Charles Kupchan e Peter Trubowitz
Charles Kupchan é professor de Relações Internacionais na Universidade de Georgetown e membro sênior do Conselho de Relações Exteriores. É autor do livro Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come (Trazendo Ordem à Anarquia: Governando o Mundo Vindouro), ainda a ser lançado.
Peter Trubowitz é professor de Relações Internacionais e diretor do Centro Phelan para os EUA na London School of Economics and Political Science, além de membro associado da Chatham House. É coautor, com Brian Burgoon, de Geopolitics and Democracy: The Western Liberal Order From Foundation to Fracture (Geopolítica e Democracia: A Ordem Liberal Ocidental da Fundação à Ruptura).
Este ensaio surgiu do Grupo de Estudos Lloyd George sobre Governança Global.
 |
| Uma bandeira americana em frente à Casa Branca em Washington, D.C., outubro de 2025 Kylie Cooper / Reuters |
A política externa "América Primeiro" do presidente dos EUA, Donald Trump, desestabilizou o mundo que os Estados Unidos construíram. Aliados questionam a confiabilidade dos Estados Unidos como parceiro estratégico e temem que Washington seja agora mais inimigo do que amigo da ordem liberal baseada em regras. Eles têm motivos para se preocupar. O governo Trump acredita que pactos internacionais, livre comércio e ajuda externa estão degradando, e não ampliando, o poder e a influência dos EUA. Trump deixou bem clara sua hostilidade ao multilateralismo, afirmando que se opõe a "uniões internacionais que nos amarram e prejudicam a América".
A política externa "América Primeiro" pode ser o ponto central do debate público sobre o futuro da liderança dos EUA e, certamente, está deixando o mundo em alerta. Mas também é sintoma de um desafio mais amplo que os Estados Unidos enfrentam: o esvaziamento do consenso interno que ancorou a grande estratégia americana desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial até o século XXI. Divisões partidárias, regionais e ideológicas produziram uma desconexão entre a política interna do país e sua política externa.
Num extremo do espectro político encontram-se os internacionalistas liberais em apuros, firmemente comprometidos com a defesa da ordem liberal através da projeção do poder americano, da liberalização do comércio, da governança multilateral e da promoção da democracia. No outro extremo, estão os recém-empoderados defensores do "América Primeiro", que tentam desmantelar a ordem liberal afrouxando os compromissos externos, erguendo barreiras tarifárias, desvinculando-se de instituições multilaterais e abandonando os esforços para disseminar valores democráticos. Nenhuma das duas visões consegue angariar apoio interno sustentado. Como resultado, a política externa dos EUA tornou-se errática e inconstante, afetada por visões concorrentes dos propósitos do país e por desacordos sobre a melhor forma de os alcançar.
Essa divisão interna teria menos importância para os Estados Unidos se o país enfrentasse um cenário geopolítico benigno e tranquilo. Contudo, o país se vê confrontado com crescentes desafios internacionais justamente quando perdeu a capacidade política para enfrentá-los. Para que uma América fragmentada consiga estabilizar um mundo fragmentado, os líderes americanos precisam restabelecer o equilíbrio entre os objetivos internacionais e os meios internos, persuadindo americanos de todas as camadas sociais a apoiarem novamente a política externa dos EUA. Para isso, será necessário adotar uma política externa que atenda aos interesses e às aspirações da grande maioria dos americanos, desde as metrópoles urbanas até os vilarejos rurais.
The laissez-faire credo that dominated the political landscape came to define U.S. foreign policy. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover recognized the need to stabilize the economies of a war-ravaged Europe but were fearful of excessive government involvement in world affairs and constrained by the demands of coalition building in an increasingly fractured GOP. They gambled that private initiative, rather than government activism, would be sufficient to steer the world away from economic fragmentation and toward interdependence and geopolitical stability. But relying on “dollar diplomacy” did the opposite; in the absence of U.S. leadership and strategic engagement, militarism and geopolitical rivalry spread. The Great Depression only deepened the United States’ retreat. Washington erected tariff barriers and sought to cordon itself off from the forces destabilizing Europe and East Asia. Only the worldwide war that broke out would end the United States’ isolationist delusions.
With the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Washington finally assumed the mantle of global leadership that it had rejected after World War I. Abandoning isolationism while eschewing idealistic calls for world federalism, U.S. officials instead took a middle course and pursued liberal internationalism. The liberal international order that took shape in the late 1940s and early 1950s was made possible by a broad political alliance that spanned party, region, and class. Democrats and Republicans, Northerners and Southerners, bankers, factory workers, and farmers all found common cause in freer trade, forward defense, and foreign aid, which linked prosperity and security at home to economic and strategic engagement abroad.
