The End of Power Read online

  None of these principles denies the value of a large military or a commanding resource base. But all of them flow logically from the decay of power, and they form the basis for a new kind of international politics.

  JUST SAY NO

  When they set up the United Nations’ system, the winners of World War II made sure to design it in ways that would protect their interests. The United States, Soviet Union, China, France, and Britain, for example, gave themselves permanent seats on the Security Council, the body that was to handle the most serious international crises. They also ensured that they would retain the power to veto any resolution. This arrangement was an innovation in international affairs and, in this case, it worked as its designers had hoped it would. The ability of the five permanent members (all of them nuclear powers) to block any action that threatened their interests gave them another useful tool to wield in the complex rivalry that resulted from the division of the world between the Western and Soviet spheres of influence. Of 269 uses of the veto between 1946 and 2012, more than 225 came before 1990.40 The Soviet Union was the most active veto wielder in the 1950s and 1960s, and the United States thereafter, mainly to stop resolutions condemning Israeli policy vis-à-vis Lebanon or the Palestinians. In the past decade, the Security Council veto has rarely been used; neither France nor Britain has employed it at all in over fifteen years. Since 2006, however, China and Russia have used their veto power to defend rogue nations such as Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and Syria from censure and sanctions.

  But if the UN veto by traditional great powers is mostly dormant, other veto powers are flourishing. One arena in which the veto has proved extremely effective for individual nations is the European Union. In 1963, when the community had only six members and was dominated by the French-German alliance, Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s application to join. He renewed his opposition in 1967—even though all five of France’s partners supported the British application. Only after de Gaulle died in 1969 did France soften its stance, resulting in the admission of Britain, Denmark, and Ireland in 1973. The French veto was an example of a major power—one of the two dominant players in the European Economic Community of the time—using the veto to stop others from usurping its national interest, not unlike the Security Council instrument.

  As a result of the steady expansion of the EU and the principle of unanimity for key decisions, considerable power was given to one new nation after another, to the extent that some analysts have wondered why the existing members were so eager to admit new ones at all. Each wave of new members has gotten benefits, often financial, by threatening to hold up new initiatives. Fear of a British referendum on EEC participation in 1975 got France and Germany to agree to new financial terms of membership that were far more favorable to the UK. Later Greece, which joined in 1981, and Spain and Portugal, which joined in 1986, were able to get financial benefits from their fellow members in exchange for not blocking new treaties aimed to advance integration, such the Maastricht Treaty and the development of the common currency.

  The EU now uses a system of “qualified majority voting” with a complicated formula that apportions votes to each country by population and requires 255 out of 345 votes for a measure to pass in the Council of Europe. This still creates safeguards for smaller states, preventing a small number of large countries from ramming any initiatives through. But key issues such as new common policies and further expansion of the union still require absolute unanimity, and each year finds small countries using this veto power to hold up various measures. For instance, Poland vetoed a key EU-Russia trade partnership in 2007, until Russia lifted a ban on imports of Polish meat. Lithuania vetoed the same deal until its EU partners agreed to endorse its position on a variety of disputes with Russia, including the issue of compensation for Lithuanians who were deported to Siberian labor camps. The Netherlands has blocked EU accession talks for Serbia over failure to hand over accused war criminals to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In these ways, small countries have used their veto power to gain concessions—sometimes on major issues, but sometimes on ones that might seem parochial—from larger EU states or from other nations seeking to deal with the EU as a whole.

  By digging in their heels, small countries can hold up any number of international initiatives—and they are not hesitating to do so. The failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009 was blamed on many factors—the reluctance of the United States and China to make a deal, the intransigence of large industrial or developing countries—but in the end, what stopped the adoption of even a weak accord was the objection by a previously unimagined coalition: Venezuela, Bolivia, Sudan, and the tiny Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. The Sudanese representative likened rich-country proposals to the Holocaust, while the Venezuelan representative cut her hand on purpose to ask if it would take blood to be heard.41 Their acts were dismissed as farcical, but their nations’ objections added to the mood of confusion and dissent of what already was a fractious meeting. In the end, the summit did not adopt the accord but, rather, “took note” of it—making a mockery of the efforts of the United States, EU, China, Brazil, India, and other big-country negotiators and sending a discouraging signal about global commitment to a common approach to climate change.

  The EU succeeded in forging an agreement at the UN’s Durban climate talks in December 2011—only to find its own climate-change policy thrown over three months later by a veto from Poland, which is heavily dependent on coal.42

  Why do vetoes work so well for small nations today? One major and paradoxical reason is the proliferation of organizations intended for international cooperation on numerous issues. The more of these, the more opportunities for a country to potentially take a stand on a parochial, ideological, or even whimsical issue, often for short-term domestic political reasons rather than because of any defense of principle. But small-country vetoes also work because large countries no longer have the same range of carrots and sticks to force compliance. The decay of military and economic power makes small countries less vulnerable to strong sanctions from traditional patrons and trading partners. And the proliferation of news and communication channels allows small countries new ways to make their case directly to the global public, fomenting sympathy and support, rather than see it limited to closed-door negotiations.

