International Relations

Its detractors should note: the L'Aquila conference did move vital climate change legislation forward.

By Andrew Light

If you believe recent media reports, the two international climate change meetings held last week in L'Aquila, Italy, at best failed to do anything and at worst signal that no serious progress will be made on a global climate agreement this year.

If true, this is bad news. According to the byzantine rules of the Kyoto Protocol, set to expire in 2012, a successor to that treaty must be decided this December at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

The good news is that many of the assessments of these meetings are incomplete, if not inaccurate. A New York Times editorial on Friday, for instance, based its argument in language from a draft of a declaration -- not from the document itself. The Times described the recognition by the world's major carbon emitters that temperatures should not increase more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as an "aspirational" goal. They concluded that "with global climate talks in Copenhagen only five months away, aspirational goals won't carry things very far." But this weakened, "aspirational" language was struck in the final version of the document, rendering this claim obsolete.

All in all, the twin declarations emerging from the G-8 and the Major Economies Forum (MEF) indicate that progress has been made on the road to Copenhagen. So why the rush to publish such dour reports from Italy, whether accurate or not? It's simple: Invested parties had unrealistic expectations of meetings, which have no binding impact on the upcoming U.N. summit.

There were, of course, disappointments. Developed countries in the G-8 failed to agree on the medium-term goal of reducing reductions targets by 2020. Developing nations, especially China and India, refused to embrace the long-term goal of halving global emissions by 2050, a cap most of the world's leading scientists believe is essential to avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

But if we only focus on what did not happen, we miss seeing the achievements made in a very short amount of time. When the United States rejoined the global discussion on a new climate treaty in January, it triggered an 11-month countdown to solve the most complicated problem humanity has ever faced. For the 16 countries responsible for 80 percent of carbon emissions to recognize even one marker of failure -- a rise in temperature over 2 degrees Celcius -- is fantastically impressive. A week before the Italy meetings, negotiators doubted that this language would make the final cut.

Some will argue that it's easy to agree on an abstract target like limiting planetary warming. But the G-8 struck an appropriate balance in creating objectives that are both ambitious and achievable. Industrialized countries finally determined their fair share of long-term emissions cuts: 80 percent by 2050. Plus, U.S. President Barack Obama prudently hedged on setting a 2020 emissions target. The Markey-Waxman climate change bill, which includes emissions cuts, is working its way through Congress. While it does, the president should not signal that he will preempt or undercut the legislature.

What about China and India's apparent intransigence to halving emissions by 2050? The fact is that the United States cannot criticize their behavior. If a Chinese leader had promised to join the world eight years ago in reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and then reversed course -- as former President George W. Bush did in 2001 -- the United States would hardly agree to his demands now. So it is with China and India. It will take incentives, diplomacy, and, most of all, time to bring about world-saving targets from them.

Ultimately, the most promising parts of last week's agreements received only marginal coverage. The MEF announced that developed countries will double clean-energy funding for developing nations -- putting pressure on those countries to commit to emissions reductions in exchange, as agreed upon at the Bali summit in 2007. Additionally, the participating countries agreed to determine how they will finance their plans by the G-20 meeting in September.

The countries assembled last week didn't get everything settled on the first go around. But in light of their accomplishments, we should hold off on our rush to proclaim failure.

Andrew Light is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University.

Photo: Flickr user AmiCalmant

It doesn't work.

By Jason McLure

As Islamist militants tighten their grip over southern Somalia, the international community is searching in vain for ways to keep the country's weak, U.N.-backed government from collapsing. The latest plan: sanctions for nearby Eritrea, which has channeled weapons to Somalia's Shabab and other Islamist militias. At the recent African Union summit in Libya, the continent's leaders reiterated their call for the U.N. Security Council to take action; condemnation of Eritrea has resonated from every corner of the globe.