This bipartisan internationalism provided the political grounding for the network of strategic and commercial partnerships that succeeded in containing the ambition and appeal of the Soviet bloc. Foreign policy and domestic politics were in broad alignment. Because international purposes generally enjoyed widespread domestic buy-in, liberal internationalism survived even the political tumult produced by the Vietnam War.
Em um mundo indisciplinado, uma liderança estadunidense equilibrada e proativa continua sendo uma necessidade.
But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ideological triumph of the Western bloc, the United States’ foreign policy aims and its domestic politics began pulling in opposite directions. In the absence of a geopolitical rival, Washington’s unchecked international ambitions ballooned beyond the country’s political will. Neoliberal reformers rushed in to liberalize, deregulate, and globalize markets. Their economic policies, coupled with the scaling back of the U.S. welfare state at home, expedited the shrinking of the middle class and incubated a backlash against globalism. An influx of immigrants, primarily from Latin America, intensified this backlash, as politicians fused concerns about economic insecurity with identity-based grievance.
Washington also overreached strategically, taking on a broad array of new commitments and missions in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Clinton administration intervened in the Balkans and launched NATO’s enlargement in central and eastern Europe; the Bush administration pursued a war on terrorism that morphed into an effort to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into stable democracies; the Obama administration pledged to shift the focus to “nation-building at home” but ended up mired in Afghanistan and battling the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. These and other internationalist ambitions regularly failed to produce the promised results and stretched well beyond what voters would tolerate. Public doubts metastasized into widespread resentment.
Indeed, long before Trump unleashed his assault on globalism, popular support for free trade, institutionalized multilateralism, and democracy promotion and nation building abroad was waning. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, antiglobalist sentiment took hold in America’s left-behind locales, whittling away what remained of the postwar bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Trump harnessed the politics of grievance, promising to end Washington’s liberal internationalist compact. His “America first” foreign policy replaced open trade with economic protectionism; liberal immigration policies with a sweeping crackdown; internationalist ambition with nationalist pullback; multilateralism with unilateralism; and the promotion of democracy with indifference toward the spread of democratic values abroad.
U.S. President Joe Biden sought to reverse Trump’s foreign policy and bring ends and means back into balance by pursuing a “foreign policy for the middle class.” His administration attempted to revive liberal internationalism by framing its foreign policy as part of a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. But Biden failed to rebuild anything close to the postwar domestic consensus and many working Americans again rallied behind Trump’s “America first” alternative.
O excesso de ambição estratégica deu lugar a uma retirada contraproducente.
A política externa "América Primeiro" pode ser o ponto central do debate público sobre o futuro da liderança dos EUA e, certamente, está deixando o mundo em alerta. Mas também é sintoma de um desafio mais amplo que os Estados Unidos enfrentam: o esvaziamento do consenso interno que ancorou a grande estratégia americana desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial até o século XXI. Divisões partidárias, regionais e ideológicas produziram uma desconexão entre a política interna do país e sua política externa.
Num extremo do espectro político encontram-se os internacionalistas liberais em apuros, firmemente comprometidos com a defesa da ordem liberal através da projeção do poder americano, da liberalização do comércio, da governança multilateral e da promoção da democracia. No outro extremo, estão os recém-empoderados defensores do "América Primeiro", que tentam desmantelar a ordem liberal afrouxando os compromissos externos, erguendo barreiras tarifárias, desvinculando-se de instituições multilaterais e abandonando os esforços para disseminar valores democráticos. Nenhuma das duas visões consegue angariar apoio interno sustentado. Como resultado, a política externa dos EUA tornou-se errática e inconstante, afetada por visões concorrentes dos propósitos do país e por desacordos sobre a melhor forma de os alcançar.
Essa divisão interna teria menos importância para os Estados Unidos se o país enfrentasse um cenário geopolítico benigno e tranquilo. Contudo, o país se vê confrontado com crescentes desafios internacionais justamente quando perdeu a capacidade política para enfrentá-los. Para que uma América fragmentada consiga estabilizar um mundo fragmentado, os líderes americanos precisam restabelecer o equilíbrio entre os objetivos internacionais e os meios internos, persuadindo americanos de todas as camadas sociais a apoiarem novamente a política externa dos EUA. Para isso, será necessário adotar uma política externa que atenda aos interesses e às aspirações da grande maioria dos americanos, desde as metrópoles urbanas até os vilarejos rurais.
