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1. Managing Global Disorder: Prospects for U.S.-China Cooperation

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
04-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Emerging challenges to international order require cooperation between the United States and China, two countries that share a common interest in preventing the world from becoming more dangerous and disorderly. U.S.-China relations are becoming more strained and antagonistic, however, and the prospects for cooperation appear to be receding. To explore whether there are still grounds for cooperation on issues of common concern between the two countries, in March 2018 the Center for Preventive Action (CPA) at the Council on Foreign Relations convened a group of fifteen experts from the United States and China for the workshop “Managing Global Disorder: Prospects for U.S.-China Cooperation.” CPA partnered with Peking University’s School of International Studies in Beijing for the workshop and also met with experts at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies in Shanghai. During the workshop, President Donald J. Trump announced plans to impose about $60 billion in new tariffs on Chinese imports. While trade was a major topic of discussion, it was by no means the only area discussed. Workshop participants assessed conflicting views of the sources of global disorder and examined areas of global governance such as international trade, development, the environment, and the future of various multilateral institutions. They also discussed the most pressing security challenges in East and Southwest Asia. Participants highlighted the need for a greater understanding between the United States and China on the evolving international order. No major transnational problems will be solved without some cooperation between the two powers. It is therefore imperative that the two countries avoid a further deterioration of the relationship and instead identify areas of potential cooperation.
Topic:
International Cooperation, International Trade and Finance, Tariffs, and Social Order
Political Geography:
United States, China, Asia, and North America

2. The U.S.-Southeast Asia Relationship: Responding to China’s Rise

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
05-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Although the Barack Obama administration rhetorically made Southeast Asia a centerpiece of its “rebalance to Asia” strategy, the administration still largely focused on the Middle East and Europe, and Southeast Asia remained a low U.S. policy priority. The Obama administration did try to boost U.S. economic ties with Southeast Asia in 2016 by forging the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but that trade deal was broadly unpopular in the United States. The following year, the Donald J. Trump administration ended U.S. participation in the TPP, and it also suggested launching punitive economic measures against Southeast Asian states currently running trade surpluses with the United States. Many Southeast Asian leaders now worry that Washington has no clear security or economic strategy for the region, other than applying pressure on Beijing to respect freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. In this perceived void of U.S. leadership and strategy, workshop participants assessed how Southeast Asia might change as China becomes an increasingly dominant regional security and economic actor. They also discussed the future of U.S. strategic and economic relationships with important partners in the region, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Participants further considered how China might use its growing leverage in Southeast Asia, and whether Beijing’s tactics could backfire. Finally, several workshop participants posited that the United States, China, and Southeast Asian states could cooperate on at least some nontraditional security issues, such as combating piracy and terrorism.
Topic:
Diplomacy, International Cooperation, International Trade and Finance, and Economic Cooperation
Political Geography:
United States, China, Asia, and Southeast Asia

3. Managing Global Disorder: Prospects for Transatlantic Cooperation

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
08-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Despite recent turbulence in the transatlantic relationship, the United States and the European Union share a common interest in managing emerging sources of global disorder. To explore prospects for and challenges to transatlantic cooperation, the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations convened an international group of twenty-three experts at the Tufts University Center in Talloires, France, on July 12–13, 2018, for the workshop “Managing Global Disorder: Prospects for Transatlantic Cooperation.” The workshop is the third in a series of meetings supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It is premised on the belief that the United States, China, the European Union, and Russia not only share a common interest in preventing the world from becoming more dangerous and disorderly, but also that the nature and scope of this task necessitates cooperation among them. Workshop participants discussed their perceptions of the growing sources of disorder in the world, examined areas of strategic cooperation, and explored where the United States and the European Union might work together to address a variety of regional concerns emanating from Africa, China, the Middle East, and Russia. While highlighting how the two can work together to address increasing political instability and violent conflict, participants also cited the importance of the transatlantic relationship in preventing or mitigating the demise of the liberal international order.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, International Cooperation, European Union, and Transatlantic Relations
Political Geography:
United States, Europe, North America, and Atlantic Ocean

