25
Examination of witnesses
Ivo Daalder and Anthony Dworkin.
Q118 The Chair: Today’s session is the 11th public evidence session on the United Kingdom’s future relationship with the United States. It will focus on the US and multilateralism and what shifts in US policy may mean for the UK’s own strategy and partnerships. The session will be streamed live on the Parliament website and a transcript will be taken. Once it is available, you will be shown a copy and may make minor amendments if you wish. I remind Members that if they have any interests pertinent to their question, they should declare them when first speaking. There is a risk that we may have a Division during the session, and if that happens, I am afraid we will need to break for 10 minutes because some of us will need to go and vote. I ask each of you to introduce yourselves briefly, and then we can go into questions. Ambassador Daalder, would you like to start?
Ivo Daalder: Thank you. I very much appreciate appearing before you today to testify in this hearing. I recently retired as the president and CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. I am now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. I was the US ambassador to NATO in the first Obama term, from 2009 to 2013. I am very pleased to be here today.
Anthony Dworkin: Likewise, it is a pleasure to be here; I am grateful for the invitation. I am a senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank, based in our London office. I work on a range of issues connected with human rights, democracy, global governance and international law.
The Chair: Thank you. I will kick us off. How do the US and the UK perceive their respective roles in upholding the international order, and to what extent do they still see themselves as co-stewards of the order? I ask Mr Daalder in the first instance.
Ivo Daalder: There has been a change in the past six months, as you may have noticed. The international order, which in many ways stemmed from the collaboration between the United States and Britain, and later with others, during World War II, helped create the United Nations and the Bretton Woods financial system. Ultimately, with the inability of the United Nations to be the primary guarantor of collective security, security alliances were created, including, importantly, NATO, under pressure led by Britain at the time, in the late 1940s. That system has worked extraordinarily well over the past 80 years to ensure—through a management that the United States led but many others contributed to, including Great Britain to a great extent—an unprecedented era of security, peace, freedom and prosperity. It has been an extraordinary era in which the United States and the UK, among others, collaborated to maintain and strengthen that order and adapt it to new circumstances.
That order may remain, but the United States is no longer its guarantor. It is now being led by a President and an Administration who believe, in the words of its Secretary of State in his hearing before the US Senate, that the post-war era was “weaponized” against the United States. That is a quote. Senator Rubio and others strongly believe these days that the order that the United States helped create and maintain, which has guided American and indeed western policy for over 80 years, is an order that needs to disappear; that the United States needs to take primary responsibility for only its own interests; and that the best way to advance American interests is not to uphold an order that has been extraordinarily good for America but to overturn it. We have seen that in its approach to security and alliances; we are seeing it in its approach to the international global economy; and, most destructively, we have seen it in its decision to abandon long-held American and indeed international views about multilateral institutions and the importance of soft power.
The challenge for the UK, which I still believe is fully on board to support this international order, is to find new partners to do so. I believe it is one of the reasons that the UK is looking once again towards Europe, but also towards friends and allies in North America, primarily Canada, of course, and increasingly in Asia. Countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada and those within the European Union are countries that still uphold this order. They believe in it and believe that their security, prosperity and freedom is advanced by it. If the United States does not want to play a part in it, that is for the United States to decide, but it does not mean that the UK and others should move in a different direction. The partnership that was created back in World War II is in a very precarious state, mainly because of the decisions made by this President and Administration in the past six months.
Anthony Dworkin: I would very much echo what Ambassador Daalder said. In the UK, there is a strong sense of this shared history and of the importance for the United Kingdom of preserving, as far as possible, a rules-based international system. We have seen some variations in how the approach to the international order—the rules-based system—is interpreted, how much it is still in the UK’s interest to work primarily through the collective UN-based institutions and how much to work, in an era of increasing global competition, more through like-minded bodies such as the G7 and others. Perhaps we can talk more about the balancing act between those two.
It is worth acknowledging that there is probably a recognition among many policymakers here in the UK that some changes in the order are inevitable. We have seen a lot of changes in international power, the balance of power and the power dynamics in the international system, but this country and its officials would like to work with the United States and other like-minded partners to try to preserve and, at the same time, reform the system of global governance to make it effective and responsive to current challenges. However, as Ambassador Daalder said, when you look across the Atlantic now, you see a former partner that really is no longer interested in being a co-steward.
It is clearly a matter of reality that the United Kingdom needs to work with others. We do not have the power and global influence to act alone. It is not even clear that the United States would have that now, so there is very much a question of who will be our partners now. It is perhaps worth highlighting the anomaly of the current situation: not only is the United States not presenting itself as a partner to the UK in working to preserve and reform the system of global governance but, in some ways, our commitment here to a rules-based order and our relationship with the United States are even in tension.
For instance, if you look at the trade deal that the UK recently agreed with President Trump, you can clearly see some tensions between the terms of that deal and the principles underlying the rules-based trading system. In that sense, the UK is in quite a difficult position. Another point along the same lines is that the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, a British national, is currently under sanction from the United States for actions taken in pursuance of his mandate as a prosecutor. That is another point of tension.
Q119 Lord Grocott: From time to time, what is meant by the international order can be a bit nebulous. I think we can all agree on that. It is not subject to precise definition, I do not think. I would like to understand from the Americans’ point of view, are they saying that there is an international order, but they are not going to play any part in it, that they do not agree with it and that it is wrong? Are they saying there is no such thing as an international order? Or are they saying that we might be able to support a different international order if such a thing existed, if it was differently defined? Have they just given up on the whole thing or is it capable of resuscitation?
Ivo Daalder: Thank you, Lord Grocott, for that question. There is always an international order, and I believe that the current Administration see an international order. What is different is that, for 80 years, we have had a rules-based international order that recognised certain institutions and rules beyond the nation state as affecting, guiding and shaping international behaviour of states. These are rules that are reflected in the charter of the United Nations, the organisation of the Bretton Woods financial and WTO trading systems and rules that led to security alliances along the lines of NATO.
This Administration are not against international order per se but against rules that constrain America in its behaviour. They seek to be an America unbound by the rules of the system and indeed willing and able to change them at a whim. The order they seek in some ways is hard to pin down, because this is a very different kind of American Administration than we have had in the past. They have a sole decision-maker who at times within a paragraph can change his mind or have different perspectives, so it is hard to know exactly what he wants.
However, one gathers from the way he has governed that he is interested in two sets of ways in which the international order is evolving. One is an order based on power, that those who have the most power should get the most say. It is an order that the great general and historian Thucydides described about the Peloponnesian War, particularly in his description of the Melian Dialogue, when the Athenians told the Melians, who were weaker at the time, that “they shall do as they must, and the strong will do as they will”. That is the world he wants to live in. In fact, that is the world that Donald Trump thinks he is living in. It is why he is able, he thinks, to dictate trading and other terms and how much other countries spend or do not spend on defence, because the United States has that power. That is one aspect of his worldview which translates in the way that the order has evolved.