Para alcançar esse objetivo, os Estados Unidos precisam fazer três ajustes fundamentais. Primeiro, precisam superar a divisão partidária entre a América urbana e a rural e reconstruir um consenso internacionalista que inclua as famílias trabalhadoras marginalizadas pela globalização. Tal esforço exigirá uma política comercial reequilibrada que evite tanto mercados descontrolados quanto excessos protecionistas, um programa de investimentos direcionados às regiões menos desenvolvidas do país e uma reformulação completa de um sistema de imigração falho. Em segundo lugar, Washington precisa encontrar um equilíbrio entre o multilateralismo profundo e uma ruptura unilateral. Para combater o nacionalismo populista, os Estados Unidos devem reformar as instituições multilaterais existentes para promover uma distribuição mais equitativa de autoridade e responsabilidades, ao mesmo tempo que aprimoram a oferta de bens públicos, como defesa comum, assistência humanitária e segurança cibernética. Devem também promover coalizões de países dispostos a cooperar, permitindo que os Estados trabalhem juntos em prol de interesses comuns, apesar das diferenças geopolíticas e ideológicas. Por fim, Washington deve adotar uma abordagem mais criteriosa em relação ao engajamento internacional, que evite tanto a tentação do globalismo desenfreado quanto o canto da sereia de um recuo contraproducente, priorizando os interesses vitais do país. Os Estados Unidos devem continuar a desempenhar o papel de equilibrador entre as grandes potências, mas não de policial global.
Consolidar o apoio interno a um novo internacionalismo americano será difícil, dadas as muitas divisões que atualmente fragmentam o país. Mas, em um mundo indisciplinado, uma liderança americana equilibrada e proativa continua sendo uma necessidade. Os Estados Unidos devem encontrar um ponto de equilíbrio entre o excesso internacionalista e o recuo nacionalista, afastando-se da ambição global excessiva sem se afastar do engajamento global.
UM CONSENSO DIFÍCIL DE CONSIDERAR
Esta não é a primeira vez na história dos EUA que os líderes do país lutam para encontrar um equilíbrio entre as pressões concorrentes da política internacional e doméstica. Atormentados por profundas divisões partidárias e regionais na década de 1920, os Estados Unidos rejeitaram a liderança internacional. O Congresso rejeitou a adesão à Liga das Nações, e os governos republicanos de Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge e Herbert Hoover priorizaram o engajamento comercial em detrimento do estratégico no exterior.
The laissez-faire credo that dominated the political landscape came to define U.S. foreign policy. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover recognized the need to stabilize the economies of a war-ravaged Europe but were fearful of excessive government involvement in world affairs and constrained by the demands of coalition building in an increasingly fractured GOP. They gambled that private initiative, rather than government activism, would be sufficient to steer the world away from economic fragmentation and toward interdependence and geopolitical stability. But relying on “dollar diplomacy” did the opposite; in the absence of U.S. leadership and strategic engagement, militarism and geopolitical rivalry spread. The Great Depression only deepened the United States’ retreat. Washington erected tariff barriers and sought to cordon itself off from the forces destabilizing Europe and East Asia. Only the worldwide war that broke out would end the United States’ isolationist delusions.
With the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Washington finally assumed the mantle of global leadership that it had rejected after World War I. Abandoning isolationism while eschewing idealistic calls for world federalism, U.S. officials instead took a middle course and pursued liberal internationalism. The liberal international order that took shape in the late 1940s and early 1950s was made possible by a broad political alliance that spanned party, region, and class. Democrats and Republicans, Northerners and Southerners, bankers, factory workers, and farmers all found common cause in freer trade, forward defense, and foreign aid, which linked prosperity and security at home to economic and strategic engagement abroad.
This bipartisan internationalism provided the political grounding for the network of strategic and commercial partnerships that succeeded in containing the ambition and appeal of the Soviet bloc. Foreign policy and domestic politics were in broad alignment. Because international purposes generally enjoyed widespread domestic buy-in, liberal internationalism survived even the political tumult produced by the Vietnam War.
Em um mundo indisciplinado, uma liderança estadunidense equilibrada e proativa continua sendo uma necessidade.
But after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ideological triumph of the Western bloc, the United States’ foreign policy aims and its domestic politics began pulling in opposite directions. In the absence of a geopolitical rival, Washington’s unchecked international ambitions ballooned beyond the country’s political will. Neoliberal reformers rushed in to liberalize, deregulate, and globalize markets. Their economic policies, coupled with the scaling back of the U.S. welfare state at home, expedited the shrinking of the middle class and incubated a backlash against globalism. An influx of immigrants, primarily from Latin America, intensified this backlash, as politicians fused concerns about economic insecurity with identity-based grievance.
Washington also overreached strategically, taking on a broad array of new commitments and missions in the 1990s and early 2000s. The Clinton administration intervened in the Balkans and launched NATO’s enlargement in central and eastern Europe; the Bush administration pursued a war on terrorism that morphed into an effort to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into stable democracies; the Obama administration pledged to shift the focus to “nation-building at home” but ended up mired in Afghanistan and battling the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) in Iraq and Syria. These and other internationalist ambitions regularly failed to produce the promised results and stretched well beyond what voters would tolerate. Public doubts metastasized into widespread resentment.
