Every month, the Global South in the World Order Project convenes a meeting of experts from across the Global South to discuss key issues in international affairs that challenge conventional wisdom and inject non-Western perspectives and viewpoints into prominent policy debates in Washington. This publication is part of the Global South Experts Turn-the-Tables series, which highlights insights from select participants in these discussions.
This article addresses perspectives from Global South experts on how the upcoming U.S. presidential elections and the change in administrations may affect Global South countries. These experts do not expect a pivotal shift to occur in the United States’ policies pertaining to the Global South. At the same time, a new U.S. administration has the opportunity to rectify Washington’s past mistakes and to overcome ignorance of the Global South’s autonomy and its efforts to improve the international order and bolster its own initiatives.
The 2024 U.S. presidential election is expected to have a major impact on the international community. The contours of Vice President Kamala Harris’ foreign policy are unclear; should former President Donald Trump be elected, foreign policy experts expect the United States to retrench from global governance and take a more nationalistic approach.
Scholars from across the Global South do not anticipate major changes in U.S. engagement with their countries, no matter who is elected, in light of the overall continuity in U.S. foreign policy during recent decades. Nonetheless, they see the U.S. election as a competition between pro-multilateralism and anti-multilateralism.
While the United States is likely to continue to focus its efforts on countering China and fostering a Manichean view of the world, “West vs. East,” “democracy vs. autocracy,” many in the Global South view the division in the world rather as being along the lines of “Global North vs. Global South.” this view is based on the longstanding and entrenched global inequalities and inequity that continue to create a wedge between Western powers on the one hand and the Majority World on the other.1The term “Majority World” is a reminder that the average income levels of those living in the West represent the income levels of a minority of people worldwide. According to the World Bank, 80% of the world’s population lives on $10 or less per day.
Historically, the Global North has aggressively suppressed initiatives from the Global South that aimed to create a more balanced and equitable international system. Many in the Global South see little difference between Trump and President Joe Biden regarding substantive support for their issues, viewing the moves of both administrations as largely rhetorical and symbolic.
In this context, many Global South political and thought leaders no longer rely on the United States to reform global governance. Rather, they seek new partnerships and alternative multilateral forums that can help them advance their interests and secure international development and climate financing. Contrary to convention wisdom in the West, these actors seek to advance universalism of international norms, in contrast to the US-led “rules-based order,” which a minority imposes on the majority while often ignoring these rules when they apply to their behavior.
This dynamic, rooted in colonial history, highlights the need for an equitable system that genuinelyincorporates the perspectives and aspirations of Global South states.
The United States Must Change its Foreign Policy in the Middle East or it will lose the Global South (Again)
Karim Makdisi, Associate Professor of International Politics, The American University of Beirut
For much of the Global South, U.S. foreign policy and its shaping of the modern international order has been marked by double standards and continuity ensuring Western dominance by any means, regardless of who is president. At the heart of this dominance is what the U.S. establishment calls the “rules-based order,” which, as the South African scholar John Dugard has argued, is in effect an amorphous and “tacit agreement” that “best advances the interests of the West, a chimera, meaning whatever the [United States] and its followers want it to mean at any given time.” The United States’ rules-based order contrasts with an alternative order based on international law and the United Nations charter, which the Global South has long struggled over many decades to make more universal and equitable.
The Global South understands well the double standards and opaque criteria inherent in the United States’ rules-based order. It observes, for example, how the United States conveniently invokes international law to de-legitimize Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine, and then intentionally undermines or attacks the same laws when defending Israel’s assorted invasions, occupations and war crimes. As one senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times, the West’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza means “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South…All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
Viewed from the Middle East, the continuity of U.S. dominance over the international system through the rules-based order has long rested on uncritical bipartisan support for Israel, no matter the cost to U.S. standing and international law, and control over Gulf oil resources. Protecting Israel and oil resources has traditionally seen U.S. leaders actively back and arm authoritarian governments in the region and consistently prosecute “forever wars” to impose U.S. hegemony and ensure enormous profits for U.S. corporations. Successive U.S. administrations have helped suppress popular sentiment and movements across the region and attack international law provisions and institutions when they get in the way of purported U.S. interests.
