How America Can Succeed in a Multialigned World

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In July 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her first major foreign policy address at the Council on Foreign Relations. She argued that the United States still needed to be a global leader, but that it had to lead in a different way than it did during the Cold War. “We will lead,” she said, “by inducing greater cooperation among a greater number of actors and reducing competition, tilting the balance away from a multipolar world and toward a multipartner world.”

Clinton’s vision of a “multipartner” world sought a different balance between the imperatives of competition and cooperation, focused on development issues as much as traditional national security concerns, and extended far beyond states “to create opportunities for nonstate actors and individuals to contribute to solutions.” Fifteen years later, even in a very different global context, that vision offers the United States a way forward.

The Biden administration has been building its own version of a multipartner world. It has reanimated and expanded traditional alliances such as NATO and strengthened and created a host of new diplomatic and security partnerships. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described in Foreign Affairs a network of “partners in peace,” the result of an intensive diplomatic strategy to safeguard U.S. interests abroad while rebuilding competitiveness at home.

These partnerships are important and valuable. Still, the Biden strategy overall has tilted too far in the direction of geopolitical competition over global cooperation, even as it tries to do both at once. To strike the right balance, the next administration must partner with a wider range of global actors, focus those partnerships more on existential global threats, and accept a more decentralized, messier world that welcomes leadership from many different quarters.

That is one version of a multipartner world. A Harris administration would likely pursue it, building on the Biden partnership strategy and moving it in this direction. A Trump administration, by contrast, would likely enter into partnerships only on a specific, transactional basis and would reject cooperation on global threats, such as climate change. But even such an approach could allow the United States to shift burdens and make space for its friends and allies to create partnerships in pursuit of national interests and the broader common good. Washington does not need to lead every initiative to facilitate the change it wants to see in the world.

SEATS AT THE TABLE Clinton’s vision of a multipartner world extended far beyond states. Any “nation, group, or citizen” could claim “a place at the table” if they were willing to bear “a fair share of the burden.” Under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, by contrast, U.S. diplomacy has remained primarily statist. Washington’s strengthened web of partnerships under Biden, such as the Indo-Pacific security partnerships known as the Quad and AUKUS, are with other governments. The Biden administration is not averse to engaging other actors; it worked with a broad coalition of businesses and civil society groups alongside governments and international organizations to make and distribute COVID-19 vaccines around the world in 2021. But states still come first. To reap the true benefits of a multipartner world, the United States should expand its diplomacy far beyond governments.

The global zeitgeist is moving in this direction, with states welcoming all possible partners to address global challenges. At the 2015 UN General Assembly, UN member states adopted Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, which emphasized 17 sweeping development goals and insisted that “all countries and all stakeholders” must act “in collaborative partnership” to achieve them. The UN Pact for the Future, adopted by consensus by the General Assembly this September, reaffirms this language. The Global Digital Compact, an annex to the pact, spells out categories of stakeholders, committing governments to “work in collaboration and partnership with the private sector, civil society, international organizations, and the technical and academic communities.”

Fine words, of course, but it can be hard work to give them meaning. The concept of “multistakeholder governance” holds that all actors who have a stake in the outcome of a specific decision, whether a state, an international institution, a corporation, or a municipality, find a place at the table at some point in the decision-making process. It has been applied in forums such as the 1992 UN Earth Summit, the Internet Governance Forum, the annual World Economic Forum summit, and the annual Conferences of the Parties held to assess progress within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Washington does not need to lead every initiative to make the change it wants to see in the world. It is also controversial. Who chooses the stakeholders and decides how they can participate? The UN, for instance, has developed an elaborate process for determining which actors qualify as “nonparty stakeholders” entitled to contribute to implementing the Paris agreement, but that process is not transparent. Governments, for all their flaws, formally represent their people under international law. “Stakeholders” do not. Yet without these stakeholders, the world does not have the resources, reach, expertise, or energy necessary to achieve the agendas it has set for itself.