Indeed, long before Trump unleashed his assault on globalism, popular support for free trade, institutionalized multilateralism, and democracy promotion and nation building abroad was waning. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, antiglobalist sentiment took hold in America’s left-behind locales, whittling away what remained of the postwar bipartisan foreign policy consensus. Trump harnessed the politics of grievance, promising to end Washington’s liberal internationalist compact. His “America first” foreign policy replaced open trade with economic protectionism; liberal immigration policies with a sweeping crackdown; internationalist ambition with nationalist pullback; multilateralism with unilateralism; and the promotion of democracy with indifference toward the spread of democratic values abroad.
U.S. President Joe Biden sought to reverse Trump’s foreign policy and bring ends and means back into balance by pursuing a “foreign policy for the middle class.” His administration attempted to revive liberal internationalism by framing its foreign policy as part of a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. But Biden failed to rebuild anything close to the postwar domestic consensus and many working Americans again rallied behind Trump’s “America first” alternative.
O excesso de ambição estratégica deu lugar a uma retirada contraproducente.
Especially during his second term, Trump has overcorrected and underperformed. His tariffs risk fracturing the global economy and have only made it more difficult for working Americans to make ends meet. His inhumane detention and deportation of immigrants have strained the labor market and alienated voters. His unilateralism has isolated the United States by antagonizing longtime allies and undermining international teamwork. Trump has dismantled U.S. foreign aid programs and coupled his pullback from promoting democracy abroad with disregard for the rule of law at home, compromising the country’s moral authority.
Meanwhile, strategic overreach has given way to self-defeating withdrawal. Trump has backed away from supporting Ukraine while failing to apply coercive leverage against Russia, enabling Vladimir Putin to hijack ongoing negotiations and intensify the war. Trump did succeed in brokering an uneasy peace between Israel and Hamas, but his episodic engagement has produced virtually no progress in advancing a broader regional peace. The administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy announced a resuscitation of the Monroe Doctrine, which has amounted in practice to legally questionable military strikes against boats alleged to be trafficking drugs in the Caribbean and open musings about toppling Venezuela’s government. Meanwhile, a strategy for dealing with China has yet to materialize.
The United States is at an inflection point. Liberal internationalist policies that once served the country well no longer enjoy public backing. At the same time, support for Trump’s “America first” foreign policy is fast dwindling; opinion polls indicate little public appetite for tariffs, deportations, unilateralism, and international disengagement. At a time when Americans are facing great economic uncertainty and recognize they live in an interdependent world, they would be better off with a pragmatic foreign policy that strikes a more measured balance between international ends and domestic means.
GET YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER
Given the scope of the country’s political fracture, it will not be easy to bring U.S. foreign policy back into alignment with public preferences. Studies by political scientists, including Jacob Grumbach and Jonathan Rodden, indicate that urban-rural differences have become a vector for polarization. Since 2016, Trump has widened the urban-rural divide by ramping up political debate over globalization and immigration. Broadly speaking, urban Americans are more supportive of open trade and liberal immigration policies. Rural Americans tend to lean in the other direction, prioritizing the use of tariffs to protect U.S. jobs and a reduction in legal as well as illegal immigration.
This political divide is now firmly entrenched in America’s electoral system. By design, the Electoral College and the Senate enhance the influence of less populous, rural states, magnifying the effect of ideological and partisan polarization along the urban-rural fault line. During the Cold War, the positions that elected officials took on matters of trade and immigration rarely broke along party or ideological lines. No longer. Mobilized voters in “red” and “blue” America now consider politicians’ positions on these issues to be a litmus test of tribal loyalty, sharply reducing the room for political compromise.
U.S. policymakers need to go to the source of the problem: the socioeconomic imbalances that are pitting urban and rural Americans against each other. To bridge this gap and rebuild support for internationalism in the country’s lagging regions, Washington needs to simultaneously move on two fronts. It needs to craft a trade policy that does more for working Americans and to expand economic investment in the country’s stagnant locales. And it needs to revamp immigration policy, stopping illegal entry while continuing to admit the documented immigrants needed to contribute to the country’s economic vitality.
Washington precisa romper decisivamente com a hiperglobalização da década de 1990.
Given the scope of the country’s political fracture, it will not be easy to bring U.S. foreign policy back into alignment with public preferences. Studies by political scientists, including Jacob Grumbach and Jonathan Rodden, indicate that urban-rural differences have become a vector for polarization. Since 2016, Trump has widened the urban-rural divide by ramping up political debate over globalization and immigration. Broadly speaking, urban Americans are more supportive of open trade and liberal immigration policies. Rural Americans tend to lean in the other direction, prioritizing the use of tariffs to protect U.S. jobs and a reduction in legal as well as illegal immigration.
