integration of most of the world’s nations into the global economy. It has been an engine for prosperity, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, particularly in Asia.

A central pillar of the order has been and remains the multilateral trading system. The system is nearing its Diamond Jubilee next year at age 75. There is, for the first time, a question of whether the nations of the world will squander their inheritance, whether the WTO can fulfill its promise, and whether the liberal international order will survive intact. It is true that there was recently a reprieve. The Trade Ministers of 164 economies came together in June and agreed to a series of decisions, most notably to begin to save the world’s fish stocks from unbridled subsidized fishing. But their items of agreement were largely a way station, marking works in progress. The outcomes consist largely of a number of promissory notes – matters that the Members said that they would resolve. These notes are going to be coming due very soon. In 1998, when the predecessor agreement to the WTO, the GATT (General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade) reached its 50th anniversary, world leaders, including Presidents Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and EU Commission President Jacques Santer, gathered in Geneva to celebrate what had been accomplished in the creation and continuous improvement of the multilateral trading system, they expressed their hopes for the future of the newly established World Trade Organization (WTO). The Prime Minister of Norway, Kjell Magne Bondevik, in his remarks on that occasion, provided a sense of the history that had led to the creation of the WTO. This is what he said:

No one can tell what a different system – or indeed what an absence of multilateral trade rules – might have led to. Looking back, I believe it is fair to say that the provisions and principles of the GATT – and later of the WTO – have made a decisive contribution to the progress large parts of the world have witnessed during the latter part of this century. I am not speaking of economic growth alone, but just as much of the social achievements, employment and political stability which prosperity generates. These are fundamental values. The multilateral trading system of today thus constitutes an important part of a global framework that fosters stability and peaceful relations.

The Prime Minister also noted that there were challenges. He was concerned even then, a quarter of a century ago, about an adverse reaction to globalization, the “fear that our democratic institutions are losing control of the international economic forces and that environmental and social costs will be high”. He also was worried about the ability of the least developed countries to benefit from the trading system. He saw a need for the Members of the WTO to discuss how the qualitative aspects of trade – such as health, consumer protection, food safety, and the environment – could be brought more into focus. He said that labor standards should also be an issue for consideration by the WTO. His words stand before us today as a clear statement of much of the unfinished business of shaping the multilateral trading system. Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, speaking at the same event in 1998, said that he
believed that the WTO would need another 20-25 years to complete the rules of the trading system. Meeting here today, we now know for certain that there is no end date to the necessary evolution of the rules. The questions before us are: (1) whether the world’s trading nations will come together to cooperate to sustain the multilateral trading system, and (2) whether they will agree on improvements to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to meet current challenges. To answer these two questions, we need to consider two environments that will shape potential international trade cooperation: one is external to the WTO, the forces that undermine or aid the process of nations working together, and the other is internal, relating to whether change is needed in how the WTO is currently structured and operates, whether Bodog Poker it is fit for purpose.

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The massive economic gains and relative peace of the second half of the twentieth century owe much to this post-war global architecture, which includes the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), NATO, the World Health Organization, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). But the upheaval in recent years from the 2008 global financial crisis and the US-China trade war to the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a rising tide of nationalism and protectionism—a kind of global pushback against multilateralism.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year represented a failure of these multilateral institutions to stop a major war. But as organizations such as NATO have found renewed purpose in coming to Ukraine’s aid and punishing Russia, the conflict has underscored the importance of these institutions. On its own, a single nation cannot contain Russian aggression any more than it can take on the other pressing problems of our age, such as climate change, socioeconomic inequality, food insecurity, supply-chain disruptions, or inflation. Solving these problems will require an inclusive global compact that transcends governments, the UN, and specialized organizations.

Here are three places to start:

First, the multilateral system needs to be restructured from closed to more collaborative, with more trust-building cooperation between regional and global organizations. While the UN’s work with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a good illustration of regular and active cooperation, today’s networked world calls for increased efforts. They must be framed within a broader multilateralist discussion that fosters inclusivity and provides a mechanism for regional concerns to be fed into policy decisions. Partnerships like this need to be guided by pragmatism, with each organization building on its strengths. Regional organizations, for instance, have historical ties and can be more capable of implementing global policies due to their knowledge of regional challenges. More interactions between the UN and regional organizations will build trust, maximize efficiency across all UN domains, and establish knowledge-transfer mechanisms. To put this vision into practice, an independent expert body should map out the regional organizations’ capabilities in different areas such as security and conflict resolution. Then, the UN should establish an official partnership with selected regional organizations, which could include regular meetings between the leaders of members of the UN Security Council and heads of the regional organization, or an annual meeting for top UN officials from the Security Council, General Assembly, UN agencies, and all regional organizations.

Second, the Bretton Woods Institutions must utilize their capabilities to enhance investments in global public goods. These are broadly shared, non-exclusive benefits such as the environment, health, peace, security, and technology. In today’s interconnected global economy, climate change, pandemics, financial crises, and regional conflicts create cascading challenges across borders, with the most acute effects often felt among the poorest countries and marginalized communities. Investing in global public goods will compete with traditional financial assistance. However, today’s agenda has shifted from country-specific issues to global ones. This requires multilateral banks to pivot away from their traditional country-focused models and prioritize global public goods investments. This is crucial for promoting the sustainable advancement of poor and rich countries, enabling inclusive economic growth, and reducing poverty and inequality. One way to accomplish this is through enhanced partnerships with regional development banks to facilitate public goods investments in low-income countries.

Third, the new multilateralism must embrace its global role in driving data governance and the digital economy. While data presents incredible opportunities, it also poses risks in terms of misuse and cybersecurity. There are many governments attempting to leverage the global digital economy for domestic economic growth, but dozens of governments have enacted measures that prevent data from flowing across borders. Multilateral organizations such as the WTO should establish data-governance frameworks and common standards to combat the trend of data localization and foster cross-border data sharing and public-private data collaboration. They should also play a role in helping governments maintain a strong national statistical system, develop talent, and foster cybersecurity solutions and data-governance policies. Also, more actions are needed to enable governments to utilize data ecosystems. For instance, the UN Development Program and the Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology are promoting the concept of open technology, This concept aims to enable the development of solutions that are made available for anyone to adapt. Examples are digital public goods (DPGs), such as open source software, and digital public infrastructure (DPIs), such as payment systems. Moving forward, it is key to further develop country capacity, which requires multilateral actors to come together so that no one is left behind in the deployment of DPGs-DPIs.

The world leaders gathering in New York this week face a world growing more volatile by the day—and they are acting within a system ill-equipped to handle the moment. To meet today’s challenges and take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities, they must change how they work and rethink multilateralism.

By Yomna Gaafar, assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center.

