US Leadership and the Limits of International Institutional Change

Abstract

It has become commonplace to bemoan the gap between today's institutional order and the nature and scope of the global problems that fall under its purview. For the order to change, however, one of two things must occur. Either the current powerful backers of the current institutional order need to reform it, or they need to stand aside and let the others do the job. For either of those things to occur, the system's still most-powerful actor would need to conceive an interest in institutional change. Below I outline the core propositions of US grand strategy as it relates to international security institutions. I argue that the current institutional architecture is well suited to US interests, at least as Washington currently understands them. The US has and will likely continue to seek to adapt institutions and rules to suit its interests, but generally does so indirectly in ways that are hard to observe and assess. Still, the case can be made that the United States has met with more success than many analysts are willing to grant.This success comes with costs, however, some already evident, others still only incipient. One evident cost is the weakness of the current institutional order. Optimality for the US does not equal optimality for the world or for the health and robustness of the institutions themselves. Far from it. Hegemons like the US thrive on institutional ambiguity and hypocrisy, which may present problems for allies like Canada that place value on the integrity and legitimacy of global rules. Another evident cost is lost opportunity: by banking on key security institutions (notably NATO), the United States forecloses a concert of powers, including Russia, China, and other increasingly assertive states. The potential incipient cost is that using institutions as a key plank in its grand strategy of global leadership may make it especially hard for the United States to retrench if its relative power continues to decline.US GRAND STRATEGY AND INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONSWoven through the speeches of President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and other top US officiais is a robust restatement of the traditional US commitment to multilateral institutions as a key plank in a grand strategy of global leadership. With some oversimplification, this approach can be summarized in a few core propositions.First, US leadership is a necessary condition of institutionalized cooperation to address classical and new security challenges, which is, in turn, a necessary condition of US security.Second, the maintenance of US security commitments to partners and allies in Europe and Asia is a necessary condition of US leadership. Without the commitments, US leverage for leadership declines.Third, the leverage the US obtains by being a security provider for scores of countries spills over into other functional areas, notably economics.Fourth, embedding US leadership in formal institutions often has major benefits for Washington and its partners: the classical functional benefits - focal point, reduced transaction costs, monitoring, etc. - as well as political and legitimacy benefits, which mitigate the politically awkward aspects of hegemony. Because the US is not meaningfully constrained by its institutional commitments, the benefits far outweigh the costs.Fifth and finally, embedding US leadership in less formal institutions - e.g., international law and other rules - also often pays in more diffuse ways. It is easier to pursue a national interest when it can be expressed as a rule or principle to which others have formally subscribed. Again, because the US itself is not meaningfully constrained by rules, the benefits outweigh the costs.Coupled with this reaffirmation of longstanding US strategic principles is a new insistence on the need for - and confidence in America's ability to spearhead - change in the institutional architecture to address new security challenges. …