Seen in this historical and bipartisan context, it is easy to understand why the administration of President Joe Biden shifted so seamlessly from moralistic rhetoric about human rights to appeasing and selling arms to authoritarian Arab governments — just as the Trump administration did. This administration has moved from calling for Middle East peace to actively enabling Israel’s horrific war on Gaza, defunding the UN agency that supports desperate Palestinian refugees ― as the Trump administration also did ― and attacking the landmark International Court of Justice cases against Israel and threatening the International Criminal Court (which the Trump administration also did). As a result, the United States is now seen by many in the Arab world as the as the biggest threat to stability and security, with a near consensus of 94% of the Arab world disapproving of Biden’s staunch defense and arming of the most right-wing, extremist government in Israeli history during its mass violence in Gaza.
In this sense, Trump’s anti-multilateralist “America First” rhetoric and Biden’s (and Vice President Kamala Harris’) ostensibly pro-multilateralist “America is back” slogan are not seen as so different in the Middle East and Global South. Both Republican and Democratic parties have attacked international law and institutions (and their representatives) when they have not aligned with purported U.S. interests. There is no reason to believe that the 2024 presidential election will fundamentally change this approach or challenge this long continuity in U.S. policy, particularly if Trump wins. Harris, at least, may adjust U.S. rhetoric and even policy on the margins as she understands that Biden’s extreme pro-Israel position is one reason why he was projected to lose to Trump, given how deeply unpopular Biden’s Gaza policy is domestically with young voters. Could a Harris win somehow better align the capricious U.S. rules-based order with the more universal order based around international law that is championed by the Global South? To do so requires the United States to fundamentally change its policy in the Middle East.
How Do US Election Outcomes Impact Africa?
Chris O. Ògúnmọ́dẹdé, Editor at The Republic
Africa’s decades-long clamor for reform of key global governance institutions has reached a crescendo in recent years. Last year, the African Union joined the G-20 as a permanent member, and South Africa is set to assume control of the forum’s presidency later this year. African states have stepped up their demands for their bloc to get at least two permanent seats on the UN Security Council with veto powers, as well as five non-permanent seats. Amid rising debt burdens, a rapidly escalating climate emergency and stalled progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, a multiplicity of voices on the continent has proposed steps to transform the global financial architecture.
Biden’s pledge to support efforts to reform the U.N. and other international organizations did not come to fruition. But the next U.S. administration can and should champion this endeavor. Although the conventional wisdom in some quarters is that the presumptive front-runners in the 2024 U.S. presidential election — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump — represent contrasting visions of multilateralism, this understates the bipartisan commitment in Washington to the use of international institutions to advance U.S. geopolitical interests. For many nations and populations in the Global South, the distinction between Democratic and Republican administrations is decidedly nil.
Nonetheless, African voices — governments, private sector organizations, civil society groups, and the like — need to continue building bridges with their peers in Global Majority countries to achieve valuable reforms in the global governance order. Several proposals laid out in the Sal Declaration and by the African High-Level Working Group on the Global Financial Architecture have found support in some European circles and could be built upon. At a time when the United States seeks to convince African nations that it can be trusted as an international partner, supporting the continent’s immediate and long-term development aspirations would be a tangible way to build lasting support beyond a presidential term.
Transacting with Trust
Shuva Raha, Fellow and International Cooperation Lead at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water
In a June 2020 Stimson Issue Brief, Multilateralism for Chronic Risks, written amidst the raging COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Arunabha Ghosh, Founder-CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), one of Asia’s leading think tanks, wrote that a “perfect storm of shocks” — “a series of environmental, economic, and social crises” — could cripple even the mightiest militaries and economies, and undo decades of progress in less developed countries. During such existential crises, he noted, “countries impulsively turn inwards” and the world must deal with “de minimis multilateralism: what is the minimum on which interests converge?”
