Four things you must know about the global puzzle

From New York to Pittsburgh you could hear the crunching and grinding of geopolitical plates. The latest jamborees at the United Nations and the Group of 20 leave the new global landscape still very much a work in progress. Some of the contours, though, stand in sharper relief.

To my mind, four things stood out from this week’s surfeit of summitry: China’s, albeit reluctant, embrace of multilateralism; the rising challenge from the Middle East to western and, especially, US power; Barack Obama’s effort to frame new rules for the global game; and Europe’s place on the margins of influence.

Hu Jintao grabbed many of the headlines with a softening of his position on climate change. The Chinese president’s pledge to cut the carbon-intensity of China’s economic growth is no guarantee of a deal at December’s global warming summit in Copenhagen. Mr Hu’s initiative underscored, though, a big shift in China’s approach to the world.

Beijing is at last owning up to the fact that it is a leading actor on the global stage. A year or so ago, China was still clinging on to an essentially passive role in international affairs. Western injunctions for it to act as a responsible stakeholder in the multilateral system were met with protestations that such demands were premature: China was still a developing country, and it prized non-interference above western concepts of mutual dependence.

The global economic crisis upended that strategy by showing that Beijing cannot detach its domestic from its international interests. True, China has had a good crisis, demonstrating that it can continue to grow while the west is in recession. But the collapse of its exports has served as a potent reminder of the inextricable ties woven by globalisation.

This interdependence is taken for granted in western capitals. For Beijing it carries the uncomfortable implication that states have a legitimate interest in the framing of others’ domestic policies.

None of this is to say that China is about to become an easy touch in the international diplomatic game. But it has begun to understand the importance of soft power, exchanging a prickly resentment at anything that smacks of interference for an effort to make friends and influence people.

The challenge to the west from the Middle East was symbolised by the malevolent presence in New York of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad. But the shifting balance of power is about more than Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its president’s Holocaust denial. American power in the region has been hobbled by the war in Iraq, the insurgency in Afghanistan, and by a consequent perception among Arab states that Washington cannot deliver.

By a stroke of irony, the diminished status was given concrete form this week by America’s closest ally in the region. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Mr Obama’s call for Israel to meet its international obligations by halting the expansion of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. The Israeli prime minister’s blunt rebuff signalled that he, too, sees the US as a waning power. The only way for the US president to recover his authority would be to set out publicly Washington’s parameters for a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The question is whether he will take the risk.

The US, of course, remains the world’s sole superpower, stronger than its rivals in every dimension. If Washington cannot always get its way, no other nation is anywhere near ready to replace it as the guarantor of global security. That said, Mr Obama’s appeal for the rest of the world to share the burden of leadership was a neat way of admitting that the US is an insufficient superpower.

To be fair to the US president, he has understood this for some time. There is method in his diplomacy and in the effort to restore the authority of international institutions scorned by his White House predecessor. The effective exercise of US power demands legitimacy; and legitimacy requires the US to accept the rules applied to others. The US effort to revive the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is a tangible step in that direction.

Mr Obama’s task is made no easier for his recognition of these facts of geopolitical life. The question asked by allies as well as opponents in Washington is why, if everyone likes him so much, Mr Obama is not getting what he wants. The answer is an unpalatable one for a superpower accustomed to winning: the world is not like that any more.

Europe’s marginalisation has been long in the making, though its leaders would like to pretend otherwise. Nicolas Sarkozy this week was once again standing on tip-toe in the effort to be heard. He wants another global summit in November. The problem is that the French president’s relentless activism seems to have become an end in itself.

Gordon Brown is not faring any better. Back in the spring he claimed a front-of-house role in tackling the financial crisis. As the threat of economic Armageddon has faded so too has Mr Brown’s lustre. This week the beleaguered British prime minister was fighting off headlines saying he had been snubbed by Mr Obama.

An invisible Angela Merkel could claim she was distracted by this weekend’s German election. But the chancellor has long pursued a foreign policy best described by calculated inertia. Friends of Germany harbour hopes that an election victory would see Ms Merkel playing a more creative role. But these are hopes rather than expectations.

Missing is anything resembling a European view of the shape of things to come. Even on climate change, where the European Union made much of the early running, its influence is now being eclipsed by talk of a grand bargain between Washington and Beijing. In Mr Obama Europeans got the US president they wanted. But, more concerned to hang on to the present than to recast the future, they had not thought what to do next.

Put all these trends together and we are left with the global puzzle. Optimists will see in America’s new-found realism and in China’s cautious multilateralism the glimmer of a chance to assemble the pieces of a new geopolitical order. Pessimists will see as many hands seeking to break the puzzle as to solve it. Success or failure in Copenhagen will give an important clue as to which side is right.