“America is back.” That was the message from U.S. President Joe Biden, the most internationalist of recent U.S. presidents, speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February 2021. There is a “dire need to coordinate multilateral action,” he declared. But his administration’s fixation on bilateral and regional agreements—at the expense of globally coordinated action—is underplaying the potential of our international institutions, all while undermining any possibility of a stable and managed globalization. Without a new multilateralism, a decade of global disorder seems inevitable.
The great irony, of course, is that the world’s preeminent multilateral institutions—from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to the United Nations—were all created by the United States in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Through U.S. leadership,…