  FROM AMBASSADORS TO GONGOS: THE NEW EMISSARIES

  “American ambassadors—an obsolete species?” The question was posed as early as 1984 by Elmer Plischke, a distinguished practitioner of that now-fading field, diplomatic history. Plischke pointed out the changes that were eroding the primacy of ambassadors as representatives of their nation, including easier travel and communications technology, the rise of ways for governments to communicate directly with publics in other countries, and the diluting effect of the proliferation of nation-states, including so many very small ones, each with its own diplomatic corps deployed.43 All of these transformations, of course, have only accelerated in the ensuing three decades.

  The idea of diplomacy as a field in decline is not new. In 1962 the scholar Josef Korbel, a Czech emigré and Madeleine Albright’s father, wrote about the “decline of diplomacy” as old values and procedures developed over centuries in the diplomatic profession began to crumble. Among these were discretion, manners, patience, thorough knowledge of the relevant topics, and the shunning of premature publicity. “The modern diplomatic world has trespassed much too frequently against these basic rules of diplomacy,” Korbel wrote, “and one is compelled regretfully to add that the sin cannot be attributed exclusively to its Communist sector.” In addition to the decay of these traditional values, Korbel pointed out the bypassing of diplomats by politicians at summit meetings and state visits, when for many years heads of state and even foreign ministers rarely traveled abroad. And he pointed out that democratic regimes create spaces for other countries to present their case directly, even when they do not reciprocate; thus, he noted, Soviet leaders had access to the American press while Am
ericans enjoyed no such direct access to the Soviet population.44

  These days, those direct-access channels have exploded into a cornucopia of political, ethnic, and religious advocacy groups; pleas by well-to-do immigrant communities on behalf of their home nation, or emigrants on behalf of their host; friendly news coverage and public relations inserts in newspapers; sponsored events by cultural or tourism organizations; the activities of paid lawyers and lobbyists; and a wellspring of blogs, forums, advertising, and propaganda in cyberspace. For some nations, the leading edge of overseas advocacy is not the embassy staff, with its protocol and security restrictions, but the Gongo. What is a Gongo? It is a government-organized nongovernmental organization: an impostor that purports to be part of civil society but is in fact instigated, funded, or directed by a government or people acting on its behalf.45

  One Gongo, for instance, occupies a pleasant, innocuous office building in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, close to the Imperial Palace. Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, has about 150,000 members and serves an ethnic community several times larger. It runs about sixty schools, including a university; it also owns businesses, including banks and gaming interests in Japan’s popular pachinko parlors. But it delivers passports as well. That’s because Chongryon serves as the de facto embassy in Tokyo for North Korea, which has no diplomatic relations with Japan. In its schools, it faithfully advances the ideology of Kim Jong-Un’s regime. Over the years North Korea has become isolated and impoverished, but Chongryon has carried on. It lost direct North Korean government funding, and Japan withdrew some of its tax privileges. When it fell into debt, a former Japanese intelligence officer tried to swindle it out of its headquarters. Chongryon encourages Japan’s Koreans to maintain their national identity and shun Japanese institutions, but it was happy to see the Japanese courts rule to restore its ownership of the building.46

  Not all Gongos are pernicious: America’s National Endowment for Democracy, a private nonprofit created in 1983 to support democratic institutions around the world, is funded by the US government. That makes it a Gongo. And its work as such has drawn the ire of antagonists including Egypt (which imprisoned and sought to try several of its staff), the Russian government, and a Chinese newspaper that called US-backed democracy promotion “self-serving, coercive and immoral.”47 Other Gongos work in the cultural sphere; among these are the British Council, Alliance Française, Goethe-Institut, and Instituto Cervantes, which promote the arts and teach the language of their respective countries overseas. Numerous religious groups operating in foreign countries have the backing of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other countries that seek to advance not just the Islamic faith but a particular geopolitical agenda. Gongo ventures can be extremely creative: one, for instance, is the annual program by the Chavez government in Venezuela to subsidize cheap heating oil for thousands of families in the northeast United States, through gifts from the Venezuelan state oil company to a Boston energy company run by former congressman and political scion Joe Kennedy.

  As these examples show, Gongos are a mixed bag—and they are not going away anytime soon. Why? Because lower political, economic, and information barriers make them vastly preferable to the rule-hobbled work of a deputy chief of mission, political officer, or science attaché. Deploying a Gongo on a subject of immediate concern can be much cheaper than ramping up personnel and resources in the diplomatic corps—or, for that matter, paying an expensive lobbyist or public relations firm. And cyberspace generates its own Gongos, in the form of bloggers, videographers, and other online voices that advance a country’s point of view and may be amenable to friendly encouragement and underwriting.

