The United States is located on planet earth, and while separated from other continents by oceans, those oceans don’t mean much in an era of drastically lower transportation costs, and mean nothing at all, aside from sea level rise, when it comes to climate change. Immigrants stream to our doors and to the doors of other rich countries because of poverty, economic disasters and wars. Money moves instantly to wherever returns can be maximized and taxes minimized. In short, we can’t pretend we’re an island, we are in fact thoroughly interconnected with the rest of the world, physically, economically and politically.
Following the success of the American Revolution, the individual states of the United States had to cooperate to defend the country, regulate commerce, adopt a basic set of rights, and hammer out how to administer a united government. Federalism doesn’t prevent states from adopting their own laws, as long as they don’t conflict with the Constitution, or from maintaining their own cultures. Mississippi is culturally quite different from Massachusetts. As a practical matter, that level of cooperation isn’t going to happen at the world level unless aliens threaten to invade ala “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. But we should strive for stronger international cooperation recognizing that the world is now thoroughly interdependent. To me it is high time that countries no longer feel free to invade their neighbors or continue to snub their noses at international law and agreements for decades.
Just as poverty in the US should be a thing of the past, wars should be a thing of the past in the 21st century. Wars are tremendously costly, destabilizing, and a major driver of migration, to say nothing about the suffering of the victims of war, including soldiers. After the World Wars, Franklin Roosevelt was a major player in the creation of the United Nations which he viewed as a crowning achievement of his political career[1]. In an attempt to ensure “never again”, Eleanore Roosevelt chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was then adopted with no dissenting votes by the nations of the world. It includes the basic concepts of dignity, liberty, equality, right to life, prohibition of slavery and torture, and right to property. The concepts are great, but countries are essentially free to ignore these principles as there is no enforcement mechanism. Individuals who are responsible for crimes against humanity can be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, which the US has not joined. The UN can organize peace keeping efforts and interventions to try to address humanitarian disasters, but only with the unanimous consent of the Security Council. We should press for more cooperation in the effort to enforce international law, not discredit the existing institutions. And we should also be an example in that effort.
Climate change is another area where cooperation is essential. Global warming is… global. Virtually every country in the world has signed the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” and the 2015 Paris Agreement, under which each country set voluntary goals for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and other actions[2]. Last year, 2023, a review of progress in meeting these goals showed that there was a large “implementation gap” between the pledged reductions and actual ones. While the rich countries are responsible for most of the accumulated emissions to date, developing countries are now responsible for about two thirds of current emissions. Developing countries require more energy as they grow, but the cost of capital in many of these countries is high[3]. Rich countries such as ours can provide low interest loans to developing countries specifically for greenhouse gas reducing projects such as solar or wind farms. Even if the interest rate on such loans is the same as our domestic loan rates, this would be a big help in ensuring that developing countries pursue greenhouse gas reductions while growing. Low or no interest loans for such projects would be even better. In the past, US companies have benefited mightily from large infrastructure projects in developing countries, some of questionable utility. Currently the US and other G7 countries are pooling funding for infrastructure projects in response to China’s Belt and Road development initiative which includes green infrastructure. Climate change investment, with or without the US, will be huge going forward and, as we saw in the chapter on climate change, while much of the technology was developed here, we have let this major market slip through our fingers so far, although Biden era legislation has changed that picture.
The development of the rest of the world is much in our interest for other reasons. The current world population of 8 billion is projected to grow to over 10 billion under current trends. This quite recent explosion of the human population is simply unlike anything the earth has ever seen before, and unsustainable for a host of reasons. We have seen that as countries become richer their birth rate declines so the sooner developing countries get richer, the sooner we reach “peak human”. And of course, as we have discussed, as countries get richer and opportunities expand, there is less impetus for migration, and trade becomes more balanced. For our own good, we need to do everything we can to lower human population growth and the only sure way to do that is to help poor countries become wealthier. That is best done through trade and investment, which is good for the earth, our economy, and theirs as well. A win-win-win.
Trade too requires international cooperation. The World Trade Organization (WTO) provides a forum for the negotiation of trade agreements and the resolution of disputes. The large majority of countries, including the US and China and all the countries with the biggest economies are signatories to the agreements at the heart of the WTO. There are in addition, many regional and bilateral trade agreements. The WTO is the “referee” when it comes to violations of trade agreements, but it has no enforcement powers. Trade in a connected world requires fair and impartial arbitration. Not shoot from the hip ad-hoc tariffs.
Finally, in this list of the benefits and needs for international cooperation is the need to deal with financial malfeasance and tax shelters. As we saw in the section on tax avoidance and evasion in the US, vast amounts of money are secreted in “tax havens” that also serve to park and hide dirty money of all sorts. The sums are enormous, many trillions of dollars. Work has been done on this by groups of countries to share data and impose minimum corporate tax rates, and that effort needs to continue and be expanded.
[1] John Allphin Moore and Jr. Jerry Pubantz. The New United Nations: International Organization in the Twenty-First Century (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey : Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006)
[2] Even though the agreement is only voluntary, and signed by every country in the world, the US pulled out of it under one administration in 2020 and back in under another in 2021.
[3] Meaning that these countries pay much higher interest to borrow capital. In 2021 Ecuador’s interest rate was over 12 percent while the rate in the US and Europe was under 4%. See https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/43923/EGR2023_ESEN.pdf?sequence=10