This political divide is now firmly entrenched in America’s electoral system. By design, the Electoral College and the Senate enhance the influence of less populous, rural states, magnifying the effect of ideological and partisan polarization along the urban-rural fault line. During the Cold War, the positions that elected officials took on matters of trade and immigration rarely broke along party or ideological lines. No longer. Mobilized voters in “red” and “blue” America now consider politicians’ positions on these issues to be a litmus test of tribal loyalty, sharply reducing the room for political compromise.
U.S. policymakers need to go to the source of the problem: the socioeconomic imbalances that are pitting urban and rural Americans against each other. To bridge this gap and rebuild support for internationalism in the country’s lagging regions, Washington needs to simultaneously move on two fronts. It needs to craft a trade policy that does more for working Americans and to expand economic investment in the country’s stagnant locales. And it needs to revamp immigration policy, stopping illegal entry while continuing to admit the documented immigrants needed to contribute to the country’s economic vitality.
Washington precisa romper decisivamente com a hiperglobalização da década de 1990.
Democrats and Republicans alike have begun to move forward on these fronts. Both parties have started to back away from open trade in favor of protectionist policies aimed at reshoring manufacturing jobs and select supply chains. The Biden administration also took steps to redress long-standing regional inequities in infrastructure investment. It sought to reduce broadband Internet gaps between urban and rural America and invested in “regional technology and innovation hubs” in up-and-coming metropolitan areas. But partly because of congressional resistance, these initiatives did not go far enough, with many projects needing more time to produce tangible benefits. And Biden moved far too slowly to curb the inflow of immigrants, leaving the implementation of measures needed to block illegal crossings of the southern border until his last year in office.
The Trump administration has focused intensely on the problems of unfair trade and illegal immigration. But it has used a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. High tariffs are only exacerbating a national affordability crisis. The promised manufacturing revival made possible by tariffs and industrial policy will not come close to employing a sizable portion of the U.S. workforce, most of which is already in the service sector. The administration’s draconian crackdown on immigration and massive deportations of undocumented migrants, opposed by two-thirds of the public, has led to labor shortages and rising consumer prices in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and other economic sectors.
To repair the partisan divide over trade and immigration, Washington needs to decisively break with the hyperglobalization of the 1990s and negotiate a more level playing field with trading partners, particularly China. But rebalancing trade does not require protectionist overkill, which risks fragmenting the global economy and punishing U.S. consumers. A better trade policy for urban and rural America needs to do more for U.S. workers, not just for corporate America. Washington should also couple place-based domestic investments with an overhaul of immigration policy to fill out the labor force and enhance economic security for working Americans.
MULTILATERALISM-LITE
The institutions of global governance are being attacked from both sides of the aisle. An array of domestic political forces in the United States is undermining support for multilateralism. Many “America firsters” view supranational bodies such as the UN and the World Trade Organization as encroaching on U.S. sovereignty and have thus embraced a stiff-necked unilateralism, aiming to hobble existing institutions and make it nearly impossible to create new ones. They see alliances as encumbrances and believe that the United States has shouldered a disproportionate share of the burdens of multilateralism while its allies and partners free-ride on the largess of the American taxpayer. Meanwhile, liberal internationalists, who generally support global teamwork, worry that in a world of mounting strife, rising economic inequality, and worsening environmental decay, multilateral institutions are no longer fit for purpose.
The United States is not the only country in which domestic support for institutionalized multilateralism is waning. Populist nationalism is gaining ground across Europe. China and Russia are leading efforts to create counterweights to post–World War II institutions that they see as dominated by the West. Bodies such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization offer new venues for organizing collective initiative. But they are also fracturing the institutional landscape and fostering distrust among competing multilateral platforms. Many developing countries see existing international organizations as outmoded, unrepresentative bastions of great-power privilege and dominance. It does not help that repeated efforts to reform the UN Security Council to make it representative of today’s world, rather than the world of 1945, have gone nowhere or that the current international architecture has failed to address climate change, reliably provide humanitarian assistance, or deliver on other fronts.
Despite these political blockages and institutional shortcomings, multilateral cooperation remains essential to marshaling the collective action needed to address global challenges. As the principal architect of the postwar order and the country best placed to reform this order, the United States needs to rebuild domestic and international support for multilateralism by updating existing institutions and supplementing them with informal coalitions of the willing, which are often able to deliver more quickly and efficiently than large, bureaucratic institutions.
