In its most basic description, it is a thoroughly unremarkable photograph: heads of state shaking hands at the G20 Summit last autumn. But for those who have seen the striking image, a basic description could not do it justice.
The man on the right wears the dark suit favored by intelligence operatives the world over, and he is generally known for a steely-faced demeanor popular with the same crowd, although he has long since traded in his own earpiece. The man on the left is enrobed in a golden bissht and an obvious charisma that grants him something of a regal affect; wholly unsurprising given that he effectively sits on one of the most powerful dynastic thrones in the world. And rather than exchange diplomatic niceties, Vladimir Putin and Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud slap palms in a gregarious display of genuine delight.
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A picture is supposedly worth a thousand words. And yet to the Right Honourable David Miliband, who delivered this year’s Fulbright Lecture at Pembroke College, the autocrats’ high-five carries a far higher premium. To Miliband, the iconic image serves as an illustration of a sea change in international relations, a shift into a new era that he calls the “age of impunity.”
The Oxford Fulbright Distinguished Lecture in International Relations is one of the most prestigious events of its kind; at least, if the prestige of a lecture series can be fairly judged by the quality of its speakers. While fairly young – this was only the ninth iteration – the series has featured some of the finest minds in the social science firmament: Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Stern, and our own Vice-Chancellor, Louise Richardson are among the luminaries who have graced the lectern in recent years.
David Miliband certainly belongs in their company. He was once the youngest Foreign Secretary in a generation, with responsibility for British foreign policy in the November of the Blair-Brown Labour government. Following the fratricidal Labour Party leadership campaign that saw him pipped to the post by his younger brother Ed, he has spent the past few years as the President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee in New York. The man has been the nation’s chief diplomat, as well as the leader of one of the world’s most prestigious NGOs, either of which would qualify as most people’s crowning professional achievement; the fact that he had done both – before turning 50 – gives him a tremendous amount of credibility in intellectual circles, and a particularly interesting perspective on issues of international affairs.
He is 54 now, although one could be forgiven for mistaking him for a late-term doctoral student, milling about the Manor Road Building canteen. This combination of youth and experience is simply tantalizing for many people steeped in British politics – I was undoubtedly not the only person in the audience wondering where the country might have found itself if the elder brother had led Labour into the 2015 election, or how differently the next few years might play out if David were to return to his frontbench political ambitions. Hillary Clinton is surely not alone among the foreign policy glitterati to have a crush on him, even if she is the only one who has confessed such a thing in the pages of Vogue. Luckily, the assembled crowd managed to stifle such fantasies for an hour and consider the man’s thoughts.
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Miliband’s lecture was titled “The New Arrogance of Power” – not an accidental choice of words. Like any good speaker, he tethered his remarks to the mission and history of the lecture’s hosts: the various groups commemorating the legacy of former United States Senator William Fulbright (a onetime student at Pembroke) and the Fulbright Program. Fulbright himself wrote a book in 1966, The Arrogance of Power, in which he decried America’s war in Vietnam and the Washington groupthink that enabled it.
Superficially, “the arrogance of power” is about as good a definition as any for Miliband’s core concept of impunity in foreign affairs, and it provided him with an emotional platform to establish his thesis. His main argument is relatively straightforward: the power of the international laws and norms that restrain states from abusing their people has all but ebbed away, leaving the world awash in humanitarian crises that were unimaginable fifteen years ago.