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Taking Exception: The Problems with a “Partial Liberal” Order

Aaron Friedberg recently published an important, thought-provoking article in these pages that examines the evolution of the international economy over the last two centuries and possible scenarios for how the current era of globalization may fail or be reconstructed.1 We commend the analysis of past phases of globalization but take issue with the likelihood and desirability of his proposed “value-based” free world trade bloc, which he calls “Globalization 2.5.” Friedberg dismisses the possibility of repairing and updating the current international system to reflect the redistribution of wealth and power from West to East and North to South. While he discusses a region-centric global economic order, his preferred outcome is a U.S.-led “partial liberal” order. However, such a framework would institutionalize a fragmented, conflict-prone world based more on power and less on rules.

The notion of a “democracies only” world order reflects the logic of the Biden administration’s “democracy vs. autocracy” strategy, but with respect to it fashioning a stable and prosperous world, it is a dubious proposition. For starters, China is the world’s largest trading power (its total export-imports were $4.2 trillion in 2021), the leading trade partner of U.S. allies and partners in Europe and Asia, and a major exporter of capital.2 Moreover, the neutral response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by most of the world — including democracies such as India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey — shows that these countries are more motivated by interests than by democratic values. Beyond fashioning legal and institutional frameworks for global trade and investment to operate in, the administration’s requirement now is to make sure that such trade and investment favor U.S. interests. The Biden administration, for example, wants to prevent any new trade regimes from hurting the middle class, even though there are inevitably going to be some losers when openings in trade are made.

The United States could do better by closing the skills-job opening gap and helping the American middle class compete by providing improved retraining and more life-long learning opportunities, as well as a stronger social safety net, including portable healthcare, universal daycare, and more generous unemployment insurance linked to retraining. Of course, trade politics include a significant amount of market intervention and managed trade — imposing quotas and voluntary export restraints, or putting in place tariffs when another’s trade practices are deemed to be unfair or in order to protect strategic industries — and demonstrate clear results from such measures.3 Yet, there seems to be an increasing temptation among foreign policy strategists to believe that China will either acquiesce to perpetual U.S. primacy or that it can simply be isolated from U.S.-led political and economic structures. This implies that the United States and its allies can redesign the world to please their preferences for democratic liberalism without regard for other countries. But when, over the past several centuries, has there been a stable world order absent the inclusion or a considered balance of the major economic and military powers, particularly China and Russia?

Technology, Economics, and Politics

To our minds, the proposal for a “partial liberal trading system,” is inconsistent with Friedberg’s elegant summary analysis of how periods of globalization over the past 200 years have come about and operated: namely that economics, in terms of market trends and other forces such as technology, has historically been the driver of globalization. Politics, on the other hand, may have established a favorable framework for globalization, but it has been unable to orchestrate it fully.

We take the point in Robert Gilpin’s prescient assessment, cited by Friedberg, regarding the reciprocal relationship between politics and economics, wherein economics redistributes wealth and power, which leads to political changes and reordered politico-economic relationships. But this model overstates the role of politics and underestimates the role of technology. Politics does create the framework in which economics operates, but within that framework — the enabling security structures and sets of rules and regulations — economics is driven by its own imperatives that redistribute wealth and power. In Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th century, economic expansion led to the development of external markets for Western exports and imports of commodities and other essential goods. These economic exchanges helped America’s trading partners — including China — to grow and compete. Some forecasts anticipate that China will outgrow the United States as measured in market exchange terms by the early 2030s.4 China’s stunning ascendency since 1978 is testimony to how economic growth upsets power balances,5 in this case triggering a U.S. backlash and a corresponding shift of U.S. views of China that Friedberg ably chronicles.

Economics has also driven calls in the United States and, to a degree, other Western countries, for changing how globalization operates in order to better protect their interests. In a sense, having pressed liberalization on everyone else and then lost the agency to run the global economy after World War II, Washington wants to re-work who’s in and who’s out to ensure continued hegemony. Friedberg’s solution to the problems with the current trading system would be a “world in which the advanced industrial democracies of Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere band together to form a free trade area and perhaps a full economic bloc.” This is wishful thinking. Such an alternative to the current global economy is unrealistic and would be disruptive, ultimately undermining U.S. and Western prosperity and potentially increasing the risk of great-power conflict — a risk that is already unacceptably high.

The historical cases that Friedberg supplies illustrate the importance of economics and technology over politics. This is strengthened if one considers the first cycle of economic globalization that took place more than two millennia ago under the Han dynasty, a case that Friedberg omitted: the Silk Road, which connected Asia and the Middle East to Europe with variations (e.g., Venice’s maritime empire) until roughly 1500.6 There were minimal rules in this system, and it was driven mainly by power, ambition, and the desire for profit. Friedberg’s “Globalization 1.0,” (1815–1914), facilitated as much by rapid technological change (the telegraph, railroads, steam engines) as by a post-Napoleonic political framework, was largely based on Britain’s and other Western countries’ comparative advantage and thirst for the raw materials that were provided by Europe’s colonies in Africa, Asia, Caribbean, and other regions. It was the politics of nationalism and anti-colonialism more than redistributed wealth that produced World War I, thus ending that period of globalization.

The post-World War II Bretton Woods system was a wildly successful partial-liberal order centered in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The crafters of this system were intent on learning from the mistakes of hyper-nationalism and protectionism that characterized the inter-war period. The system had a rules-based architecture that was open and mutually beneficial and that worked to no small degree because of relatively open U.S. markets and a hegemonic enforcer that underpinned the system. The self-imposed separation by the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries helped set its limits. As John Ruggie argues (which Friedberg cites), one reason for the post-Cold War resilience of the Bretton Woods system, current problems notwithstanding, is that even absent a hegemon, if there is a sense of common purpose and shared interests, a multilateral structure can still function.7 Bretton Woods partners felt they were receiving enough mutual benefit to sustain the system, regardless of whether a hegemon was involved. But as Europe and Japan rebuilt and became industrial competitors by the 1980s, the generosity of America’s relatively open markets became increasingly problematic for Americans who saw those whom they had defeated gaining economically on the United States. Washington struck back, as showcased in the 1980s U.S.-Japanese trade wars in which Japanese auto companies were pressured into investing their profits in building new factories in America.