The other is that he tends to look at other strong, big countries, primarily Russia, at least until recently, and China as similarly inclined to pursue their own interests on the basis of power, to recognise that and to think that the world may be better off if it was divided into spheres of influence. This is much like we have seen in the 19th century between competing powers, in which the competing powers recognised those spheres of influence: China in Asia, Russia to some extent in Europe, and of course, the United States in the western hemisphere. You may recall that at the outset of the Administration, there was a lot of talk by the President about making Greenland part of the United States, making Canada the 51st state, taking over the Panama Canal—all critical parts of the western hemisphere and control over it.
Therefore, the international order that the Trump Administration are talking about is in some ways, by the way, not that different from the international order that both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are talking about. It is an order based on power rather than rules; that is the fundamental difference. The problem for countries like the UK is that because they do not single-handedly have the power to affect the behaviour of the stronger nations, they need to find other friends and allies in order to both counter those who are using power to enforce their will and to maintain whatever rules-based order might exist within the relations among those countries. I think that is exactly what the UK has been trying to do in the last six-plus months, as indeed has Canada, the European Union, to some extent Japan—there are issues there—Australia, and others. That part of the future of the US-UK relationship is that the UK is increasingly going to—and will have to—align with other countries in order to counter America’s whims and power.
Lord Grocott: Anything to add at all?
Anthony Dworkin: I will just pick up on one crucial point. Clearly, the conception of the national interest which we see being pursued by this Administration is one where the predictability and stability of international rules and institutions is not seen as something that contributes to all countries in the world being able to achieve greater collective goods. Rather, as Ambassador Daalder says, it is seen as something which prevents and constrains the United States from achieving what it could achieve through a more direct and transactional use of its own power. That is a real dilemma for the UK in looking for a potential partnership with the US.
Q120 Lord Houghton of Richmond: Those two opening comments from you both have rather shocked me. We are making dynamic adjustments to our questions in the light of what has been said, such is the powerful nature of those remarks. It appears to us that we can completely abandon any sort of sense of the teleological certainty of human harmony evolving over time, so long as we can all roughly stay on the same track.
I wonder, therefore, whether you can offer any hope that in this context, what we are experiencing at the moment is maybe just a hiccup in time. The aim of the committee’s study in many respects is not just to make a judgment of the moment, but to look to the end of this Trump Administration—and who knows, at the two-year point his ability to do what he is doing now might in some ways be constrained. Is this an expression of the will of the American people, as appears to be the case, or might there be a similarly bold correction back to a more enlightened approach to multilateralism?
In that context, what are the things on which a future Administration might converge with the United Kingdom and the rest of the world, and Russia and China and all that, and get on a bit to resolve some of the world’s great challenges? Or when and where will those divisions of, dare I say, a policy of power and selfishness, remain? Ambassador, if you could kick off again because it is it is great to hear what you are saying, even though it is somewhat sobering and spoiling my afternoon.
Ivo Daalder: It is one of the reasons my liver is not doing as well in the past six months as it did before—but it is still early for drinking, I am afraid.
I do not want to give up all hope, but whatever happens afterwards will not be the same as what came before. The fundamental reason is that the United States, from 7 December 1941 until quite recently, earned an incredible degree of international trust in its judgments, behaviour and willingness to uphold an international order to provide public goods by supporting institutions that benefited not only the United States, which by definition they did, but others too. In the past six months that trust has gone; it has disappeared. At its core, every relationship is based on trust. I know from my own background that, at their core, alliances are based on the trust that your allies will come to your defence, because that is all it is: it is trust. It is not a legal thing that you can write down in a treaty. It is the belief that it will in fact happen, and that that will deter your enemies and ultimately defeat them if they are not deterred. That trust is gone. I do not speak for you here in the House of Lords, but in every conversation I have with every allied country and official, it is clear that the past six months have destroyed that trust.
The United States will come back and realise this after what I call “the great suicide”. In my view, the United States is committing suicide as a great power: undermining its own power, not understanding its own interests and not getting that working together with its like-minded friends and partners around the world is fundamental to achieving its goals. Instead, it believes wrongly that it can use power in a way that will get it short-term gain. It may, but in the long term it will not; in the long term, it will hurt the United States greatly. That country may decide that, in fact, this experiment they have had with Donald Trump’s policies needs to be reversed, but if and when that happens, it will be a weaker and less trusted United States that comes back to the global scene.
In some ways, the relationship the United States will have with other like-minded countries, which I hope we would want to continue to work with, will be far more one of equals, rather than, as it has been in the past 80 years, one of unequals—one of the United States being not only first among equals but unquestionably so. The kind of leadership that the United States has demonstrated over the past 80 years would be impossible to execute; it would have to be shared—with the UK and friends in Europe and Asia. That will create extraordinary obligations on what used to be our allies, including the UK and others, to lead in a way that has not been the case for a very long time because there has been a deference to the United States—a belief that the UK could help the US as it pursued its leadership. There will not be the same deference, so the nature of the international effort and of working together, particularly if we still confront—which I believe we will—a very strong and adversarial China and a very militarised Russia, will be very different.
My optimism relies on the fact that in the past six months we have seen a number of countries and leaders taking up that challenge—I would put the UK squarely in the middle of that. As we have seen, an effort by the Prime Minister, Chancellor Merz, NATO Secretary-General Rutte and, to some extent, Emmanuel Macron, has turned Trump around on the issue of Ukraine and Russia—perhaps 50% or 70% rather than 100%, but it is better than where we were—with a willingness to sell weapons and to consider the possibility of sanctions on Russia. That was extraordinary diplomacy and leadership on the part of those countries and leaders. That is the future: a future of more equal power. It is not a bad future for the UK; it is just a terrible future for the United States.
Anthony Dworkin: I agree very much. I would highlight that, although what the current President has done is a radical departure, it does not come out of nowhere. Looking at the United States from the UK, we can identify that there is a strain in American political culture that is to some degree sceptical of some forms of international organisation and international law, particularly those that would constrain the democratic sovereignty of the United States. We see this strain in, for instance, the US decision not to join the International Criminal Court, and in moves against the United Nations undertaken by previous Administrations of one sort or another. So I think there is some suspicion.
The other thing worth bearing in mind is that, as I mentioned before, the global balance of power was already changing. President Trump is not the first American President to think that the kind of leadership role that the United States was playing was one that could no longer be continued in the same way as before, partly because of shifts in the global balance of power, including the rise of China as a really serious competitor, as Ambassador Daalder mentioned. That is forcing a sense not only among Trump and his circle but more widely that the US needs to reassess its priorities and, as I mentioned, the degree to which it thinks that it can work through collective global organisations that involve some co-operation with China, such as the UN, the World Health Organization and others, as well as the degree to which it makes more sense to work among like-minded groups such as the security alliances, NATO and the G7, and a variety of other kinds of processes. Perhaps we will discuss that a bit more as we go along.
