The End of Power (29 page)

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 Americans enjoyed no such direct access to the Soviet population.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.

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).
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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.
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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.
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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 overseas 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.

So, does this mean that the alternative view is correct? Is the world spiraling toward an updated, twenty-first-century version of Hobbes's war of all against all, made more complicated by the cross-cutting and blurred
lines between nation-states, nonstate actors, unmoored financial flows, charities, NGOs and Gongos, and free agents of all kinds? The default answer is yes—unless, and until, we adjust to the decay of power and accept that the ways we cooperate across borders, both inside and outside the framework of governments, must change.

There is no reason we cannot do so. The collapse of the world system has been repeatedly predicted at times of technological change and cultural and demographic flux. Thomas Malthus predicted that the world could not carry an expanding population. Yet it did. Witnessing the industrial revolution and the expansion of global markets and trade in the nineteenth century, the Marxists anticipated a collapse of capitalism under the weight of its internal contradictions. It did not. World War II and the Holocaust deeply shook our faith in the moral character of humanity, yet the norms and institutions the world established in response have endured to this day. Nuclear annihilation, the cardinal fear of the 1950s and 1960s, failed to occur.

Today's panoply of international threats and crises—from global warming and resource depletion to nuclear proliferation, trafficking, fundamentalism, and more—come as the hierarchy of nations is in flux and the very exercise of state power is no longer what it used to be. The juxtaposition can be jarring. Each new massacre, bombing, or environmental disaster jolts us anew, and the laborious, ambiguous results of conferences and summit meetings seem to offer little consolation or hope. It may seem that no one is in charge. That feeling, and the trends that provoke it, will continue. But looking for a current or new hegemon or a committee of elite nations to reassert control is a fool's errand. The solutions to the new challenges of international cooperation—ultimately, of sharing the planet—will emerge in a landscape where power is easier to obtain and harder to use or even to keep.