As globalization took off at the end of the Cold War, the Bretton Woods trade and financial system, fueled by the IT revolution and global supply chains, expanded exponentially to former Warsaw Pact nations and to emerging economies like Brazil, India, and East Asia writ large, as well as China and even Russia itself. The result was a new global middle class, but also new vulnerabilities that manifested in financial crises in Latin America (most pronounced in the 1980s but episodic and ongoing in Argentina and several other countries), the 1998 Asian financial crisis, and eventually the meltdown of the whole system in the 2008 Western financial crisis.8 All of this affirms Gilpin’s point about trade redistributing wealth and, in turn, leading to changes in political fortunes, such as America’s relative decline. While it is still a work in progress, we have seen some change in the character and scope of globalization. Capital controls are one such shift, as well as a proliferation of regional and extra-regional trade arrangements. A polycentric world also faces unprecedented uncertainty about the future of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) role as the arbiter of global trade, as the failure of the Doha Round of global trade liberalization underscored.9

At present, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and rapid digitization have shown that economics tends to race ahead of governance. This was illustrated by China’s unprecedented economic success in recent decades, outgrowing the political framework of the trading system, going from $150 billion in GDP in 1978 to $18 trillion in 2021 with an average 10 percent annual growth from 1978 to 2021.10 China’s gaming of the system led to a shattering of U.S. myths that economic reform leads to wider liberalization and a realization that China’s state-centric model was a different type of capitalism, something that President Donald Trump called out.11

Repairing the Current System

Instead of proposing an improbable strategy for a return to a partial globalization centered on the “free world,” Friedberg may have done better to show that the current, flawed system of globalization can be repaired. This would preserve, if not boost, current benefits for the United States and the rest of the world. In Friedberg’s account of the breakdown of “Globalization 2.0,” China is largely at fault. Nobody denies that China has never fulfilled the promises it made to liberalize its internal market at the time of its 2001 accession to the WTO. Beijing is also, as Friedberg charges, engaged in rampant intellectual theft to help it become a tech giant, but this is not the most important factor in its rapid technological ascent. Missing in Friedberg’s analysis are U.S. causes for America’s disenchantment with globalization. As Adam Posen has argued in a recent Foreign Affairs article, the “United States has, on balance, been withdrawing from the international economy for the past two decades.”12 The jobs lost to Chinese competition have, in fact, been relatively small — namely, two million jobs lost between 2000 and 2015 out of a workforce of 150 million, or roughly 130,000 workers a year.13

So why the public backlash against globalization and China? Part of the reason, Posen argues, concerns the “fetishization of manufacturing jobs.” The United States has been steadily losing manufacturing jobs, with many of the losses coming from electorally important states, giving the issue more prominence. But why shift all the blame onto China? While Beijing bears much of the blame, the United States has been woefully remiss in helping redundant workers find new employment through retraining. Policies encouraging U.S. offshore investment in global supply chains until very recently also contributed to the problem. According to a 2021 study by the American Enterprise Institute, U.S. “federal spending on worker training has fallen over the past few decades as a share of GDP.”14 U.S. states have traditionally played an important role in trade adjustment, but in the aggregate, there has also been a decline in trade funding assistance since the 1980s. Other advanced economies do much better in terms of funding both social safety nets and skills training: The United States is second to last in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s ranking of countries that provide public spending to support job readiness and matching skills to jobs.15 Fashioning a more robust social safety net and better equipping bodog poker review the workforce with the skills needed to advance in a rapidly changing 21st-century workplace might restore trust in freer trade.

It is not only on trade that the United States has turned against the rest of the world. Anti-immigrant feeling has also exploded, although there is little evidence that unskilled immigrants are going to take away highly paid jobs.16 In fact, the U.S. economy can’t run without immigrants. The turn inward and opposition to globalization is as much cultural and psychological as it is based on rational interests. Disregarding history and the distributive effects of trade, Americans always tended to assume that their country would be an outright winner of globalization.

European countries have been much less enamored with globalization, fearing that their industries would lose out. As Friedberg points out, globalization was sold in the mid-1990s by President Bill Clinton as the motor for achieving the “end of history.” But there was little understanding of how globalization leads to more — not less — strategic competition. One reason for this may be that America’s rise to become one of the great economic powers by the end of the 19th century came about because of Britain’s embrace of free trade and its support for globalization. A better appreciation at the outset of the challenges of economic competition might have pushed the United States toward a Sputnik-like “self-improvement” program, rendering it better prepared for the inevitable competition from China and other emerging markets.

Instead of throwing the globalization baby out with the bath water, America can still try to repair the flaws in globalization’s workings. What’s wrong with putting pressure on China by rounding up allies to force Beijing to mend its ways on IP theft and lack of market access or risk losing global markets? China’s growth remains dependent on trade, and China is the biggest trading partner of many U.S. allies.

Sacrificing Globalization 2.0 and trying to build a partial replacement anchored in the “free world” carries a number of risks. For starters, it is not a given that the United States can harmonize its views on trade and regulation with those of the European Union, which has been integrating its trade with Asia and Latin America. Globalization 2.0 has also been the vehicle for many developing countries to enrich themselves, reduce poverty, and build middle classes, which, over time, can bolster the chances of democratization and liberal market reforms. A partial liberal trade system that leaves out a good part of the world would increase the chances of conflict and make authoritarianism more likely, leaving the developing world more dependent on China.

In all of this, there needs to be a better understanding of the limits of America’s power to impose its will. It may have worked for Dean Acheson, but that time is long past. It is U.S. hubris and concern over America’s unreliability that has prompted Europe and much of Asia to hedge against the United States. Look at E.U. trade and investment deals with Japan, China, and other Asian and Latin American states,17 and consider Asia, with its new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership accord,18 which does not include America. Though Friedberg minimizes the effort required to achieve consensus, he is right about the importance of mobilizing democracies and other like-minded states to forge a common position on trade issues, but that should not be an end in itself. Precisely because of the limits of U.S. agency, working with allies and partners makes sense in order to maximize America’s leverage to shape global rules and norms, but it should not be a substitute for global rules.

With only 18 percent of the world economy, is it not possible that China would alter its policies to sustain access to global markets,19 particularly now, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to a state-centric, investment-driven economic model that no longer works?20 The same Chinese Communist Party of the Great Leap Forward disaster and the maniacal cultural revolution self-corrected by enacting Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. It is worth exhausting diplomacy to test this idea before concluding that there is no difference between China’s grandiose ambitions and what it is willing to accept. That’s where coordination among democracies and the like-minded can build leverage to test the proposition. Friedberg is too quick to eliminate any role for the United States and its partners working together to update global trade and tech rules, as well as the WTO. At present, however, the mutual demonization between China and the United States, and America’s assumption that China can’t change, render such an effort difficult.

Domestic Obstacles to a Value-Based Globalization

Friedberg also ignores the growing domestic obstacles when he calls for a return to a partial, value-based globalization. President Joe Biden may have eased Trump-era steel and aluminum sanctions against European allies, but he angered those allies with his Buy American rule, using federal procurement to support American manufacturing. Biden also dismayed America’s United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement partners, when he proposed electric car subsidies for unionized U.S. carmakers,21 although it’s unclear how the subsidies will be implemented in the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. The episode has left a bad taste in the mouths of America’s closest trade partners, such as South Korea and Japan, who have been encouraged to build auto factories in the United States, and it reinforces the impression that the United States is becoming more protectionist, even with its allies.