Some pre-existing issues, strains and trends will inevitably be there after President Trump leaves, but that takes me to very much the same place: a return to the old vision of the US as the leader of the free world would not be on the cards in any case. We need to look for new forms of international governance that are more reflective of the world we are in, but we are in a position now where that effort has to go forward essentially without the United States because it has opted out of the business of trying to find stable rules-based governance at all.
Q121 Baroness Coussins: Following on from your last two answers, President Trump’s scepticism towards some multilateral organisations has been quite specific in some cases—for example, his stated intention to disengage from the WHO and Gavi. Is this really just down to Trump or is it a reflection of a shift over the past couple of decades within the US? As you answer that question, could you say whether there is any distinction between the US Administration’s attitude towards multilateral institutions and the US population’s attitude? Mr Dworkin, you mentioned US culture just now, and I wonder whether you could expand on that. Do people in the US have the same kind of cynicism towards multilateral institutions as the current Administration appears to have? Perhaps Ambassador Daalder could begin.
Ivo Daalder: I am glad to. It is important to distinguish, as you rightly do in your question, between policy as executed by a variety of Administrations and the public. Let me start with the first.
You are absolutely right that, as Mr Dworkin rightly said, there has been a growing degree of scepticism on the part of American policymakers about being bound by international rules and institutions. This is not new. Some 20 years ago, I wrote a book with Jim Lindsay called America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, in which our primary argument was that George W Bush wanted to be unconstrained by rules and institutions that he saw as tying America down in some way.
You may recall that, after 9/11, even though NATO had invoked Article 5 for the first and only time, the United States decided that it would go after, invade and bomb Afghanistan as part of a coalition of the willing—with the UK a part of that—but not as part of the NATO peacekeeping operation that came much later. It also decided that the decision on Iraq was not fully consistent with the international rules and norms; I know that this body and others have been debating that for a very long time. So, in that sense, it is nothing new. Going back into history, Ronald Reagan withdrew from UNESCO—a decision that was, by the way, repeated for the fourth time on the part of the United States just the other day.
In a sense, when you are the most powerful country in the world, rules that apply equally to the most powerful ones and to the weaker ones are rules that you sometimes do not like. You do not feel that you want to be constrained by them. Again, as Mr Dworkin rightly said, there is a reason why the US military opposed the US joining the International Criminal Court: it believed that that would affect American soldiers more than others because they are more engaged in international conflict. So there is a long-standing American belief that the rules are great for others but not necessarily for the United States. That is true for all great powers—even the ones that, in the end, believe in a rules-based international order, as I think the United States did for most of its post-war history until very recently.
When it comes to the question of public opinion, there is something interesting here. As I mentioned, I was until recently the president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which has been doing in-depth polling on American attitudes to foreign policy for the past 50 years; it is probably the longest-standing longitudinal study on American foreign policy. Even today, there is support for the idea that you should be restrained and that America can be constrained by international roles and international institutions because, ultimately, that serves America better. This idea enjoys widespread support among Americans by margins of 3:1 or 4:1. Even between Democrats and Republicans, the difference is not as stark as one might have thought.
On the question of whether the United States should exercise unilateral leadership or shared leadership, shared leadership wins by 60:40 or 65:35. On the question of whether the United States should be willing to work with others—even if this means that, sometimes, its own view will not win the argument—or whether it should ignore others and do whatever it wants, again, the results have the first answer being supported by two-thirds of the American people. On questions around NATO and alliances, alliances are seen as extraordinarily important to American leadership and global engagement. Willingness to co-operate with others is seen as supportive.
The problem is that, for the average American—and, I would argue, for the average Briton—foreign policy is not high on the list when it comes to voting. It is not a determinative factor. Unless something goes terribly wrong—such as Vietnam or Iraq, to name but two American mistakes of highly strategic importance—people vote on other, pocketbook issues. So there is a disconnect between what Administrations tend to do when it comes to foreign policy and what the American public, in general, will support.
What that means, going back to the previous question, is that there is plenty of basis for a return to a more multilateral, rules-based and co-operative form of international engagement within the American body politic, if and when the leaders who are committed to that return to power.
Anthony Dworkin: It is perhaps worth adding, as a footnote, that, although we have been describing, I think accurately, this Administration’s broad hostility towards multilateralism and international organisations—this is very true, particularly in relation to the global public goods agenda that has been a dominant form of multilateralism in recent years, for example on health, the climate or development, noting that we saw the Administration reject the sustainable development goals—there are still a number of respects in which the Administration are committed to working within some international organisations.
Those include, in particular, organisations that are seen as contributing directly to US interests; the UN is an obvious one. There is going to be a significant reduction in funding there, I think—we are already seeing that come through—but a new ambassador to the UN is going through the process of confirmation and we are getting some sense of what the US vision for the United Nations will be. A more narrowly focused, back-to-basics agenda is defining the remaining commitment of this Administration, but there will be some interest in peace and security and in—again, perhaps we could discuss this more—reforming and streamlining the UN to make it more efficient. Those goals could be shared more widely and are not unreasonable, even if they are perhaps being addressed in an extreme way.
To my relief—and, I think, that of many abroad—the US has recommitted to its participation in the IMF and the World Bank, although, again, guiding US participation is the back-to-basics idea that these organisations are supposed to concentrate more narrowly on their core mandate, which, in the views of the Trump Administration, would mean not doing anything on climate and not doing that much on the sustainable development goals but instead concentrating on the stability of the financial system. Although the World Bank is now led by a rather skilful leader who will, I think, accentuate those parts of the programme that may be most appealing to the Trump Administration, it is not going to get out of the business of working on the climate or on development because those things are integral to the organisation’s mission.
We have seen that, although the United States has reduced its budget a little, there is still a significant amount of money in it for the World Bank’s fund for the least developed countries. So there will still be some residual element, but with a strong orientation in the direction that I mentioned.
Q122 Lord Alderdice: I would like to probe just a little more this question of public opinion on foreign policy. To date, much of what we have been thinking and speaking about has been pro-Trump or anti-Trump, but it seems to me that, within the body of public opinion that supports President Trump, broadly speaking, some divergence has made an appearance over the past month or two. Last month, Tucker Carlson did a couple of interviews: one with Ted Cruz and one with Steve Bannon. It was clear that one side was pro-isolation and the other was pro-intervention.
These are important differences, and not just within the United States; their impact on the rest of the world is profound. Obviously, you, Ambassador, have focused a lot on assessing and monitoring public opinion. Do you think that this divergence is indeed opening up? What impact might that have or not have on the presidency?
