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Relations DefenseMultilateralismFailsMultilateralism fails – countries won’t cooperate, causing fragmentation.Young et al 13 (Kevin Young, Assistant Professor in the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Department of Political Science, Thomas Hale, Postdoctoral research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, David Held, Professor of politics and international relations at Durham University, “Global Cooperation Buckling Under Past Successes,” The Globalist, Global Cooperation Buckling Under Past Successes, *fc) A Systemic Crisis While the need for global cooperation continues to grow, the ability of multilateral institutions to deliver the policy coordination we need has not kept pace. The provision of effective global governance isn’t just lacking in one area — like, say, climate change. It is systematically underperforming across a range of issues. These include the management of the global economy to human security and environmental problems. While many have pondered the many pressing global dilemmas facing the world today, there is a paradox accompanying the global situation as a whole. We are failing under the weight of our own success. Decades of multilateral agreements, new institutions and an increasingly robust system of international law have enabled a radical increase in economic globalization, with substantial benefits for a wide range of countries. But our ability to manage all this complexity of progress has not kept pace. Our more integrated global economy demands more, and more effective, collective management. The problems that confront us now are challenges we never would have encountered without the progress made by the existing network of institutions. The various committees based in Basel, the IMF, the G20, and beyond facilitated a sharp deepening of financial interdependence. When the crisis arrived, they proved adequate — albeit just adequate — to coordinate a minimally sufficient series of policy responses to avoid another Great Depression. Instead of an unmitigated disaster we got a mitigated one. They were of course unable to prevent the crisis from occurring in the first place and have not been able to take the measures needed to prevent the next one. Moreover, just as existing international institutions are useful vehicles for cooperation, they can also come to hinder it. International institutions like the IMF, for example, contain a vast array of resources and expertise for addressing global problems. Yet because of their past behavior and the lock-in of US dominance that was secured over six decades ago, many countries do not trust the IMF as a global governor. Newer institutions like the G20 are a testament to successful development of countries like Brazil, India and China, who have been able to strategically engage with economic globalization in recent years. Yet, with a greater plurality of voices at the negotiation table, cooperation becomes more difficult. Fragmentation From Cooperation
But the sum is not greater than the parts. Indeed, the lack of coherence in global economic governance is directly responsible for a number of the challenges we now face. For example, the reform efforts surrounding complex financial instruments like derivatives are as complex as the instruments themselves. There is not one international institution handling the reform process. Rather, there are five different organizations all handling different pieces, separate initiatives at the EU level and a panoply of different countries all acting simultaneously. Some claim that global economic governance has utterly failed, pointing to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and a sluggish recovery. Others regard global economic governance as “good enough.” They point out that we averted an even worse disaster and — despite a global recession — didn’t collapse. In fact, both views are correct: global economic cooperation is failing under the weight of its own success. Across a range of issue areas, the remarkable success of global cooperation in the last several decades has made human interconnectedness weigh much more heavily on politics and the economy than it did in the past.