4. Global Governance to Combat Illicit Financial Flows

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
10-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
International efforts to curb illicit financial flows (IFFs) resemble post–Cold War collaboration in other issue areas that have risen on the global agenda: climate change, global health, internet govern- ance, and cybersecurity. Nongovernmental actors, including private corporations and nongovern- mental organizations (NGOs), have often driven agenda-setting in those domains. The focus has shifted over time, as new issues have been added and as older issues have assumed renewed im- portance. That reshaped agenda has in turn affected the institutional ecosystem of global action, which is captured only in part by formal and informal intergovernmental institutions. These new is- sue areas are characterized not by a single dominant institution or core set of institutions but by mul- tiple clusters of institutions that have each claimed a segment of the agenda and the instruments of cooperation. The result is a fragmented landscape with disjointed actors and organizations that often compete, collaborate, and act in parallel in pursuing their collective ends.1 The term of art for such an institutional landscape, one with several institutional or legal founda- tions, is “regime complex.”1 The regime complex for combating IFFs differs in its complexity from other, similar issue areas. Defining IFFs produces disagreement among researchers, activists, and policymakers. “Illicit” captures a normative judgment perhaps broader than “illegal.” For law en- forcement, IFFs are framed by predicate crimes, activities that are illegal in one jurisdiction or anoth- er and often of greater interest to authorities than IFFs. For those interested in broader global out- comes, such as the effects of IFFs on economic development, “illicit” could include cross-border fi- nancial flows associated with activities that they believe should be forbidden, such as tax avoidance by multinational corporations (MNCs). Those activities may not be illegal, however.2 These categories shift over time: bribery of foreign officials by corporations based in Organization for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) countries was made illegal in the United States well before it was criminalized in other industrialized countries. Variations in national treatment of both IFFs of certain kinds and the underlying predicate crimes have made harmonization of national policies and their implementation in many IFF domains difficult. IFFs are also one of the most important features of globalization’s dark side. Unlike other illicit or dangerous cross-border flows, however, IFFs bear almost no markers in and of themselves: pecunia non olet. Tainted food, endangered species, and dangerous individuals all present fewer problems of identification. For IFFs, it is suspicious activity rather than a characteristic of the funds themselves that generates the attention of those attempting to curb the flows. These definitional and identification problems make measuring the effectiveness of counter-IFF policies more difficult than assessing the effectiveness of policies in other issue areas. As many skep- tics and critics have pointed out, without a clear grasp of the scale of underlying flows, the scale of effects, though perhaps not the direction, of policies to counter those flows cannot reliably be deter- mined.3 If the costs of enforcement and compliance or unintended negative effects are included in estimates, the balance sheet becomes even more uncertain. International collaboration to curb IFFs and domestic measures to support that collaboration are directed to a wide array of predicate crimes that produce IFFs (drug trafficking, terrorism, or tax eva- sion) or to negative externalities (global “bads,” such as corruption) that both support IFFs and are sustained and promoted by them. This diversity of IFF sources and effects, and the public policy goals that follow, mobilize an unusually large number of actors: law enforcement agencies, financial super- visors and ministries, private financial institutions, and NGOs. These actors are interested more in certain IFFs and predicate crimes than in others. The links between specific crimes or categories of crime and larger global outcomes of interest, whether economic development or international securi- ty, are often second or third order. As a result, political attention to these issues—and willingness to bear the costs of implementation—fluctuates over time and across jurisdictions. As Peter Reuter and Edwin M. Truman observed in their classic 2004 account, the anti–money laundering (AML) regime (a subset of the complex countering IFFs) “reflects shifting priorities, compromises, and trade-offs.”4 This variation over time is particularly important in combating IFFs, because enforcement depends largely on national governments and both their incentives and their capacity to enact anti-IFF poli- cies. Financial markets and naming-and-shaming campaigns can strengthen those national efforts; they can also direct attention and effort against particular IFFs. However, they cannot substitute en- tirely for government action. What follows is a summary and introduction to organized international efforts to combat IFFs. In order to limit the policy universe, the narrower definition of IFFs used by the World Bank—“money illegally earned, transferred, or used that crosses borders”—will be used to define the wider interna- tional regime complex to combat IFFs.5 Mapping the institutions and actors involved in this issue area over time will capture the evolution of the global IFF agenda and the politics surrounding its de- velopment and implementation.
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Governance, Institutionalism, and Illegal Trade
Political Geography:
Global Focus