There's no doubt that Eritrea has an awful government (Human Rights Watch recently labeled the country a "giant prison"). As gratifying as it may be to punish bad behavior, however, the question here is different: Would sanctions actually change this tiny dictatorial state or its delinquent behavior? It's a quandary that has plagued policymakers for decades -- from Cuba to North Korea to Burma. And despite sanctions' status as a go-to foreign-policy gadget, the answer is often no. When used on already-isolated regimes, sanctions may even be counterproductive. The Eritrean example shows us why.

Sanctions are made to cut countries off from vital international exchange. The trouble is, Eritrea already trades less with the outside world than any country in Africa and places 210th out of all 226 countries and islands for global commerce. The country's president, Isaias Afewerki, isn't interested in being a globe-trotting statesman. He regularly skips African Union summits and meetings of East African leaders. And anyway, sanctions won't deter his few, less savory allies in Libya, Sudan, and Iran who provide Eritrea with aid and diplomatic support. Sanctions will only drive the Eritrean government further into the arms of its dubious allies.

Nor will sanctioning Eritrea choke off the flow of arms and money heading toward Somalia's militants. There has been an arms embargo on Somalia for more than a decade, and it has been about as effective as a chastity belt on Silvio Berlusconi. The country has a 3,000-km coastline that the world has struggled to patrol for pirates -- let alone under-the-radar arms shipments. On land, Mogadishu is home to a dizzying array of traditional money-transfer services that keep Somalia's economy from further collapse -- and its Islamists propped up with foreign funds. Besides, as the United Nations has pointed out, both African Union peacekeepers and Ethiopian troops have apparently sold arms and equipment in Mogadishu to their ostensible enemies.

Aside from being ineffective, sanctions on Eritrea could carry a rather debilitating liability for the international community. Sanctioning Eritrea would dangerously border on taking sides in Eritrea's frozen conflict with Ethiopia, one that has stretched on in one form or another for nearly a decade. Following the two countries' border 1998-2000 war, Ethiopia refused to give back land that a U.N.-backed border commission awarded to Eritrea. So both sides took their struggle to Somalia, where Eritrea backs Islamist militias and Ethiopia props up a flailing government. Eritrea has behaved badly, true, but both countries have been arming Somali militias in a proxy war for years. The United Nations and the United States would do better to mediate the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict rather than taking sides.

These lessons apply to sanctions on dictators more broadly. How do you punish North Korea with sanctions when its trading partners are already limited to a handful of countries -- none of which are likely to pay heed to a harsher set of rules? How do you choke Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe when his strongest rationale for staying in power is to save his country from the hands of countries who would (and do) impose sanctions? Perhaps it's no wonder that such countries' leaders not only survive sanctions, but use them to justify bad behavior.

After 18 years of civil war, it's possible there's nothing outsiders can do to fix Somalia. Certainly, sanctions on Eritrea are not the answer. Trying to get Ethiopia and Eritrea to stop using the country as a proxy battleground would be worth a shot.

Jason McLure is a journalist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His reporting has appeared in Newsweek, The Economist, and Bloomberg News.

Photo: ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images

The International Monetary Fund now has $750 billion to lend to needy nations during the Great Recession. But will the additional capacity hurt the IMF's mission? 

By Martin Edwards

Two years ago, global economic consensus held that the International Monetary Fund -- the lender of last resort for ill-managed countries with a desperate, immediate need to borrow -- was dying or dead. Its bungling of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 harmed its reputation; the availability of foreign capital made it obsolete.

But global economic consensus now holds that the IMF will play an integral part in alleviating today's crisis. The "Great Recession" has created a strong demand for its lending, and the G-20 countries tripled its resources to $750 billion at their latest conference. Once a black sheep, the IMF overnight became the world's economic shepherd.

Yet the reforms undertaken to expand the IMF dramatically alter its modus operandi and fundamental purpose. They might even make the fund less effective over time.

At the latest G-20 conference, the IMF announced two major changes in response to the global economic crisis: It eased the conditions on its standard loans and created a new lending facility for approved countries. Standard IMF loans now have negotiable installment schedules and easier conditional restrictions. Countries were once required to make big changes -- rewriting their tax codes, for instance -- in order to receive loans. Now, the fund is much less aggressive in cleaning up governments' acts. Second, the IMF created the "Flexible Credit Line" (FCL) program to provide loans to countries with strong macroeconomic fundamentals. FCL loans have essentially no conditions whatsoever -- and Poland, Mexico, and Colombia have already received them.

