It has become conventional to assert, following Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer, that we live in a “G-Zero World.” The international system lacks global leadership. Rather than concerting efforts in common endeavors, we are told, every nation is out for itself. In fact, the “G-Zero” label is misleading—a barren caricature of the rich landscape of international cooperation that actually does exist. What is distinctive about our era is not the absence of multilateralism, but its astonishing diversity and flexibility. When it comes to collective action, states are no longer focusing solely or even primarily on universal, treaty-based institutions like the United Nations—or even on a single apex forum like the Group of Twenty (G20). Instead, governments have adopted an ad hoc approach, coalescing in a bewildering array of issue-specific and sometimes transient bodies depending on their situational interests, shared values, and relevant capabilities. Welcome to the “G-x” world.

An important pillar of this G-x world is the venerable Group of Eight (G8), composed of the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, and Russia (plus the European Union). The G8’s resilience is something of a surprise. Ever since President George W. Bush elevated the G20 to the leaders’ level in November 2008, pundits have predicted the G8’s demise. Such obituaries remain premature. The G8 retains unique advantages as a minilateral forum for political and macroeconomic coordination among advanced market democracies—notwithstanding Russia’s sometimes fractious relations with its liberal partners. These strengths will be in evidence next week, when the body meets for its annual summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland.

One of the G8’s obvious advantages over the G20 is its modest size, which enables the unscripted, candid dialogue that world leaders crave. The first summit of this kind, a G-5 meeting in the Chateau de Rambouillet in 1975, remains the model for this sort of interaction. After intimate discussions over the world economy, the leaders produced a concise declaration of only fifteen paragraphs. David Cameron, this year’s host, is anxious “to go back to those first principles. There will be no lengthy communique. No armies of officials telling each other what each of their leaders think.” As at last year’s Camp David summit, leaders will roll up their sleeves, outside the prying eyes of cameras and reporters, and get down to business.

That business, mercifully, will focus on a limited agenda. Under the theme of supporting “open economies, open governments and open societies,” Downing Street has chosen three topics for discussion: advancing global trade, ensuring tax compliance, and promoting greater transparency. These are all worthy goals and ones where the G8—which represents half of global GDP and the lion’s share of official development assistance—has a natural role to play in mobilizing international action.

• Advancing trade liberalization: Given the abandonment (for all intents and purposes) of the WTO’s Doha Round, trade liberalization efforts are increasingly focusing on the negotiation of bilateral, regional and “plurilateral” agreements. At Lough Erne, the Cameron government will seek to build momentum for the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), as well as the EU’s ongoing bilateral negotiations with Canada and Japan. An eventual EU-US trade deal could add many tens of billions of dollars to the U.S. and EU economies, but it will necessitate extraordinarily detailed and painstaking negotiations, scheduled to begin shortly. The most difficult talks are likely to pertain to reductions not of tariffs (which are only 3 percent, on average), but of non-tariff barriers. Expect tough negotiations over the liberalization of public procurement rules, the reduction in agricultural subsidies, the harmonization of regulatory standards from automobiles to pharmaceuticals, and France’s insistence on a “cultural exception” to free trade movies as well as digital products.
• Cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance: As a conservative, Cameron favors lower taxes. But that result is impossible, he says, if individuals and corporations illegally evade the taxes that they owe, or if governments make it too easy to legally avoid taxation altogether. To avoid regulatory arbitrage and protectionist competition, the world’s major economies need to adopt common multilateral standards. This includes a commitment by national authorities to crack down on tax cheats, make tax avoidance difficult, and tackle tax havens. Supporting improved tax collection is particularly important within the developing world. Too often, foreign aid from OECD countries “crowds out”—rather than “crowds in”—domestic efforts to generate government revenue for essential welfare goals. The G8 can offer technical assistance to help developing countries bolster their performance.
• Enhancing transparency in development aid and extractive industries: Donor countries have long demanded greater transparency and accountability from developing countries in return for foreign aid. More recently, NGO activists have turned the tables, insisting on greater donor accountability in delivering on generous pledges made at G8 and other summits, as well as in policing the conduct of multinational firms doing business in the developing world. At Lough Erne, Cameron will make transparency in foreign aid a priority, as well as push for major new commitments to the G8’s food security initiative. Having met its target to spend 0.7 percent of its gross national income on development aid, the UK is in a strong position to press other governments to augment their efforts. The UK government will also push its G8 partners to demand greater transparency from international companies exploiting mineral wealth in developing countries, building on the work of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and, in the United States, Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act (which seeks to reduce trade in conflict minerals from Eastern Congo and the Great Lakes region of Africa).

This being a meeting of world leaders, the conversation in Northern Ireland will doubtless stray from this focused agenda to high-profile political topics—from the latest developments in Syria to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. If so, one can hope that the intimate setting will offer opportunities to forge common ground—or, at least a common understanding of the stakes involved. In a G-x world, global problem-solving will increasingly occur through concerted action within informal clubs of states.

Thirty-five years ago, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously declared that the doctrine of détente “lies buried in the sands of Ogaden.” By exporting revolution to the Horn of Africa, he implied, Moscow had abandoned norms of peaceful coexistence, as well as prospects for the SALT treaty. One wonders if a more recent would-be doctrine, the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), is destined to suffer a similar fate. Two years ago, the UN Security Council seemed to vindicate this new norm, by authorizing “all necessary means” to protect Libyan civilians against strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Today, R2P clings to life support in Syria, as the civilian body count there mounts to appalling levels.

Many commentators, including this one, welcomed the Security Council’s authorization of intervention in Libya as the first legitimated use of armed force under R2P. UNSC Resolution 1973, as well as historic support from the Arab League, provided legitimacy to a NATO-led intervention that reversed Qaddafi’s depredations and, ultimately, provided cover for Libyan rebels to remove him from power. At the time, the intervention seemed to tick all the boxes: the situation was grave, the interveners’ cause was just, and their response was proportional. After a lengthy air campaign, in which no NATO troops lost their lives, Qaddafi had been toppled from power.

At the time, it was easy to overlook the fact that this Western interpretation was not widely shared—and that the Libyan case had unique features that were unlikely to be easily replicated in other settings. These features included a dictator despised in the Arab world, a country of minimal strategic importance, a small national population, and topography conducive to an aerial campaign.