  ALLIANCES OF THE FEW

  The multiplication of working partnerships, some more formal than others, among countries involved in one issue or another reflects the shifting lines of power in geopolitics today. The Cairns Group, founded in 1986 to reform agricultural trade, gathers nineteen food-exporting countries, including Canada, Paraguay, South Africa, Argentina, and the Philippines, that push for cutting both tariffs and subsidies. And the BRICS group, which, as noted, is an acronym for five large emerging markets—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and now South Africa—held its first summit meeting in Russia in 2009, though the acronym was coined by a banker for Goldman Sachs eight years earlier and had spread in financial circles before the politicians latched on. Russia also belongs to the G-8 of industrial nations; Mexico and South Africa joined Brazil, India, and China as the “plus 5” in the expanded G8+5. There are two different G-20s, one consisting of finance ministers and central bank governors of nineteen large nations, plus the EU; the other a grouping of developing countries that are now more than twenty in number. The memberships of the two overlap. New trade blocs and regional cooperation agencies are simmering in all parts of the world. And the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), an alliance begun by Venezuela and Cuba in 2005, has seven members including Ecuador, Nicaragua, and the Caribbean nations of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, and Antigua and Barbuda. It resembles a trade pact but has larger political aspirations, and among the benefits it shares among nations are eye care (provided by Cuba and subsidized by Venezuelan oil).48

  The key common feature is that none of these groups is trying to be a universal alliance. By allowing admission only to members with a common outlook or concerns, they more resemble the “coalitions of the willing” in America’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars than they do the United Nations or the international climate-change negotiations. In March 2012, for example, the members of BRICS discussed the creation of a common development bank to mobilize savings between the countries and promote the opening of further trade links, particularly between the other members and Russia and China.49

  Such groupings also have a higher chance of accomplishing whatever it is they set out to do. Truly global agreements have grown exceedingly rare—especially ones that actually work. The last global trade deal was in 1994, with the agreement to create the World Trade Organization; the United States has yet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and many signatories have missed their targets; and the United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed by 192 countries in 2000, set out numerous global social goals to be achieved by their target date of 2015. The Copenhagen fiasco, with its vast expenditure of diplomatic effort for barely a symbolic outcome, is far more characteristic of multilateral initiatives that aim for universal adherence.

  The alternative is what I have called minilateralism. At its most fine-tuned, minilateralism consists of gathering the smallest number of countries necessary to make a major change to the way the world addresses a particular issue—for instance, the ten largest polluters, the twenty largest consumers of endangered fish stocks, the dozen major countries involved in aid to Africa as donors or recipients, and so on. Minilateralism can serve small countries too, when it takes the shape of alliances of the few that have a greater chance of succeeding, but also of not being shut down by dominant powers whose leverage is diminished. In turn, minilateralism is vulnerable to the decay of power. Because many of these associations are ad hoc and lack the moral pressure of global membership, they are also more vulnerable to dissolution or defection when a member-government falls, its population dissents, or its policy preferences change.50

  ANYONE IN CHARGE HERE?

  The leveling of hierarchy means that a small number of dominant nations (let alone a single hegemon) no longer hold sway over the direction of international cooperation and how the world will handle present and future crises. It also means the bypassing of the traditional diplomatic establishment—foreign ministries, embassies and their staff, national aid agencies, and other bilateral services—that has controlled the terms of engagement across borders. Diplomats were once the gatekeepers and guardians of certain norms of interaction. Now they have been disinter-mediated, and the advantages of traditional statecraft blunted, in a landscape of small-country initiatives, promotion by nonstate actors, and channels of direct access to ov
erseas public opinion.

  The edifice of cooperation and deterrence built in the last seven decades has been strong enough to see through decolonization, ward off invasions and conquests, and limit secessions. The dissolution of unwieldy unions that had been held together by ideology and force—the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia—stand as the exceptions that confirm the rule. So sovereign states remain, and they still possess the trappings of sovereignty, which are not insignificant: armies, border controls, currencies, economic policy, taxation. The rivalry among states—along with its expression through the Great Game of negotiations, alliances, agreements, propaganda, and confrontation—is here to stay.

  The tail will not always wag the dog, either. The power of the United States or China is vastly superior to that of a small European, Latin American, or Asian state both on paper and almost always in practice. It is the effectiveness of that power that is lagging, not its potential. The American president will have his or her phone call taken at any hour anywhere in the world. He can barge into a meeting of fellow leaders and redirect the conversation. The clout of the Chinese premier by that measure is growing. These are the dynamics that unfold at international conferences and summit meetings, and they have an impact on the outcome. Keeping tabs on them is more than a matter of jingoism or attachment to bygone ways: it does make a difference.

  But the decay of power means that obsessing about which great power is on the rise and which one is declining, as if geopolitics in the end reduced to a zero-sum game among a global elite, is a red herring. Yes, each issue on which they face off is significant on its own merits. The alignment of military forces between the United States, Russia, and China is certainly worthy of concern. So is the nature of China’s response to American entreaties that it manage its currency differently. So are differences between the United States and the European Union on trade policy, agricultural subsidies, and the prosecution of war criminals. So are the stances of India and China on carbon emissions. But none of this signifies the fall of one hegemon and the rise of another in its place. Future superpowers will neither look nor act like those of the past. Their room for maneuver has tightened, and the capability of small powers to obstruct, redirect, or simply ignore them will continue to grow.