As instituições de governança global estão sendo atacadas por ambos os lados do espectro político.
Washington should take its cues from the U.S. and global public. Americans, along with the citizens of many other countries, oppose Trump’s deep cuts to U.S. foreign aid; they would respond favorably to efforts to enhance the capacity of the World Food Program. They are also united in their anguish over the human suffering in Gaza; Washington should enhance and showcase the UN’s ability to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinians. And in the aftermath of the havoc caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Washington should be investing in and improving the World Health Organization, not walking away from it.
Washington should also look for ways to get other states to be more generous providers of public goods. Giving large countries from the developing world permanent seats on the UN Security Council, for instance, would demonstrate that the body is changing with the times, and could encourage countries such as Brazil, India, and Nigeria to contribute more. The United States remains the UN’s largest funder, contributing almost one-third of the body’s overall budget. Washington should continue to pay its UN bills, but it is time for other countries, including wealthy countries in the global South, to scale up their contributions in exchange for a greater voice.
As the global South seeks to increase its say in global governance, its regional institutions should assume more authority and responsibility in their respective zones of influence. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League, the African Union, and other regional organizations can and should do more to provide public goods, including conflict resolution, peacekeeping, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. The United States and other wealthier countries can foster greater regional self-reliance by helping lower-income countries build state capacity, alleviate poverty, hunger, and disease, and expand economic opportunity.
Os Estados Unidos devem estar preparados para operar em um ambiente institucional complexo e em constante mudança.
U.S. alliances are similarly in need of a rebalancing of responsibility. European and Asian allies that benefit from the United States’ military protection should boost their own defense spending and contribute more to collective defense. Trump’s arm-twisting has produced results, with NATO members on track to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP. But Washington should rely more on positive inducements than angry harangues, which end up alienating friends that the United States needs by its side. Better trade deals, preferential access to U.S. research and development programs, and favorable financing for major purchases of U.S arms would provide attractive incentives.
Rather than focus only on formal bodies, Washington should also more regularly rely on smaller and informal coalitions to tackle specific issues that are more difficult to resolve in large, slow-moving institutions. The Biden administration made good use of this approach, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, where it partnered with fellow democracies to counter Chinese ambition by teaming up with Australia, India, and Japan in the security partnership known as the Quad. Cooperation with democracies comes easily, but Washington must also reach across geopolitical and ideological divides to tackle pressing problems. The United States has experience fashioning such informal, ideologically diverse coalitions. The Clinton administration joined France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom in the Contact Group, which helped bring peace to the Balkans in the 1990s. The Obama administration joined China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom in the so-called P5+1, which negotiated a deal to contain Iran’s nuclear program in 2015. Such ad hoc groupings do not always produce results, but they do offer a model for working across ideological lines and sidestepping the bureaucratic and political snags that often stymie action by larger, more formal bodies.
Finally, Washington should look for ways to work with, rather than oppose, multilateral groups formed and headed by other countries, including rivals. It was a mistake for the Obama administration to oppose the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank by China in 2015. Washington should have joined the effort and sought to ensure that the new lending institution complemented and aligned with the work of the World Bank. Bodies such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, despite limited track records of serving the public good, have the potential to add value even if the United States and its allies are not members. These bodies also provide a vehicle for advancing dialogue across ideological dividing lines by including large democracies such as Brazil, India, and South Africa.
The United States must be prepared to operate in a messy and fluid institutional setting, measuring the merit of multilateralism through output and efficacy, not ideological affinity or Washington’s ability to call the shots. By devolving greater decision-making authority to other countries and persuading those states to assume greater responsibility for finding and funding solutions to global and regional challenges, U.S. leaders can accomplish two goals at once: securing broader international support for collective action and winning back a measure of the domestic support for multilateralism that has been lost since the 1990s. Progress will be slow and uneven; skepticism about multilateral governance runs deep in rich and poor countries alike. But modest, incremental changes will go a long way toward closing the gap that now exists between the demand for global public goods and the supply.
The institutions of global governance are being attacked from both sides of the aisle. An array of domestic political forces in the United States is undermining support for multilateralism. Many “America firsters” view supranational bodies such as the UN and the World Trade Organization as encroaching on U.S. sovereignty and have thus embraced a stiff-necked unilateralism, aiming to hobble existing institutions and make it nearly impossible to create new ones. They see alliances as encumbrances and believe that the United States has shouldered a disproportionate share of the burdens of multilateralism while its allies and partners free-ride on the largess of the American taxpayer. Meanwhile, liberal internationalists, who generally support global teamwork, worry that in a world of mounting strife, rising economic inequality, and worsening environmental decay, multilateral institutions are no longer fit for purpose.
