Instruments in the Marketplace of Liberal Democratic Multilateralism: Brief Thoughts on Stewart Patrick, "Four Contending U.S. Approaches to Multilateralism"

 

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 The narrative, carefully cultivated in the United States and even more carefully cultivated by on set of factions of the leading forces of American collective society, is that the period between 2016-2020 was some sort of aberration and that the correction gloriously brought forth by the voting choices of a bare majority of those participating in the 2020 American presidential election, has set to rights the otherwise well tended course of American engagement in the world.  

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It is, if nothing else, comforting. And to the extent that there was a correction from the crude boorishness of communication during those years (expressed in brutalist style text and policy) to the more refined Neo-classical style of post -1945 American discursive and policy engagement, the forms of discourse and policy have again assumed an outward appearance more in keeping with the expected forms of politesse among stakeholders in the international community. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether the forms of engagement continue to mask an affirmation of precisely many of those products of that brutalism and many of the fundamental re-orienting frameworks that were so boorishly rolled out  after 2016. And, indeed, the even more interesting question is one of continuity--that the manufacturing of the narrative of aberration and break between 2016 and 2020, and the return to Neo-classicism  actually serves to mask a strategic set of continuity choices of trajectories of choices with respect to which the political climate before 2016 made substantially harder to advance.

The Biden Administration National Security Strategy (October 2022) made this later point somewhat clearer:

Our goal is clear—we want a free, open, prosperous, and secure international order. We seek an order that is free in that it allows people to enjoy their basic, universal rights and freedoms. It is open in that it provides all nations that sign up to these principles an opportunity to participate in, and have a role in shaping, the rules. It is prosperous in that it empowers all nations to continually raise the standard of living for their citizens. And secure, in that it is free from aggression, coercion and intimidation.
Achieving this goal requires three lines of effort. We will: 1) invest in the underlying sources and tools of American power and influence; 2) build the strongest possible coalition of nations to enhance our collective influence to shape the global strategic environment and to solve shared challenges; and 3) modernize and strengthen our military so it is equipped for the era of strategic competition with major powers, while maintaining the capability to disrupt the terrorist threat to the homeland. (NSS, supra, pp. 9-10).

The President made this quite clear in the introduction to NSS:

The 2022 National Security Strategy outlines how my Administration will seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests, position the United States to outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors, tackle shared challenges, and set our world firmly on a path toward a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow. . . Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been. We are in the midst of a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order.

To a large extent, then, one might be forgiven if the thought creeps in unbidden that the current iteration of the American foreign policy vision appears to be to preserve and augment the effective goals of America First but without its impolite and offensive discursive rabble rousing. In its place is a language and practice better conforming to international practices of discursive politesse.  That state of things would, at the very least, have the salutary effect of aligning the discourse and intentions of the United States and of China, each incarnating quite distinct visions of and for the world for each each has reserved for itself the position of apex vanguard leadership. At the same time, however, it becomes discursively critical to take the opportunity of personnel and discursive shifts to suggest that the change in discourse also has produced a change in objective. Moreover, it leaves open the question of the constitution of the amalgamation of willing states assuming various relationships with the leading forces of American functionaries and others with the authority operationalization of discourse and policy.   

This all becomes clearer as one considers the quite interesting contribution that that important mission, Stewart Patrick, "Four Contending U.S. Approaches to Multilateralism," published 23 January 2023 through the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The core purpose of the contribution is to think through modalities of multilateralism and their risk-reward profiles. The four that serve as the basis of analysis reflect what is put forward as the core consensus strategic approaches around which American leaders and their allies now strategize and with which they now argue among themselves. 

 

("Four Contending Approaches to Multilateralism," supra)

True to the times, the essay situates its contribution within the four corners of the new American foreign policy discursive orthodoxy. "The era of U.S. president Donald Trump exposed the shortcomings of a unilateralist and hypernationalist approach to the pursuit of U.S. global objectives. . . Biden has turned the page on Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, but the debate over alternative approaches to intergovernmental cooperation has just begun." (Four Contending U.S. Approaches to Multilateralism," supra). Patrick aligns the analysis, quite rightly, to the necessity of bending strategy to the realization of the NSS core objectives of American leadership over a rules based multilateral order.