Amidst the pandemic, which was decimating lives, livelihoods, and national economies, in February 2022, the simmering Russia-Ukraine conflict escalated into war. The US-NATO–led defense of Ukraine further polarized the world with its “with-us-or-against-us” demand for condemnations and sanctions against Russia. India followed its independent foreign policy and, despite its warming relations with the United States during both Republican and Democratic administrations, called for cessation of hostilities — without taking sides. Similar stances by many countries reflect their growing — and unifying — aversion toward being coerced into chaos while they focus on their own priorities.
Now, in 2024, the world is truly in de minimis multilateralism. At least 97 countries, with ~2 billion voters, have elections this year. Many have yielded surprising results; the focus now is on the U.S. Presidential race in November, mired in controversies. Worldwide, speculation is rife about how party ideologies would shape U.S. foreign policy, and how domestic imperatives could overwhelm diplomatic acumen.
Meanwhile, countries are instituting unlikely yet strategic mini-laterals, forging new trade and currency connections, and adopting novel technologies and media strategies. New leaders are emerging: China, with its aggressive policies; Russia, driven by its isolation by the West; diplomacy-oriented India, which in 2023 led the G-20 — including the United States, European Union, Russia and China, to a wide-ranging, unanimous Leaders’ Declaration; and many regional powerhouses.
Dr Ghosh notes that post-World-War-II multilateralism banked largely on the economic reliance of countries on the United States, “whose individual state objectives aligned with global ones at the time: financial stability, freer trade, and global development… these conditions no longer seem to apply.” And, there is an urgent global demand to reform these 1944 Bretton Woods institutions — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — and governance systems to transparently and equitably serve the modern, multipolar world.
Therefore, the United States should redefine its leadership role in today’s context: yesterday’s conflict will need to yield to collaborative efforts for tomorrow. Moreover, Washington should transact with allies and partners with trust and respect. It should see the world beyond U.S. borders as a multilateral tapestry to be rewoven, with new co-weavers, new threads, and a brand new design.
Notes
- 1The term “Majority World” is a reminder that the average income levels of those living in the West represent the income levels of a minority of people worldwide. According to the World Bank, 80% of the world’s population lives on $10 or less per day.
Every month, the Global South in the World Order Project convenes a meeting of experts from across the Global South to discuss key issues in international affairs that challenge conventional wisdom and inject non-Western perspectives and viewpoints into prominent policy debates in Washington. This publication is part of the Global South Experts Turn-the-Tables series, which highlights insights from select participants in these discussions.
This article addresses perspectives from Global South experts on how the upcoming U.S. presidential elections and the change in administrations may affect Global South countries. These experts do not expect a pivotal shift to occur in the United States’ policies pertaining to the Global South. At the same time, a new U.S. administration has the opportunity to rectify Washington’s past mistakes and to overcome ignorance of the Global South’s autonomy and its efforts to improve the international order and bolster its own initiatives.
The 2024 U.S. presidential election is expected to have a major impact on the international community. The contours of Vice President Kamala Harris’ foreign policy are unclear; should former President Donald Trump be elected, foreign policy experts expect the United States to retrench from global governance and take a more nationalistic approach.
Scholars from across the Global South do not anticipate major changes in U.S. engagement with their countries, no matter who is elected, in light of the overall continuity in U.S. foreign policy during recent decades. Nonetheless, they see the U.S. election as a competition between pro-multilateralism and anti-multilateralism.
While the United States is likely to continue to focus its efforts on countering China and fostering a Manichean view of the world, “West vs. East,” “democracy vs. autocracy,” many in the Global South view the division in the world rather as being along the lines of “Global North vs. Global South.” this view is based on the longstanding and entrenched global inequalities and inequity that continue to create a wedge between Western powers on the one hand and the Majority World on the other.1The term “Majority World” is a reminder that the average income levels of those living in the West represent the income levels of a minority of people worldwide. According to the World Bank, 80% of the world’s population lives on $10 or less per day.
Historically, the Global North has aggressively suppressed initiatives from the Global South that aimed to create a more balanced and equitable international system. Many in the Global South see little difference between Trump and President Joe Biden regarding substantive support for their issues, viewing the moves of both administrations as largely rhetorical and symbolic.