Moreover, the Biden administration is so divided it is hard for it to make any move on trade. A recent Politico article describes the difficulty plaguing administration efforts to develop a trade strategy with Asian countries, despite the eagerness of America’s Asian allies and partners for the United States to take a more active role in trade.22 In one corner of the three-way administration division are the trade expansionists who want to tie Asian nations closer to the United States with trade deals. Then there’s the more labor-friendly faction, which wants to use tariffs and quotas to protect U.S. workers. The third camp worries that scrapping with China economically could undermine administration priorities to ease inflation and decrease supply chain bottlenecks. Even smaller trade deal ideas, such as a digital trade agreement, have met with opposition. A U.S. Trade Representative plan to launch a trade case against China’s use of industrial subsidies has also been dropped.

Then there’s Congress, which is increasingly anti-trade. Trumpist Republicans and progressive Democrats oppose any effort to resurrect the Trans-Pacific Partnership and would block America’s entry into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Both parties are fighting the last war, blaming foreign trade as the main cause of the decline of union workers and the loss of manufacturing jobs, when technological change is a major driver of job gains and losses. The problem is more the mismatch of skills to labor, one reason why the United States has some 10 million unfilled jobs.23

Administration paralysis in moving forward with any trade initiative combined with growing protectionism make it hard to envisage a “free world” free trade agreement being workable. While such an accord would seem to be in line with the administration’s anti-China and pro-democracy focus and popular with the growing anti-China congressional consensus, it would mean crafting a trade agreement that is larger than any of the administration’s smaller initiatives. Friedberg has rightly focused on the problems that China poses to the functioning of the world trading system. Yet, the current political disorder at home is as much the issue when it comes to remaking the global trading system. The fundamental problem with Friedberg’s advocacy for a free world trading system is that we cannot just wipe the slate clean and start anew.

Conclusion

There is much uncertainty about the future of the global trading system, and Friedberg nicely sketches possible alternative futures. The WTO’s role will almost certainly be diminished. There may be sector-specific global trade liberalization to come, but most likely no future global trade rounds. Trade liberalization has become more region-centric and trans-region centric, such as is the case with the U.S.-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement.24 Nonetheless, because of its near universal membership (it covers 96 percent of global trade), and its role as the only over-arching dispute settlement mechanism, the WTO remains critical to maintaining a rules-based trade regime, although both aspects of the organization are in need of major reform if the WTO is to remain relevant.25

Recent trends of regional trade clusters and the reorganization of supply chains suggest that the most probable scenario is one in which the WTO and U.N. standard-setting bodies create a loose global umbrella over regional accords. But continued trade and financial fragmentation cannot be dismissed. Protectionism — managed trade in key sectors like steel and aluminum — is on the rise. For the very reason that Friedberg highlights via Gilpin — that economics alters politics — we cannot rule out that today’s authoritarians could become tomorrow’s market-oriented democracies, as internal forces, such as growing middle classes, push for more political participation and liberalization over time.

Apart from the inertia of U.S. trade policy, market forces pose a strong obstacle to any effort to reorder trade along ideological lines that cuts out the world’s largest market and trading power. We are already seeing hints of a prospective mirror-image response to “democracies only” efforts in the February joint statement from Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, promising closer affiliation between Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.26 Similarly, Beijing has proposed a new Global Security Initiative.27

There is a complex network of trade and investment with China. U.S. corn and wheat farmers are attracted to the Chinese market, and shale producers welcome selling to the Chinese liquefied natural gas market. Boeing enjoys the Chinese commercial airline market, and Qualcomm and others like selling low-end chips for Chinese cellphones. None of this necessarily poses national security risks. A circumscribed, partial liberal trade order would defy market forces that benefit American businesses and consumers.

Strategic competition is leading to decoupling by both the United States and China where national security interests are deemed at risk, particularly in the tech sector. Fixing a global system that economics has overtaken, however problematic, still seems the most sensible strategy. Finally, with regard to the broader systemic consequences, it is worth recalling a recent cautionary note from Henry Kissinger: “Differences in ideology should not be the main issue of confrontation, unless we are prepared to make regime change the principal goal of our policy.”28

Dr. Mathew Burrows serves as director of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub and is a distinguished fellow in the Reimagining Grand Strategy program and Red Cell project at the Stimson Center. He retired in 2013 from a 28-year career at the CIA, serving the last 10 years as counselor at the National Intelligence Council.

Robert A. Manning is a distinguished fellow in the Reimagining Grand Strategy program and the Red Cell project at the Stimson Center. He was a senior counselor to the undersecretary of state for global affairs from 2001 to 2004, a member of the U.S. Department of State policy planning staff from 2004 to 2008, and a member of the National Intelligence Council strategic futures group from 2008 to 2012. Follow him on Twitter @Rmanning4.

Response to Mathew Burrows and Robert A. Manning

I appreciate the many thoughtful points that Mathew Burrows and Robert Manning raise in their reply to my article, and I am grateful for the opportunity to continue this important discussion.

In the interest of concision, I will sum up my main points in response to their arguments as bluntly as possible. First and foremost, I believe that the authors misunderstand the motivations and strategy of China’s Communist Party regime and, as a result, understate the dangers that its economic policies now pose to the welfare and security of the United States and the other advanced industrial democracies. The approach that Burrows and Manning propose, which is essentially a continuation of the one that the West has been following for the past three decades, cannot achieve the objective they set for it. The narrowing gap in power between Washington and Beijing, and the yawning divergence in their interests and values, mean that “reglobalization” is infeasible, at least for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, clinging to past policies and continuing to pursue the dream of a truly open, integrated global economy will only lead to mounting costs and risks for the United States and its like-minded partners. Creating a partial (as opposed to an all-encompassing global) economic subsystem that operates on liberal principles will have costs of its own, and its construction will require overcoming significant domestic political and diplomatic obstacles. Under present circumstances, however, it is the best available alternative.

International relations theory and the last 200 years of economic history suggest that the creation of an open global trading system requires the presence of a liberal hegemon; that the normal functioning of such systems will result in uneven rates of growth and a redistribution of wealth and power among the states that comprise them; and that the hegemon’s relative decline will give rise to pressures that can lead to an open international economy’s collapse or its fragmentation into blocs.29

Scholars have also pointed out that it may still be possible to sustain openness “after hegemony,” as Robert Keohane famously put it, provided that there is a convergence of outlook and interest among the leading powers and, in particular, a shared commitment to liberal economic principles.30 If China’s full incorporation into a globalizing world economy after the end of the Cold War had led to its political and economic liberalization, as the advocates of engagement promised and believed it would, then such cooperation might be possible.31 But that is not how things have turned out. The rise of an illiberal China and America’s relative decline are already starting to fragment the global economic system. The only questions now are exactly where the lines will be drawn and how deep the divisions will be.