U.S. officials will need to think hard about how to make global coalitions of various kinds as legitimate as possible. The UN and other legacy international and regional organizations have what scholars call “input legitimacy,” that is, their structures and processes for formal decision-making are broadly understood and accepted. But partnerships with other less established actors will require “output and outcome legitimacy,” or demonstrations that these groups and coalitions can accomplish their stated goals. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, for instance, has committed to vaccinate 500 million children in the next five years. Gavi is a public-private partnership that includes governments, international organizations, philanthropies, global businesses, and civil society groups. If it can achieve its mission, then it has at least chosen the right partners.

Building this kind of legitimacy thus requires partnerships that commit to specific positive action, preferably the achievement of a goal that is concrete and measurable. Take, for instance, Sustainable Energy for All, an international organization that works with a network of partners from multiple sectors. It has adopted three goals by 2030: “Ensure universal access to modern energy services; double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix; and double the global rate of improvement in energy efficiency.” Thus far, it has mobilized $1.4 trillion in finance for affordable and clean energy, with $201 billion already deployed, and it has improved access to energy for 177 million people.

Compare the results of Sustainable Energy for All with the goals and results of Finance in Common, a global network of public development banks, international organizations, governments, philanthropists, and others who seek to “transform the financial system towards climate and sustainability.” The French government hosts the network, and it plays a valuable role in connecting some 530 public development banks in over 150 countries, a natural role for governments to play. “Transforming” and “aligning” are much vaguer goals that are hard to quantify, but here input legitimacy substitutes for outcome legitimacy. True multi-actor partnerships are more likely to succeed if they can be held accountable for the accomplishment of specific results.

SEED, NOT LEAD According to the 2022 National Security Strategy, the “strategic challenges” facing the United States fall into two buckets: competition among “major powers” to shape the next world order and meeting the “shared challenges that cross borders,” including “climate change, food insecurity, communicable diseases, terrorism, energy shortages, [and] inflation.” The former can be called geopolitical threats, the latter global threats.

In a historic move, the National Security Strategy insisted that global threats lie “at the very core of national and international security” and thus deserve the same attention as do geopolitical challenges. In practice, however, executing a strategy that tries to focus simultaneously on competing with adversaries and cooperating with countries on global challenges has proved difficult. The world has been in a growing geopolitical crisis since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, one deepened by the spreading war in the Middle East and a horrific civil war in Sudan. The tensions and divisions of geopolitics can get in the way of the collective approach required to deal with global problems. They also present a logistical hurdle: for national security officials, the urgency of war often pushes all other issues aside.

Here is where Washington should look beyond statist diplomacy and think differently about U.S. leadership. Global threats require global partnerships just as geopolitical threats do, but among broader and more effective coalitions of global actors. Critically, the U.S. government does not need to be running these partnerships. Sustainable Energy for All, for instance, was originally launched by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon in 2011; it was then restructured as an independent organization with a CEO and board in 2016. The United States can still influence what the group does; its current funders include USAID and at least six U.S. businesses and philanthropies. Yet other government development agencies, alongside funders and partners such as the IKEA Foundation and the International Copper Association, share the stage.

A new administration could apply this approach to each of the UN’s sustainable development goals. The White House could task the relevant departments to work with governmental and nongovernmental actors to build on existing partnerships to ensure that they have the scale and the resources to make measurable progress toward specific goals. The United States might still need to appoint special diplomatic envoys such as former Secretary of State John Kerry to handle interstate negotiations, but much of the most important work would happen behind the scenes. Washington does not need to lead, only to seed.

OPENING THE WORLD After he came into the Oval Office in 2021, Biden initially envisaged a global coalition of democracies versus autocracies. He wanted to choose partners based on their domestic ideology. This approach stumbled when faced with the difficulty both of defining exactly which countries qualify as democracies and the need to work with countries that are clearly not democracies, such as Saudi Arabia, in the competition against China.

The result has been a quiet shift from an emphasis on open societies to a push for what strategists and administration officials Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper call an “open world.” An open world may not always be democratic but it is one without great-power spheres of interest, one in which, as Blinken put it, “countries are free to choose their own paths and partners.”