5. Women and the Law

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
10-2018
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The connection between women’s economic participation and global prosperity is undeniable. Over the past two decades, international organizations and world leaders have increasingly recognized how critical women’s economic empowerment and financial inclusion are to economic prosperity and growth. Analyses from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, and other leading institutions demon- strate the growth potential of women’s increased economic partici- pation. UN frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals recognize the relationship between economic opportunity for women and development, and include time-bound targets—such as equal access to financial services, natural resources, and technology, and equality in property ownership and inheritance—to advance women’s economic participation. However, despite growing awareness that women’s economic empowerment is critical to women, their families, and broader eco- nomic prosperity, many countries still legally undermine women’s economic participation and undervalue women’s work. Of the 189 economies surveyed in the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2018 report, 90 percent have at least one regulation that impedes wom- en’s economic opportunities. More than one hundred economies still prevent women from working in certain jobs; fifty-nine economies provide no legal recourse to women who experience sexual harassment in the workplace; and in eighteen countries, men can legally prevent their wives from working outside the home. An array of other legal barriers—from limitations on access to finance to laws restricting women’s agency and mobility—prevent women from fully participat- ing in the economy. Even in 2018, the legal landscape for women in the economy fails to reflect the value women’s participation adds to eco- nomic growth. But change is on the horizon. Over the last decade, several countries have enacted legal reforms that significantly advance women’s rights. Today, all but thirty-two countries legally guarantee gender equality in their constitutions, and a record number of countries now have laws prohibiting discrimina- tion or violence against women. While these gains—rightfully cel- ebrated—show that progress is possible, proposals to eliminate the critical barriers that limit women’s economic potential remain absent from mainstream discussions on international and national economic policy, and barriers to female economic enfranchisement persist in every region of the world. In order to realize the economic potential of 50 percent of the world’s population, nations need to do more to level the legal playing field for women. This volume collects in-depth analysis and commen- tary on legal barriers to women’s economic participation, with a focus on five areas in which the greatest obstacles to women’s economic par- ticipation endure: financial inclusion, identification laws, land rights, workplace discrimination, and family law. In the opening essay, I make the economic case for eliminating legal barriers that inhibit women’s economic participation. Closing gender gaps in the workplace could add an estimated $12 trillion to the global economy. Countries simply cannot afford to waste this economic poten- tial—and governments from Saudi Arabia to Japan are taking notice and enacting policies to promote women’s workforce participation. A web of discriminatory laws impedes women’s access to financial services and undermines their capacity to borrow, save, or obtain insur- ance. In an essay on financial inclusion, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Senior Fellow Jamille Bigio highlights how banks stand to ben- efit economically by ensuring women’s access to and use of financial services, by sharing the experience of a Nigerian woman who employed digital tools to save for her daughter’s school fees. CFR Senior Fellow Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, reporting on a successful financial inclusion program in Tanzania, explores how education can help women over- come legal and social barriers to opening bank accounts. The economic case for legal reform to promote women’s financial inclusion is strong: when women can use financial services without spousal consent and have control over where they live, and when unpaid work is recognized in marital property regimes, gender gaps in financial inclusion are nar- rowed. Legal reform needs to be a central component of any strategy to advance women’s access to and use of savings, credit, and insurance.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Women, Feminism, and Participation
Political Geography:
Global Focus

6. Harnessing International Cooperation to Advance Energy Innovation

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
05-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
On March 29 and 30, the Council on Foreign Relations convened a workshop in New York to explore how international cooperation can accelerate energy innovation. The workshop, hosted by Douglas Dillon Fellow and Acting Director of the Energy Security and Climate Change Program Varun Sivaram, was made possible by the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The views described here are those of workshop participants only and are not CFR or Sloan Foundation positions. CFR takes no institutional positions on policy issues and has no affiliation with the U.S. government.
Topic:
Energy Policy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

7. Managing Global Disorder: Prospects for U.S.-Russian Cooperation

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
08-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
While relations between the United States and Russia have deteriorated in recent years, making it exceedingly difficult for both countries to collaborate in managing a variety of common concerns, emerging challenges to global order make such cooperation increasingly imperative. To explore where U.S.-Russia cooperation is desirable and, in some places, even necessary, the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations convened an international group of twenty-three experts at the Tufts University European Center in Talloires, France, on June 9 and 10, 2017, for the workshop “Managing Global Disorder: Prospects for U.S.-Russian Cooperation.”
Topic:
NATO, Diplomacy, International Cooperation, and Military Strategy
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, and North America

8. Chinese Investment in Critical U.S. Technology: Risks to U.S. Security Interests

Author:
Council on Foreign Relations
Publication Date:
10-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
Chinese firms, both private and state-owned, have in recent years invested billions of dollars in the U.S. technology industry, raising concerns that a powerful rival has gained or could soon gain access to sensitive and, in some cases, critical technologies that underpin American military superiority and economic might. At the workshop entitled “Chinese Investment in Critical U.S. Technology: Risks to U.S. Security Interests,” held in San Francisco, on July 18, 2017, CFR convened nearly thirty current and former government officials, academics, bankers, investors, and corporate executives to explore whether the large and growing early-stage Chinese investment in critical U.S. technology poses a threat to U.S. national security, and, if so, to outline policies that mitigate the risks of unbridled Chinese investment and to bolster U.S. competitiveness.
Topic:
Security, Science and Technology, Foreign Direct Investment, and Cybersecurity
Political Geography:
United States, China, Asia, and North America