To press his case, he elegantly weaved an historical narrative, complemented by an assiduously sourced set of data points on civil wars, conflicts, and their casualties. At times, the onslaught of dire statistics threatened to overwhelm the senses, but Miliband always seemed to know when his point had been made. In terms of civilians and war, he set out a persuasive challenge to the idea that the world is progressively wealthier, healthier, and more peaceful than ever before – the security blanket for enlightened liberals such as Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling. From attacks on medical and aid workers, to the length and internationalization of civil wars, to the number of refugees and stateless persons, to the prevalence of genocide and ethnic cleansing, Miliband used increasing numbers to describe a world in which the rules of engagement no longer seem to hold any sway over combatants. While acknowledging that such rules and commitments have not always been binding – the Cold War routinely found states justifying all manner of internal atrocities in the name of sovereignty – Miliband sees modern developments as violating a trend of increasing accountability in international conduct, a trend that he dates to a roughly fifteen-year period spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In Miliband’s telling, the period stretching from the end of the Cold War through the global financial crisis of 2008 was the coming-of-age for the global order. Although international institutions like the United Nations and the Bretton Woods system had been conceived amid the ashes of war fifty years earlier, it was not until the 1990s that the flat earth created by technology, trade, and migration was first viable. This new world needed a new set of global norms and institutions, and there was no question what philosophical school would supply them; humanity had reached liberalism’s End of History, and the dominant values of the victorious rich, democratic West would set the tone for this emerging era. Set against the backdrop of an ever-expanding economy, the worldwide spread of liberal democracy, and a chorus of “Never Agains” concerning the depravity in Rwanda and the Balkans, the international community enacted a number of laws governing states’ obligations to individuals, ranging from the Ottawa Treaty against landmines to the International Criminal Court. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously enshrined in resolution the “Responsibility to Protect,” what Miliband claims as the very summit of liberal interventionism.
Alas, the mountain appears tallest when viewed from the valley, and Miliband’s thesis posits that the international community has descended to those depths today. Putin’s embrace with the Saudi Crown Prince is an example of how national leaders have been freed from the bonds of international law and norms. The Responsibility to Protect of 2005 rings rather hollow while Syria burns, China brazenly “re-educates” citizens in its western provinces, and liberal protections for minorities are eroded in India and Burma, leading to internecine violence. If the international community is unwilling or unable to assert laws and norms in defending its own prerogatives, we should not be surprised when states essentially invoke laches in their ongoing disregard of those laws and norms. Indeed, the “arrogance of power” seems an entirely appropriate name for the force that fuels his age of impunity, where the only thing that limits a state’s capacity for action is what they can get away with.
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David Miliband is an excellent rhetorician. Crossing swords with William Hague across the dispatch boxes in the House of Commons is more than enough preparation to impress a willing audience with charm and command of facts. He is also an astute analyst of political affairs. His lecture was entertaining, enlightening, and genuinely thought-provoking; nevertheless, there are broad critiques to make of his core argument.
The lowest-hanging fruit is to take issue with his methodology of comparison. Is his “age of impunity” really a new and unusual – if not unprecedented – epoch in international relations? Is it as remarkable a situation as he presents it? The degree to which an observer finds Miliband’s argument convincing will likely lie with their level of agreement with his conception of the 1990s and early 2000s. To Miliband, the decade or so following the Rwandan genocide is the baseline by which our new age can be judged.
In his story, that period is the zenith of liberal internationalism, one that lays out a framework of international community that the age of impunity has dismantled. However, Miliband himself points out that the Cold War was a similarly “lawless” time in the affairs of states, where proxy wars, coups, and realist power politics dominated the global scene. Further, if the beginning of the end of this age of accountability was 2005, then we have been living in his age of impunity far longer than the belle époque that preceded it. In this light, the 1994-2005 period is the outlier in this narrative, with an unprecedented paradigm shift that should make us question its sustainability now that we have returned to a more “normal” world of realpolitik.
It is worth pointing out that the political narrative that Miliband advances is very much autobiographical as well. In 1994, he became a senior policy aide to Tony Blair – one of the future architects of the Responsibility to Protect – and had a leading hand in the Labour manifesto that launched Britain’s Third Way government. He took his own seat in the House in 2001, and left frontbench politics after the 2010 leadership contest, thus consciously or unconsciously aligning his own career with the golden age he describes. He would certainly not be the first public figure to take the circumstances of his own coming-of-age as a normal or ideal state of affairs.
