The (re)birth of American multilateralism
By: Kelly Mcfarland
Tags: Diplomacy, Joe Biden, United Nations, Multilateralism, Foreign Policy

You’d be forgiven for missing it, but on Sunday a group of Asian nations representing the region’s leading economies signed the world’s largest trade agreement. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), signed on November 15, includes fifteen nations — China, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, among others — and deepens regional economic integration, which will accrue financial benefits to the member states and to the possible detriment of the United States. Equally, if not more significant, the pact also places these nations more firmly within China’s orbit.

Americans, by contrast, don’t like multilateralism — “it has too many syllables and ends in -ism,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright quipped at a Georgetown School of Foreign Service event this week. Taking this to an extreme, the Trump administration, in accordance with its “America First” worldview on trade and foreign policy, withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement in 2017. The remaining nations then signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership without the United States. Now, the RCEP further pushes the United States out of the picture on major global trade issues.

These aren’t the only ways in which the Trump administration’s trade and foreign policies over the past four years have made the United States weaker, and exacerbated a number of broader global challenges. Drastic American turns away from multilateralism include: withdrawals from the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization during the height of a global pandemic, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear program even though Iran was adhering to the deal.

The future depends on multilateralism

There are numerous challenges — big and small, regional and global — that only multilateral efforts can solve or manage. For instance, as ISD has explored in reports over the last four years, issues of environmental security are increasingly a driver of migration around the planet; and climate change is heating (and thus opening up) the Arctic twice as fast as the rest of the globe, creating a new region of geopolitical stress. Moreover, our increasingly interconnected world is likely to see more pandemics like Covid-19 in the future. These problems are all global in nature, and cannot be solved unilaterally or even bilaterally.

Read ISD’s working group report, The New Arctic (Image: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy)

It is imperative that the Biden administration moves quickly to reverse the Trump administration’s go-it-alone, unilateral, and transactional foreign policies. The most significant and all-consuming initial work for the administration will revolve around slowing the spread of Covid-19, and collaborating with other countries on vaccine development and distribution. While this will entail a heavy domestic focus, there is also room for immediate moves by the new administration to reengage multilaterally by rejoining the WHO and participating in the COVAX mechanism. President-elect Biden has said that he will rejoin the WHO immediately upon taking office. Complaints regarding the organization and its occasional kowtowing to China are legitimate, but leaving the organization, as the Trump administration did, was not the correct answer, especially in the middle of a pandemic. If America wants to have influence in the organization and ensure its effectiveness and efficiency, it needs to be on the inside.

On climate change, Biden has specifically noted that he will bring the United States back in line with the Paris Climate Accords on day one, which is the correct first step toward successful climate action. The rest of the world hasn’t stopped moving forward to combat climate change, but Biden’s plans to make it a first-order issue of his entire administration will provide a major boost to global carbon reduction efforts, and plan to go further than any previous administration.

In addition, the Biden administration will likely move quickly on new negotiations for the United States to rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Any durable nuclear agreement with Iran must be multilateral, as we saw in 2014 and 2015. The Biden team will almost certainly look to work with its partners to rejoin and then expand upon the original agreement. Any new efforts at nuclear summitry with North Korea should also take a multilateral approach.

These are just a few examples, but they are by no means the only ones. The administration should also open up regular and serious discussion on Arctic security. As the High North becomes more navigable and exploitable, and as outside players such as China try to gain a larger foothold in the region, more systematic multilateral talks are needed to ensure a peaceful and sustainable future for the Arctic. Likewise, after four years of the Trump administration’s disparagement and ill-treatment of Latin American migrants, along with its lack of sustained diplomacy in the region, the Biden administration should pursue regional reengagement with near neighbors. This policy would seek to remove drivers of migration through more sustained efforts to bolster democracy in the Western Hemisphere, which include increased anti-corruption efforts, strengthening the rule-of-law, and counter-narcotics efforts, as a start.

After four years of America First, the field is wide open for U.S. multilateral reengagement on numerous fronts. Thankfully, we will certainly see an early flurry of activity in this regard from the Biden administration.