The World’s Only Real Hope of Maintaining Order

Foreign Policy | Charles Kupchan

A new global concert system, which has been designed by Charles Kupchan, provides a form of governance that is both centralised and regionalised in order to preserve the international order in the face of growing geopolitical tension. The system is intended to handle the systemic instability caused by the competition between the United States and China, the war in Ukraine, and the worsening crises in the Middle East. In the past, established international organisations such as the United Nations have had difficulty in adapting to a multipolar arrangement of power.

The framework suggested assigns managerial responsibilities to the regional organisations while still keeping a central core made up of the great powers in order to stop local conflicts from spreading into global wars. A consensus among the great powers is essential. By combining regional autonomy with central supervision, this two-pronged system aims to maintain stability even though the existing multilateral institutions continue to suffer from constant deadlock. In the end, this reform is a practical way of avoiding systemic collapse in an age characterised by fragmented alliances, technological disruptions, trade disputes, and changing global power relations.

Comment

The move to a dual-track global concert system would greatly change the practical value of existing collective defence agreements such as NATO. Since the concert system emphasises regional management, Washington and Beijing would tend to hand over local stabilisation duties to regional organisations, which might weaken the binding mutual defence obligations set out in the North Atlantic Treaty. There is a danger that this could result in a number of tiered security areas in which partners in Eastern Europe or in the South China Sea would not have the clear deterrence assurances that have traditionally been given by Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. As a result, the unity of the alliance would decline. In such a situation, small coalitions like the Quad or AUKUS would probably take the place of general treaties as the main means of providing regional deterrence.

The situation is similar to that of the Holy Alliance in the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe, where localised crises kept revealing the shortcomings of collective action. In the Balkans, when the separate imperial interests came into conflict, the general agreement broke down since the informal concert did not have the strict and binding treaty provisions of modern defensive pacts. Likewise, a present-day shift back to an informal approach to regional matters would lead to security fragmentation for the Baltic states if the agreement between Washington and Moscow splits over the drawing of regional borders.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the regional concert system in fact tends to sideline comprehensive treaties, how should the deterrent value of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty be viewed when facing grey-zone aggression in the Baltic area?

The article shows that Article 5 would probably shift from being an automatic trigger for collective defence to becoming a consultative procedure, one that is largely based on the immediate strategic interests of the main nuclear guarantors. As a result, deterrence in the Baltic area would tend to depend more on bilateral "tripwire" deployments than on the reliable assurance provided by NATO's integrated command system. This trend implies that peripheral security will become highly transactional, forcing vulnerable states to look into forming small, local arrangements in order to compensate for the weakening of the multilateral guarantees.

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