Diplomatic fallout began quickly. Russia and China, which had abstained from the resolution, soon objected that the NATO-led coalition had transformed the UN mandate into a license for “regime change.” Such a claim was either naïve or cynical, since all involved in Security Council deliberations should have been well aware of the expansive implications of authorizing “all necessary means,” as well as the unlikelihood that Qaddafi himself would agree to a negotiated agreement with rebel forces. Nevertheless, the complaint resonated in many corners of the globe.

The African Union (AU) also emerged as a primary critic, depicting the intervention as yet another ill-advised imperialist venture on the continent. This reflected less knee-jerk opposition to R2P—after all, the AU’s constitutive act declares “non-indifference” to the internal affairs of other countries, and its Peace and Security Council has endorsed the principle of intervention in cases of genocide and mass atrocities—than pique at being sidelined diplomatically. By brushing aside AU efforts at diplomatic mediation, the Western powers reinforced African insistence that future interventions on the continent be endorsed by the African Union.

The chaotic aftermath of the Libyan intervention also left a sour taste in the mouths of many UN member states. Indeed, independent militias continue to run rampant in parts of Libya two years after the intervention.  Moreover, the collapse of Libyan domestic security permitted a wave of weaponry to wash over neighboring countries—contributing to instability in the Sahel. In Mali, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and extremist Tuareg groups exploited this flow of material to launch their bloody insurgency, at one point controlling nearly half of the country.

Even before the civil war in Syria, then, the implementation of R2P in Libya had generated buyer’s remorse among many governments that had endorsed it at the 2005 UN World Summit. In an effort to rescue the concept, Brazil proposed that UN member states embrace the related concept of “responsibility while protecting” (RWP) in November 2011. Under this framework, the UN Security Council would undertake military intervention only as a last resort, after weighing the balance of likely consequences, and ensure that any force used was proportionate to the gravity of the situation. It would also oblige the Security Council to adopt a formal monitoring and review mechanism where states would discuss and debate the implementation of any ongoing R2P action. The proposed RWP scheme is not without problems: the “last resort” requirement is at odds with the reality that early, preventive action is often the best way to head off atrocities. The Permanent Five (P5) may also balk at committing to an ongoing monitoring mechanism for R2P-mandated missions. Nevertheless, the Brazilian proposal offers a potential bridge to bring skeptical governments back to the R2P fold. As such, it merits careful U.S. consideration rather than dismissal.

It is the bloody situation in Syria, however, that has fostered disillusionment with (though not yet the demise of) R2P. The most obvious lesson to be drawn is that the implementation of R2P will inevitably be selective. If one or more of the P5—in this case Russia—sees a significant national interest in protecting the offending government, the UNSC will be blocked. Interventionist powers will then face the unpalatable choice of doing nothing or (as the United States did in Kosovo with NATO) pursuing a surrogate form of multilateral legitimacy for coercive action.

Second, the Syrian case demonstrates the difficulty of applying R2P when the conflict in question has evolved from a government making war on unarmed civilians into a full-blown civil war in which both regime and rebel forces commit atrocities. When opposing sides are wearing neither white nor black hats but varying shades of grey, the threshold criteria for R2P intervention—and the means by which it should be implemented—become even cloudier than normal.

Third, the situation in Syria underscores the difficulty of reconciling humanitarian ideals with geopolitical concerns. The Obama administration, from the President on down, has often denied this distinction, on the grounds that mass atrocities create dangerous spillover consequences for entire regions (with the Great Lakes region of Africa a case in point), as well as fomenting forces of (and providing havens for) extremism. Perhaps. But the strategic, economic, and human consequences of a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria are hard to predict. The costs—for regional instability, budgetary overstretch, and U.S. lives—could be gargantuan. And they need to be weighed against the likelihood (and benefits) of “success”—something the administration has yet to define. This cost-benefit analysis must also include an honest assessment of the expenses associated with “the responsibility to rebuild” the post-intervention society (something the Bush administration notoriously neglected to do in Iraq).

It would be premature to describe Syria as the death knell of R2P. But it is clear that much of the idealism surrounding the UN’s unanimous endorsement of the norm eight years ago has dissipated, buried in the Libyan Desert and the blood-soaked hills of Syria.

Below is a guest post by Andrew Reddie, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program.

The nation could be forgiven its current case of technological whiplash. Last week it learned that the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court  had ordered Verizon to collect all of its customers’ data between January and April of this year. Then came Ed Snowden’s claims of the massive breadth of the NSA’s PRISM program, and the news that Microsoft has, along with the FBI, neutralized over ten thousand botnets in “Operation Citadel.” These revelations suggested that the boundaries between privacy and the surveillance state had shifted fundamentally, with profound legal, security, and social ramifications.

It was in this context that the Council on Foreign Relations released its’ most recent Independent Task Force Report, “Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet.” The report makes a strong case for preserving internet freedom. But it also highlights the lurking dichotomy between security and the protection of civil liberties, as the Internet matures and states inevitably (in the view of the task force) play a larger role in its governance.

The task force underscores how vital the Internet has become for “communication, commerce, trade, culture, research, and social connections” as well its potential contribution to “disaster relief, diplomacy, conflict prevention, global education, and science.” This reliance, however, brings risks, as “societies are becoming more dependent and more vulnerable to disruption.” The objective, in the task force’s repeated mantra, is to promote an “open, global, secure, and resilient Internet.”

Unfortunately, the report itself fails to adequately define these terms—or to make clear the potential tensions and contradictions among these four goals. These trade-offs should be brought out into the open, so policymakers can navigate them. The following sections explore these trade-offs, in particular, and the findings of the report, in general.

The report makes several fundamental, but contestable, assumptions about global Internet governance challenges. To begin with, the task force suggests that the Internet is no longer capable of addressing existential threats “organically” (either through changes in the behavior or users or via technical changes to network processes), and thus growing state involvement in Internet regulation is inevitable. However, the engineers and technical experts who have long been responsible for managing Internet exchanges, protocols, and technologies worldwide continue to debate whether this is the case.

To be sure, states like China and Russia have repeatedly called for sovereign control of the Internet. But the task force’s recommendation that the United States work “with the International Telecommunications Union more consistently and persistently” is a risky one, potentially subjecting global Internet governance to the same dysfunctional dynamics that have made intergovernmental climate change negotiations excruciatingly difficult.