Ivo Daalder: For 80 years, about a third of American public opinion has been isolationist. That has been unchanging. About one in three Americans just believes that we are better off if we are not engaged in the world, and that is unchanging.
Because of the Trump phenomenon in the last 10 years, one-third has probably expanded to about 40%, which is particularly large in the Republican Party. As I think you mentioned, there is a split within them and between them, between those who are true isolationists, who really believe fundamentally that the United States is better off if it is more autarkic, economically and in security terms, than anything else, perhaps focused on the western hemisphere at most. In Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and in part of the MAGA base, you saw that true isolationist perspective. In some ways, JD Vance is part of that, although Vance has gone all over the place, as have so many of these guys.
A second piece, which I think is where Donald Trump has always been, is America first. America first in the late 1930s was deeply isolationist, because the issue was whether to get involved in a war in Europe. Therefore, the America first argument was that not doing so serves American interests better than doing so. So, America first and isolation being one and the same thing is no longer the case. In fact, it may never have been the case. The idea that you are promoting America’s interests, including through the possibility of foreign intervention—as we saw with regard to the strikes against Iran, in the belief that America’s interest fundamentally required that Iran does not get nuclear weapons—is not inconsistent with a view that you do not work within alliances or a rules-based system. Both strains within the MAGA movement, if you want to call it that, are anti the international rules-based order, because it is a constraint on American power. However, what they will actually do when it comes to policy is divergent.
The debate will likely hit most acutely on the issue of China. We can go into that in greater detail, but there is one strand that believes decoupling from China is absolutely required. That tends to be the more isolationist strand. Another thinks that America first requires making a deal with China, which may sacrifice Taiwan or our alliances in east Asia. This is where I happen to believe the President is and where he will land.
That with have a huge impact on the Republican coalition in particular, because much of the Republican coalition, including his Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, are China hawks. I do not believe the President is, and we will see how that plays out, but that is part of where that debate is going to be.
Lord Alderdice: Thank very much, Ambassador. Mr Dworkin?
Anthony Dworkin: Nothing to add.
Q123 Lord Soames of Fletching: Ambassador, it is entirely possible that this fox has already been shot; you have partially answered this question, both of you. Given the background to what we have been talking about today, what do you actually consider are the most important and significant causes of friction between the United States and the multilateral organisations today?
Ivo Daalder: The most important cause of friction, Lord Soames, is the unwillingness of the United States to play by the same rules as everyone else, because it believes that those rules constrain America in its ability to do what it wants and needs to do. Critically important, and one of the distinctions between the US and many others, is that it believes that not abiding by the rules, by defying them, has no cost. In fact, I happen to believe that that is fundamentally mistaken. I believe that adhering to the trading system is a good for the United States, but that is not the view of this Administration. They will argue that the trade deals that they are negotiating are going to be good for the United States; I beg to differ. We will see in history whether that is the case. A unilateral way of thinking about security is ultimately deleterious to American security and American interests.
The fundamental tension is that the United States believes that rules, norms and institutions are constraints on American behaviour, and that they now have the power to do what we want. Others may not, and in America’s view, that is too bad for them, but it is fine with America. That is the tension that exists. It has always existed; it has just exploded in a way that few of us had had thought was likely until about 10 years ago.
Anthony Dworkin: In one sentence, I would echo that. From the source of tension, we see an extraordinarily narrow vision coming from this President, and to some extent, his Administration, of how American interests are best served.
There is clearly a real dichotomy between the sense of what are America’s interests and the global public goods agenda which is believed to simply take advantage of the United States rather than serving its interests. To some extent, added to that and going along with it is a sense that the ideological debates and battles that the President is pursuing within the United States can to some degree be replicated on the international scene. When he looks at the United Nations and some international processes with emphasis on greater inclusion and representation for the global South, he sees an echo of the war on woke and DEI, and so on, that he is conducting within the United States. So I think those two go together.
Q124 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: As Lord Houghton said, our aim in this inquiry is to try and look beyond the present day and to identify the trends of the future. Turning to the future of multilateralism, what are the alternatives to institutions? Mr Dworkin, you have talked about aiming for smaller groups of like-minded partners with shared principles. Are these any more palatable to the US, do you think? For the UK, what should be the guiding principles for us?
Anthony Dworkin: Even going back before this Administration, it has been a notable feature of the international scene for a number of years, with the growth of these kinds of alternative plurilateral or multilateral mechanisms. That reflects two things. One is simply the difficulty of working through an international system that contains many more states now than when the central institutions were initially set up. Not only that, but we see a greater divergence and a greater sense of geopolitical competition with China, Russia and with others with different views, which can make it difficult to reach agreement or even to pursue the kinds of values-based solutions that we want through formal international institutions, particularly the collective ones associated with the UN.
We have seen a number of these different groups growing up in many different areas. Whether it is in climate, health, security or development, clubs, taskforces and coalitions of one sort or another have proliferated. That, to my mind, is helpful. In some of my own work, I have developed the idea of a twin-track strategy, which is how to combine our support for—if we still believe in their value—the collective institutions, but also the greater efficacy and ability to pursue our own distinctive vision through more like-minded groups, and how these two can be combined. The principles that I set out are, first, that the smaller groups should be pursued in a way that does not undermine the greater collective bodies but sits within them or alongside them and aligns with them; and, secondly, that these smaller groups should be open on the basis of anyone who subscribes to the fundamental guiding principles of these coalitions.
This is an area where the UK, Europe, the United States and other partners could work together. In fact, I was struck that, under the Biden Administration, the national security strategy that they produced used the same phrase of a “twin-track strategy” to international co-operation. The scope for pursuing it now under this Administration is more limited. There may be some areas where it is possible to find alignment. For instance, we see a remaining interest coming through quite strongly; although it is quite hostile to a lot of forms of development, it is quite supportive of a private sector-led vision of development.
One institution that is prospering in the US in the development field, as everything else is being decimated, is the Development Finance Corporation—the DFC—which is being given a lot more money or a different funding mechanism. This is an area where the UK, for instance, has also been quite active, through BII and other things. So there could be some scope there. The G7 has done quite a lot in this field of infrastructure and so on in recent years.
I shall end on this: the degree to which there is potential to work with the US in some of these smaller groups faces the fact that, as Ambassador Daalder said, this Administration seem rather hostile to the notion of alliances, as well as to the notion of broader international organisations. However, a lot depends on where they land on precisely the question that the ambassador raised at the end of his last answer about China. If the Administration decide that the guiding principle will be strategic competition with China, working with like-minded groups becomes more attractive, perhaps. However, if the vision is more transactional—“We can do deals, including deals with China”, and so on—and that vision of the US interest prevails, the scope will be a lot more limited.