China has profited greatly from the openness of its advanced industrial trading partners — it could not have developed nearly as rapidly as it has without access to their technology, capital, and markets. Instead of embracing liberal economic principles, however, China’s communist regime remains deeply committed to a set of mercantilist trade, industrial, and technology promotion policies whose market-distorting effects have now been magnified by the sheer size of the nation’s economy.32 The Chinese Communist Party has succeeded in sustaining growth without surrendering its exclusive grip on domestic political power, at least thus far, and it has no intention of changing course. Rather than let market forces and the principle of comparative advantage shape the evolution of their economy, China’s planners aim to use various forms of state intervention to undercut foreign competitors and propel their own companies to positions of dominance in semiconductors, robotics, artificial intelligence, and all of the other sectors that comprise the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Burrows and Manning call repeatedly for “repairing and updating” an open global economic order, but they do not explain how China could be compelled to play by the rules of such a revitalized system any better than it does at present. The authors are onto something when they suggest, in passing, that the United States should try “rounding up allies to force Beijing to mend its ways on IP theft and lack of market access.” But, if such a plan is to have any chance of success, it will take time and it will involve more than a few rounds of trade talks, or a few more ineffectual legal cases brought before the World Trade Organization. In fact, sustaining significant collective pressure will require creating an advanced industrial trading bloc of precisely the sort to which the authors so vehemently object. As I explain, one of the main functions of such a grouping would be to enable its members to “work together to exert leverage over Beijing, threatening to deny or restrict its access to their common market if it refuses to modify its mercantilist … policies.”

The authors make virtually no mention of geopolitics or the intensifying “systemic rivalry” that is now underway between China, the United States, and its democratic allies.33 Yet, it is impossible to make sense of Beijing’s economic policies, or to respond to them effectively, without acknowledging that their purpose is not merely to create wealth, but to enhance the power of the Chinese Communist Party and of the state that it rules. China is not just a normal trading partner that needs to be cured of some bad mercantilist habits. It is a hostile great power pursuing policies that threaten the security of the United States and the other democracies.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has made clear his intention to reduce China’s reliance on the West for technology, capital, and markets. His stated goal is to achieve greater “self-reliance,” using any means necessary to acquire and “indigenize” foreign technology, and deploying massive subsidies and all the other tools of industrial policy to help Chinese firms gain advantage across an array of new and emerging sectors.34 Through his “dual circulation” strategy, Xi aims to boost the role of domestic consumption and exports to non-Western developing nations as drivers of China’s future growth, while reducing the country’s dependence on the markets of the advanced industrial nations.35 Even as he does this, Xi has called for efforts to maintain and deepen the democracies’ dependence on China for a broad range of products and materials.

Xi likes to present himself as the defender of globalization against the forces of protectionism. What he clearly has in mind, however, is a very lopsided version of the concept, one in which Western countries remain open for as long as possible while China constricts their access to its economy and builds up a trans-regional subsystem — or bloc — with itself at the center, that extends across much of eastern Eurasia and large swaths of the global South. The purpose of all these policies is not simply, or even primarily, to enhance China’s prosperity, but rather to maximize its power: enabling it to build superior weapons and other strategic systems, but also reducing its vulnerability to foreign sanctions, technology “blockades,” or other forms of pressure, while enhancing its ability to exert leverage over others.

Contra Burrows and Manning, responding to these challenges by recreating a liberal economic bloc would not mean building a “‘democracies only’ world order” entirely decoupled from China and excluding the global South. As was true during the Cold War, I argue that a new liberal subsystem would be “nested within a larger global economy.” In contrast to the past, however, “trade and investment flows between China and the democratic bloc would continue, but they would be constricted and more closely monitored and regulated.” Among other things, the advanced democracies need to work together to maintain their edge in key technologies by coordinating more stringent policies on investment screening, export controls, and scientific and industrial cooperation. To reduce vulnerability to strategically motivated pressure or disruption, the United States and its allies will have to create incentives for private companies to restructure supply bodog poker review chains, minimizing dependence on China for select critical products and materials and constructing resilient networks of trusted producers in friendly countries. Taking the European Union’s new counter-coercion instrument as a model, democratic governments in Europe, Asia, and North America should develop a strategy of collective economic defense, making clear in advance how they will respond if Beijing tries to isolate and target one of their members.36 In addition to these measures, the advanced industrial democracies should promote their own long-term growth and make it less dependent on China’s by lowering remaining barriers to trade and investment among themselves. The democracies should also compete more vigorously with China for markets and investment opportunities in the global South, expanding two-way trade with the fastest-growing parts of the developing world.

Nevertheless, I do agree with Burrows and Manning on several points. At least for the moment, policies that would increase foreign access to the U.S. market, even for friendly countries, are political nonstarters. In part for this reason, a new economic strategy for competing more effectively with China should include measures to offset whatever negative effects it may have on American workers, consumers, and producers, and to make sure that the burdens of transition, as well as the long-term benefits, are distributed equitably across society. Even where interests and values converge, harmonizing economic and technology policies with allies will not be easy. Finally, there can be no denying that a segmented global economy will be less efficient than the unachievable ideal of a fully integrated system. Enhanced security will come at a cost. Rather than concluding that these barriers are insurmountable, however, analysts and policymakers should be working on ways to minimize and overcome them.

Burrows and Manning warn that trying to create a partial liberal order would “institutionalize a fragmented, conflict-prone world based more on power and less on rules.” But, like it or not, and despite our best efforts, that is the world in which we now find ourselves. The reason for building an economic subsystem based on liberal principles is to carve out a domain in which those principles, and the rules that derive from them, can survive, and to generate the wealth and power necessary to defend it.

Aaron L. Friedberg is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. His latest book is, Getting China Wrong (Polity Press).

To read the full piece, please click here.

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Flows of goods and services between the two countries are well below the levels one would expect for the largest and sixth-largest economies in the world, especially given their economic complementarities and the strong link created by members of the Indian diaspora in the United States. Out of context, the numbers look robust: trade between the United States and India has risen from approximately $19 billion in 2001 to almost $160 billion in 2021. But that represents only around two percent of total U.S. trade and just 12 percent of total Indian trade. Moreover, there have been frequent trade squabbles and nagging disputes between the two countries. These are due, in part, to long-standing U.S. concerns regarding market access in India and India’s sensitivities about agricultural imports and the access of its skilled professionals to the U.S. market.

The fact that efforts to advance the bilateral trade agenda have frequently fallen short does not mean either country should give up. Enhanced bilateral trade is important for growing both economies and providing long-term ballast to U.S.-India partnership. To promote their commercial and strategic objectives, the two countries must also play a central role in developing the economic framework for a free and open Indo-Pacific. Failing to do so would provide opportunities for other countries, such as China, to create a trade order that would leave India and the United States on the outside looking in.