More persuasive is the report’s recommendation that the Commerce and State Departments strengthen their commitments to the state-based Global Advisory Council of ICANN and Internet Governance Forum. Done properly, this would alleviate some foreign dissent surrounding the activities of ICANN, as well as blunt efforts to shift toward sovereign control of the Internet via the ITU’s governance mechanisms. Extending the affirmation of commitments between ICANN and the U.S. government to the rest of the Government Advisory Council might also offer a tangible, costless shift in policy that would strengthen ICANN’s ability to continue its essential role maintaining the Internet’s infrastructure. Such a development would also offer transparency to the “multi-stakeholder” process supported by the task force.

The task force also correctly highlights the importance of the U.S. government formulating a coherent approach to global Internet governance as the necessary first step toward approaching the broader sovereignty issues of the Internet. Only after it develops a clear vision and a strategy to implement it can the United States hope to foster new standards that protect intellectual property, copyright, privacy, and freedoms already afforded on the Web.

The report also concludes that current policies related to critical infrastructure and cybersecurity are inadequate. Its recommendation that a government “czar” be appointed to manage this process, however, seems ill-advised. A more promising approach, as former Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg notes in additional comments appended to the report, would be for each relevant government department to incorporate cyber-related concerns into its work.

The report’s suggestion that the United States seek alternative fora to discuss Internet governance issues is also problematic. While dialogue involving evolving powers is important, there is a significant risk that fragmentation of existing Internet governance mechanisms will delegitimize the current multi-stakeholder model (that the task force supports). In any case, it is unlikely that agglomerations like the Major Economies Forum or Global Counterterrorism Forum would achieve any more success than the contentious World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai.

More work also needs to be done to address the extension of the laws of war into cyberspace. The report fails to broach the international and legal implications of “white-hat hacking” or “hacking back” that have become an increasingly common practice. While providing false data in “honeypots” has become an accepted practice, the legal ramifications of destroying individual computers that are part of larger botnets remain unclear. Further work is needed to analyze the appropriateness of responses to cyberattacks, espionage, and “white-hat hacking” both domestically and internationally.

After a golden era of presumed neutrality, the Internet is quickly becoming a venue for international political disagreement and competition—with the added wrinkle that a multitude of private actors play key roles in its governance. CFR’s Task Force report begins to outline some of these issues and the challenges, but more work is needed to resolve complex legal, geostrategic, economic, and political trade-offs.

The open, global Internet, which has created untold wealth and empowered billions of individuals, is in jeopardy. Around the world, “nations are reasserting sovereignty and territorializing cyberspace” to better control the political, economic, social activities of their citizens, and the content they can access. These top-down efforts undermine the Internet’s existing decentralized, multi-stakeholder system of governance and threaten its fragmentation into multiple national intranets. To preserve an open system that reflects its interests and values while remaining both secure and resilient, the United States must unite a coalition of like-minded states committed to free expression and free markets and prepared to embrace new strategies to combat cyber crime and rules to govern cyber warfare.

These are the core messages of the just-released CFR report, Defending an Open, Global, Resilient, and Secure Internet. The product of a high-level task force, chaired by former Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte and former IBM Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano, the report opens by describing the epochal transformation the Internet has wrought on societies and economies worldwide—particularly in the developing world.

Facilitating this unprecedented connectivity has been a framework based not on governmental (or intergovernmental) fiat but on “self-regulation, private sector leadership, and a bottom-up policy process.” By leaving regulation in the hands of technical experts, private sector actors, civil society groups, and end-users, the pioneers of the early Internet ensured that it would “reflect a broad range of perspectives and keep pace with rapidly changing technology.” They also ensured that rights of free expression and privacy would emerge as dominant norms.

Those halcyon days are over, alas, as more states assert sovereignty in cyberspace, as cybercrime spikes to unprecedented levels, and as nations develop new weapons of cyber warfare. Already, dozens of governments place restrictions on transmitting data and knowledge over the internet. These include not only authoritarian regimes but some democracies in Europe and the developing world (like India and Brazil). At the multilateral level, meanwhile, a majority of states at December’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai voted to transfer authority for regulating critical aspects of the Internet from ICANN (perceived as U.S.-dominated) to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a UN agency. Although some participants were motivated by equity concerns, others—notably Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia—saw the intergovernmental route as a means to assert sovereignty in cyberspace, including a license to crack down on dissent under the guise of fighting cyber crime. The forces arrayed in Dubai will clash again in 2014, at the ITU’s plenipotentiary meeting, intended to revise the body’s constitution.

Meanwhile, cyberspace is increasingly anarchic, as cyber-criminals use sophisticated attacks to steal vast quantities of funds, intellectual property, and trade secrets. Of even greater concern are government-backed cyberattacks. Some forty governments are believed to have developed offensive cyber weapons. The absence of clear rules of cyber warfare, as well as the general problem of attribution, creates a situation of strategic instability, rife with risks of miscalculation and escalation. Still, as the task force notes, the danger is less of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” (as former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned) than a growing loss of confidence by both governments and the private sector in the security and integrity of the Internet.

Given current trends, can the United States possibly preserve the open global internet? Yes, but the first step is getting its own house in order. Distressingly, the U.S. government lacks a coherent strategic vision, an adequate policy coordination framework, and the requisite legislative authorities to develop and implement a national cyberspace policy, undercutting its global leadership.

Beyond this general guidance, the CFR task force offers some ninety (!) recommendations for U.S. policymakers. Let’s group the most important in clusters:

• Create a cyber alliance: The United States should sponsor “a coalition of like-minded actors,” including both foreign governments and private corporations that are committed to common “Internet practices and principles.” To nurture this coalition, the U.S. government should expand military-to-military contacts, intelligence and homeland security cooperation, and extend mutual legal assistance with friendly governments. Finally, it should sponsor the creation of an International Cyber Crime Center “that addresses the problem of sanctuary states—territories unwilling or unable to rein in cyber crime.”

• Foster transparency and new legal norms: To increase strategic stability, the task force recommends, the United States should clarify the U.S. right to conduct offensive operations in cyberspace. At the same time, it should work with other “cyber powers” to hammer out consensus on the applicability of the laws of war in cyber operations. At a regional level, the United States can promote confidence building in groupings like the OAS, OSCE, and ASEAN Regional Forum.

• Promote limits on cyber espionage: The estimated cost of commercial cyber espionage to the United States may be as high as half of a percent of GDP. Given its relatively clean reputation, the United States is in a strong position to work with the EU, Japan and other like-minded countries to combat espionage incorporating prohibitions against these practices in bilateral and “plurilateral” trade pacts. A successful counter-espionage program must include close collaboration with the private sector.