The essay may be accessed HERE. The essay is an important one and well worth reading and thinking through. Brief reflections follow below. 

1. Patrick understands the problem considered in the essay as an elite decision making problem.  That is, the range of viable options are those that  span the consensus of viable options (or the totality of useful instruments in the policy toolkit) that are being considered by those with the authority to operationalize them, in, as Patrick suggests, context. 

Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, four distinct models vie for primacy—and the administration’s attention. The first is a charter conception of multilateralism, focused on the UN’s model of universal membership. The second is a club approach, which seeks to rally established democracies as the foundation for world order. The third is a concert model, which seeks comity and joint action among the world’s major powers. The fourth is a coalition approach, which would tailor ad hoc frameworks to each global contingency. Each of the so-called four Cs lays claim to a respective virtue: legitimacy, solidarity, capability, and flexibility. (Four Contending U.S. Approaches to Multilateralism," supra).

That approach makes perfect sense.  At the same time it suggests the contours and confines of an analytic universe that reflects the self-reflexive understanding of the world, and the valuation of its objects and principles, that are as much a manifestation of the internally coherent governance collective from which it emerges than of any sort of free ranging analytics, free from the sensibilities of the collective from which they emerge.  One has here a product of the nexus of interlined individuals tied by a common education, common culture, and common outlook, spread among the organs of collective political life the influence over which determines the authority of the modalities put forward, as well as serving as the disciplinary constraints beyond which analysis may not go. This is not odd in the least, and its relation to the processes of liberal democracy are now well developed, if not as well understood among the representative electing masses. Still, it reflects a common global practice that makes it possible to elaborate, if also to sometimes severely constrain the breadth of, strategic analysis.   That understood, the key point of analysis from an operational only perspective is to identify what is on the table, consider their characteristics, and then develop an analytics for application given the spaces into which each might be best projected. "As in the past, actual U.S. foreign and national security policy in the remainder of the twenty-first century is likely to involve an ecumenical amalgam of all four approaches. Such heterodoxy makes sense, because the United States has a wide range of objectives and needs to operate on several chessboards at once" That is well done here. 

2. At the same time, these analytics also expose the normative constraints within which the acceptable possibilities are defined and manifested, as well as the architecture and decision making cage within which the President will be nudged to choose.  The four models are important because those who count believe they are the only four models worth considering. And here, the extended discussion does a very nice job of identifying the sources of those with the clout to guide the discussion so that the four models become virtually all there is in the the toolkit.  The more interesting question, then might touch on an analytics of choice.  More bluntly--why only these four?  The conceit that the foundational premises  of the model makers for the leading group centered around the Americans also presupposes (again a fatal miscalculation among the leading social forces of the liberal democratic camp) that The much more detailed analysis of each model also does a nice job of thinking through answer for each. Much of that answer involves the power--and authority--of inertia. That is something that ought never to be discounted. Inertia in this case has two significantly important features: (1) the assurance of the known (trustworthiness); and (2) acquiescence by the players involved (the ideological and normative power of consent). But other factors also come in to play.  One is utility and efficiency--the institutional foundations and consensus on jurisdiction and mission makes resort to those tools less costly within manageable risk parameters. This was nicely drawn out in the analysis of the utility of Charter Multilateralism utilizing the UN system as a convenient instrument. (eg, "the United Nations remains a relative bargain, allowing America to advance global goals it cannot accomplish on its own or only at prohibitive cost." (Four Contending U.S. Approaches to Multilateralism," supra). Another are the advantages of oligarchy in"clubby" peer structured organization--an OECD sensibility but now metastasized to suit all occasions. The club approach, of course, is fundamentally privileged as one of the key operational vectors in the NSS, something Patrick considers well. And it fits in nicely in aligning American implementation modalities with the customs and habits of emerging structures of post.global imperialism (see essays here). Another is giving form to an ancient impulse of modernist society to look back, excavate past instruments and "make them better". That, effectively is the normative value of the so-called concert approach--a 19th century favorite now repurposed for the post-global.  Lastly, flexibility appears to be a string motivator in the constitution of these four models, especially the coalition model.  Today's friends are tomorrows problems, and coalitions are infinitely malleable.

