In a valedictory address delivered today at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for a new era of American global leadership. The United States remains the world’s “indispensable” power, she insisted. It is the cornerstone of a “just, rules-based international order.” But she warned against complacency. “Leadership is not a birthright,” she insisted. “It has to be earned by each new generation.” To lead in the twenty-first century, the United States will need to “adapt to these new realities of global power and influence,” by exploiting its entire array of policy levers, cultivating diverse partnerships and networks, and forging a “new international architecture” tailored to new global challenges and emerging powers. Read more »

Mathew Burrows, counselor to the National Intelligence Council, may have the most fascinating job in Washington. Every four to five years he coordinates the U.S. intelligence community’s crystal-ball gazing exercise, which imagines what the future will bring fifteen to twenty years hence. The sixth and most recent installment, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, offers an eye-opening  glimpse into the turbulent world we will inherit as middle classes grow, power shifts to developing countries, demographics change, and humanity confronts daunting ecological constraints. Read more »

– Moscow

Having recently assumed the rotating chair of the Group of Twenty (G20), the Russian government is now soliciting input on the agenda for its September 2013 meeting in St. Petersburg. Yesterday I contributed to these deliberations as a member of the “Think20”network—a consortium of independent experts from around the world. My own advice to the Russian sherpa, Ksenia Yudaeva, was that Russia should transform the G20’s nascent development agenda to address the pressing challenge of fragile states. Read more »

The Persian Gulf is receiving plenty of press this week, as climate negotiators debate in Doha and political turmoil buffets Bahrain. But another important drama is unfolding in Dubai, where more than one hundred and fifty nations are meeting for the World Conference on International Telecommunications (Wcit) from December 4-13. Topping the agenda is the future governance of the internet. A bloc of developing countries and authoritarian states is pushing for a sweeping new treaty that would wrest authority for regulating the internet from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and hand it to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  Fortunately, the United States, European Union, and private sector have mobilized to block this nightmare scenario, which would threaten the free and open character of the internet. Read more »

It’s telling that President Obama’s first foreign trip after winning reelection takes him to Asia, the historical hinge of the twenty-first century. The president will visit three Southeast Asian nations: He’ll mark one hundred and eighty years of diplomatic relations with Thailand, a staunch U.S. ally in the region. He’ll become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Myanmar, a nation emerging from five decades of military rule. And he’ll attend the East Asia Summit in Cambodia, reaffirming the presence of the United States as a Pacific power and a geopolitical counterweight to China. Read more »

–Singapore (November 2, 2012)

The dynamic city-state and commercial entrepot of Singapore offers an ideal vantage point to consider the geopolitical and economic crosscurrents washing over East Asia. The past three years have underscored the contradictions between East Asia’s dual geoeconomic and geopolitical orders. Notwithstanding China’s modest recent slowdown, three decades of explosive growth have made it the region’s clear economic fulcrum. At the same time, regional stability remains undergirded by a “hub and spoke” system of longstanding bilateral alliances between the United States and China’s neighbors—including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand—as well as emerging security partnerships with Indonesia, Vietnam, and others. Read more »

Like the West, the developing world is struggling to update global institutions to twenty-first century realities. The Nonaligned Movement (NAM), which holds its sixteenth summit in Tehran this week, is grasping for contemporary relevance. It is clinging to shopworn shibboleths and cleaving to outdated bloc mentalities within the United Nations and other global bodies. In so doing, the NAM is undermining the search for constructive solutions to today’s most pressing transnational problems. Read more »

When it comes to “rising powers,” the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and especially China—tend to get the most press. But there’s another emerging player that promises to shape world politics in the twenty-first century with its robust growth, political evolution, and strategic choices. It is Turkey, a country that straddles some of today’s most critical divides: between Europe and the Middle East, between the West and the developing world, between secular democracy and religious piety. Turkey’s evolving might, its geographic position, and model of moderate political Islam make it a natural candidate for “strategic partnership” with the United States. This is the conclusion of U.S. Turkey Relations, a just-released CFR task force report co-chaired by former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright and former national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley—and directed by my able colleague, Steven A. Cook. Read more »

After emerging from the 2008 financial crisis relatively unscathed, Brazil’s inevitable entrance into the club of major global powers is increasingly accepted. The Internationalist and Carlos Simonsen Leal of the Brazilian Getulio Vargas Foundation discuss Brazil’s perspective on global finance and international security. Simonsen says: Read more »

On CFR’s new Global Expert Roundup, I argue that the U.S. diplomatic push to install an American as the next World Bank president squandered a golden opportunity to promote a new era of global governance founded on contemporary economic realities, and not outdated Western prerogatives. The Obama administration could have thrown its weight behind either of the two outstanding alternatives–Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria or José Antonio Ocampo of Colombia–and in doing so, would have signaled that global institutional reform requires integrating the dynamic developing world. Nevertheless, the first multi-candidate competition is a historic turning point. Read more »