• Clarify what sort of “active defense” is permissible: As victims of cyber-crime, private corporations are increasingly taking matters into their own hands—“hacking back” against assailants. Given the risks involved, the U.S. government needs to clarify what sorts of tactics are legally permissible, as companies seek to protect their property.

• Create a cadre of cyber-public servants: The U.S. ability to compete in cyberspace will require not only a dynamic private sector but a public sector staffed with cyber-savvy employees. The task force calls on the United States to “expand the pipeline of people in cybersecurity” and to develop a special “Cyber Service,” analogous to the Foreign Service, to which talented young professionals may aspire.

• Pass needed cyber legislation and improve domestic coordination : The United States urgently needs a new legal framework for cybersecurity that balances the protection of individual privacy against the need to secure critical infrastructure. It also needs to promote  greater information sharing between the private and public sectors while reducing the liability of corporations involved in such programs. Beyond calling for such legislative changes in Congress, the task force recommends executive branch reforms, notably augmenting the coordinating authority of the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), creating a new Cyber bureau at the State Department, and establishing posts of cyber attachés in U.S. embassies abroad.

• Insist on the free flow of information in all trade agreements: the United States should require all trade partners to adopt common principles, among these nondiscrimination in digital trade and information flows, limited liability for internet intermediaries, protection of intellectual property, and the security of personal data and free expression. Such principles should be embedded in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and future trade agreements.

• Adapt to the rise of emerging Internet powers: Rising powers like Brazil, India, and especially China are testing the U.S. vision of an open Internet, both commercially and politically. In league with likeminded countries, the United States should use positive and negative incentives—including sanctions—to discourage discriminatory economic practices and intellectual property theft. At the same time, the United States should be prepared to engage rising powers on issues of internet governance—including within ICANN, the ITU, and, perhaps more significantly, in “mini-lateral” forums modeled on the Major Economies Forum for climate change. The objectives of U.S. efforts should be to broaden global support for an open Internet built on the existing multi-stakeholder governance mechanisms. 

Last week the UN’s latest “High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons” released a long-awaited report on global development. The resulting document—A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development—is not only a good read, it’s also a compelling blueprint for extending prosperity to the world’s poor.

Formed in July 2012, the panel of twenty-seven luminaries had a clear mandate: to craft a “single, universal… agenda” to guide development cooperation once the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) expire in 2015. The panel—cochaired by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and British Prime Minister David Cameron—succeeded admirably. While building on the MDGs, the report widens the aperture of global development to consider new horizons and avenues to reach them.

The MDGs, as the report notes, have mobilized unprecedented global support for development cooperation, particularly when it comes to foreign assistance. While the MDGs’ precise impact is hard to gauge, the years since 2000 have witnessed “the fastest reduction of poverty in human history.”  The number of people living in absolute poverty has declined by 500 million, and the incidence of infant mortality has declined by thirty percent. These are monumental achievements.

At the same time, the MDGs were heavily focused on meeting basic human needs. As such, they overlooked other preconditions for sustainable development, among these security from violence, the provision of good governance and the rule of law, protection of human rights, reliable infrastructure, access to energy, and responsible environmental stewardship. The MDGs also framed development cooperation, narrowly, as essentially an aid-driven relationship, in which wealthy donors provided charity to the tin cups of demanding recipients. This ignored the many other policy instruments both sides could deploy, from trade to investment to technology transfer.

The new report corrects these gaps by proposing an innovative post-2015 agenda organized around five broad themes, accompanied by twelve “illustrative” goals. The five themes are:

1. “Leave no one behind”: The report embraces the goal of “ending” (not just reducing) poverty and hunger. Beyond these baseline objectives, the panel recognizes the imperative of improving equitable access to education and health care, as well as to the infrastructure of electricity,  transportation, and communications. Sustained progress on these fronts requires, as a matter of justice, reaching out to formerly excluded and marginalized communities.
2. “Put sustainable development at the core”: In a long-overdue shift, the panel insists that the environmental aspects of sustainable development must be given equal weight with economic and social dimensions. In the past, the philosophy was “grow now, clean later.” But that “business as usual” path will only further degrade the ecosystem services—including fisheries, aquifiers, coral reefs, arable land, and forests—upon which humanity depends.
3. “Transform economies for jobs and inclusive growth”: Ensuring decent employment and secure livelihoods for a swelling global population will require unprecedented investments in human capital and productivity. The report is bullish on the potential of technological innovation and private sector initiative to “unleash” entrepreneurial dynamism, diversify developing country economies, and turn the world’s swelling cities into engines of growth.
4. “Build peace and effective, open and accountable institutions for all”:  For too long, as Thomas Carothers and Diane de Gramont point out in their new book, well-meaning donor nations have ignored  the fundamentally political nature of development, even as a growing percentage of the world’s poor is concentrated in fragile states plagued by arbitrary rule, corrupt elites, and endemic violence. The panel acknowledges the centrality of good governance,  civil liberties,  stable property rights, and peace as preconditions for human development.
5. “Forge a new global partnership”: For all their value, the MDGs framed the development cooperation as principally an aid relationship between wealthy donors and poor recipients. The panel offers a more encompassing vision, celebrating the range of partnership possibilities between private and public sector actors, including international instituions, governments, local authorities, corporations, and civil society. The panel exhorts donors “to go beyond the aid agenda” by expanding trade and investment links, as well as transferring technology, to poor nations. Finally, the report calls on donors to get their “own house in order” by eliminating practices that cripple development, like tolerating corrupt business practices, providing havens for tax evasion and money-laundering, and exacerbating greenhouse gas emissions.

So far so good. But how to realize these broad shifts? Here, the report pulls its punches a bit, offering only an “illustrative” (rather than “prescriptive”) list of twelve new goals to replace the MDGs. This decision may disappoint some readers. But it’s strategically wise. The ultimate goals will be hammered out within the UN General Assembly (UNGA),  which guards its few prerogatives jealously. In such a context, the panel’s subtle, indirect approach may pay greater dividends.