One might also take issue with Miliband’s association with Senator Fulbright and even the phrase “arrogance of power.” Miliband uses this grounding not merely as a nod to the lecture’s sponsors, but also as a thread of connection between his ideas and the fuzzy memory of a man regarded as a leading internationalist, and a key early American supporter of the United Nations. However, Fulbright had several acts to his career, and while Miliband generally draws upon the spirit of the first – when Fulbright held a much more Wilsonian, idealistic view of international law – he also seeks to channel words from the last in titling his lecture. Fulbright wrote The Arrogance of Power in 1966; in 1967, he reported to a joint congressional committee that “[c]ontrary to the traditions which have guided our nation since the days of the Founding Fathers, we are in grave danger of becoming a Sparta bent on policing the world.” While there is great room for nuance in the practice of foreign policy, it is easy to imagine a good-faith opponent turning the “arrogant” label against its wielder.
Careers in international relations are made and broken in the context of former Prime Minister (and former Chancellor of this University) Harold Macmillan’s apocryphal “Events, dear boy,” and this is plainly evident in the careers of both Fulbright and Miliband. For when Fulbright wrote his book, less than three years had passed since he – as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – shepherded the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through the Senate, thus dramatically expanding the scope of the war. In 2003, Miliband voted for war in Iraq, although he later expressed his regret for the vote on the basis of incorrect contemporary intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. This is not to belittle two men who are widely – and in my view, appropriately – considered titans in the international arena, but it is meant to point out the difficulty in maintaining a Niebuhrian sense of humility when the roll is called to set policy. Indeed, it is rarely clear which civil wars are crimes against humanity in potentia, and which are headlong jumps into the quagmire, or where a nation stands on the slippery slope between arrogance and paralyzed inaction. Given this truth, might there be some ironic value to an approach that Miliband dismisses as inadequate – “managing chaos?”
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Miliband’s greatest insight shines when he links the humanitarian crises he sees every day with the political crises engulfing the world’s wealthy democracies – those nations who once served as guarantor of the late liberal order he so movingly eulogizes. If Putin’s brazen support of the Butcher of Damascus simply because he can is illustrative of the age of impunity, is not Boris Johnson’s thwarted attempt to shutter Parliament on the eve of Brexit in the same genre? Certainly, one must be cautious in comparing parliamentary maneuvering with mass murder, but there are obvious similarities in the motivations.
Putin and others can violate international law because they have learned that there are no consequences – the international community is too disorganized, too fractured, and perhaps too reliant on the United States to enforce the rules of the road. Johnson and his right-wing populist ilk can attempt to run roughshod over long-established standards of domestic governance – hinting that the Government might simply ignore a Parliamentary mandate to ask for a Brexit extension – because he fears no reprisal from his voters or a feckless and unpopular Leader of the Opposition.
Of course, violating the law is one thing – the kind of poor form that a patrician populist in a democratic society might still shy away from – eroding or ignoring norms with impunity is a different matter entirely. An authentically great English man of letters named Johnson (Dr Samuel Johnson – no relation) once observed: “How small of all that human hearts endure/That part which laws or kings can cause or cure;“ a quotation that Boris Johnson knows well. Boris can attempt to circumvent Parliament; Trump and his partisans can blatantly steal a Supreme Court seat; Matteo Salvini can call for “mass cleansings” in a country with deep fascist roots; all because voters have shown their unwillingness to enforce norms of conduct in lieu of satisfying their tribal passions.
Perhaps we can extend Miliband’s argument deeper, since the rot in our norms goes beyond politics. Today’s ultra-wealthy shield their hoard from tax, while Instagramming their profligacy to the jealous mob. Enormous financial institutions pay ever-greater record fines for their crimes, often with no admission of wrongdoing, nor seemingly any intention of reform. Mass media’s encouragement to shatter longstanding cultural and communal norms has made a prophet of former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the man who coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” in the early 1990s. It was not courts or armies that prevented these things from happening in an earlier era – it was some measure of social shame, a concept that has lost significant positive esteem in the Western public consciousness over the past few decades. When individuals, firms, parties, or states can get away with anything, it is only their internal sense of shame that can constrain their behavior.
Whatever issues can be taken with Miliband’s analysis, his powers of description seem dead on; by all accounts, we are indeed living in an age of impunity. But with Western society rapidly tiring of any kind of external hierarchical authority, escaping from this era may require a much deeper, more decentralized, and more inward set of solutions than he or anyone else can imagine.