Thus, the IMF has greatly expanded and turned itself into a provider of loans to prevent crises, not just alleviate them. The amount pledged to fund borrowers is now twice as much as was committed at the height of both the Asian crisis in 1998 and the Latin American crisis in 2002. That is all well and good for the Polands and Colombias of the world. Their IMF loans will surely help them avoid economic catastrophe. But it isn't necessarily good for either the developing countries that may be worst hit by the crisis, or for the IMF itself.

Indeed, with its much-heralded unveiling of the FCL, the IMF placated G-20 countries unwilling to provide loans to struggling countries themselves. Industrialized countries, such as the United States, pledged to lend directly to the fund to meet the $750 billion goal. But middle-income emerging countries, like Brazil, Russia, India, and China, proposed to provide resources in the form of purchases of IMF-issued bonds, rather than permanent lines of credit. These new resources will help the fund better meet the challenges of the economic crisis in the short term. In the long term, however, they mean that Brazil, Russia, India, and China will have a greater procedural voice within the fund. The golden days of the IMF being autonomous and distant from the desires of developing countries has surely reached an end.

Second, the fund's easing of conditionalities stemmed from a perceived need to reduce the stigma associated with seeking a loan from the IMF. But many countries value these conditions and tolerate the stigma. In a weak state, politicians might not want to take vital steps that will be electorally costly, such as cutting government spending or raising taxes. The fund plays a valuable role as a scapegoat, providing political cover for policymakers and ensuring changes are made. Making conditionality "cheaper" by reducing the stigma, then, may net the IMF more loans as states with weak commitment seek fund programs, but it is not likely to produce the reforms many of these countries urgently need.

These developments should temper our enthusiasm about the reemergence of the IMF. A more responsive fund is not necessarily a better one. Having a degree of autonomy from member states allows international organizations to be influential. The conditionality reforms, combined with the likely exchange of bond purchases for more voting power, by diminishing this autonomy, may make the fund's new prominence brief indeed.

Martin Edwards is assistant professor at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and the author most recently of "The International Monetary Fund, Conditionality, and the World Economic Crisis: New Beginning or False Dawn?" (pdf).

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Yale legal scholar Harold Koh understands foreign legal systems -- that doesn't mean he's going to implement them here.

By Ronald Slye

U.S. President Barack Obama's nomination of Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School, for the position of legal advisor to the State Department spurred uproarious criticism. A number of media commentators argued that his espousal of a transnationalist legal perspective makes him a dangerous choice. The New York Post branded him a member of the "axis of disobedience." The National Review reprinted a letter castigating Koh for saying he could imagine precepts of sharia law at work in the United States.

These critics argue that a transnationalist approach subordinates U.S. national interests to global or foreign ones (an especially timely issue given the global legal wrangling over the United States' "enhanced interrogations" policy). But this view is incorrect and based upon a lack of understanding of this dynamic legal approach.

All transnationalism does, in a nutshell, is work to describe and understand how law develops in a globalizing world. It is not prescriptive, purporting to say how international law and domestic law, or public and private law, should interact; nor does it attempt to answer whether the United States should adopt or reject a particular rule of international law. Instead, it challenges the descriptive power of international law's traditional dichotomies, between public and private, and domestic and foreign law. It recognizes that states are not the only actors in international law -- that organizations such as the United Nations, for instance, play a vital role. It also examines how international actors interpret, internalize, and enforce laws.

This is hardly a radical approach -- in fact it is solidly within the mainstream of academic legal scholarship, legal practice, and U.S. constitutional law. Everyone from corporate lawyers to International Criminal Court prosecutors recognize the dynamic relationships between domestic and international law. And the vast majority of international law scholarship, whether "liberal" or "conservative," concerns the proper relationship between international and domestic law. No one questions that international law exists or matters.

