A corrective on China's multilateral influence
Stewart Patrick’s always engaging World Politics Review column offers a grim perspective on American leadership and the multilateral architecture. And his central indictment of the Trump administration echoes the conventional wisdom among U.S. foreign policy observers: that the president’s team has abandoned multilateral leadership and created valuable space for an illiberal China to assert itself:
The lesson is clear: World politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. When the United States abandons its share of global leadership, others will fill that space—though not necessarily in its entirety—and their visions may diverge significantly from America’s. China has skillfully deployed talented diplomats to the corridors of international organizations, while also increasing funding to burnish its image as a benevolent global citizen committed to “win-win” arrangements.
Patrick’s core accusation is inarguable: that the Trump administration has been inattentive to the point of recklessness in the multilateral sphere (as in many others). In part, the policy has been a deliberate choice. The insistence of Republican administrations on abandoning the UN Human Rights Council might be the most salient example. The administration has also chosen to attack the International Criminal Court with vitriol almost designed to alienate U.S. allies that are court members. These deliberate choices merge with a broader pattern of neglect, negligence, understaffing, and sheer disorganization.
But for all this, some context is in order. With or without U.S. blundering, China’s growing economic and political weight has been making it a much more consequential player in multilateral settings for years. Chinese nationals assumed key leadership positions in several international organizations during the Obama administration, which can hardly be accused of neglecting multilateral diplomacy. Consider the following partial list of Chinese leadership slots at UN specialized agencies, with the year they were secured:
International Telecommunication Union, 2015
International Civil Aviation Organization, 2015
Industrial Development Organization, 2013
At the Bretton Woods institutions, Chinese nationals have also been steadily climbing the ranks for years. And it’s important to recall that China seriously wrong-footed the United States in 2014 and 2015 as it created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
This administration’s conduct of foreign policy has been uniquely awful in many, many respects; but the phenomenon of growing Chinese influence and savvy in the multilateral realm long predates the Trump administration, and it will remain when that administration is gone.