HEADING FOR THE EXITS

In recent years, the United States and India have pulled back from shaping the Asian trade landscape. In February 2016, the United States signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, a trade pact among 12 countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, and Vietnam. The TPP never went into force, however, because in early 2017, newly elected U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly withdrew the United States from the pact. Under Japan’s leadership, the remaining 11 signatories revived the agreement and created a successor, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).

India also withdrew from a regional trade agreement. From 2013 to 2019, India was one of 16 Asian nations—including the large economies of China, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea—forging the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). As negotiations were wrapping up in November 2019, however, India pulled out, arguing that the deal would lead to a flood of imports from China, with which India already registered a sizable trade deficit. The other 15 nations signed the RCEP in late 2020, and the agreement went into effect on January 1 of this year, among ten of the signatories. (South Korea and Malaysia have subsequently joined, bumping the number to 12.)

The U.S. exit from the TPP and India’s withdrawal from the RCEP negotiations were driven, in large part, by a growing sentiment in both countries that trade deals have hurt their domestic manufacturing industries and cost middle class workers their jobs. Those concerns may well be legitimate, but failing to pursue trade deals handicaps both countries’ ability to tap foreign markets, participate in developing regional trade rules, and advance their broader objectives in the Indo-Pacific.

China, meanwhile, has pursued an expansive regional economic agenda. It was one of the first countries to ratify the RCEP agreement and encouraged others to follow suit. Last September, it unexpectedly submitted a formal application to join the CPTPP. Soon thereafter, it applied to join the regional Digital Economy Partnership Agreement, which is aimed at facilitating digital trade; its current signatories are Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, moreover, includes investments in regional infrastructure that will strengthen Beijing’s influence in Indo-Pacific countries and across the globe. The common denominator for China in all these initiatives is the ability to shape the rules for trade and investment while promoting integration with its neighbors and increasing their dependence on Beijing.

FITS AND STARTS

China’s assertive approach is a major reason why both India and the United States seem to be rethinking their economic and trade strategies, despite the domestic political headwinds: U.S. and Indian leaders understand that ceding the region to China may have irreversible consequences. Together, the U.S trade representative and India’s minister of commerce and industry have revitalized their Trade Policy Forum to discuss “the full range” of issues affecting their trade relationship. India also recently signed a trade deal with Australia and an economic partnership agreement with the United Arab Emirates, as well as launched or revived bilateral negotiations with Canada, the European Union, Israel, and the United Kingdom. At the same time, the Biden administration is putting the finishing touches on its new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) to economically reengage with this dynamic region.

This does not mean the two countries are on the verge of a bilateral breakthrough. On several occasions, the United States and India have been on the cusp of agreeing on a package of trade measures only to come up short. This occurred most recently in 2019, when the Trump administration terminated India’s designation as a beneficiary under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program, which gives duty-free treatment for imports of thousands of products from developing countries. To justify the move, Washington pointed to the fact that New Delhi had not provided the United States with “equitable access” to its market—one of the criteria for participation in the GSP.

The U.S. Congress now appears poised to renew the overall GSP program, which would provide the Biden administration with the authority to reinstate New Delhi’s GSP benefits and generate momentum for the reinvigorated Trade Policy Forum to resolve outstanding bilateral issues. This would clear out the underbrush in trade relations to allow for a more forward-looking engagement to take center stage. The two countries should also agree to a political standstill commitment to refrain from taking new trade-restrictive measures affecting each other, so that they do not end up in a situation where the deck is cleared only to be repopulated with new irritants.

In addition, Washington’s launching of the IPEF will set the agenda for U.S. economic engagement in the region, with a focus on four pillars: fair and resilient trade; infrastructure, clean energy, and decarbonization; supply chain resiliency; and tax and anticorruption. The United States is not aiming to negotiate a traditional trade pact, but rather is looking to work with multiple countries in the region on efforts to set high standards, adopt binding rules, and make softer commitments on cooperative efforts related to the four pillars.

At this point, India may not be ready to be a full member of the IPEF because of its own developmental constraints. But there may be opportunities for India to participate in certain aspects of the IPEF, such as infrastructure and resilient supply chains. For this regional economic initiative to be most meaningful, broad Indian participation should be an aspiration for both Washington and New Delhi.

THE QUAD

Another way to shape the regional economic order and counter China’s influence would be to expand the mandate of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—the grouping composed of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States known as the Quad. The Quad countries represent four of the largest and strongest economies in the region, with the United States viewing the Quad as “a premier regional grouping” that “delivers on issues that matter to the Indo-Pacific.” At this critical juncture, the Quad should get directly involved in designing regional rules and norms of commerce through the establishment of a trade working group, albeit with realistic expectations.

The Quad has carefully nurtured an expanding agenda of issues, ranging from humanitarian assistance to global health to critical and emerging technologies. Trade, however, is noticeably absent from the Quad’s agenda. This may be because a trade discussion would reveal differences among members and not readily lend itself to tangible results. But the United States already has bilateral trade agreements with Australia and Japan; those two countries, moreover, concluded an economic partnership agreement seven years ago. India has long had a similar agreement with Japan and has just signed an interim trade pact with Australia, with the aim of moving to a comprehensive agreement by the end of the year.

While Quad members are far from in sync on trade issues, these agreements provide the foundation for the Quad to begin work on select matters, adopting a building block approach. Because trade is both strategic and filled with esoteric detail, trade negotiators would benefit from having Quad leaders engaged to help them make the tough political decisions, keep the larger picture in mind, and delicately provide impetus for a pragmatic plan on trade that can help shape the regional architecture.

The trade working group could begin by considering relatively low-hanging fruit, such as trade facilitation, the behavior of state-owned enterprises, and liberalization of services sectors. Over time, the group could take on more challenging matters that originate from and build on the various bilateral agreements among the parties. The group could also address trade aspects of issues that are the focus of other Quad working groups or the IPEF, such as the digital economy, supply chains, and standards for critical and emerging technologies. To be sure, the four partners would need to be mindful of India’s different level of development. Given that a sizable portion of the Indian population lives below the poverty line, the Quad could agree to give India longer transition periods on opening its market to imports, so that farmers and family-owned businesses would have time to adjust to a steady increase of foreign products.

Some commentators have suggested that a better way to forge closer trade relations between the United States and India would be through a bilateral free trade agreement. But this would inevitably be a difficult and laborious process, with no guarantee of success. Even if India and the United States were able to hammer out such an agreement, they would still find themselves outside the economic integration underway in the region. In the meantime, China and other countries would be shaping the regional rules. As Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has pointed out in discussing the Indo-Pacific, “bilateralism has its own limits.”

DIFFICULT, BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE

Despite efforts in recent years to strengthen the U.S.-Indian trade relationship, it remains a weak component of the strategic partnership. As a result, many current and former officials in both capitals have concluded that trying to enhance relations in this area is an exercise in futility. Undoubtedly, it will be difficult, but by making the political commitment to work together on the IPEF agenda and use the Quad as a vehicle to pursue closer trade ties, the two sides can make tangible progress. Over time, they could engage a broader set of Indo-Pacific partners—including those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the CPTPP—to create a robust economic architecture for the region.

