Is diplomacy becoming more multilateral?
This report suggests that Hillary Clinton may not attend the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. The administration is apparently racing to counter the impression that this may be a snub of Japan (hat tip: CSIS Southeast Asia). Ministers from APEC countries will gather in Yokohama for a two-day conference starting Nov. 10. The U.S. ...
This report suggests that Hillary Clinton may not attend the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. The administration is apparently racing to counter the impression that this may be a snub of Japan (hat tip: CSIS Southeast Asia).
This report suggests that Hillary Clinton may not attend the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. The administration is apparently racing to counter the impression that this may be a snub of Japan (hat tip: CSIS Southeast Asia).
Ministers from APEC countries will gather in Yokohama for a two-day conference starting Nov. 10. The U.S. is preparing to chair APEC next year, and the country in that position usually sends its foreign affairs chief to the current year’s ministerial meeting. A U.S. secretary of state has not missed an APEC ministerial conference since 1992.
The scheduling difficulties are understandable. Major world leaders face a near gauntlet of summits and conferences in the coming months, including the ongoing G-20, the NATO summit in Lisbon, a big European Union confab, and an ASEAN summit in Hanoi (which Clinton apparently will attend). My impression is that fitting all this multilateralism into leading diplomats’ schedules has become increasingly complicated, as various regional and international fora compete for primacy in the diplomatic ecosystem. At times, it appears that major world leaders and ministers are in a near-constant state of summitry, although the forums and participants shift somewhat from week to week.
To (crudely) test the proposition that diplomacy has become increasingly multilateral over the past couple of decades, I recently compared the travel schedules of two U.S. secretaries of state: James Baker and Condoleezza Rice. They both served for just over three years and both worked for Republican presidents. By my count, they took almost the same number of international trips: Baker traveled 227 times and Rice 225 times. To my surprise, about the same proportion of their trips had an explicitly multilateral purpose. Just under 22 percent of Baker trips and 24 percent of Rice trips included either an international organization meeting or some informal multilateral process (such as, in Baker’s case, meetings of the 2+4 process on German reunification or, in Rice’s case, meetings of the P5+1 on Iran sanctions).
Next on my list: testing whether Democratic secretaries of state are more multilateral in their travel patterns than Republicans.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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