Power and Responsibility: Building International Order in an Era of Transnational Threats

Preface

IN ITS OPENING YEARS, the twenty-first century has distinguished itself as an era of paradox. Globalization has created unprecedented opportunities to better the lives of people around the world. The ability to access global markets for capital, technology, and labor has allowed the private sector to amass wealth unfathomable fifty years ago. It has raised incomes for millions of people in emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil. Indeed, for China, integration into the global economy has driven the most remarkable story of national progress in human history: 500 million people have been raised out of poverty in just thirty years. Yet the forces of globalization that have stitched the world together can also tear it apart. As seen in the fall 2008 financial crisis, economic turbulence in one country can undermine economic growth half a world away. The spread of nuclear technology and know-how means the most lethal weapons are within the reach of terrorists. The same technologies that speed the transfer of information and capital around the world are used by international criminals for illicit gain. Investments in energy subsidies in one part of the world can contribute to skyrocketing food prices that drive hunger and social unrest in scores of countries. The ease and frequency of international air travel hasten the spread of emerging deadly infectious disease. xiii PREFACE 00-4706-2 frontmatter 12/17/08 10:24 AM Page xiii The net result of globalization is profound interdependence. Our prosperity and security depend greatly on the actions—or inaction—of people and governments all over the world. But U.S. foreign policy has yet to come to grips with this simple truth. In an interdependent world, if you need the cooperation of those outside your borders to ensure your own national security, you had better listen to them. They may not get a vote in your elections, but they have an unprecedented impact on whether your foreign policy succeeds or not, indeed even on whether you have the financing needed to bail out failing banks and industries in turbulent times. This insight is fundamental to why we wrote this book as part of the Managing Global Insecurity project, and how we wrote it. Bruce Jones and Stephen Stedman worked for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2003–05 on the most sweeping effort to transform the United Nations and the larger global security system since 1945. We saw up close the weaknesses and strengths of international cooperation to address security and prosperity. We gained a pretty good sense of what works and what doesn’t, and where, in American parlance, the bodies are buried. We also learned a secret about American foreign policy. Every day Washington, D.C., uses international institutions to help protect the American people. We saw that U.S policymakers are genuinely frustrated at the performance of those institutions and want them to be more effective and efficient. And finally, we saw a yawning gap between what American policymakers want and the vision and capacity to translate this into action. On issue after issue, whether working on nonproliferation, dealing with regional conflicts, alleviating poverty, or preventing deadly disease, we saw potential gains from cooperation left at the bargaining table. Not all of this was the fault of how Washington engaged the process, but a good portion of it was. Too often the United States did not pay attention to the priorities, fears, and aspirations of others. In formulating proposals for UN reform, Stedman and Jones traveled to every continent. We engaged in discussions about what people, governments , and NGOs thought were the biggest threats to international security. We learned a simple, but invaluable lesson: depending on one’s xiv PREFACE 00-4706-2 frontmatter 12/17/08 10:24 AM Page xiv region, power, and level of prosperity, one sees a world of very different threats. An example makes the point. When we traveled to Africa to discuss threats to security, and engaged African diplomats around the world, they never once brought up the threat of catastrophic terrorism. They wanted to talk about poverty and deadly disease, especially malaria and HIV/AIDS. And why not, when tens of millions of people have died, more than ten million children are orphans, and those living in some African countries face a life expectancy reduced by more than forty years because of HIV/AIDS? The three of us first met during...