PARIS — This week’s virtual United Nations General Assembly could be a metaphor for the decline of diplomacy and of efforts to maintain a rules-based international order instead of the law of the jungle.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, world leaders are delivering a series of video monologues without being able to meet in New York for the customary pull-asides and private talks in which global disputes are often thrashed out, and common challenges such as climate change, disease, poverty and development addressed.
On its 75th anniversary, the U.N. cuts an increasingly beleaguered figure, eerily reminiscent of the League of Nations in the 1930s. In the age of megaphone diplomacy by tweet, jaw-jaw — to misparaphrase Churchill — is no longer better than war-war.
The Security Council is once again deadlocked by disputes and distrust among the great powers: the United States, China and Russia.
Arms-control treaties that helped keep the Cold War cold by slowing the spread of atomic weapons and instilling a modicum of trust among the superpowers have been violated or torn up. The few safety limits that are still intact may soon be left to expire.
Foreign ministries around the world have seen their role and budgets shrink.
There is no single culprit for the current waning of the “universal” world order that many emerging nations contend was fashioned by the West in its own interest in 1945, and again after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The many disruptive factors include China’s increasingly assertive rise, highlighted by its militarization of the South China Sea; Russia’s revisionist drive to carve out a sphere of influence, epitomized by its seizure and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine; and America’s refusal under President Donald Trump to honor agreements on Iran, climate change or trade to which his predecessors committed the United States.
Washington’s dereliction of its post-World War II role as the guarantor of a liberal, rules-based international order — whatever the defects and inadequacies — has been arguably the most startling and damaging blow.
Trump’s diplomatic vandalism has encouraged emulators around the world. Mini-Trumps are hard at work disrupting the Eastern Mediterranean, Libya and Kashmir, to name but three regions, defying international law or unilaterally changing facts on the ground or in the water.
The U.N. body at the forefront of fighting pandemics — the World Health Organization — is in crisis after Trump cut off U.S. funding in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak, in protest against the body’s alleged bias toward China.
The World Trade Organization, too, was dealt a heavy blow by the “America First” president and is struggling for survival after a U.S. blockade paralyzed its appellant body by blocking the appointment of judges.
The International Criminal Court, a U.N. institution that Washington helped to shape but never joined, has come into Trump’s crosshairs after its chief prosecutor launched an investigation into whether U.S. troops may have committed war crimes in Afghanistan, prompting Trump to retaliate with unilateral sanctions for “illegitimate attempts to subject Americans to its jurisdiction.”
Trump’s administration is not the only one tearing up the rulebook. Even the United Kingdom, which has long laid claim to the moral high ground despite its imperial past, is rushing through legislation that would break international law in a “specific and limited way,” giving itself the power to override part of its withdrawal treaty from the European Union, ratified less than a year ago.
This may yet turn out to have been a hardball negotiating tactic rather than a firm intention. A bipartisan quartet of former prime ministers has rightly pointed out that such willful disregard of the rule of law would set a terrible example to other states and undermine trust in Britain’s word in any future negotiation, as well as wrecking the prospect of a free-trade deal with the EU.
All this leaves diplomacy — the art of using persuasion, incremental compromise and legal agreements to resolve disputes peacefully and codify international behavior — in growing peril.
To be sure, the practice of foreign representation and negotiation was transformed by instant communication, the 24/7 news cycle, cross-border economic integration and social media before the great power storms of the last decade struck.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s presidency has seen the U.S. retreat from its post-World War II role as a guarantor of liberalism | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Foreign ministries around the world have seen their role and budgets shrink. With national leaders communicating directly or decreeing policy on the hoof by tweet, finance ministers often wield more international clout than foreign ministers. Ambassadors are increasingly out of the loop, and embassies have been repurposed as trade-promotion offices or arms-sales showrooms.
This post-diplomatic world, with dwindling respect for international law and a growing slide back to the rule of the strongest, poses particular problems for the EU — a community built on treaties, rulemaking and the enforcement of common regulations.
The EU has struggled, with little success, to uphold its standards of the rule of law and judicial independence in Poland and Hungary. Its attempts to build a common foreign policy have been hobbled by the unanimity principle that gives each member a veto that can be used to coerce EU partners on unrelated issues.
Hence the bloc’s inability this week to impose widely agreed sanctions on officials in Belarus blamed for election-rigging and repression, because Cyprus is holding out to obtain sanctions against Turkey over its illicit drilling in the waters of the Cypriot exclusive economic zone.
As a strong, normative economic power but a structurally feeble hard power, the EU is now on the defensive.
Flushed with the achievements of building an integrated single market, enlarging to the east and launching a single currency, EU officials believed they could convert the world to the European gospel of rules-based governance with supranational enforcement.
History has taken a different course. As a strong, normative economic power but a structurally feeble hard power, the EU is now on the defensive, struggling to preserve what’s left of global agreements on trade, climate, arms control and international justice with one hand tied behind its back by its dysfunctional decision-making system.
A self-styled “geopolitical” Commission is learning the hard way that Europe’s model of a rules-based international order is no match for brute force.