Op-Ed Columnist

Missing Dean Acheson

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 1, 2008

We’re about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the
Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C.
Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions
after World War II, and they’ve asked: Why can’t we rally that kind of international
cooperation to confront terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation and the
rest of today’s problems?

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The answer is that, in the late 1940s, global power was concentrated. The victory
over fascism meant the mantle of global leadership rested firmly on the Atlantic
alliance. The United States accounted for roughly half of world economic output.
Within the U.S., power was wielded by a small, bipartisan, permanent governing
class — men like Acheson, W. Averell Harriman, John McCloy and Robert Lovett.

Today power is dispersed. There is no permanent bipartisan governing class in

Washington. Globally, power has gone multipolar, with the rise of China, India,
Brazil and the rest.

This dispersion should, in theory, be a good thing, but in practice, multipolarity

means that more groups have effective veto power over collective action. In
practice, this new pluralistic world has given rise to globosclerosis, an inability to
solve problem after problem.

This week, for the first time since World War II, an effort to liberalize global trade
failed. The Doha round collapsed, despite broad international support, because
India’s Congress Party did not want to offend small farmers in the run up to the
next elections. Chinese leaders dug in on behalf of cotton and rice producers.

In a de-centered world, all it takes is a few well-placed parochial interests to bring

a vast global process tumbling down.

And the Doha failure comes amid a decade of globosclerosis. The world has
failed to effectively end genocide in Darfur. Chinese and Russian vetoes foiled
efforts to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe. The world has failed to implement
effective measures to deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The world has failed to
embrace a collective approach to global warming. Europe’s drive toward political
union has stalled.

In each case, the logic is the same. Groups with a strong narrow interest are able
to block larger groups with a diffuse but generalized interest. The narrow Chinese
interest in Sudanese oil blocks the world’s general interest in preventing
genocide. Iran’s narrow interest in nuclear weapons trumps the world’s general
interest in preventing a Middle East arms race. Diplomacy goes asymmetric and
the small defeat the large.
Moreover, in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among
competing factions. In a democratic nation, the majority rules and members of
the minority understand that they must accede to the wishes of those who win
elections.

But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they
have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power
to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values
on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a
mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their
autocracy.

The results are familiar. We get United Nations resolutions that go unenforced.
We get high-minded vows to police rogue regimes, but little is done. We get the
failure of the Doha round and the gradual weakening of the international
economic order.

A few years ago, the U.S. tried to break through this global passivity. It tried to
enforce U.N. resolutions and put the mantle of authority on its own shoulders.
The results of that enterprise, the Iraq war, suggest that this approach will not be
tried again anytime soon.

And so the globosclerosis continues, and people around the world lose faith in
their leaders. It’s worth remembering that George W. Bush is actually more
popular than many of his peers. His approval ratings hover around 29 percent.
Gordon Brown’s are about 17 percent. Japan’s Yasuo Fukuda’s are about 26
percent. Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi have ratings that
are a bit higher, but still pathetically low.

This is happening because voters rightly sense that leaders lack the authority to
address problems.

The bottom line is that presidential candidates can talk grandly about global
partnerships, but it’s meaningless without a mechanism to wield authority. A
crucial question in an authority crisis is: Who has a strategy for execution?

The best idea floating around now is a League of Democracies, as John McCain
and several Democrats have proposed. Nations with similar forms of government
do seem to share cohering values. If democracies could concentrate authority in
such a league, at least part of the world would have a mechanism for wielding
authority. It may not be a return to Acheson, Marshall and the rest, but at least it
slows the relentless slide towards drift and dissipation.

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