The report’s twelve proposed post-2015 development goals are:

1.  End Poverty
2.  Empower Girls and Women and Achieve Gender Equality
3.  Provide Quality Education and Lifelong Learning
4.  Ensure Healthy Lives
5.  Ensure Food Security and Good Nutrition
6.  Achieve Universal Access to Water and Sanitation
7.  Secure Sustainable Energy
8.  Create Jobs, Sustainable Livelihoods, and Equitable Growth
9.  Manage Natural Resource Assets Sustainably
10.  Ensure Good Governance and Effective Institutions
11.  Ensure Stable and Peaceful Societies
12.  Create a Global Enabling Environment and Catalyse Long-Term Finance

Each of these goals is accompanied by 4-6 “measurable targets,” ideally allowing one to gauge progress. (For example, a target for “securing sustainable energy” includes “doubling the share of renewable energy.”) As the report concedes, refining these targets, as well as developing accurate indicators with sufficient global coverage, will require a lot more technical work.

One of the report’s most promising recommendations is its call for a “data revolution for sustainable development.” It has become a cliché, of course, that we live in an era of “big data.” What is less well known is the degree to which digital connectivity, including mobile telephony and social media, has begun to change the development landscape, empowering individuals and enabling communities to make large improvements in the quality of their lives and livelihoods. The same technologies can be usefully marshaled to gather timely data on local conditions and needs, domestic and international responses, and development outcomes.

Recalling how far the world has come since 2000, the authors are “convinced that the next 15 years can be some of the most transformative in human history.” Their report offers a useful roadmap for that journey.

Coauthored with Andrew Reddie, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program.

Will the Internet’s future resemble its past? That seems increasingly unlikely, given the growing influence of new global powers, the determination of many governments to control Internet access and content, and the difficulties of balancing security and civil liberties. This was the take-home message at a meeting last week on “The Geopolitics of Internet Governance,” hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The coming transformation may well challenge the longstanding U.S. vision of an open network whose governance remains largely in private hands.

To date, global Internet governance remains largely unchanged since the early 1990s, when engineers and technical experts established the “rules of the game” to manage Internet exchanges in individual countries and assigned domain names through the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This networked, decentralized platform has permitted an explosion of private sector activity and empowered individuals to obtain and share data, knowledge and ideas in unprecedented ways.

Unless we’re careful, however, historians may look back on the past two decades as a lost golden age of Internet freedom. As last December’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai made clear, a large number of states are attempting to assert sovereign—as well as intergovernmental—control over cyberspace. Of the one hundred forty-four governments attending, more than sixty percent (eighty-nine versus fifty-five) endorsed a non-binding resolution submitted by the UAE and supported by Russia and China calling for the ITU “to foster an enabling environment for the greater growth of the Internet.”

This would be no cosmetic change. Currently, intergovernmental supervision of the Internet is light: states play only an advisory role in ICANN through the Government Advisory Council (GAC). It is feared that the Chinese-Russian proposal would give a more robust role to states to supervise their “government-controlled” networks. Thanks to the consensus-based decision-making of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Western powers were able to rebuff this effort to add the Internet to the ITU’s mandate, at least for now. But the issue will surely resurface at next year’s ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, scheduled for Busan, South Korea, in October 2014.

At first glance, the ITU—a specialized agency of the United Nations—would seem the logical global forum for Internet governance. But as The Internationalist argued last December, handing the Internet to the UN is rife with unacceptable risks. The United States, Europe, Japan and other advanced democracies justifiably worry that a shift toward greater inter-state regulation of the Internet could cripple the very innovation that has allowed it to thrive and undermine its open nature, given the vastly different preferences of national governments regarding the role of the private sector, the protection of civil liberties, and the requirements of security. China and Russia, for example, support a stronger role for the ITU, seeing it as a bulwark of state sovereignty, and advocate a heavier hand for the state in controlling the flow and content of information on the Internet—postures that Western governments regard as unacceptable.

The demand for a greater state role in Internet governance will not go away, however. Even some major democracies in the developing world, such as Brazil and India, lean toward a stronger sovereign control and have misgivings about perceived U.S. control (through ICANN) over the Internet. A growing number of developing states (again including Brazil) are laying their own global Internet cables [see Map], and want to manage that traffic that flows through these networks.

Given this context, the trick for the United States and likeminded partners is to find a limited role for the ITU in global Internet governance that avoids states and politicians usurping control of Internet exchanges from the current multi-stakeholder model, which is based upon the technical skills of Internet service providers, regional internet registries, and various other support organizations.  The alternative is a world in which states gain greater power to perform “deep packet” inspection of information—that is to say, to monitor (and conceivably censor) private communications.

Reining in the vaulting ambitions of the ITU is a good place to start. Seeking to prove his organization’s relevance, the ITU Secretary-General, Dr. Hamadoun Touré, in May 2013 outlined nine distinct challenges the organization should address. Of these, only four—connectivity, network development, network robustness, and privacy assurance—are remotely linked to the ITU’s current capabilities and expertise and thus warrant broad support.

Given the ITU’s mandate to harmonize global telecommunications standards, it has a legitimate role to play in facilitating global connectivity—including supporting broadband connections and the establishment of additional internet exchange points. The ITU could also help improve Internet access to under-served communities: today, the Internet reaches only one-third of the global population. Two other areas within the ITU’s remit are improving the robustness of networks so that they can survive spikes in traffic (or cut cables) and—a priority for Western countries—ensuring privacy for packets of information that travel across national borders.

The ITU has few comparative advantages when it comes to the other five issues Touré identified. ICANN will remain the most appropriate venue to discuss the challenge of “multilingualism” (or reconciling alternative code types) on the Internet, as well as the assignment of domain names. And despite occasional protests from states that disapprove of ICANN’s relationship with the U.S. government (on the grounds that it is chartered by the U.S. Department of Commerce), in practice the GAC has supported 90 percent of the decisions of ICANN’s Board.

Finally, individual states, including national legal systems and law enforcement officials, will remain the most appropriate entities to address the remaining three issues on Touré’s list: combatting cybercrime, curtailing spam, and protecting individuals (including children) from Internet exploitation.

Too often, Internet governance is conceptualized as a zero-sum game between those states that wish to control the Internet and those that wish to allow its users freedom to use it. The reality is that all states face the challenge of discerning what is appropriate online—and of making trade-offs between security and openness. At the Dubai WCIT conference, it was tempting to caricature the ITU as a tool of a Russian and Chinese-led coalition. But one should not dismiss the ITU’s potential to advance global Internet governance in certain limited domains. Going forward, U.S. and international policymakers need to parse the comparative advantages of the ITU, ICANN, and the current multi-stakeholder model—ideally in a manner that meets global needs while avoiding a large-scale confrontation between blocs of states.

Before the two blocs once again berate one another from opposite sides of the negotiating table, they ought to examine what is already on it.