The United States is not the only country in which domestic support for institutionalized multilateralism is waning. Populist nationalism is gaining ground across Europe. China and Russia are leading efforts to create counterweights to post–World War II institutions that they see as dominated by the West. Bodies such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization offer new venues for organizing collective initiative. But they are also fracturing the institutional landscape and fostering distrust among competing multilateral platforms. Many developing countries see existing international organizations as outmoded, unrepresentative bastions of great-power privilege and dominance. It does not help that repeated efforts to reform the UN Security Council to make it representative of today’s world, rather than the world of 1945, have gone nowhere or that the current international architecture has failed to address climate change, reliably provide humanitarian assistance, or deliver on other fronts.
Despite these political blockages and institutional shortcomings, multilateral cooperation remains essential to marshaling the collective action needed to address global challenges. As the principal architect of the postwar order and the country best placed to reform this order, the United States needs to rebuild domestic and international support for multilateralism by updating existing institutions and supplementing them with informal coalitions of the willing, which are often able to deliver more quickly and efficiently than large, bureaucratic institutions.
As instituições de governança global estão sendo atacadas por ambos os lados do espectro político.
Washington should take its cues from the U.S. and global public. Americans, along with the citizens of many other countries, oppose Trump’s deep cuts to U.S. foreign aid; they would respond favorably to efforts to enhance the capacity of the World Food Program. They are also united in their anguish over the human suffering in Gaza; Washington should enhance and showcase the UN’s ability to provide humanitarian assistance to Palestinians. And in the aftermath of the havoc caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Washington should be investing in and improving the World Health Organization, not walking away from it.
Washington should also look for ways to get other states to be more generous providers of public goods. Giving large countries from the developing world permanent seats on the UN Security Council, for instance, would demonstrate that the body is changing with the times, and could encourage countries such as Brazil, India, and Nigeria to contribute more. The United States remains the UN’s largest funder, contributing almost one-third of the body’s overall budget. Washington should continue to pay its UN bills, but it is time for other countries, including wealthy countries in the global South, to scale up their contributions in exchange for a greater voice.
As the global South seeks to increase its say in global governance, its regional institutions should assume more authority and responsibility in their respective zones of influence. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Arab League, the African Union, and other regional organizations can and should do more to provide public goods, including conflict resolution, peacekeeping, and the delivery of humanitarian assistance. The United States and other wealthier countries can foster greater regional self-reliance by helping lower-income countries build state capacity, alleviate poverty, hunger, and disease, and expand economic opportunity.
Os Estados Unidos devem estar preparados para operar em um ambiente institucional complexo e em constante mudança.
U.S. alliances are similarly in need of a rebalancing of responsibility. European and Asian allies that benefit from the United States’ military protection should boost their own defense spending and contribute more to collective defense. Trump’s arm-twisting has produced results, with NATO members on track to raise defense spending to five percent of GDP. But Washington should rely more on positive inducements than angry harangues, which end up alienating friends that the United States needs by its side. Better trade deals, preferential access to U.S. research and development programs, and favorable financing for major purchases of U.S arms would provide attractive incentives.
Rather than focus only on formal bodies, Washington should also more regularly rely on smaller and informal coalitions to tackle specific issues that are more difficult to resolve in large, slow-moving institutions. The Biden administration made good use of this approach, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, where it partnered with fellow democracies to counter Chinese ambition by teaming up with Australia, India, and Japan in the security partnership known as the Quad. Cooperation with democracies comes easily, but Washington must also reach across geopolitical and ideological divides to tackle pressing problems. The United States has experience fashioning such informal, ideologically diverse coalitions. The Clinton administration joined France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom in the Contact Group, which helped bring peace to the Balkans in the 1990s. The Obama administration joined China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom in the so-called P5+1, which negotiated a deal to contain Iran’s nuclear program in 2015. Such ad hoc groupings do not always produce results, but they do offer a model for working across ideological lines and sidestepping the bureaucratic and political snags that often stymie action by larger, more formal bodies.
Finally, Washington should look for ways to work with, rather than oppose, multilateral groups formed and headed by other countries, including rivals. It was a mistake for the Obama administration to oppose the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank by China in 2015. Washington should have joined the effort and sought to ensure that the new lending institution complemented and aligned with the work of the World Bank. Bodies such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, despite limited track records of serving the public good, have the potential to add value even if the United States and its allies are not members. These bodies also provide a vehicle for advancing dialogue across ideological dividing lines by including large democracies such as Brazil, India, and South Africa.