Q125 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Ambassador Daalder, can you identify alternatives or guiding principles? Health is an interesting one, with RFK Jr apparently stating a willingness to continue working on pandemic and global health security stuff. Do we have shared perceptions of threats? That might dig into your comments on how China will be the hill we all have to climb.
Ivo Daalder: No, we do not; that is the interesting thing. We do not have shared perceptions of threats any more, which is one of the reasons why collaboration between the United States and others is falling apart.
You mentioned health. It used to be pretty evident in the United States that vaccines for children were a good thing but that is now a debateable proposition, given the way in which Covid vaccines have been politicised as an issue in the US over the past four to five years. A President who rightly takes extraordinary pride in Operation Warp Speed, which produced Covid vaccines at a record pace, has walked away from that singular achievement and appointed to his Cabinet people who are going against the received scientific and medical wisdom of the past 60 years. So I do not see that as a basis for collaboration.
The larger answer to your question is that, because we are now in an era of strategic competition of one form or another—in which the United States is, by the way, one of the great competitors because it is challenging received wisdom—those who agree on both the nature of the threat and the steps that need to be taken need to coalesce. That will be less than global almost by definition, in almost every instance, including on climate. Every country in the world, except for the United States, now accepts the science of climate. The US no longer does. What does that mean? It means that, on that issue, other countries will have to collaborate in a way that both advances the challenge of a changing climate—and the causes thereof—and deals with them.
So, what I think you are going to see—from a UK perspective, you should be encouraged by this—is coalitions that are the largest possible to deal with the challenges that they face. On the global order writ large, I suggest that the UK would be better off forming coalitions with like-minded countries across the globe to address these things. Mr Dworkin rightly mentioned the importance of the G7 in the past few years, but we do not have a G7 any more; we have a G6 plus one. We saw that in Canada: six countries were there, while one left and hardly participated. Indeed, the Finance Minister and the Foreign Minister did not participate in some of the ministerial meetings beforehand, but the six were doing fine. I would argue that they could be enlarged, with countries such as Australia—as well as India, on certain issues—becoming part of them.
The order that we are moving into is one of overlapping groupings, some of which the US will be part of, some of which will be led by China—as is true in the BRICs—and some of which will have neither of them. The idea that Ursula von der Leyen has put on the table of a new trading order that combines Canada, the UK, the EU and the CPTPP—not as a treaty, per se, but as a rule-setting order that would have neither China nor the United States as part of it—is the way in which the order needs to evolve. This provides a huge opportunity for a country like the UK to put a stamp on the global order in a way that may not have been as much the case when the United States was the undisputed leader of the free world.
Q126 Lord Darroch of Kew: Ambassador, I share your existential dismay and despair at the destruction of the international rules-based order and the damage done to international institutions over the past six months; most of them were, as you say, created by American statesmen 80-odd years ago. However, you said earlier that you thought there was no going back to the way things were because of the loss of trust in America. I get that point but I would say that, over in Europe, when the Biden Administration succeeded Trump 1, it felt, almost overnight, as though a lot of things had gone back to the way they were. In terms of the prediction that Trump was going to be a one-term phenomenon, which turned out to be wrong, quite a lot of complacency built up that the world had been restored to what it was. All of that is now shattered by Trump 2 and by the much greater degrees of destruction achieved in his first six months than during the whole of his first term.
Suppose you get a new American leadership in 2028 that does want to restore multilateralism as the key mechanism of solving international challenges and crises, and suppose Europe gives you a pass: “Yes, there is a bit of loss of trust, but there is so much enthusiasm for getting back to how things were”. Is there support in American politics, among the American public and in the media for any kind of return to the status quo pre Trump, or has that now gone for ever?
I will now ask the second part of the question. You have already mentioned the G7—or the G6 plus one—but look at what is left, with international institutions lying in wreckage around us. You have the G7 and the G20. NATO, your specialist subject, is perhaps a bit restored because of European countries stepping up to the plate and promising much greater expenditure. The NATO summit a couple of weeks ago was a lot better than some of the ones during Trump’s first term. The World Bank and the IMF are still working, respected and reasonably functioning. There is still the potential for coalitions of the willing. Looking back, some of the most important international deals done in the 1980s were bilateral between the US and the Soviet Union on arms control issues, so you can imagine an era in which big bilateral deals are done between the US and China that make the world a better and safer place. Are you entirely pessimistic about the future, or do you think we can build something out of that kind of structure, if there is no going back to the post-war rules-based order?
Ivo Daalder: Those are all excellent questions. I should say that I learned more about Donald Trump from our past conversations than from any others, so it is great to see you again in this new role.
I would answer in two ways. First, we have created, not just over the past six months but over the past five years, a fundamentally different political culture in the United States. Donald Trump won 77 million votes—the second-largest number of votes in the history of the presidency. Only Joe Biden in 2020 won more. As in all elections, a good number of those votes were not pro Trump but anti the other side, but a good number of votes were pro Trump, and his popularity within his own voting base remains very strong. He has lost the rest of the country, but he never had it, frankly.
We now have a media ecosystem and a Republican Party that have been so changed and transformed by the fact that he has been the dominant political figure within the political structure for 10 years that I find it hard to think that we will find the same kind of Republican Party that we had under George HW Bush. It is hard to see that happening, and it is hard, by the way, to see Democrats believing that could be the case. I think that the divisions we see today will persist.
Secondly—you hinted at the answer—this is very different from the first term, when most of the world looked at this as an anomaly, a disease that would hopefully be cured, as indeed it was, by the biggest electoral margin and victory in a long time, when Joe Biden won in 2020. It was therefore understandable and not surprising that this was greeted as “America is back”, although, as President Biden said at the time, people asked for how long, and now we know. That is no longer the case. As far as I can see, no one is saying that the United States will be back in the same way that it was before.
I was at the Munich Security Conference when JD Vance launched an extraordinary attack on the host Government’s politics and, indeed, on all European countries, about the enemy within being larger than Russia and China as a threat to the security of Europe. Something fundamental has changed and the reality of that means that countries will take steps to increase their independence and reduce their dependence on the United States. To take the most obvious example, again, in my own field, by the end of the Trump term, Germany will be spending more on defence than it did during the Cold War. It will be the third-largest military power in the world, spending 3.5% of German GDP. That is a serious amount of money, and it means that Germany will have a bigger stake within NATO and a bigger stake and a bigger say within Europe overall than it has had at any time since 1945. That is transformative.
I spend a lot of time with our Canadian friends up north, since I live in Chicago. They are not going back; it is done. Donald Trump has done something that no one ever thought possible: he has created Canadian patriots. It is extraordinary, but he has. Countries are taking their measure, and they will move on. Would they like to co-operate with the United States? Would they like to work with a US that is committed to multilateralism? Of course. But will they defer to the US in the same way they have done in the last 80 years? No, because the need will be less as a result.
