Director’s Lecture 2025, Bronwen Maddox (Check against delivery)
The pursuit of order in a contested world
The rivalry between the US and China gives other countries a chance to reshape global governance.
Introduction
We live in fluid times. I never thought, when I was writing this last week, that I might have to refer to Greenland and Panama as contested territories, along with Ukraine and Taiwan.
Some things endure, though. If you look up in the hall as you go out, inscribed on the ceiling are the founding statements of Chatham House.
They talk about pursuit of the rule of law over the rule of force, and of building mutual understanding between nations. Chatham House was founded in the ashes of the First World War, on the margins of the Paris Peace Conference, with the aim of bringing intelligent thought to bear on avoiding the calamities the world might otherwise inflict on itself.
This is our mission today. The world is witnessing more wars and a fraying of international law, institutions and economic stability. That jeopardises the prosperity that has flowed to much of the world since the Second World War. It could lead to worse conflict or the catastrophe of war between US and China.
So, pursuit of agreement on future order is essential. I will set out here some priorities for countries who share that goal. They begin with re-acknowledging the value of the UN Charter, 80 years old in June, as well as international law on sovereignty, war, the sea and on arms control. They extend to support for key economic institutions including the IMF. That acknowledgement, and even better, advocacy for the benefit of agreement, is a basis for the pursuit of new pacts on the environment and tech and space.
This is not nostalgia for the heyday of the United Nations; trying to salvage the US-led multilateralism of the post WWII era is not credible. There is too much of a contest between the US and China (along with Russia and Iran). Nor is this a call for the US to act as the world’s policeman; it doesn’t want to and much of the world doesn’t want that either.
But it is a call to those who regard international agreement as important to argue for its value and try to extend it. It is a pitch to the new Trump administration, even if the president-elect and his appointees do not exactly use these terms. It is a pitch, too, to China; President Xi Jinping defends international order in his speeches (and of course, China has prospered greatly from it) although China notably ignores those rules when it chooses, particularly laws of the sea, of intellectual property and of sovereignty.
Even more, though, it is an appeal to countries that are not superpowers to use the chance to exert more influence. The new multilateralism needs a confident group of countries to argue for it and lead it. Of course, that applies to the US’s traditional allies: the UK, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada and Australia among others. For the Starmer government, there is a real opportunity to work on these emerging agreements behind the scenes and to support the value of international law.
For countries of the Global South, and particularly the ones that do not have authoritarian governments such as Brazil, Indonesia and perhaps India and South Africa, there is also a chance for them to influence emerging rules and alliances.
That is because the US and China each want their support, but also because many do not want either the US or China to dominate. Global South countries do need, though, to be realistic about what the richer world might pay to help them and to be consistent in their own standards, not just to lambast others for their failings.
The contest over global governance
A few points first about the problems that flow from the contest over global governance. One ambassador from the Middle East said of the times we’re in: ‘It’s something like the Cold War in that on every question, countries line up on one of two sides. But unlike the Cold War, it’s different countries on each side each time.’
Not everything is broken: much still works of agreements made in the last century. Phone calls are placed across borders; aircraft land at foreign airports. The World Trade Organization settles many disputes even though the US has stymied the appeals process. The World Health Organization is helping eliminate diseases even though its role in the pandemic was criticised.
But the United Nations Security Council, the world’s prime forum to make and enforce agreement on peace and security, is jammed by the vetoes of the US, China and Russia.
Those divisions extend to other parts of the 1945 UN Charter, a text which may have been shaped by the US but was originally backed by 50 countries including the Republic of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India and the USSR. They include the principle of sovereignty and the legitimacy of the International Court of Justice, the main judicial body of the UN, which settles disputes between nations.
The biggest current conflicts in the world reflect the unravelling of international agreement as well as causing devastation for people there. Take Ukraine, where Russia shattered principles of sovereignty by its invasion, which China has increasingly openly backed.
In the Middle East, the conflict between Israel and Hamas raises questions about the enforceability of laws of war. Sudan, a cauldron of immense suffering, where at least 11 million people are displaced, shows the failure of Security Council sanctions as well as diplomacy: the UAE, Iran, Libya, Egypt and Russia are all there, drawn by a desire for regional influence as well as gold.
This new disorder is all the greater because the US and its allies are hardly united in upholding existing values and institutions. Trump and his team are exuberantly transactional, saying to Europe and NATO, Japan and South Korea ‘we’ll defend you if you pay us’. Trump’s remark about buying Greenland from Denmark and taking the Panama Canal by force shocked allies – and very likely delighted Moscow and Beijing – for its exultant lack of interest in principles.
