Preparing for a post-American world (part 1)

“You aren’t going to like what comes after America,” the great bard Leonard Cohen famously wrote. Perhaps he is being proved right — at least this is not the America we thought we knew. (“I’ve seen the future,” Cohen also sang, “it is murder.”)

Guessing the endgame of President Donald Trump’s policies is a fool’s errand. But it would be a fool, too, who didn’t try to prepare for a world from which the US has withdrawn — economically, militarily and diplomatically. So here in Free Lunch, I want to start an occasional series of pieces on how the world, and in particular (the rest of) the liberal democratic west, might cope with a US-sized hole in its heart. Send me your thoughts at [email protected].

My thoughts today are about international governance — where I bring, I hope, some good news, at any rate better than what Cohen would have us fear.

The Maga modus operandi in international affairs is now familiar. The polite word for it is bilateralism. More harshly, it’s divide and rule everywhere, and bully weaker countries into fealty when you can. Conversely, it’s not a surprise that Trump scorns the multilateralism of a rules-based order, where big countries give up the freedom to take unfettered advantage of their greater power, for the sake of a structure that ties everyone in.

This goes far beyond cutting foreign aid. Trump, in his first presidential term, famously withdrew from the Paris treaty against climate change and the multi-power agreement to prevent Iran from going nuclear. This time around, he has withdrawn from the Paris treaty a second time (Joe Biden brought the US back in), as well as the World Health Organization. Trump’s US is also disengaging from several entities of the UN (UNRWA, Unesco and the UNHRC). That’s not all: Washington is also deploying sanctions policy to frustrate the actions of the International Criminal Court, snubbing the G20 and being uncooperative in the G7.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but it bears emphasising that these are its own creatures that the US is abandoning. The whole edifice of the democratic postwar order — in opposition to the undemocratic one established by the Soviet Union — was largely of Washington’s design and fully of its making. Can the vault remain standing if the keystone is unceremoniously pulled away?

From the early signs, it looks like it might. Among the lesser-noticed events of Trump’s (second) first 100 days were two international agreements struck without the US. First, the members of the International Maritime Organization passed a measure to introduce carbon pricing on shipping emissions. Then, only a few days later, the remaining members of the WHO agreed a legally binding treaty on how to handle pandemics so as to co-operate better for pandemic preparedness.

These are both monumental achievements of multilateralism. Of course, they will not on their own solve the problem they are supposed to deal with — global climate change in the first case and the cross-border spread of serious contagious diseases in the second — but they are clearly necessary steps. In particular, they help to overcome the collective action problem in international governance, where individual nations have an incentive to neglect how their actions or omissions may inflict harm on others. 

(It may be a coincidence that the subject matter of the two agreements are ones on which the Trump administration flaunts a contrarian stance. But it’s a striking one.) 

Whatever the merits of these particular deals, however, I bring them to your attention for the simple fact that they have been made. Whether to your liking or not, global governance in the rest of the world continues to be shaped by multilateral agreement. The world outside the US does not stand still.

Of course, the US can do more than simply disengage; it can actively sabotage. It has been doing some of this. A case in point is how the Trump administration uses the threat of the paused “reciprocal” tariffs to pressure other countries to adopt its tough line on China. (So far, it doesn’t seem to be working.)

But the clearest example has been going on since Trump’s first presidency and concerns the World Trade Organization. The WTO works on consensus, so any member can block anything. The US has consistently blocked appointments to the WTO’s court-like panels that rule on trade disputes under WTO rules. The result is that since November 2020, the WTO’s appellate body “has been a court without judges”, as one analysis puts it. (This also tells you that US disengagement goes deeper than Trump; the Biden administration could have restored the functioning of the WTO bodies but chose not to.)

But it turned out that consensus was not quite as paralysing a feature of rules as all that. In 2017, a group of lawyers, seeing where things were heading, proposed making use of WTO provision for alternative dispute settlement to mimic the workings of the appellate body as closely as possible. As one of those lawyers, Nicolas Lockhart, told me, the intention was to “let WTO member countries take their destiny into their own hands”.

When US obstructionism did indeed stop the appellate body from functioning, several WTO members — most importantly, the EU — adopted the proposal, accepting to be bound by arbitration panels applying the same rules. Dozens of countries, including China, have joined the “Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement” (MPIA — here is a description of how it works).

This alternative mechanism is sustained by a political agreement, within a sort of substructure of WTO rules, and by the voluntary commitment of parties to invoke it as the agreed appeals process for WTO disputes between them. Is it successful? Judged by the number of states that take part, one must say so, even if important trading nations have so far declined — the US, of course, but also the UK, Turkey and Indonesia. (Turkey has, however, agreed very similar procedures on an ad hoc basis in disputes with the EU.) As a legal study points out, the MPIA’s success is also noticeable in its not needing to be used: it has only issued one final ruling, but the fact that it is available seems to have encouraged participating countries to come to agreement sooner.

What we learn from the two new treaty agreements mentioned first is that the rest of the world can keep using the international governance structures of the erstwhile US-led order to their advantage. What we learn from the MPIA case is that there are ways to replicate even the structures the US has the ability to torpedo. You may not like what comes after America — but the America we knew has left behind a pretty resilient legacy.

Other readables