In this context, many Global South political and thought leaders no longer rely on the United States to reform global governance. Rather, they seek new partnerships and alternative multilateral forums that can help them advance their interests and secure international development and climate financing. Contrary to convention wisdom in the West, these actors seek to advance universalism of international norms, in contrast to the US-led “rules-based order,” which a minority imposes on the majority while often ignoring these rules when they apply to their behavior.
This dynamic, rooted in colonial history, highlights the need for an equitable system that genuinelyincorporates the perspectives and aspirations of Global South states.
The United States Must Change its Foreign Policy in the Middle East or it will lose the Global South (Again)
Karim Makdisi, Associate Professor of International Politics, The American University of Beirut
For much of the Global South, U.S. foreign policy and its shaping of the modern international order has been marked by double standards and continuity ensuring Western dominance by any means, regardless of who is president. At the heart of this dominance is what the U.S. establishment calls the “rules-based order,” which, as the South African scholar John Dugard has argued, is in effect an amorphous and “tacit agreement” that “best advances the interests of the West, a chimera, meaning whatever the [United States] and its followers want it to mean at any given time.” The United States’ rules-based order contrasts with an alternative order based on international law and the United Nations charter, which the Global South has long struggled over many decades to make more universal and equitable.
The Global South understands well the double standards and opaque criteria inherent in the United States’ rules-based order. It observes, for example, how the United States conveniently invokes international law to de-legitimize Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine, and then intentionally undermines or attacks the same laws when defending Israel’s assorted invasions, occupations and war crimes. As one senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times, the West’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza means “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South…All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost . . . Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”
Viewed from the Middle East, the continuity of U.S. dominance over the international system through the rules-based order has long rested on uncritical bipartisan support for Israel, no matter the cost to U.S. standing and international law, and control over Gulf oil resources. Protecting Israel and oil resources has traditionally seen U.S. leaders actively back and arm authoritarian governments in the region and consistently prosecute “forever wars” to impose U.S. hegemony and ensure enormous profits for U.S. corporations. Successive U.S. administrations have helped suppress popular sentiment and movements across the region and attack international law provisions and institutions when they get in the way of purported U.S. interests.
Seen in this historical and bipartisan context, it is easy to understand why the administration of President Joe Biden shifted so seamlessly from moralistic rhetoric about human rights to appeasing and selling arms to authoritarian Arab governments — just as the Trump administration did. This administration has moved from calling for Middle East peace to actively enabling Israel’s horrific war on Gaza, defunding the UN agency that supports desperate Palestinian refugees ― as the Trump administration also did ― and attacking the landmark International Court of Justice cases against Israel and threatening the International Criminal Court (which the Trump administration also did). As a result, the United States is now seen by many in the Arab world as the as the biggest threat to stability and security, with a near consensus of 94% of the Arab world disapproving of Biden’s staunch defense and arming of the most right-wing, extremist government in Israeli history during its mass violence in Gaza.
In this sense, Trump’s anti-multilateralist “America First” rhetoric and Biden’s (and Vice President Kamala Harris’) ostensibly pro-multilateralist “America is back” slogan are not seen as so different in the Middle East and Global South. Both Republican and Democratic parties have attacked international law and institutions (and their representatives) when they have not aligned with purported U.S. interests. There is no reason to believe that the 2024 presidential election will fundamentally change this approach or challenge this long continuity in U.S. policy, particularly if Trump wins. Harris, at least, may adjust U.S. rhetoric and even policy on the margins as she understands that Biden’s extreme pro-Israel position is one reason why he was projected to lose to Trump, given how deeply unpopular Biden’s Gaza policy is domestically with young voters. Could a Harris win somehow better align the capricious U.S. rules-based order with the more universal order based around international law that is championed by the Global South? To do so requires the United States to fundamentally change its policy in the Middle East.
How Do US Election Outcomes Impact Africa?