For its part, Europe struggles to impose its principles on its members never mind recommend these to the world. The Hungarian foreign minister sat on this platform last year and said that Hungary would change Europe rather than let Europe change Hungary. And the UK is struggling – like many democracies – to get people to pay for the services, including national defence, that they have taken for granted.
China’s choice about the part it plays will have huge influence on future order. It has been for some time guided by President Xi’s conviction that ‘the East is rising and the West declining’, although given the strength of the US economy and the weaknesses of China’s own, that may be a miscalculation. But that vision has guided its courtship of the Global South, and it has had some success in establishing the BRICS as a club that countries want to join (as Indonesia has just done).
However, it has not yet got the BRICS to create an alternative to the dollar as it would like. And while its rhetoric has been to offer an alternative to what it calls Western ‘colonialism’, Western countries could get better at retorting that China sometimes practices a new form of colonialism, not only in its treatment of internal minorities but in the terms on which it extracts resources from others.
As I said in my lecture last year, the West needs to address better the accusations of double standards against it, but it should not be shy of pointing out hypocrisy on the other side too.
What should be done: recommitting to fundamental principles
So what should be done? In this high-stakes contest, there are some institutions and principles that countries should try to preserve, if they want international order to be stable.
First, countries should reaffirm their agreement of key parts of the UN Charter. International law evolves as sedimentary layers of treaties and protocols and is generally not binding unless countries consent (and many reject the human rights provisions). But increasingly, even core parts of the Charter are contested: the principle of sovereignty, some of the laws of war and of laws of the sea.
The terms on which countries seek resolution of current conflicts could help – or make it worse. In Ukraine, Trump would make a considerable contribution if he helped end a conflict that has brought hundreds of thousands of casualties on each side. But if he jettisons principle in pursuit of a ‘deal’, he will undermine stability.
For all his claims, Trump has not been a great foreign dealmaker. He did broker the Abraham Accords between Israel and several Muslim states, but those ignored Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. His first-term deal with the Taliban casually sacrificed the stability and human rights that the US had advanced in Afghanistan; his talks with North Korea did nothing to reduce the threat of its nuclear weapons.
The minimum that needs to emerge over Ukraine is that a deal guarantees its ability to thrive free from Russian threat, and Europe’s too. That can only be done by the US, whether explicitly or by helping Ukraine build up its weapons. The US should also not force Ukraine to accept that Russia’s occupation of its sovereign territory is legal even if it is indefinite.
In the Middle East, the US could advance peace by pursuing normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel – but both the Trump team and the Israeli government show no interest in the Saudi condition of a commitment to a state for the Palestinians. Trump could though undermine the chance of regional agreement let alone wider support by supporting Israel if it retains control of Gaza and takes over more of the West Bank.
Europe and the UK are better placed than the US to argue for the role of the ICJ while acknowledging that this role will never be without controversy. Supporting the court’s legitimacy is part of the UK government’s reasoning in handing sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius after an ICJ advisory opinion.
Countries should renew their focus, too, on arms control. Nuclear proliferation comes top of the list; the US and China need to decide whether they will systematically try to stop it but others can put pressure on them to do so. If the US’s security guarantee to South Korea and Japan is not credible, then those countries will ask whether they need their own. China is said to have been helpful at discouraging President Putin from talking about use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, but not at all in diminishing the North Korean threat or, so far, the Iranian one.
Let me say something briefly on the Security Council itself. In the past, proposals for reform of ‘chairs and shares’ have been futile although the case for reform is well known. Reform is still unlikely. But the demand from the Global South for more representation is now unanswerable.
So is the argument that there should be a new limit on the veto powers of the ‘permanent five’ members, the US, China, Russia, France and the UK. The UK is well-placed to help move this debate forwards as one of the permanent members. The US and China want to court the Global South; this is one test of whether they will make good on it.
After the basics of international law, the priority should be economic institutions. They have held up in this disorder fairly well. But Trump’s tariffs threaten global trade; the hope must be that even if purely out of desire to avoid inflation in the US, he focusses only on points of real threat to the US from China. The way the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership has been revived as the Japan-led CPTPP is a model for how middle powers can begin to pull new agreements together even when the superpowers are unwilling.
Beyond that, the world needs the International Monetary Fund to remain a universal institution to preserve global economic and financial stability, and this means resolving the standoff between the US and China over voting weights. Probably, this will demand a compromise from the US – but one that might be traded for what it wants elsewhere.