The fundamental flaw in Trump’s foreign policy is the belief that others do not have agency. They do; they have choices. He likes to say, “I run a big department store and I set the price for when they come in”. Well, they also have the choice not to shop in the United States. That is the weakness of his approach. It is why the US will be weaker as a result of what has already happened to date. Therefore, it will be different in 2029, assuming we even get to 2029 with a new President and a return to a more multilateral perspective. That is why I think that something good may come out of it, but it will be very different. I repeat that it places more responsibility on countries like the UK to take on a bigger role, in collaboration with others.
Anthony Dworkin: I am very much in agreement. As I said before, some of these changes were inevitable; they were happening anyway, and Trump has turbocharged the disruption of the international order. There was already some question about whether the US would continue to play that leadership role and whether it was appropriate for it to do so. He has now made that into an urgent and existential question for others.
After Biden won the presidency, there was an excessive degree of complacency among some of the United States’s allies. Although Biden was the right President for mobilising a coalition to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in some respects, his vision of the international order was somewhat backward-looking, and perhaps he was not the right President for thinking about how to reform the system. He came in with a deep belief in the US’s continued role of leadership, as leader of the free world.
But we are now heading into this multi-aligned world—an à la carte world, as our organisation has called it. Very much as the ambassador said, I think we will see a patchwork of overlapping organisations, including the ones that he mentioned and others. The G7 is turning into the G6 plus one, but Canada also invited South Africa, India, Brazil, Mexico, Ukraine, South Korea and Australia to attend the meeting, so you see there the potential dynamics. I think we will see, in different areas and in different kinds of subjects, attempts to form new coalitions. Forms of order will emerge, but it will be more fragmented and unstable.
Looking at some of the challenges that are coming up, particularly in the technology field, there is a real danger of instability—of competition potentially leading to conflict. The urgent question is how to find coalitions that can both preserve the shared interest that we in the West and these other countries I mentioned have but at the same time not accelerate a potential fragmentation between a bloc that the West is involved in and the Chinese technological bloc. Many countries around the world want to avoid that kind of outcome, but clearly the risk is there. That is the urgent question, and the US should have a central role in dealing with this big transition that is coming up. Currently, Trump is not contributing constructively to these challenges; he is focused on very different issues.
Q127 Baroness Morris of Bolton: It is inevitable that, when you get to the end of such an interesting evidence session, you have almost answered my question; I will put it anyway in case you would like to add anything else. Looking at this in a slightly different way, to what extent can effective global government exist without American leadership? If the US retreats, which it is clearly doing, which states or coalitions might be the ones to step forward? You have already mentioned Germany and everything. Perhaps you, Mr Dworkin, would like to start off; we will then turn to Ambassador Daalder.
Anthony Dworkin: I addressed this in my previous answer, to some degree, so I can try to be brief.
There will be different forms of grouping for different issues. We are not going to see a cohesive order; we are going to see more of a fragmented order. However, a lot of countries out there still share the belief that operating through rules serves the common interest and their collective interest. We have seen a real increase in trade agreements being constructed around the United States. We have seen a lot of discussions of the sort that took place at the G7, with different partners thinking about how they can address challenges such as global imbalances and questions on development. We have seen developments in the security field, with regional countries trying to come together. The Middle East is obviously very destabilised at the moment, but we have seen new potential kinds of coalition emerging there to try to manage the situation more locally.
All that is really what is going to continue. There will be forms of global governance, I think, but this is a transitional period. There is a risk of instability and conflict. It is essential that we get the balance right between trying to work out how we can promote our own vision and values in international co-operation and doing so in a way that accommodates and lives with the other values and worldviews that are out there now, so that we can coexist peacefully without giving up on our aspirations for and visions of what is truly the best foundation for order.
Ivo Daalder: Let me sum it up this way, because your question got to the core of it: it is true that, over the past 80 years, global governance has been uniquely driven by the leadership of one country. The leadership of the US, as the leader of the free world or whatever you want to call it, was the core ingredient that both created the order, as it was, and maintained it over time.
We now live in a world where that is no longer the case, and I do not think it will ever be the case again; “ever” is a long time but it will not be anytime soon, including not after the Trump Administration disappear from the political scene. The challenge, therefore, is for those who still believe in a rules-based form of global governance to figure out a way to lead it without the United States. If the US wants to participate, that is great—as a variety of members and Mr Dworkin have said when it comes to the World Bank and the IMF—but, if the conclusion of a state is that it needs to be part of an effort to deal with climate change, it should do so.
The challenge now is finding the alternative to American leadership. Part of it is going to lie in fragmentation, which is to say that various countries are going to collaborate on the various issues that we have both talked about, but I would argue that a number of countries have an outsized responsibility to take over American leadership. Those happen to be the countries that have been the closest in helping the United States drive this global governance system over the past eight years—our friends and allies—including: the UK; the countries of the European Union; Canada; Japan; South Korea; Australia; Mexico, at times; Brazil, perhaps; India; and others.
It is about finding ways to organise groupings that make explicit the need to uphold the rules-based order that is being challenged today by not just Russia and China but the United States. It will require a degree of confidence in the ability of these groupings both to take on those who behave in ways that are contrary to the rules and not to accept that. We will see what happens with the trade deadline on 1 August but I would encourage the European Union to hold fast—it is important—and to find other ways of working together. I believe that the Canadians will; I believe that the EU will as well. As a result, there is, I think, a way in which leadership can be exerted by different countries now.
To conclude, that is the opportunity. It is a huge responsibility, but it is also a huge opportunity. As the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, used to say, “Never let a crisis go to waste”; I believe that Prime Minister Churchill might have said that as well. There is a crisis here, as well as an opportunity that needs to be grabbed. In some ways, this is it.
Q128 Baroness Crawley: Having listened to our witnesses this afternoon, I know that we cannot go forward simply by saying that all western allies should hold their collective, rules-based noses until the next US election. However, when we talk about reform of the institutions, is that realistically an opportunity for the UK and the US to work together? Would it make any difference to multilateral organisations such as the UN, the WTO and the World Health Organization if we set out an agenda or began to work on a reform programme? As long as I have been in politics, there have been calls to reform the UN. Would that mean anything to this current US Administration? Are they really interested in reform of the institutions, or has that boat sailed?
Anthony Dworkin: That is a very good question. In principle, if we look at what the Administration have said, there should be some scope for co-operation if we take it in good faith that there is a real interest in reforming the functioning of the UN. That is an interest that we in the UK share; I have heard from people in the FCDO that this is one of our priorities.
Change is coming to the United Nations simply by dint of the funding question. The significant cuts in funding will mean either that it does the same range of things even less effectively or that it seizes the opportunity to streamline. We have heard quite a lot of suggestions come out of the UN Secretariat via the UN80 process. Clearly, there is a lot of overlap. The UK has a tradition and a track history of assessing the functioning of the multilateral system critically. So there could be some scope, but that will depend on the US approaching it in good faith.