Chris O. Ògúnmọ́dẹdé, Editor at The Republic
Africa’s decades-long clamor for reform of key global governance institutions has reached a crescendo in recent years. Last year, the African Union joined the G-20 as a permanent member, and South Africa is set to assume control of the forum’s presidency later this year. African states have stepped up their demands for their bloc to get at least two permanent seats on the UN Security Council with veto powers, as well as five non-permanent seats. Amid rising debt burdens, a rapidly escalating climate emergency and stalled progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, a multiplicity of voices on the continent has proposed steps to transform the global financial architecture.
Biden’s pledge to support efforts to reform the U.N. and other international organizations did not come to fruition. But the next U.S. administration can and should champion this endeavor. Although the conventional wisdom in some quarters is that the presumptive front-runners in the 2024 U.S. presidential election — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump — represent contrasting visions of multilateralism, this understates the bipartisan commitment in Washington to the use of international institutions to advance U.S. geopolitical interests. For many nations and populations in the Global South, the distinction between Democratic and Republican administrations is decidedly nil.
Nonetheless, African voices — governments, private sector organizations, civil society groups, and the like — need to continue building bridges with their peers in Global Majority countries to achieve valuable reforms in the global governance order. Several proposals laid out in the Sal Declaration and by the African High-Level Working Group on the Global Financial Architecture have found support in some European circles and could be built upon. At a time when the United States seeks to convince African nations that it can be trusted as an international partner, supporting the continent’s immediate and long-term development aspirations would be a tangible way to build lasting support beyond a presidential term.
Transacting with Trust
Shuva Raha, Fellow and International Cooperation Lead at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water
In a June 2020 Stimson Issue Brief, Multilateralism for Chronic Risks, written amidst the raging COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Arunabha Ghosh, Founder-CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), one of Asia’s leading think tanks, wrote that a “perfect storm of shocks” — “a series of environmental, economic, and social crises” — could cripple even the mightiest militaries and economies, and undo decades of progress in less developed countries. During such existential crises, he noted, “countries impulsively turn inwards” and the world must deal with “de minimis multilateralism: what is the minimum on which interests converge?”
Amidst the pandemic, which was decimating lives, livelihoods, and national economies, in February 2022, the simmering Russia-Ukraine conflict escalated into war. The US-NATO–led defense of Ukraine further polarized the world with its “with-us-or-against-us” demand for condemnations and sanctions against Russia. India followed its independent foreign policy and, despite its warming relations with the United States during both Republican and Democratic administrations, called for cessation of hostilities — without taking sides. Similar stances by many countries reflect their growing — and unifying — aversion toward being coerced into chaos while they focus on their own priorities.
Now, in 2024, the world is truly in de minimis multilateralism. At least 97 countries, with ~2 billion voters, have elections this year. Many have yielded surprising results; the focus now is on the U.S. Presidential race in November, mired in controversies. Worldwide, speculation is rife about how party ideologies would shape U.S. foreign policy, and how domestic imperatives could overwhelm diplomatic acumen.
Meanwhile, countries are instituting unlikely yet strategic mini-laterals, forging new trade and currency connections, and adopting novel technologies and media strategies. New leaders are emerging: China, with its aggressive policies; Russia, driven by its isolation by the West; diplomacy-oriented India, which in 2023 led the G-20 — including the United States, European Union, Russia and China, to a wide-ranging, unanimous Leaders’ Declaration; and many regional powerhouses.
Dr Ghosh notes that post-World-War-II multilateralism banked largely on the economic reliance of countries on the United States, “whose individual state objectives aligned with global ones at the time: financial stability, freer trade, and global development… these conditions no longer seem to apply.” And, there is an urgent global demand to reform these 1944 Bretton Woods institutions — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — and governance systems to transparently and equitably serve the modern, multipolar world.
Therefore, the United States should redefine its leadership role in today’s context: yesterday’s conflict will need to yield to collaborative efforts for tomorrow. Moreover, Washington should transact with allies and partners with trust and respect. It should see the world beyond U.S. borders as a multilateral tapestry to be rewoven, with new co-weavers, new threads, and a brand new design.
Notes
- 1The term “Majority World” is a reminder that the average income levels of those living in the West represent the income levels of a minority of people worldwide. According to the World Bank, 80% of the world’s population lives on $10 or less per day.
