June 29, 2018
Jean Pisani-Ferry, Project Syndicate
Global governance requires rules, because flexibility and goodwill alone cannot tackle the hardest shared problems. With multilateralism under attack, the narrow path ahead is to determine, on a case-by-case basis, the minimum requirements of effective collective action, and to forge agreement on reforms that fulfill these conditions.
FLORENCE – Rewind to the late 1990s. After an eight-decade-long hiatus, the global economy was being reunified. Economic openness was the order of the day. Finance was being liberalized. The nascent Internet would soon give everyone on the planet equal access to information. To manage ever-growing interdependence, new international institutions were developed. The World Trade Organization was brought to life. A binding climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, had just been finalized.
The message was clear: globalization was not just about liberalizing flows of goods, services and capital but about establishing the rules and institutions required to steer markets, foster cooperation, and deliver global public goods.
Now fast-forward to 2018. Despite a decade of talks, the global trade negotiations launched in 2001 have gotten nowhere. The Internet has become fragmented and could break up further. Financial regionalism is on the rise. The global effort to combat climate change rests on a collection of non-binding agreements, from which the United States has withdrawn.
Yes, the WTO is still there, but it is increasingly ineffective. US President Donald Trump, who does not hide his contempt for multilateral rules, is attempting to block its dispute settlement system. The United States pretends against all evidence that imports of BMWs are a threat to national security. China is brutally ordered – outside any multilateral framework – to import more, export less, cut subsidies, refrain from purchasing US tech companies, and respect intellectual property rights. The very principles of multilateralism, a key pillar of global governance, seem to have become a relic from a distant past.
What happened? Trump, for sure. The 45th US president campaigned for the job like a bull in a china shop, vowing to destroy the edifice of international order built and maintained by all of his predecessors since Franklin Roosevelt. Since taking office, he has been true to his word, withdrawing from one international agreement after another and imposing import tariffs on friends and adversaries alike.
Still, let’s face it: today’s problems did not start with Trump. It was not Trump who, in 2009, killed the Copenhagen negotiation on a climate agreement. It was not Trump who is to blame for the failure of the Doha trade round. It was not Trump who told Asia to secede from the global financial safety net managed by the International Monetary Fund. Before Trump, problems were dealt with more politely. But they were there.
There is no shortage of explanations. An important one is that many participants in the international system are having second thoughts about globalization. A widespread perception in advanced countries is that the rents from technological innovation are being eroded precipitously. The US factory worker of yesterday owed his standard of living to these rents. But as the economist Richard Baldwin brilliantly shows in The Great Convergence, technology has become more accessible, production processes have been segmented, and many of the rents have gone.
A second explanation is that the US strategy toward Russia and China has failed. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton thought that the international order would help transform Russia and China into “market democracies.” But neither Russia nor China has converged politically. China is converging in terms of GDP and sophistication, but its economic system remains apart. As Mark Wu of Harvard argued in a 2016 paper, although market forces play a strong role in its economy, coordination by the state (and control by the Communist Party) remains pervasive. China has invented its own economic rules.
Third, the US is unsure that a rules-based system offers the best framework to manage its rivalry with China. True, a multilateral system may help the incumbent hegemon and the rising power avoid falling into the so-called “Thucydides’ trap” of military confrontation. But the growing perception in the US is that multilateralism puts more constraints on its own behavior than on China’s.
Finally, global rules look increasingly outdated. Whereas some of their underlying principles – starting with the simple idea that issues are addressed multilaterally rather than bilaterally – are as strong as ever, others were conceived for a world that no longer exists. Established trade negotiation practices make little sense in a world of global value chains and sophisticated services. And categorizing countries by their development level is losing its usefulness, given that some of them combine first-class global companies and pockets of economic backwardness. But inertia is considerable, if only because consensus is required to change the rules.
So what should be done? One option is to preserve the existing order to the greatest extent possible. This was the approach adopted after Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate agreement: the other signatories continue to abide by it. The advantages of this approach are that it contains the damage from one country’s peculiar behavior. But, to the extent that the US attitude is a symptom, the conservationist approach does not address the disease.
A second option is to use the crisis as an opportunity for reform. The EU, China, and a few others – including, one hopes, the US at some point – should be the ones to take the initiative, salvaging those aspects of the old multilateralism that remain useful, but fusing them into new arrangements that are fairer, more flexible, and more appropriate for today’s world.
This strategy would have the advantage of identifying and absorbing the lessons offered by the exhaustion of traditional arrangements and the emergence of new ones. But is there enough leadership and enough political will to go beyond empty, face-saving compromises? The downside risk is that failed reform could lead to a complete unraveling of the global system.
