A Plan for Action: Renewed American Leadership and International Cooperation for the 21st Century

Transcript

CARLOS PASCUAL:  Those traditional precepts of sovereignty were founded on the precept that borders are sacrosanct, in a time and era when the principal threats in the international community were great powers threatening one another across borders. And what we see now is a world which is fundamentally different, in which we have transnational issues and problems that require us to reach across borders.

And hence, even though we can get consensus, for example, that it’s necessary to scrutinize the behavior of financial systems within countries, no country wants to be the first to volunteer itself to be scrutinized.Even though the international community might reach agreement on the responsibility to protect, we have difficulty in establishing a capacity to protect in places like Darfur. Even though we all recognize that it’s necessary to have the capacity to deal with nuclear proliferation, it becomes difficult to get consensus for the International Atomic Energy Agency to have a more aggressive capacity to scrutinize the management of the nuclear systems within individual countries.

And so we began work that took us into previous work on sovereignty, particularly work done by a colleague at Brookings and an African statesman, Francis Deng, on the nature of responsible sovereignty. It is a concept which is fairly simple, but extremely powerful. It says that states, in order to exercise responsibility, have to be accountable for how they treat their own people, that they must be accountable for the domestic and international actions that they take, and the ramifications that those have across borders, and it means that states, to be responsible, need to take responsibility in helping weak states build the capacity to function in a transnational world.

It is these responsible states then that become the foundation for effective regional institutions, for effective global institutions, and in addition to that, for setting the guidelines and the parameters that effect how the private sector and NGO function in the international environment. It is also these states that define responsibility, not as a universal global regime of governance, but focused around specific issues such as climate change and nuclear security, where the terms are negotiated to achieve a consistent and predictable set of rules on how we govern the international environment.

The challenge then became how we apply that against this reality on day one for President Barack Obama, where he will face a series of international crises on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Middle East Peace Process, a series of geopolitical challenges like the Rise of China and India and a more assertive Russia, as well as the type of global and existential threats that I have been discussing earlier.Yet even here what we find is that the only way to address the agenda requires us to go back to the precepts of international cooperation and sharing the burden across countries. In order to do that, we developed in this Action Plan a framework that had four tracks to help organize the way that we think about these issues.

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