It was half a century ago that UK Prime Minister Harold McMillan famously noted the “winds of change” buffeting the British Empire. Old verities were crumbling and Great Britain would need to adapt to a new political reality. Something analogous is happening today in the Western Hemisphere, where Latin American governments are rethinking their participation in Washington’s decades-long war on drugs. The latest evidence is a ground-breaking Report on the Drug Problem in the Americas, released May 17 by the Organization of American States (OAS). For the first time, the multilateral body is calling for a sober reassessment of the prohibition strategies the United States has backed since the Nixon administration.

Most international reports simply gather dust. This one won’t. It offers the basis for a long-overdue conversation among the thirty-five members of the OAS.

Produced at a cost of $2.2 million, the report was commissioned at last year’s contentious Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia. As I argued at the time, the April 2012 meeting revealed fissures in hemispheric attitudes. A new generation of Latin leaders was appealing for new approaches to combating the drug trade, ranging from demilitarization to decriminalization to legalization. Among the most outspoken was Otto Perez Molina of gang-ravaged Guatemala, who warned that he might abandon the anti-drug struggle to save his country from violence. But he was hardly alone. A plea for greater flexibility also came from Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, whose country has received much of the $20 billion the United States has spent in hemispheric counterdrug efforts this past decade. Alas, President Obama, facing a November election against Mitt Romney, rebuffed efforts to discuss the range of potential options between current counterdrug policies and full legalization.

The United States will no longer have the luxury of avoiding honest dialogue. In two weeks an OAS assembly convenes in Guatemala to discuss the 400-page report, which OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza presented to Santos last Friday. The document actually has two parts. The first is an “analytical report” describing the scope of drug production, trafficking and consumption in the hemisphere, and the often devastating impact that addiction and drug-related crime and violence can have on the social fabric, economic fortunes, and political stability of OAS member states. The second is a “scenarios report” setting out four possible trajectories for the hemisphere, depending on national drug policy choices and coordination among them.

The strengths of the report are its clear-eyed description of the current hemispheric drug problem and its willingness to set out policy alternatives, without endorsing any particular model. As Santos stated on May 17, “Let it be clear that no one here is defending any position, neither legalization, nor regulation, nor war at any cost.” The document’s objective is to provide “the basis for a long-postponed discussion.” Another intellectual breakthrough is explicit recognition that divergent national circumstances warrant “differentiated approaches,” tailored to local contexts and “individual concerns.” This echoes the finding of a 2011 report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy: Namely, it’s crazy to ask all countries to apply “the same rigid approach to drug policy—the same laws, and the same tough approach to their enforcement,” regardless of context. The report also firmly endorses a “public health” approach to the hemispheric drug problem, calling for a greater focus on treatment rather than incarceration of addicts.

Predictably, media coverage has focusing overwhelmingly on just one possibility the report raises: the decriminalization and legalization of drugs, “starting with cannabis.” That’s a pity, for the document outlines a wide range of legal and regulatory alternatives, based on what is actually going on in OAS member states (as well as in individual U.S. states)—and the costs and benefits associated with these various strategies.

The authors’ most creative decision was to offer four distinct scenarios describing what the hemispheric drug problem might look like in 2025, depending on the choices OAS member states make. They provide these alternative futures as thought experiments, labeling them as follows:

1. “Together”: Under this scenario, OAS members understand the drug problem as a symptom of broader insecurity. They thus work to reform and reinforce state institutions so that governments can “control organized crime and the violence and corruption it generates.”
2. “Pathways”: Believing that prohibition regimes and criminal sanctions are causing more harm than good, OAS states under this scenario experiment with “alternative legal and regulatory regimes, starting with cannabis,” and reallocate resources “from controlling drugs and drug users to preventing and treating problematic use.”
3. “Resilience”: In this scenario, OAS members treat the drug problem as “a manifestation and a magnifier of underlying social and economic dysfunctions that lead to violence and addiction.” Their policy response is to focus on “strengthening communities and improving public safety, health, education and employment through bottom-up programs.”
4. “Disruption”: In this fourth and darkest scenario, producer and transit countries conclude that they are “suffering unbearable and unfair costs” from the war on drugs. In response, they unilaterally defect from hemispheric cooperation, “abandoning the fight” or even “reaching an accommodation” with the cartels.

These possibilities show how divergent understandings of the nature of the drug problem could encourage different responses, creating opportunities but also new policy challenges. The bleak “Disruption” scenario, the authors warn, “alerts us to what could happen if we are incapable in the short run of reaching a shared vision that allows us to join forces to address the problem, while respecting diversity in our approaches to it.” Going forward, the price of hemispheric cooperation on illegal drugs is likely to be greater tolerance —not least from Washington—for national experimentation.

What world traveler hasn’t declined at least one local “delicacy”? A decade ago in Oaxaca, Mexico, I turned up my nose at chapulines, a steaming plate of toasted grasshoppers. “Tastes like chicken,” my waiter smiled unconvincingly. But overcoming disgust for “edible insects” may be the easiest way to meet global food needs, according to a fascinating, if occasionally stomach-churning, report from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Agency (FAO), based, of all places, in Rome.

The notion of meeting caloric, especially protein, needs from insects (as well as grubs, worms and other creepy-crawlies) is hardly new. It’s something humans and their hominid ancestors have been doing for millions of years. Paleoanthropologists and biologists speculate that our Paleolithic ancestors consumed prodigious quantities of insects—a fact conveniently omitted by most contempoary aficionados of the “cave man diet”. More recently, nineteenth century European arrivals to Australia marveled at aboriginal tribes’ insatiable appetite for insects, and the dramatic impact such a diet could have on their health and appearance, as documented in a fascinating ethnography, The Moth Hunters.

What’s surprising is how enduring the human taste for class Insecta remains. According to the FAO, more than two billion people—thirty percent of humanity—already supplement their diet with insects. And given the number of insects out there—1 million distinct species have already been identified and nearly two thousand proven edible—diners have a crunchy smorgasbord to choose from. “The most commonly eaten insect groups,” we learn, “are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leaf and planthoppers, scale insects and true bugs, termites, dragonflies and flies.”

Most of today’s insect-eaters live in the developing world, in countries where insects are perceived as a perfectly acceptable and convenient source of energy—readily (or at least seasonably) available, highly portable, and requiring fewer inputs than agriculture or animal husbandry. In terms of nutrition, insects provide an outstanding advantages, having “high fat, protein, fiber, vitamin, and mineral content,” and can be a particularly important diet component for children under the age of five in poor countries.