The goal of an open world is consistent with a “multialigned” world, a path that many U.S. partners are choosing. India, for instance, has said it is “multialigned” rather than “nonaligned,” as it was during the Cold War. It works closely with Australia, Japan, and the United States as a member of the Quad, but it also buys large amounts of oil from Russia and maintains relationships with countries strictly based on its own interests. When pressed in 2022 about India “being on the fence” between the West on the one hand, and China and Russia on the other, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar replied: “Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I’m sitting on the fence. I’m sitting on my ground.”

For national security officials, the urgency of war often pushes all other issues aside. Many countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas feel the same way. They refuse to choose between the United States and China, or between the West and Russia, instead entering relationships and forming partnerships as their national interests dictate. What is true of countries is even truer of other global actors; business leaders and civic groups working to combat climate change, for instance, will forge as many relationships as necessary to achieve their goals, even when their partners may be at odds with one another.

This multialignment can benefit the United States. Influence requires connection: the relationships and channels of communication through which persuasion and pressure can be exercised. Back in 2014, when China launched its initiative to create the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Obama administration refused to join and tried to convince its allies and friends to stay out, as well. But in 2015, the United Kingdom broke ranks. Soon, many other European and Asian countries closely aligned with the United States also joined the bank. Rather than being a loss for Washington, however, the resulting web of relationships enabled the United States to work with and through its friends to help shape the bank’s rules, norms, and practices.

Jaishankar alluded to this dimension of multialignment with regard to the war in Ukraine, observing that at some point the conflict will have to end and that some group of people or countries “will have to engage the players.” “At that point,” he continued, “people will need us.”

The same countries that insist on multialignment in pursuit of their national interests will likely be more assertive partners, demanding equality in their relationships. In the moment, Washington may find that frustrating. But over the longer term, if U.S. partners set their own agendas and take regional and international initiatives, they will be more independent, more able to resist the coercion of outside powers, and more able to underpin an open world.

A STRATEGY FOR SURVIVAL A national security strategy dedicated to building a multipartner world will still leave plenty of room for the United States to lead on the global stage. Moreover, embracing multisector partnerships gives open societies such as that of the United States a leg up in in geopolitical competition, given the autonomy and energy of American civic, corporate, philanthropic, technological, scientific, and educational institutions. Most of these organizations are already embedded in global networks of some kind.

Elements of this strategy will also appeal both to the anti-imperialist left and the “America first” right. A second Trump administration will never lead with partnerships. Still, a core tenet of Trumpism is that the United States has long gotten a raw deal from the rest of the world and gives much more than it gets. Specific partnerships, concluded on a transactional basis, will be seen as a way of allowing Washington to shift burdens.

For Vice President Kamala Harris and her supporters, who believe in U.S. global leadership but also recognize the need for changes in the way responsibilities and resources are distributed, partnerships can mean opportunities for resetting relationships with countries, people, businesses, and organizations worldwide. A Harris administration will likely build on the partnerships that Biden has renewed but also devote more time to meeting global threats such as climate change and infectious disease. Given Harris’s background as a prosecutor, she may also forge partnerships aimed at bringing global criminals to justice, ending what International Rescue Committee President David Miliband has called the “age of impunity.” Harris, however, like Trump, will be no less specific in demanding results.

Analysts of the shifting dynamics of the twenty-first century see the emergence of a multipolar order, but that is too simplistic a framework. The principal “poles” are not necessarily the governments that are leading the fight against climate change, for instance, or infectious disease, nor those preparing for the migration of hundreds of millions of climate and conflict refugees. Nor can the term account for the many other actors of consequence on the international stage.

Substitute partners for poles, and measure power not only in terms of GDP or military strength but also of agency, the ability to get things done. The twenty-first century international order should be understood as a set of platforms for governmental and global actors to collaborate in tackling specific challenges. A multipartner world is not a mushy vision of global harmony. It is a necessary precondition for survival.

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