Additionally, the power to create and enforce laws now lies outside capital courtrooms -- and thus requires a transnationalist approach. The World Trade Organization ensures a level playing field for international trade; the World Intellectual Property Organization protects patents globally; and U.N. Security Council resolutions impose financial sanctions on states. The State Department needs a counselor who understands all such global actors.

Finally, since the founding of the republic, international law has influenced U.S. law and vice versa. All three branches of the U.S. government have incorporated, interpreted, resisted, and responded to international law. And, especially since World War II, the United States has played a proud and instrumental role in developing it and ensuring its enforcement. Those interactions are the focus of a transnationalist legal approach to law, and why Koh must understand transnationalism to act as the State Department's legal advisor.

Ultimately, legal transnationalism, particularly as articulated by Koh, falls squarely within the mainstream. Koh himself is a moderate, having worked for both the Republican Reagan and Democratic Clinton administrations. Everyone from Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School to Dean Kenneth Starr at Pepperdine University School of Law, as well as half the country's law school deans, supports him. This is not surprising. We are, of course, talking about the legal office that most directly engages with issues of international law. Why would we not want one of the foremost international law experts in the country in that position?

Ronald Slye is an associate professor of law at Seattle University and the director of its international and comparative law program.

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U.S. drones have executed dozens of alleged al Qaeda members along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But is silence on this counterterrorism tactic the best strategy?

By Stuart Gottlieb 

If you were under the impression that U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to craft new counterterrorism policies "in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals" could be accomplished without exposing dangerous contradictions, consider this:

Since Obama's swearing-in, the United States has executed dozens of suspected al Qaeda leaders and operatives without court hearings, the presentation of evidence, or the involvement of defense lawyers. These executions, typically carried out by missile strikes from unmanned CIA drone aircraft, have taken place in the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Scores of civilians, including many women and children, have reportedly been killed or maimed in the strikes.

Calls for granting habeas corpus rights to Guantánamo detainees and outrage over the Bush administration's harsh treatment of enemy combatants have dominated the headlines. Yet this side of the U.S. war against al Qaeda and its affiliates is little discussed and even less deliberated.

But with tensions rising in Pakistan and around the Muslim world over the brutality and high civilian death toll from these targeted assassination attacks, the United States' day of reckoning regarding this policy may soon arrive as well. As we learned from the Bush administration, there are tremendous costs to aggressive counterterrorism policies, especially when their purposes are not clearly understood. Unless Obama candidly explains how targeted killings fit within his overall counterterrorism approach, he faces similar difficulties and the possible exhaustion of goodwill toward his new administration.

Indeed, although targeted killings can be justified on national security grounds -- to weaken the capability of Taliban and al Qaeda forces to carry out attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- they run counter to Obama's espoused counterterrorism ethos. Assuring the world in one breath that "America does not torture" suspected terrorists, while in another ordering Hellfire missile strikes that can burn victims alive, is unsustainable from both policy and diplomatic perspectives. How does the U.S. president explain why one suspected terrorist leader held in Guantánamo gets a team of lawyers fighting for his day in court, while another is killed in his car along with his family?

To justify these targeted killings, the Obama team needs to acknowledge two things. First, that the threat from al Qaeda and its affiliates remains so dire that the United States needs to engage in practices that in some contexts would be war crimes. Second, that some of the former Bush administration's most aggressive and controversial policies remain necessary in the conflict against al Qaeda, including targeted killings (admittedly a preferable alternative to a ground operation, which could leave scores of U.S. troops and Pakistani and Afghan civilians dead as well).

Obama has taken great care to level with the American people about the current financial crisis. He has made clear that there are no silver-bullet solutions and that returning to sustained economic growth will require difficult trade-offs.

This same candor is needed in the fight against global terrorism, whether on the frontiers of Pakistan or elsewhere. Although this might not mesh well with Obama's overall message on the terrorist threat and his administration's response, in the case of targeted killings, actions are already speaking more loudly than words.

Stuart Gottlieb, a former Senate foreign policy adviser, directs the Policy Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

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