While many in the West may recoil in disgust, the FAO makes a compelling case on food security grounds for entomophagy (eating bugs, in science-speak). Often dismissed as “famine foods,” insects may offer at least part of the answer to the global food crisis. And a crisis is what we have on our hands. Based on current demographic and dietary trends, as I’ve written before, the world needs to double its food production over the next forty years—an effort that will require unprecedented productivity gains while risking ecological calamity.

Here’s where insects come in. Insects, it turns out, are far more efficient than livestock—perhaps ten times so—in transforming feed into edible meat. And they largely avoid the huge greenhouse gas emissions, as well as other environmental pollutants, associated with livestock. While most edible insects continue to be collected in the wild, more organized forms of insect farming have emerged, including “cricket farming” in Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Insects are also being increasingly used as animal feed, particularly for poultry and acquaculture. By providing employment opportunities, the edible insect sector has a potential role to play in rural development, from Southeast Asia to Central Africa.

To have a real impact on food consumption patterns, however, edible insects must go global. Today, the international trade in these commodities is neglible, limited to niche markets like fulfilling the dietary desires of diaspora populations.

Expanding global trade in edible insects will require expanding existing national and multilateral health and sanitary regulations. This will include updating the Codex Alimentarius, created by FAO and the World Health Organization in 1963 to harmonize international food standards and codes of practice.

The biggest stumbling block to expanding global consumption of insects is cultural. The very idea of eating bugs remains taboo in many countries, particularly in the wealthy West, where they tend to be confined to “novelty snacks.” There may be ways to make inroads against this stigma, however. A few celebrity U.S. chefs have put insect items on their restaurant menus. In the future, one could imagine trend-setters like Anthony Bordain competing with counterparts to see who can make the tastiest dragonfly confit. Who knows? With Manhattan and L.A. foodies leading the charge, would Middle America be far behind?

So, if you’re inclined to strike a blow for global food security, or just want to set the trend in your hometown, you’re in luck. Since 2010, the FAO has created a useful “Webportal of Edible Insects,” listing your culinary options. Be sure to check out the chapulines. I hear they taste like chicken.

Tuesday’s agreement between Moscow and Washington to convene an international conference on Syria raises some obvious questions. After a brutal conflict that has killed more than seventy thousand, is a negotiated peace between government and rebels forces plausible? And even if a settlement can be negotiated, is it likely to hold?

Certainly, the apparent rapprochement between the United States and Russia is important. For the past two years frictions between the governments have paralyzed diplomacy at the UN Security Council, with Moscow (supported quietly by China) blocking Western efforts to place intense pressure on the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Moscow’s agreement to an international conference, secured during a meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry and President Vladimir Putin, would seem to signal greater diplomatic flexibility—an impression reinforced by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s statement that Russia is not concerned about the fate of “certain” individuals (a clear reference to Assad’s future).

The timing of the conference remains up in the air. Kerry, warning that Syria is heading “over the abyss and into chaos,” wants it “by the end of the month.” Whether the antagonists themselves will actually agree to substantive talks remains in doubt, however. Assad continues to dismiss the rebels as “terrorists,” while the Syrian National Coalition—the Western-backed umbrella group of rebel forces—has long made his departure a precondition for any talks on Syria’s future. Still, international pressure for the two sides to meet will be intense, and likely irresistible.

Getting the combatants to the bargaining table is critical to ending a war that has generated tremendous human suffering and now risks a wider regional conflagration, possibly involving weapons of mass destruction. But it is only a first step. Presuming the two sides actually meet and are able to achieve a cease-fire—or even a more extensive peace agreement—what is the likelihood that that accord will endure?  It is not too early for policymakers in Washington—and Moscow—to begin asking these questions.

With the caveat that each conflict has its own dynamic, the scholarly literature on how civil wars end may provide some clues, if no definitive answers, about Syria’s future. One of the biggest lessons is that negotiated settlements are notoriously difficult to maintain, for several reasons. To begin with, peace agreements rarely remove the underlying societal conflicts, such as political and economic inequities between different tribal or sectarian groups, that led to war in the first place. Second, negotiated settlements, compared to winner-take-all scenarios, are by definition second best, compromise solutions, and formerly warring parties are accordingly often reluctant to invest heavily in them. Third, peace agreements typically force parties to cede unitary control over their respective areas and ultimately disarm in settings of persistent insecurity. Finally, individuals and factions—known as “spoilers”—may have a vested interest in undercutting the peace process, particularly if it interferes with their access to illicit revenue streams that have sprung up during the conflict (say, from smuggling arms or other commodities).

Beyond these generalities, what else can we say? Based on their study of sixteen civil wars (ranging from Bosnia to Sierra Leone) the political scientists Stephen John Stedman and George Downs distinguish between “permissive” and “demanding” environments for implementing peace agreements.  What separates these environments are two sets of critical contextual factors.

The first set of factors are international: All things being equal, peace agreements are most likely to hold if major powers agree to serve as custodians of the peace process, if outsider actors invest major financial and other resources to help support the accord, and if the international community is willing to risk the lives (whether as part of an intervening coalition or UN peacekeeping force) to defend the terms of the agreement.

How would these international factors apply in Syria’s case? First, the United States, Russia and other parties will need to form an enduring “contact group” that shepherds the peace process for years. Second, the international donor community, including major powers, the World Bank, and other entities, must be prepared for a multiyear financial commitment to reconstruct a devastated country. Third, preserving the peace will require international “boots” on the ground. These need not be American, but they will need robust terms of engagement.

The second set of factors determining success and failure of peace agreements are internal and, alas, more numerous and daunting. The most important include: the number of warring parties and the extent of agreement among these groups prior to external intervention, the presence of potential “spoilers,”  the degree of state collapse, the overall number of combatants, the presence of exploitable natural resources, the involvement of neighboring states in the conflict, and whether secession is a motive for the conflict.

Taking all of these factors together, chances for an enduring peace in Syria would appear to be dim. Let’s begin with the warring parties. Despite press coverage dividing combatants into government and rebel forces, the latter are extraordinarily heterogeneous. For example, there is little agreement on Syria’s future between those secular opponents of the Assad regime favored by the West and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front, which is already establishing Islamist rule in cities under its control. Syria is also replete with potential spoilers to any eventual peace treaty. These include first and foremost the Alawite coterie around Assad himself, likely to fight tooth and nail against a diminution of its historic influence in Syrian politics. Shia militants, backed by Hezbollah, could also play a spoiler role, as could Syria’s Christian and Kurdish minorities, depending on the composition of any transitional government.

