LA Times publishes GPPi op-ed on “Making the world safe for multipolarity”
On December 3, GPPi Associate Director Thorsten Benner published an op-ed on the crucial overarching foreign policy challenge for President-elect Barack Obama: Shaping a multipolar global order. The op-ed responds to a piece by A. Wess Mitchell which argues for the Obama administration to embrace foreign policy realism by way of an “ABC” approach (allies, bargains and checked balance of power).
Benner argues that this realist view misses out on one crucial ingredient for shaping global order — institutions. Benner suggests that President-elect Obama build on his Berlin speech earlier this past summer, in which he emphasized: “Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century.” Benner stresses that “Obama is well advised to take inspiration not from the likes of Kissinger, but from the genius of FDR, whose “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” inspired the pillars of the post-1945 order of global and regional institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union.”
Yet building global institutions that withstand the messy politics of a multipolar world won’t be easy. It will require turning China, India, Brazil and other rising powers into joint stakeholders of the global system. It will mean making the existing institutions such as the U.N., the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund fit to face the realities of pressing global problems and shifts in global power. It will also require abandoning outdated institutions such as the Group of Eight industrialized nations and investing in new formats such as the G20.” The piece is part of GPPi’s work on reforming the architecture of global governance.