When Modi and U.S. President Joseph Biden held their first meeting in September of last year, Biden spoke of a bilateral relationship “destined to be stronger, closer, and tighter” that “can benefit the whole world.” By jointly announcing this vision for a new economic and trade strategy, and proceeding with a step-by-step approach to get there, the United States and India could reposition themselves geopolitically in the most dynamic region of the world and provide further impetus for their growth and prosperity.

Kenneth I. Juster is a Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. Ambassador to India.

Mohan Kumar is Chairman of the Research and Information System for Developing Countries and India’s former lead negotiator at the World Trade Organization.

Wendy Cutler is Vice President of the Asia Society Policy Institute and former Acting Deputy U.S. Trade Representative.

Naushad Forbes is Co-Chair of Forbes Marshall, former President of the Confederation of Indian Industry, and author of The Struggle and the Promise: Restoring India’s Potential.

To read the full commentary from Foreign Affairs, please click here. 

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The new partnership has been marketed as a strategic security alliance, with the Biden administration underscoring that “[AUKUS] is a fundamental decision—fundamental—that binds decisively Australia to the United States and Great Britain for generations.”

A key part of that binding will need to be built through strong economic ties, and the rise of a new U.S.-Australia-U.K. security alliance to potential prominence may amount to little more than hollow promises if the United States fails to demonstrate leadership in advancing free trade and investment.

If the U.S. is to be a credible leading force in the Indo-Pacific, America must prove itself a positive and dependable actor—not a reactive and unpredictable one—particularly when it comes down to trade and investment.

The U.S. can and should step up its own game considerably. Washington’s evolving efforts to become more deeply engaged in the Indo-Pacific region, raise the American profile, and elevate its participation in the region are very well advised. However, without a discernible trade component, particularly America’s leadership in building a predictable open trading environment, it will be an empty gesture.

The U.S. relationships in the region need substance, and the substance that counts in a concrete and practical way these days is trade. America should strengthen enduring alliances and build on nascent ones by increasing measurable economic opportunities and collaboration—by removing barriers to open trade.

America needs to get back to the free trade table, which will reinforce the network of alliances and partnerships America has invested in and built over decades.

It’s notable that China’s quick response to the announcement of the new U.S.-Australia-U.K. alliance was not military, but economic. In less than 24 hours, Beijing had formally applied for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), an 11-nation regional free trade agreement.

Clearly, China is aiming at flipping the strategic game plan on the United States through trade and investment.

In this evolving geostrategic context, the new U.S.-Australia-U.K. partnership must go beyond a trilateral security pact. A unique triangle network of free trade can be built upon that, and more importantly amplify the security alliance to the next level.

2020 marked the 15th anniversary of the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement. Over the years, the two allies have enjoyed greater trade and investment interaction since the pact entered into force in 2005. The agreement eliminated previous trade barriers, resulting in a doubling of trade between the two countries and a tripling of two-way investment between the two countries to about $1.3 trillion.

Like the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement, in an effort to secure and build on the already vital economic and security partnership between the U.S. and the U.K., the two nations embarked on negotiations for a long-desired free trade agreement last year, shortly after the U.K. withdrawal from the European Union.

Unfortunately, the negotiations—a high priority for both then-President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, with bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress—have been derailed at this juncture.

Worse, the recent White House summit between President Joe Biden and the U.K.’s Johnson did not provide a clear timeline for reinvigorating the stalled bilateral free trade agreement talks between Washington and London.

Revitalizing the stalled bilateral free trade negotiations with the U.K. and implementing the U.S.-U.K. Free Trade Agreement in a timely fashion is critical, now more than ever. 

The Biden administration underscored that “[f]or more than 70 years, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have worked together … to protect our shared values and promote security and prosperity. Today, with the formation of AUKUS, we recommit ourselves to this vision.”

Advancing free trade bodog poker review and investment is vital to ensuring that vision. Economic security driven by the advancement of economic freedom at home and abroad—not by the proliferation of protectionism—truly enhances national security, which in turn buttresses greater economic dynamism.

The time for Washington to act on that is now. 

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“There has always been a close relationship between RTAs and the multilateral trading system,” Director-General Okonjo-Iweala said at the Committee’s 100th session since it was first established by the General Council in 1996. “The work done by the Committee helps us understand how this relationship is evolving and is a regular reminder of how important it is for RTAs and the multilateral trading system to work towards the same goals,” she said, noting that over 190 RTAs have been reviewed in the Committee.

All 164 WTO members are party to at least one RTA and estimates suggest that close to 20% of global merchandise trade occurs between RTA partners on the basis of preferential tariff rates. Over 75% of global trade, on the other hand, occurs on most-favoured-nation (MFN) terms, underscoring the continuing commercial importance of multilateral agreements at the WTO.

“RTAs today go beyond market access in goods and services and related WTO rules,” the Director-General said. “The work of the Committee in considering these more complex trading relationships is especially valuable. Indeed, today you will be considering one of the largest and most complex RTAs, the CPTPP,” she said. The full speech can be accessed here.

The CPTPP is currently in force for seven of the 11 parties. It entered into force on 30 December 2018 for Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and Singapore and then on 14 January 2019 for Viet Nam. Singapore liberalized all its tariffs at entry into force while New Zealand will do so by 2024. Other parties will liberalize at least 95.9% of their tariff lines by 2039 at the latest. Moreover, CPTPP commitments in trade in services are in general broader than those under the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services. The CPTPP also includes commitments in investment, government procurement, intellectual property, competition, state-owned enterprises, environment, labour, electronic commerce, and small and medium enterprises.

New Zealand and Japan introduced the Agreement at the meeting on behalf of the CPTPP parties. They said the CPTPP is a trailblazer at the forefront of many issues on the wider multilateral trade agenda. They noted the parties’ continuing commitment to cooperate on economic recovery in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. They also reported that the parties decided on 2 June 2021 to start the accession process for the United Kingdom. Several members took the floor to welcome the Agreement and thank the parties for their replies to written questions.

The Committee chair, Ambassador Cleopa Kilonzo Mailu of Kenya, said the consideration of the CPTPP had allowed members to clarify a number of questions and thanked the parties for their responses.

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The chair further noted that 53 RTAs have still not been notified to the WTO. In addition, there are 72 RTAs involving WTO members and 34 involving non-members for which a factual presentation has to be prepared, counting goods and services separately. The factual presentation for six other services agreements are on hold pending the negotiations of services commitments (of these, one involves non-members). The steep increase in pending factual presentations is due to the new trade agreements between the United Kingdom and its partners following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.