Multilateralism not key to solve climate change – individual countries are already taking action.Levi 14 (Michael Levi, Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations with a Ph.D. in war studies from the University of London, “Why climate change policy won’t hinge on international talks,” Fortune, 25 September 2014, http://fortune.com/author/michael-levi/, *fc) It’s not that international diplomacy won’t matter, but individual countries are already taking action to reduce carbon emissions for various reasons beyond worries about climate change. World leaders gathered at a United Nations summit this week to kick off 15 months of negotiations aimed at finalizing a climate pact next December in Paris. If you focus on those international climate talks, though, you’ll miss most of the real action. The fate of global efforts to tackle climate change – and of the businesses that will win and lose as a result – depends far more on what countries do at home. Climate change has long been approached as the ultimate foreign policy problem. Greenhouse gas emissions anywhere raise temperatures everywhere. What that means for climate policy is that emissions cuts anywhere curb global warming everywhere. Since cutting emissions usually costs money, it makes sense for each country to ask other countries to act while trying to do as little as possible themselves: that way, they keep their costs to a minimum, but still benefit from reduced climate change because of what others have done. The danger is that if every country adopts this attitude, no one will do much of anything. The only way out of this beggar-thy-neighbor quagmire, strategists have long assumed, is for countries to reach a legally binding pact in which they all curb greenhouse gas emissions at the same time. That’s why people have long paid attention to the international climate talks. It’s also why, after the last big talks at Copenhagen in 2009 failed to produce a legally binding climate treaty, so many people assumed that climate action was dead. Yet something perplexing happened in the nearly five years since. Leaders from the United States to China moved forward with domestic climate policies despite the absence of a solid international foundation. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, announced regulations aimed at coal-fired power plants earlier this year despite no international agreement requiring that it do so. Three things explain what’s going on. Countries are taking actions that cut carbon emissions for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with climate change. China, for example, is facing massive challenges as a result of its dependence on coal. Suffocating pollution is wrecking public health, hurting productivity, and boosting the risk of social unrest. Chinese leaders have responded with a plan that includes a gradual shift toward natural gas and renewable energy and away from coal. A happy byproduct of this set of policies is reduced greenhouse gas emissions. But China isn’t waiting for an international deal to take these steps, because it has other reasons to pursue them. And if businesses and investors focus on diplomatic negotiations to divine where China is heading on climate policy, they’ll be inevitably surprised. Policymakers around the world are also discovering that it’s possible to loosely coordinate their climate efforts with each other even absent an international deal. Conventional wisdom about climate diplomacy owes a lot to experience with nuclear arms. During the Cold War, if the United States wanted to cut its nuclear arsenal, it needed iron-clad assurances that the Soviet Union was cutting its arsenal too. That meant not only tough legal requirements but also extensive and mandatory monitoring and verification to ensure that the secretive Soviet military wasn’t cheating. Many have long assumed that something similar was needed for climate change in order to ensure that every country was doing its part. But the United States doesn’t need a treaty or a complex inspections system to know roughly what Chinese emissions are and what policies China has adopted to reduce them – it can rely largely on a mix of market data, news reports, and intelligence. (China has an even easier time tracking the United States.) Each country can adjust its national policy as it sees shifts elsewhere in the world – even without a treaty. The last reason that climate policy will be determined mainly at the national level is that that’s where the most important political forces lie. Take the United States as an example. The biggest sources of opposition to strong U.S. climate action are skepticism that it is a serious problem and concern by some industries (notably coal and oil producers as well as energy-intensive manufacturers) that they’ll lose out as a result of robust climate policy. Whether or not there’s an international deal doesn’t matter much to them – they have independent reasons to oppose aggressive action. This means that watching domestic politics, rather than international diplomacy, will give far more insight into where policy is heading. Occurring NowMultilateral agreements occurring now – China initiating reforms now.Rudd 15 (Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in Asian Studies from the Australian National University in Canberra, “U.S.-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping,” Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, April 2015, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Summary%20Report%20US-China%2021.pdf, *fc) Beyond Asia, and in the reform of the global order more broadly, China has a long-standing commitment to greater “multipolarity” in the international order. For this reason, it has long been a member of most multilateral institutions within the UN and the Bretton Woods systems. China has used multilateralism as a means to expanding its diplomatic influence in the world, particularly through its membership of the UN Security Council, at a time when its national power was limited. This has now begun to change. Xi Jinping stated clearly in his November 2014 address to the Party’s international policy work conference: China is now engaged in “a struggle for the international order” (guoji zhixu zhizheng 国际秩序之争). This is an unusually sharp statement from the Chinese leadership and suggests that the international community should prepare for a number of new Chinese reform proposals of the current multilateral system. This may manifest itself through the normal review processes of the UN and other multilateral agencies as their treaty or regulatory systems come up for periodic review.
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