It is probably worth distinguishing between the areas where there might be some co-operation and the other areas where it might be more difficult. In terms of efficiency—reducing bureaucracy, reducing overlaps, streamlining and all of that—one could see a shared agenda.
One of the other questions that is very live around the UN is that of voice: the inclusion and representation of countries in the global South. There, we are likely to meet quite a lot more resistance from the United States, because its vision of making these institutions serve US interests more directly will not be one that conduces giving other countries greater power. For that reason and others, I would be a bit sceptical of looking at the membership of the Security Council and others. The functioning of the bodies is worth pursuing and testing the faith of the Administration.
Beyond that, the US has more or less checked out of the other institutions that you mentioned. It is obviously out of the WHO, and it is clearly pretty hostile to the World Trade Organization. What Trump is doing in his use of tariffs could hardly be more inimical to the underlying rules of the WTO. Therefore, this is a discussion that will have to continue with more like-minded partners. These institutions will be difficult to reform. It is worth making the effort but, alongside that, it is also worth pursuing some of the other parallel processes that we have talked about in health, in trade, with plurilateral trading agreements and so on.
Ivo Daalder: I would just add that the problem of reforming these institutions is so large that thinking you can have the United States as a partner in that effort will make it even larger and more difficult.
You would be much better off, in many ways, to try to figure out what the reform agenda should be without the United States because it is not likely to be a particularly useful player—even, I would argue, in the UN, where the guiding philosophy of the United States is not to be constrained. The guiding philosophy of reform should be to have rules that work well but apply equally to all. If it does not, you do not have rules: you have exceptions. There is huge scope for reform in the WTO—or in the world trading system, if I can put it that way. I just do not think that the United States or, frankly, China should be part of the discussion. However, the EU, the UK and the CPTPP countries—those include Canada and Mexico, by the way—should have a fundamental role to play there.
As for the global institutions that have equal membership for all, the focus in the UN should be on agencies, as opposed to the institutions in New York and Geneva per se, because that is where there is more scope for actually doing good. The systems work in a different way. I would also warn that the retreat of the United States from these institutions is leading China to double down in trying to control them. We are seeing that at the UN in terms of its financial and other commitments in New York, where the Chinese UN presence is already larger than that of any other country. That is only going to increase. To the extent that China’s view of these institutions is perhaps not the same as the UK’s, there is a limit to how one might want to think about reforming these institutions in collaboration with the Chinese.
Q129 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: I thank both of you for these absolutely fascinating insights.
Some 25 years ago, I was at a party in New York to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s election to the Senate. Strewn around the hotel were a lot of campaign leaflets from Democratic candidates saying things to their voters like, “I don’t have a passport. I promise that, if I am elected, I will not apply for one. I will not support America going to any international institutions”. These were Democrat candidates 25 years ago. Is the reality not that the history of America, right from its very foundation and through the War of Independence, has been detachment rather than engagement; and that it is only the post-war period that was an aberration? You both said that we are heading in that direction.
Therefore, what should the UK’s priority be? Should it be trying to rebuild a world without the United States, while recognising that we have to—and want to—keep all our communications open? The UK Government can presumably walk and chew gum, so it is not a question of having to do one or the other. However, as Baroness Crawley pointed out, we have to demonstrate to the United States that the world is capable of putting things together with or without it. In the process of doing that, it might be persuaded that it is not in its interest to be on the outside of such institutions, especially if it sees accommodations with China, for example, because that is the practicality. My question to both of you is: how should we prioritise that?
I would put a footnote in there. We should not be too priggish about isolationism. This country voted to leave the European Union on the back of thinking that we could be another great country again on our own, so we followed the same argument. Our Government have cut aid, underfunded our soft power and all of those things. Therefore, we are not totally guiltless of following that agenda. Does it undermine our leadership that we have done so?
Ivo Daalder: You have answered your own question, in my view. I fully agree that the UK should prioritise the reform and strengthening of a rules-based system on the issues that matter most to the UK, which are, as you mentioned, trade and development among other things. It should do this together with like-minded countries that are actually committed to these issues in a way that leaves the door open to the United States, if and when it comes to its senses, to come back and be a participant in that process.
In doing so, the UK should create leadership structures and ways to move forward that are not dependent on the United States. The difference between now and the first term is that, in many ways, countries refused to take the necessary steps to deal without the United States then, but that is no longer the case. It is about having an open-door policy—to coin a phrase—as you move to strengthen the co-operative elements among like-minded countries, which people in the international relations literature now call the middle powers; they are not Russia, China or the United States but everyone else.
Those middle powers collectively have more power than anyone else. It is about figuring out how to encourage co-operation among those countries and to do so in a way that says to any country, such as China or whoever, “If you want to co-operate within our rules, you’re welcome, but there are rules and we’re not changing them; at least, we change them only together and we don’t change them just because you don’t like them. That is the policy and the priority”. The priority should be to create co-operative structures with other countries that are still committed to the same norms, rules, structures and idea of global governance as the UK is.
Your footnote accepted, it would have been easier as a member of the EU—there is no doubt about that—but we are where we are. As a result, that is the approach: doing it not as a way to counter the United States but as a way to foster the kind of global co-operation that is necessary to deal with the problems that exist today and that the UK cannot deal with on its own.
Anthony Dworkin: I very much agree. As I have tried to sketch out a bit, there are urgent challenges facing the UK and the international system, particularly our partners and like-minded countries. It is really important to get on with tackling them, which has to be done through co-operation and collaboration. These are issues on which we need to work with other countries—ones beyond the G7, really, which is why it is important to be talking to and working with countries such as Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Turkey and the others that I mentioned. We cannot wait for the United States or allow ourselves to be distracted by what it is doing; we have to get on without it. To some degree, that is happening. Different, new forms of co-operation are emerging around Europe, even outside the EU; these should all be encouraged.
As the ambassador and others here said, the door should be open and the space for the US to come back should be there, but we have to get on with working together. There will be a particular complication for the UK in doing this because historically it has always had a very close relationship with the US, and to some degree that still offers some opportunities.
As I mentioned in my first answer, the trade agreement obviously offers some tangible benefits to the UK, yet it is also potentially problematic. I know that we do not know all the details, but is it compatible with the WTO and its rules and the rules-based trading system? It is not 100% clear. It is good that the UK has now signed up to the arbitration panel, the MPIA; that is a sign of the way to go. To some degree it will be a complicated balancing act for the UK, but it is very important and in this country’s interest to play its role in co-operating, looking for solutions, working with these kinds of like-minded countries and not giving up on the attempt to find co-operative solutions to global challenges. I hope that the UK will commit to that agenda in quite an active way.