In the end, the solution is neither to cultivate the nostalgia of yesterday’s order nor to place hope in loose, ineffective forms of international cooperation. International collective action requires rules, because flexibility and goodwill alone cannot tackle hard problems. The narrow path ahead is to determine, on a case-by-case basis, the minimum requirements of effective collective action, and to forge agreement on reforms that fulfill these conditions. For those who believe that such a path exists, there is no time to lose in finding it.
It may be necessary to introduce a long overdue open debate, with the objective of freeing trade from restrictions
CAMBRIDGE – For years, political leaders such as former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have warned of the danger of a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” We have known for some time that potential adversaries have installed malicious software in our electricity grid. Suddenly the power could go out in large regions, causing economic disruption, havoc, and death. Russia used such an attack in December 2015 in its hybrid warfare against Ukraine, though for only a few hours. Earlier, in 2008, Russia used cyber attacks to disrupt the government of Georgia’s efforts to defend against Russian troops.
Thus far, however, cyber weapons seem to be more useful for signaling or sowing confusion than for physical destruction – more a support weapon than a means to clinch victory. Millions of intrusions into other countries’ networks occur each year, but only a half-dozen or so have done significant physical (as opposed to economic and political) damage. As Robert Schmidle, Michael Sulmeyer, and Ben Buchanan put it, “No one has ever been killed by a cyber capability.”
US doctrine is to respond to a cyber attack with any weapon, in proportion to the physical damage caused, based on the insistence that international law – including the right to self-defense – applies to cyber conflicts. Given that the lights have not gone out, maybe this deterrent posture has worked.
Then again, maybe we are looking in the wrong place, and the real danger is not major physical damage but conflict in the gray zone of hostility below the threshold of conventional warfare. In 2013, Russian chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov described a doctrine for hybrid warfare that blends conventional weapons, economic coercion, information operations, and cyber attacks.
The use of information to confuse and divide an enemy was widely practiced during the Cold War. What is new is not the basic model, but the high speed and low cost of spreading disinformation. Electrons are faster, cheaper, safer, and more deniable than spies carrying around bags of money and secrets.
If Russian President Vladimir Putin sees his country as locked in a struggle with the United States but is deterred from using high levels of force by the risk of nuclear war, then perhaps cyber is the “perfect weapon.” That is the title of an important new book by New York Times reporter David Sanger, who argues that beyond being “used to undermine more than banks, databases, and electrical grids,” cyberattacks “can be used to fray the civic threads that hold together democracy itself.”
Russia’s cyber interference in the 2016 American presidential election was innovative. Not only did Russian intelligence agencies hack into the email of the Democratic National Committee and dribble out the results through Wikileaks and other outlets to shape the American news agenda; they also used US-based social-media platforms to spread false news and galvanize opposing groups of Americans. Hacking is illegal, but using social media to sow confusion is not. The brilliance of the Russian innovation in information warfare was to combine existing technologies with a degree of deniability that remained just below the threshold of overt attack.
US intelligence agencies alerted President Barack Obama of the Russian tactics, and he warned Putin of adverse consequences when the two met in September 2016. But Obama was reluctant to call out Russia publicly or to take strong actions for fear that Russia would escalate by attacking election machinery or voting rolls and jeopardize the expected victory of Hillary Clinton. After the election, Obama went public and expelled Russian spies and closed some diplomatic facilities, but the weakness of the US response undercut any deterrent effect. And because President Donald Trump has treated the issue as a political challenge to the legitimacy of his victory, his administration also failed to take strong steps.
Countering this new weapon requires a strategy to organize a broad national response that includes all government agencies and emphasizes more effective deterrence. Punishment can be meted out within the cyber domain by tailored reprisals, and across domains by applying stronger economic and personal sanctions. We also need deterrence by denial – making the attacker’s work more costly than the value of the benefits to be reaped.
There are many ways to make the US a tougher and more resilient target. Steps include training state and local election officials; requiring a paper trail as a back-up to electronic voting machines; encouraging campaigns and parties to improve basic cyber hygiene such as encryption and two-factor authentication; working with companies to exclude social media bots; requiring identification of the sources of political advertisements (as now occurs on television); outlawing foreign political advertising; promoting independent fact-checking; and improving the public’s media literacy. Such measures helped to limit the success of Russian intervention in the 2017 French presidential election.
Diplomacy might also play a role. Even when the US and the Soviet Union were bitter ideological enemies during the Cold War, they were able to negotiate agreements. Given the authoritarian nature of the Russian political system, it could be meaningless to agree not to interfere in Russian elections. Nonetheless, it might be possible to establish rules that limit the intensity and frequency of information attacks. During the Cold War, the two sides did not kill each other’s spies, and the Incidents at Sea Agreement limited the level of harassment involved in close naval surveillance. Today, such agreements seem unlikely, but they are worth exploring in the future.
Above all, the US must demonstrate that cyber attacks and manipulation of social media will incur costs and thus not remain the perfect weapon for warfare below the level of armed conflict.