9. Independent Task Force Report: U.S. Policy Toward Northeastern Europe

Author:
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Council on Foreign Relations, and F. Stephen Larrabee
Publication Date:
04-1999
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Council on Foreign Relations
Abstract:
The Independent Task Force on U.S. Policy Toward Northeastern Europe sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations was formed to examine the policy challenges confronting the United States in northeastern Europe and recommend measures to advance U.S. interests in the region. The Task Force felt that northeastern Europe deserves special attention for several reasons. First, during the Cold War, northeastern Europe was a strategic backwater and received relatively little attention in U.S. policy. However, since the end of the Cold War, the region has become an important focal point of U.S. policy. The Clinton administration has given northeastern Europe high priority and viewed the region as a laboratory for promoting closer regional cooperation and reknitting Europe—both eastern and western—into a more cohesive economic and political unit. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted in her speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July 1997, “Our challenge is to build a fully integrated Europe that includes every European democracy willing to meet its responsibilities. That goal embraces the Baltic nations.” Thus, to some extent, northeastern Europe can be seen as a test case for the Clinton administration's general approach toward post-Cold War Europe. Second, northeastern Europe is also a test case for the administration's policy toward Russia. One of the key elements of the administration's policy has been its effort to reach out to Russia and to include Russia in regional cooperation arrangements in northeastern Europe. This effort has been designed to integrate Russia gradually into a broader European framework as well as to defuse Russian concerns about the integration of the Baltic states into Euro-Atlantic institutions, especially NATO. This policy is seen by the administration as a litmus test of its effort to overcome the old zero-sum Cold War paradigm and demonstrate that greater regional cooperation can bring benefits to all, including Russia. Thus, how well this policy succeeds will have broader implications for the administration's policy toward Russia as a whole. Third, three critical areas of U.S. policy interest—the Baltics, the Nordics, and Russia—intersect in northeastern Europe. Instability in the region would affect all three interests. Moreover, the Baltic region is the one region in Europe where a U.S.-Russian confrontation is still conceivable. Thus, the United States has a strong stake in defusing the potential for conflict in the region and promoting its stable economic and political development. Fourth, the United States faces a number of critical challenges in the region. One of the most important is managing the security aspirations of the Baltic states. The Baltic states are tied to Europe historically and culturally. They share Western values and aspirations. Having thrown off the shackles of communism and Soviet domination, the Baltic states, like their counterparts in Central Europe, want to join Europe and Euro-Atlantic institutions. How the United States seeks to accommodate their security aspirations will be a major test of the U.S. commitment to creating a “Europe whole and free” and its ability to overcome the zero-sum logic of the Cold War. Fifth, the policy challenges in northeastern Europe—particularly those in the Baltic subregion—directly touch on Russia's security interests and have important implications for U.S.-Russian relations. Top Russian officials have reiterated on numerous occasions that Baltic membership in NATO could have serious repercussions for Russia's relations with NATO and the newly established Russia-NATO Council in particular. Although such statements should not necessarily be taken at face value, they highlight the sensitivity of the Baltic issue among the Russian policy elite and ensure that it will remain a highly contentious issue in U.S. relations with Russia. Sixth, the issue of security in northeastern Europe directly affects U.S. relations with the Nordic states, especially Sweden and Finland: the Baltic states are in the Nordic states' strategic backyard. Thus, how the Baltic issue is handled has direct implications for Nordic security—and especially for relations of the Nordic states with Russia. Neither Sweden nor Finland wants to see the Baltic or Nordic region become a gray zone or flash point. At the same time, neither wants to assume the primary responsibility for the security of the Baltic states, which would overburden the capability of either nation. Finally, security issues in northeastern Europe pose important dilemmas for U.S. policy toward NATO. The Baltic issue is the trickiest and most sensitive part of the enlargement puzzle. The Clinton administration has committed itself to helping the Baltic states gain membership in NATO. But many senators have reservations about further enlargement, especially to the Baltic states. So do many of America's NATO allies. Thus, gaining support for Baltic membership could be difficult and will require the administration to build a consensus for its policy both in the U.S. Senate and within the alliance.
Topic:
Cold War and Communism
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, and Eastern Europe