The New New World Order

Daniel W. Drezner

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2007

Summary:  Controversies over the war in Iraq and U.S. unilateralism have overshadowed a more pragmatic and multilateral component of the Bush administration's grand strategy: its attempt to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy and international institutions in order to account for shifts in the global distribution of power and the emergence of states such as China and India. This unheralded move is well intentioned and well advised, and Washington should redouble its efforts.

Daniel W. Drezner is Associate Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and the author of "All Politics Is Global."

The Defense Department was the first U.S. bureaucracy to make major changes to reflect the new new world order. It started by moving around U.S. troops stationed abroad. In 2004, more than 250,000 troops were based in 45 countries, half of them in Germany and South Korea, the battlegrounds of the Cold War. To improve troop mobility in the face of ever-changing threats, President Bush announced in August 2004 that the number of U.S. armed forces stationed overseas would be reduced and that 35 percent of U.S. bases abroad would be closed by 2014. Many of these troops will be based in the United States, but others will be redeployed in countries on the periphery of the new zone of threat: in eastern Europe, in Central Asia, and along the Pacific Rim.

The State Department is also adjusting. In a January 2006 address at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, Secretary of State Rice said, "In the twenty-first century, emerging nations like India and China and Brazil and Egypt and Indonesia and South Africa are increasingly shaping the course of history. ... Our current global posture does not really reflect that fact. For instance, we have nearly the same number of State Department personnel in Germany, a country of 82 million people, that we have in India, a country of one billion people. It is clear today that America must begin to reposition our diplomatic forces around the world ... to new critical posts for the twenty-first century." Rice announced that a hundred State Department employees would be moved from Europe to countries such as India and China by 2007.

Washington has also strengthened its bilateral relationships with China and India. After an awkward beginning -- the Bush team's first foreign policy crisis came when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese jet fighter -- the Bush administration reoriented its approach to Beijing. "It is time to take our policy beyond opening doors to China's membership into the international system," then Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick announced in September 2005. "We need to urge China to become a responsible stakeholder in that system" so that it will "work with us to sustain the international system that has enabled its success." The "responsible stakeholder" language has since become part of all official U.S. pronouncements on China, and the theory behind it has guided several initiatives. Last fall, Washington launched the U.S.-China Strategic Economic Dialogue. In December, Treasury Secretary Paulson led six cabinet-level U.S. officials and the chair of the Federal Reserve in two days of discussions with their Chinese counterparts on issues ranging from energy cooperation to financial services to exchange rates. On matters as diverse as dealing with North Korea and Darfur, reigniting the Doha Development Agenda, and consulting with the International Energy Agency, Washington has tried recently to bring China into the concert of great powers.

The United States has reached out to India as well. For most of the 1990s, the United States was primarily concerned with managing India's dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir and defusing potential nuclear crises. Even though Pakistan is a significant U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, the U.S.-Indian relationship has warmed considerably over the past five years. In November 2006, the U.S. Department of Commerce arranged its largest-ever economic development mission to India, expanding the commercial dialogue between the two countries. Last year, they also concluded a bilateral agreement to cooperate on civilian nuclear energy -- a de facto recognition by the United States that India is a nuclear power. The agreement reinforces India's commitment to nonproliferation norms in its civilian nuclear program, but it keeps India's military program outside the orbit of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Critics of the deal have warned that it threatens the NPT. But the Bush administration argues that India is emerging as a great power, the nuclear genie cannot be put back in the bottle, and because India is a democracy, the genie will do no harm. According to the 2006 National Security Strategy, "India now is poised to shoulder global obligations in cooperation with the United States in a way befitting a major power."

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More ambitiously, the Bush administration has tried to reshape international organizations to make them more accommodating to rising powers. In some instances, the changes have occurred almost as a matter of course. The formation of the G-20 bloc of developing countries, for example, compelled the United States to invite Brazil, India, and South Africa into the negotiating "green room" at the September 2003 WTO ministerial meeting of the Doha Round of trade talks, in Cancún. Since then, U.S. trade negotiators have been clamoring for greater participation from China in the hope that Beijing will moderate the views of more militant developing countries.

Similarly, the United States has encouraged China to participate periodically in the G-7 meetings of finance ministers and central-bank governors. Washington's aim is to recognize China's growing importance in world politics and economics and in return get Beijing to concede that its exchange-rate policies and its repression of domestic consumption contribute to global economic imbalances. Officials from Brazil, India, and South Africa have also been invited to G-7 meetings on occasion, on the theory that, as a recent paper from the Treasury Department argued, "addressing global [macroeconomic] imbalances requires engaging heavily with new actors outside the G-7."

Also with a view to giving greater influence to China (as well as Mexico, South Korea, and Turkey), the Bush administration has pushed hard to change the voting quotas within the IMF. China's formal quota grossly underrepresents the country's actual economic size. Timothy Adams, the undersecretary for international affairs at the Department of the Treasury, told The New York Times in August 2006 that "by re-engineering the IMF and giving China a bigger voice, China will have a greater sense of responsibility for the institution's mission." At a meeting in Singapore in the fall of 2006, the IMF's International Monetary and Financial Committee agreed to reallocate quotas to reflect shifts in the balance of economic power. Clay Lowery, the assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of the Treasury, restated Washington's position at the time: "We came to the view awhile ago that if we do not take action to recognize the growing role of emerging economies, the IMF will become less relevant and we will all be worse off." Washington also recently signaled its willingness to have China join the Inter-American Development Bank.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has moved toward greater cooperation with emerging powers on other issues as well, especially energy, the environment, and nuclear proliferation. Washington has engaged China through APEC's Energy Working Group. It has encouraged China and India, which are anxious to secure regular access to energy, to work with the International Energy Agency in order to create strategic petroleum reserves. It has launched, along with Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate to facilitate energy efficiency and environmentally sustainable growth. (Because its members account for more than half of the global economy, the partnership has the potential to affect global warming more than does the Kyoto Protocol.) The United States has also relied on China and India to help halt nuclear proliferation. It is depending on Beijing to bring Pyongyang back into the six-party talks and to implement financial sanctions limiting North Korea's access to hard currency. In October 2006, following North Korea's nuclear test, for the first time China endorsed a UN Security Council resolution mandating sanctions against the regime. Similarly, Washington has relied on India's support for the United States' objections to Iran's nuclear program, as well as India's presence on the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in presenting its case against Tehran to the UN Security Council.

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