3. For aristocratic, or vanguard, politics--all expressed through the organs of states--these four models do tend to well represent the universe of the possible. Nonetheless, the models also suggest the way that modelling is severely constrained by the outlook and logic of those who constitute the class of actors wielding the authority to rationalize the world around them. Those constraints, of course, can be weaponized by national enemies against the Republic and its interests. The constraints in this case are glaring.  

FIRST, the supposition that such modelling ought to be limited to or suppose that it matters only when it touches on the interaction of states serves as a reflection of the anachronistic outlook of the leader class and their own conceits about the nature and locus of power. One must continue to bend the knee to the state system--to be sure.  But to suppose that this genuflection then must invariably erase everything around the state evidences a structural blindness that consistently throttles the best laid plans of these insular elites.  States matter--but so do global enterprises, the global communities of believers, and thanks to the prominence of evidentiary discourse, so do transnational communities bound together by identity. In some cases states co-exist on a not quite level playing field with other actors--the control of which is not necessarily a valuable presupposition. Near the end of the essay there is an acknowledgement of the role of non state actors: "Needless to say, the four models of intergovernmentalism identified in this paper do not exhaust the rich array of frameworks for contemporary global cooperation, which also include regional organizations, multistakeholder arrangements, and transnational networks of cities and states/provinces." (Four Contending U.S. Approaches to Multilateralism," supra). And yet it is precisely the "needfulness "of both centering and adding non-state monopoly models that significantly weakens the analytic strength of American elite strategists around the NSS. Failure to incorporate ecologies of non state governance actors with governance power can sometimes produce a cascade of fatal miscalculation. 

SECOND, even though these models are to a large extent endogenously (that is for the constitution of coherence among groups of like minded states), it also has a critical exogenous function--to project endogenously disciplined objectives against competitors and enemies.  But that is the problem. The stronger the model is dependent on the fundamental premises and world views that promotes endogenous discipline (the references to the great world rationalizing principles of liberal democracy and its markets driven spaces within which individual autonomy may triumph), the potentially weaker its potency when projected against adversaries. More specifically, if the object of these models is to protect the core and then expand it  to states (and others) that might be aligned with the great liberal democratic-markets driven project,  the models may have some success with states on the borderlands of ordering ideologies.  However, their potency against adversaries at the core of an incompatible ordering  rationality and some others (eg Chinese Marxist Leninism; post-colonial sensitivities to the forms and badges of dependency)  may produce little positive result. These models are at their most effective when they can be translated into the normative and meaning rich language of the system against which it is projected.  It is arrogant to think that American enemies would undertake the task for themselves. 

THIRD, Patrick considers some of these weaknesses in the section of the essay entitled, "Navigating the Multilateral Landscape." The approach objectifies ideology, the interrogation of the semiotics of which might produce a strategy that for all intents and purposes appears to be a liberal-democratic version of the Chinese Marxist-Leninist win-win strategy; but it is one that will generate opposition from purists on both sides of the pragmatism of that strategy (see eg here). Oppositional states and their ideologies are critical risks to US interests precisely because of their strengths.  Clearly, a core strategy must involve the diminution or undermining of competing ideological visions. Certainly US opponents have been working that angle to an art form. But it is one thing to engage in those necessary tactics (and criticize its use by opponents).  It is quite another to build a strategy around the idea that because one opposes or rejects an incompatible ideology it necessarily lacks strength and power.  The reverse presumption might be the better strategic starting point for protecting national-allegiance interests. Lastly, ideology and opposition is not merely political--the most sensitive challenge, then, is the confrontation of religiously based systems where the ideology of religious community may be used as a shield to protect the interests of institutional projections of power the legitimacy of which is grounded in the political expression of religious community. That conversation, however remains impossible today.