The Syrian state, meanwhile, is close to collapse. The government has ceased to function in approximately 85 percent of the country and struggles to deliver services even in areas that it controls. Syria’s physical as well as administrative infrastructure has been decimated, contributing to a humanitarian catastrophe that now includes over 1.2 million registered refugees and 4.25 million internally displaced persons. Meanwhile, the country has become a battleground for regional rivalries between Shiite Iran and Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Turkey, with each funding their local proxies. Finally, at least some Alawites, fearing eventual collapse of the Assad regime, appear prepared to carve out a secessionist enclave of their own in western Syria, while Syria’s Kurds have their own secessionist ambitions. Only in the area of exploitable natural resources, it appears, does oil-poor Syria escape vulnerability.

If history is any guide, these internal vulnerabilities may well trump even robust external support for any future peace settlement. Still, the fact that the belligerents in Syria appear locked in a “mutually hurting stalemate” make this a ripe time for the U.S.-Russian initiative.

Coauthored with Alexandra Kerr, program coordinator in the International Institutions and Global Governance program.

On May 2, 2011, the American people celebrated the news that Osama bin Laden, mastermind behind 9/11 and international symbol of al-Qaeda, had been brought to justice. Addressing the nation that night, President Obama praised the U.S. special forces that killed the terrorist leader in Pakistan, calling bin Laden’s death “the most significant achievement to date” in the United States’ efforts to defeat al-Qaeda. Yet, he cautioned that this victory was not the end of the fight against terrorism: “We must —and we will—remain vigilant at home and abroad.”

The President was right. Although al-Qaeda has been degraded and become far more decentralized in recent years, its Salafist ideology continues to resonate among jihadis in many corners of the world. Over the past year alone, we have witnessed Islamic militants join forces with al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb to seize northern Mali, declaring the short-lived independent state of Azawad and imposing harsh sharia law; increased violence from al-Qaeda-linked jihadist groups Boko Haram and Ansaru in Nigeria; and the alignment of the al Nusra Front rebel group in Syria with al-Qaeda. Even in the United States, the “self-radicalized” Tsarnaev brothers drew inspiration from jihadist internet sites in planning April’s Boston Marathon bombing.

This litany of carnage should not obscure the considerable counterterrorism successes of the international community. The United States and its partners have indeed remained vigilant, and shown commendable stamina against this persistent threat.

This is a point we make in the Global Governance Report Card, recently released by the Council on Foreign Relations. The first effort to grade multilateral cooperation in addressing major global challenges, the Report Card gives both the international community and the United States high marks—a ‘B’ and ‘B+’, respectively—for their counterterrorism efforts.

These grades reflect several laudable achievements, including cooperation in eliminating high level al-Qaeda leaders, progress in developing counterradicalization strategies to reduce al Qaeda’s attraction, and active measures to ensure that terrorists never get their hands on weapons of mass destruction or the materials necessary to build them. But perhaps most significant has been the effective international collaboration to crack down on terrorist financing, by stemming the flow of funds to terrorists’ hands and providing legal frameworks to prosecute those providing them.

The United States stands out as the leader of counterterrorism efforts worldwide. Beyond the elimination of Osama bin Laden, the United States has denied safe-haven to al-Qaeda through its operations in Afghanistan and has thwarted at least thirty attempted al-Qaeda inspired attacks on U.S. soil since 2008, contributing to the deterioration of the network. Alongside Saudi Arabia, the United States established the influential Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF), increasing multilateral coordination in counterterrorism strategies, and has worked with Russia and other nations to secure the world’s stocks of fissile material, reducing the threat of nuclear terrorism.

That said, while a ‘B’ or a ‘B+’ is commendable, it also indicates room for improvement. The United States must work with partners to close remaining gaps in the counterterrorism regime, both at the international and domestic level. So what would it take to earn an ‘A’? Well, finally forging international consensus at the UN on a definition of “terrorism” would be an admirable start. Beyond that goal, the Report Card suggests the following tangible steps:

Uphold human rights while fighting terrorism: The most shameful aspect of global counterterrorism efforts has been failure to consistently uphold international human rights norms. Egregious violations have included depriving accused perpetrators of due process, the persistence of state sanctioned targeted killings (including by drones), military actions that have resulted in disproportionate civilian casualties, and the use of torture as an enhanced interrogation technique. The United States should work to negotiate common rules for the detention and treatment of terrorists apprehended both in and outside theaters of war, expedited extradition procedures to facilitate trials in home countries where sufficient capacity and dedication to human rights norms exist, and international norms governing targeted killings of suspected terrorists.

Establish a UN counterterrorism coordinator: In the wake of 9/11 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1373, creating a new Counterterrorism Committee and establishing a Counterterrorism Executive Directorate which offers technical and financial assistance to nations fighting terrorism. Building on this progress, the UN should now establish a counterterrorism coordinator to provide strategic coherence for the mandates of officials who currently oversee the UN’s efforts.

Hold state sponsors of terrorism—and wavering governments—accountable: One of the enduring obstacles to thwarting terrorism has been the insufficient will—and in some cases the outright connivance—of governments in countries ranging from Pakistan to Eritrea, Iran, and North Korea. The United States and its partners should use existing international legal frameworks more effectively to hold state sponsors of terrorism accountable—and increase pressure on governments that simply look the other way. UN member states should continue to support capacity-building efforts in countries whose governments are weak but well-intentioned.

Increase coordination between bilateral and multilateral counterterrorism efforts: The United States and other UN members should work to integrate their bilateral mechanisms for counterterrorism assistance with existing multilateral frameworks, particularly when it comes to capacity-building for intelligence, policing and counterradicalization.

Integrate counterterrorism with the fight against transnational crime: Given emerging relationships between terrorist and criminal networks, international and domestic agencies that fight terrorism should integrate counterterrorism and anticrime efforts. The evolution of the Financial Action Task Force—created to combat money laundering but now enlisted in the fight against terrorist financing—provides a good example of how this can be done.

History suggests that significant bouts of terrorism—like the anarchist movement a century ago—will eventually burn themselves out. But in an age of weapons of mass destruction, waiting out al Qaeda is a luxury we cannot afford. By bolstering multilateral counterterrorism efforts, we can get closer to the day when bin Laden is only a distant memory.