The Chair said he had held consultations with delegations for which the RTA factual consideration remains delayed due to the lack of comments or data from the members involved and hoped that the outstanding information would be provided soon.

To read the original commentary by the World Trade Organization, please click here.

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Yet this year, there was a long communiqué, and it had a full section even entitled “Free and Fair Trade.” Once more, the G7 committed to championing “the rules-based multilateral system” that the previous US President so disparaged.

The G7 statement now calls “for the world’s leading democratic nations to unite behind a shared vision.” That vision is “to ensure the multilateral trading system is reformed, with a modernised rulebook and a reformed World Trade Organization (WTO) at its centre.”

This general commitment is followed by specific ones. The first stresses the need to make “progress” for the WTO’s next Ministerial Conference in November, with the hope of “a meaningful conclusion” of negotiations on fisheries subsidies. Meanwhile, subsidized fleets deplete the oceans of fish. The baseline for progress may be low, but engagement is critical.

The second expresses concern about “forced labour in global supply chains.” The statement does not call out China by name, possibly because of pushback from other G7 members, but it specifically mentions “the agricultural, solar, and garment sectors,” all of which involve production in Xinjiang.

The final paragraph commits to working together and “with the wider WTO membership” to address major issues that implicate China. Once more, China is not mentioned expressly, but the US clearly has China in its scope on “forced technology transfer, intellectual property theft, lowering of labour and environmental standards to gain competitive advantage, market-distorting actions of state owned enterprises, and harmful industrial subsidies,” and “transparency.” As I have argued elsewhere, singling out China by a so-called “alliance of democracies” is not just risky, but a mistake. The issues, however, are real.

Perhaps most interesting is the G7’s commitment to advance the “proper functioning of the WTO’s negotiating function and dispute settlement system” (emphasis added). This could have been worded more elegantly (“functioning” of a “function”?), but it is an advance.

Unstated is that there is tension—if not outright contradiction—between the G7 commitment to a “rules-based multilateral system” and the US neutering of WTO dispute settlement. Here the US remains alone among the G7 and the “broader membership.” The communiqué nonetheless offers hope here, signaling that the G7 aims to see WTO dispute settlement “function properly.”

On this front, the Biden administration’s strategy, it seems, is first to resolve disputes over the Trump tariffs imposed on G7 and other US allies, against which the allies retaliated. Resolving this dispute is politically tricky. The tariffs provide protection to the US steel industry, and that industry is in swing states that are critical for the 2022 election. The control of the US Senate and House are at stake. The Biden administration will thus proceed carefully, biding its time, consulting with labor union constituencies. Still, the two sides are making progress, agreeing to suspend new tariffs while they negotiate.

If the Biden administration can settle tariff disputes with its G7 allies, then maybe, just maybe, the US will be in a cleaner position to make concrete proposals to return to binding multilateral trade dispute settlement. Then the system might be “rule-based” once more.

Gregory Shaffer is Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine and author of Emerging Powers in the World Trading System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law.

To read the original commentary from WorldTradeLaw, please visit here

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Though global merchandise trade took a significant hit in the first half of 2020 and fell as much as 15% in the second quarter, it exhibited astonishing recovery in the second half of the year. According to a March 31, 2021, press release by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), merchandise exports fell by only 5.3% over the full year. This compares with a whopping 12% fall in 2009 following the global financial crisis. WTO predicts that merchandise exports volume would rise by 8% in 2021.

Global merchandise exports have thus survived well the onslaught of Covid-19. With vaccine supplies expected to rise at an accelerated pace globally, prospects for the WTO forecast coming true are excellent. While this fact removes weak global market as a source of worry in the immediate aftermath of Covid-19 crisis, we would still face challenges posed by the fissures and fractures in the WTO system.

Central to the enforcement of multilaterally agreed rules under the auspices of WTO is its dispute settlement body (DSB), which does for international trade disputes what domestic courts do for civil disputes. If a WTO member feels that another member has violated its trading rights enshrined in WTO rules, it can bring a case against the latter in DSB. If the initial efforts to settle the dispute through intermediation fail, DSB appoints a panel to investigate and hear the case and give a ruling. If either party is dissatisfied with the ruling by the panel, it can take the matter to the appellate body (AB). Ruling by AB is final and binding.

Judges to AB are appointed for a four-year term (renewable for at most another term) by consensus among WTO members. At any time, AB can have up to seven members of which three make the quorum for hearing a dispute.

For more than a decade, the United States has been unhappy with the rulings by AB in cases brought against it. As a result, beginning in 2011, it has been vetoing the renewal of AB members completing their first term as well as the appointment of others to succeed them.  Cumulative effect of the vetoes has been that the total number of AB members fell to two on December 11, 2019, one short of the quorum for a hearing.

Consequently, WTO is no longer able to enforce its rules. If this emboldens one or more members to begin exploiting the system by violating the rules, members whose rights are violated and are unable to seek a remedy via DSB are bound to respond in kind. That is what has happened in cases of steel and aluminum tariffs and US-China trade conflict.

While the United States has expressed its displeasure with a number of features of how DSB has operated, so far, it has not placed a proposal to reform it to WTO membership. Therefore, the path to bringing the DSB process back on track is simply not clear.

In part, the United States’ reluctance to offer a reform proposal may be rooted in its dissatisfaction with WTO on other counts, many of them centred on China. It contends that under the existing WTO rules, it is not possible to satisfactorily deal with China’s state-owned enterprises, industrial policy, subsidies and intellectual property rights violations. China for its part resents the United States for not making good on its promise to give it market-economy status.

The United States also remains unhappy with developing-country status (which qualifies them for special and differential treatment under WTO rules) to countries such as China, India and Brazil.  Additionally, it wants greater transparency and better enforcement of WTO notification obligations.

Most of these issues cannot be resolved without renegotiation of many of the current WTO rules. Unfortunately, rule-making negotiations are currently stalled and may take some years to return on track. In the meantime, one can only hope that member countries would recognise the value of trade benefits they have enjoyed within a rules-based multilateral trading system since World War II and adhere to their commitments and obligations.

As far as India is concerned, with global merchandise exports holding up at $18-19 trillion and commercial services exports at another $6-7 trillion, it has much to gain from the current system even if it is somewhat broken. To return the country quickly to 7-8% growth path in the post-Covid-19 era, it must unwind its higher tariffs rather than continue with the losing strategy of import substitution.

For geopolitical reasons, India aims to distance itself from China. To achieve this objective while simultaneously improving its access to foreign markets, its recent decision to pursue free trade agreements with the United Kingdom and European Union is a very welcome development. India has much to gain from duty-free access to these large markets. The issue of protecting the interests of sensitive import-competing products should be handled via a 10-15 year phase out of tariffs on them rather than protection in perpetuity.

Arvind Panagariya is Professor of Economics and the Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University.

To read the original blog by Times of India, please click here.

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