The United States must be prepared to operate in a messy and fluid institutional setting, measuring the merit of multilateralism through output and efficacy, not ideological affinity or Washington’s ability to call the shots. By devolving greater decision-making authority to other countries and persuading those states to assume greater responsibility for finding and funding solutions to global and regional challenges, U.S. leaders can accomplish two goals at once: securing broader international support for collective action and winning back a measure of the domestic support for multilateralism that has been lost since the 1990s. Progress will be slow and uneven; skepticism about multilateral governance runs deep in rich and poor countries alike. But modest, incremental changes will go a long way toward closing the gap that now exists between the demand for global public goods and the supply.
REPAIRING THE FRACTURE
The United States needs a more levelheaded brand of statecraft that occupies the middle ground between strategic overreach and indifference toward, if not detachment from, the outside world. Washington’s former role as global policeman breached the limits of U.S. power and the American public’s appetite for engagement abroad. But in an interdependent world, the United States does not have the option of returning to hemispheric isolation. It still needs to prevent China or Russia from dominating Asia and Europe, even as it retrenches from other regions, particularly the Middle East. The shift in power from Iran and its proxies toward Israel, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey should enable the United States to downsize its military footprint in the region and pursue its interests primarily through diplomacy.
As it seeks to check the threats posed by China and Russia, the United States should focus on discrete challenges rather than amp up rhetoric about an existential clash between democracy and autocracy. Washington will ultimately need to work with Moscow and Beijing, as well as other autocracies, to deal with climate change, nuclear proliferation, and other global threats. The United States should keep trying to find a just end to the war in Ukraine and make improved relations with Moscow contingent on the Kremlin’s readiness to compromise and end its ongoing aggression. Similarly, Trump’s instinct to seek a trade deal with Beijing that could help dial down U.S.-Chinese rivalry is correct. Washington should embrace practical carrot-and-stick diplomacy, working with whatever regimes are willing to cooperate to address shared challenges.
A foreign policy more oriented toward problem solving would have strong public appeal. Americans on both sides of the aisle are concerned about job security, inflation, health care, and immigration. They would welcome leadership in Washington that lightens the country’s load abroad and invests more time and money in solving problems at home. They also have little appetite for protectionist and isolationist policies that only exacerbate economic insecurity for working families, needlessly increase suffering abroad, and leave the United States less secure. More pragmatism will play well with an American electorate that has grown skeptical of Washington’s ability to shoot straight and to deliver concrete gains at home and abroad.
Nearly a century ago, Washington mended the domestic fracture of the interwar era with a steady statecraft that successfully navigated the global fractures of the Cold War. Today, the country again faces domestic and international fracture—simultaneously. Once more, it must overcome partisan division, reinvent its statecraft, and anchor U.S. leadership abroad in a new political consensus at home. As always, good policy requires good politics.
The United States needs a more levelheaded brand of statecraft that occupies the middle ground between strategic overreach and indifference toward, if not detachment from, the outside world. Washington’s former role as global policeman breached the limits of U.S. power and the American public’s appetite for engagement abroad. But in an interdependent world, the United States does not have the option of returning to hemispheric isolation. It still needs to prevent China or Russia from dominating Asia and Europe, even as it retrenches from other regions, particularly the Middle East. The shift in power from Iran and its proxies toward Israel, the Gulf monarchies, and Turkey should enable the United States to downsize its military footprint in the region and pursue its interests primarily through diplomacy.
As it seeks to check the threats posed by China and Russia, the United States should focus on discrete challenges rather than amp up rhetoric about an existential clash between democracy and autocracy. Washington will ultimately need to work with Moscow and Beijing, as well as other autocracies, to deal with climate change, nuclear proliferation, and other global threats. The United States should keep trying to find a just end to the war in Ukraine and make improved relations with Moscow contingent on the Kremlin’s readiness to compromise and end its ongoing aggression. Similarly, Trump’s instinct to seek a trade deal with Beijing that could help dial down U.S.-Chinese rivalry is correct. Washington should embrace practical carrot-and-stick diplomacy, working with whatever regimes are willing to cooperate to address shared challenges.
A foreign policy more oriented toward problem solving would have strong public appeal. Americans on both sides of the aisle are concerned about job security, inflation, health care, and immigration. They would welcome leadership in Washington that lightens the country’s load abroad and invests more time and money in solving problems at home. They also have little appetite for protectionist and isolationist policies that only exacerbate economic insecurity for working families, needlessly increase suffering abroad, and leave the United States less secure. More pragmatism will play well with an American electorate that has grown skeptical of Washington’s ability to shoot straight and to deliver concrete gains at home and abroad.
Nearly a century ago, Washington mended the domestic fracture of the interwar era with a steady statecraft that successfully navigated the global fractures of the Cold War. Today, the country again faces domestic and international fracture—simultaneously. Once more, it must overcome partisan division, reinvent its statecraft, and anchor U.S. leadership abroad in a new political consensus at home. As always, good policy requires good politics.