The Chair: This has been a really important and helpful session. I had hoped to finish by 5 pm, but I have two more questions, which I hope could be quick, if you are you able to accommodate us.
Q130 Lord Houghton of Richmond: Mine is a bit of a defence spotter’s question. In the policy context of accommodating China, could America just walk away from the AUKUS treaty because it is a bit of a minor irritant in its challenges? It certainly gives us challenges to our defence budget and our industrial capacity. Might the President just walk away from AUKUS and dismiss it, or is it of a higher standing because everybody has bought into it as though it is absolutely fundamental to our nations’ future? Do you have a view?
Ivo Daalder: Could the United States walk away from AUKUS? Yes, and without much regret or many issues. If the judgment is that it is in America’s interest to stay in AUKUS, it will. If the judgment is that it is a net negative, particularly in the short term, it will not. Indeed, the entire review is driven in the Pentagon by a view that the short-term consequences of AUKUS are negative—in particular that the United States needs to retain some of its nuclear submarines rather than provide them to Australia, given the threat that exists in the Pacific. That may change, because the United States may decide that there is no longer a threat in the Pacific or that a trade deal or some deal with China is sufficient to eliminate that threat, which is equally possible—in which case AUKUS becomes a more interesting trade relationship in which the United States can make some money, which is how this Administration tend to look at these kinds of things.
That is the problem with this Administration: they can change their mind and it is very hard to know on what basis they will do so, other than some short-term transactional arrangement. I think we all agree that AUKUS has many positive elements, particularly its other pillars, but that does not deter this Administration from making short-term decisions. That is how they are driven, in every instance, to make their decisions.
Anthony Dworkin: I will not say anything on the security aspect but will make two quick points. First, given the extraordinary importance of the US-China relationship in today’s international system, it is quite striking, looking from the UK, that we still do not have a clear idea of where this Administration stands and what they are trying to achieve in their relations with China. As the ambassador said, that probably very much comes down to Donald Trump himself. My sense is that we are still waiting to see exactly how that is going to play out.
The second thing is China’s place in the emerging framework of global governance that we have been discussing. We have put a lot of emphasis, rightly, on working with like-minded countries whose values and vision of international organisation and co-operation we share. China is to some degree an antagonist, rival or competitor in that respect, with a different vision.
At the same time, China and its size, importance and wealth, means that we have to find a way of co-existing with it. There is another aspect of global governance that should be looking at ways of working together, whether it is on avoiding conflict, managing the evolution of new technology or on questions of international debt and climate. There is a residual element of global governance that has to involve a mutual modus vivendi with China.
Q131 Lord Grocott: Very quickly, it seems to me that there is a real tendency in these kinds of discussions to develop a notion that there was somehow a golden age when the rules-based international order was functioning wonderfully, the powerful were helping the weak and the United States was acting against its own self-interests, if it was for the greater good. It would be quite difficult to think of specific examples of that, though I am sure Ambassador Daalder could.
Wherever you decide to start this discussion, prior to the Second World War and its preliminaries, the First World War or the League of Nations, American isolationism was very strong. Even looking at the last 80 years, on which most references to the rules-based international order focus, where was the rules-based international order during the Vietnam War? Where was it during the Iraq War? Where could it be in relation to Israel-Palestine?
It seems to me that a very powerful nation like the United States, the most powerful nation, understandably acts in its own interests. There is not a lot of evidence of self-flagellation to help the weaker. Therefore, there are big elements in the Trump approach—which, by the way, I do not like, but I will leave that aside—that are very much in keeping with large swathes of US history. Is that too pessimistic a view of the world, and was there a golden age?
Ivo Daalder: A golden age is not the word that I would use, but there was a recognition sometime in early 1942 that America’s security, prosperity and ultimately freedom required that others would be secure, prosperous and free as well, and that the United States now had the responsibility, as the greatest power on earth, to help foster a system that could bring that about.
At no time did FDR, Harry Truman, or indeed any other American leader, believe that this system, which was created out of the ruins and ashes of World War II, was a goodwill gesture to others. It was fundamentally in America’s self-interest. That is the core misunderstanding on the part of the current Administration. Ronald Reagan did not believe in NATO because it was somehow nice to do to others; he believed in NATO because the absence of war in Europe was fundamental to America’s security. It is that simple. Ronald Reagan did not believe in fair and free trade rules because he wanted to be nice to other countries; he believed it was fundamental to America’s prosperity. That was true for Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy, Carter, Obama, and to some extent, Biden—although I agree that the way he looked at the system was looking backwards rather than forwards. That is the fundamental difference.
Did the US abide by all the rules that we hoped others would? Of course not, because we were too powerful. We made tremendous errors and mistakes, but the unique realisation that a system that benefits others would also benefit us was important. The Marshall plan was not some largesse. It was fundamentally the belief that the rebuilding of Europe was necessary, as part of the fight against Soviet communism and its expansionism, and that a strong, capable and wealthy Europe would be stronger and more capable to withstand what was then the true threat from within—communism and subversion—as well as the threat from without, which was the Soviet Union.
So I—and, I think, most American leaders—believe that this system served America well, not because it was helpful to other people, although that was nice, but, fundamentally, because it served America’s interest. The abandonment of that view, at a time when America’s power is not as strong as it was 80 years ago, is short-sighted and wrong, but it is no less an abandonment of that view.
Anthony Dworkin: Absolutely; I completely agree. The right way to think about this is to ask, “How is the United States defining its interests?”, rather than, “Is the United States acting out of altruism?” What we now see coming from the White House is a definition of US interests that is extremely striking and transactional; one might even say that, occasionally, it seems to overlap with the personal interests of the President.
Was there a golden age? There was not. It is important to recognise that, when we talk about the rules-based order, it is not as if one order was put in place in 1945 and existed until 2016 or 2024. There was an attempt, at the end of the Second World War, to build institutions that would precisely avoid what had happened in the aftermath of the First World War, which had led so quickly again to a war in Europe that became a global war. There was an attempt to learn those lessons by creating international security and economic structures to prevent that.
This was quickly succeeded by a Cold War order. We saw security institutions such as NATO and so on growing up. They did a very good job of keeping the peace in Europe and defending Europe. Then, after 1989, we saw an attempt to evolve this order—probably an incomplete effort—with some different views in Europe and in the United States as to how exactly this order should evolve. There have been questions about how far and in what way Russia or China could be integrated into this single order. For various reasons, those projects did not lead to the results that their creators had hoped for; to some degree, that is the cause of some of the wider uncertainties that we now face, even beyond the personal predilections of the current US President.
I very strongly believe that, in answering these challenges, rules-based co-operation remains absolutely in the interests of the UK, of the United States and of our allies, as well as more widely. That has to be our guiding principle as we look forward.
The Chair: Thank you, Ambassador Daalder and Mr Dworkin, very much indeed. This has been a very helpful contribution to our inquiry.