New priorities
I’ve been talking about preserving existing order and institutions; progress here would then help construct new agreements in other areas. Indeed, some diplomats are explicit that one might be traded for the other: we’ll care about Ukraine if you help us with climate finance.
On the environment, the key climate change, plastics, biodiversity and oceans treaties all need work. But as the UK shows, many richer countries are highly indebted and reaching the limits of their citizens’ willingness to pay tax. They are not going to come up with the step change in public finance that is needed in the developing world. They and the recipients need to use better the funds already available – and there is a lot of scope for improvement here.
While poorer countries are right to push for more help, they also need to get more realistic about where efforts on international cooperation are best spent. Preaching to richer countries about their responsibility for climate change does not generate more funds. They may want to push more on China to help – as it may.
On tech, regulation should respect the creative effect of these technologies, resoundingly visible now in medicine. It should aim to find the right bargain between tech companies, their users and the countries in which they operate. They do need to pay more tax and fees for use of intellectual property. They must accept constraints on their monopoly power, at least regional ones, a principle that has underpinned international competition policy and growth for decades. On their responsibility for truth of information and for harm, there is no easy answer, but they would be wise to respect the differences that exist between countries in their style of regulation.
How smaller countries can influence the new order
The US and China have most influence on the future order of the world – or lack of it. But others have a new opportunity partly because the US and China want their support, and partly because many don’t want the US or China to dominate. They do, though, need to organize to make the best of it, including using regional cooperation to negotiate as cohesive blocs (say, through the African Union, Asean or Mercosur).
But they need realism too: richer countries will not give much more aid than their electorates currently support. And countries challenging the West over double standards do need to show consistency themselves. Turkey’s finance minister told a Chatham House audience last year that his country is very keen on laws of trade – but ignores sanctions on Russia because it wants to. South Africa has taken Israel to the ICJ but complained that under the ICC’s rulings, Putin was not allowed to visit.
How the UK can influence the new order
In all this, there is a real opportunity for the UK, although not helped by the competing priorities of its foreign policy – and lack of money. The foreign secretary, David Lammy, has coined the term ‘progressive realism’ for his policies – taking the world as it is, as he said in a Foreign Office speech last week, but pursuing progressive goals.
Yet the government wants economic growth, and the conclusions of a report which Lammy commissioned are inescapable: focus on the US, EU and China. That is what we said in our report before the UK election.
The trade goals are hard to square with each other let alone with progressive realism. The hardest choice for the UK will be how much to diverge from the US. Trump may well demand tariffs or other action against China that jars with the warm words Chancellor Rachel Reeves uttered in Beijing this weekend.
He will also no doubt look scornfully on the UK’s pledge to ‘set out a clear path to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP’ on defence as barely half of what he is demanding. ‘Progressive’ policies including the Chagos Islands handover, support for court action against Israel and a drive for net zero represent further divergence from Trump.
All the same, there should be a way through, with adroit footwork. The UK has a golden chance this year to play a leading role in European security, given the political upheaval in France and Germany. Lammy has made clear his commitment to the Commonwealth, to the challenges in West Africa and the Sahel, and to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, all areas that do not conflict with trade goals and represent paths to exploring agreements between groups of countries. The UK has a real chance to be one of the clearest and loudest voices arguing for cooperation, for new agreements, for the rule of law.
How Chatham House can influence the new order
Chatham House has a clear role to play as this untidy world evolves. That is why we are setting up this month our Centre for Global Governance and Security, headed by Dr Samir Puri, author, academic and former UK civil servant, who joins us today.
The centre brings together our work on security, digital society, international law and health, as well as global governance overall. We are positioning ourselves at the point where the world makes these new decisions.
Partly that is through convening private conversations about these sticking points, particularly in the Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America. It is also through testing out proposals in speeches and in debates. And it is through our deeper research, making a case for the way through these deadlocks.
That includes our analysis of the costs of proposals and who will pay where I’m indebted to our much-strengthened economics team. And to our also-strengthened country programmes, one of the historic strengths of Chatham House, for their judgement on how we can get these proposals to become real.
Conclusion
We are facing a multipolar world where power is distributed untidily among blocs and regions. If stable, that could serve people well – better than rising conflict between the US and China. But countries do need to organize themselves to salvage the best of the past and create new agreement for the prosperity and order of the future.
For all the disruption that a second Trump presidency will bring as well as the authoritarian wave sweeping the world, those changes are creating a space in which new agreements can develop. Those who want order should seize this chance to help shape the rules and institutions of the future, ensuring that many countries have a role in agreeing them. This is not a defence of the West, it’s a project for the world.
