As U.S. President Joe Biden hosts the leaders of Japan and the Philippines for the countries’ first-ever trilateral summit in Washington this week, his top diplomat is preparing to go to Italy for a G-7 foreign ministers’ meeting next week. Despite being thousands of miles apart with vastly different agendas, the two meetings are both part of what has become a defining feature of the Biden foreign-policy doctrine: minilateralism.
Minilateralism, a wonky term first popularized in the pages of Foreign Policy, refers to a form of international collaboration that involves smaller, more targeted groupings of countries with shared interests, rather than large and often slow-moving traditional multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and World Trade Organization (WTO). This is precisely the approach the Biden administration has pursued, and it represents the starkest sign yet of how the post-Cold War global order is fracturing.
The strategy represents a significant shift from the traditional tenets of the Democratic Party’s foreign policy. In the Obama era, Washington focused on pushing major foreign-policy initiatives through the U.N. system or other major multilateral blocs—such as the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that first relied on a U.N. Security Council green light or President Barack Obama’s emphasis on tackling climate change through major U.N. confabs.
Instead, Team Biden is increasingly relying on smaller, fit-for-purpose “coalitions of the willing” to advance specific policy agendas on major crises.
In Europe, it has used the G-7 to enact sweeping economic sanctions against Russia over its war in Ukraine and established an ad hoc new structure—the so-called Ramstein group—to coordinate the delivery of military aid to Ukraine among dozens of countries. In Asia, it employed a patchwork of overlapping smaller groupings, including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (or Quad), AUKUS, and trilateral initiatives such as the one this week with Japan and the Philippines to try to blunt China’s rising power.
“These minilateral meetings among three or four countries have really become a hallmark of the Biden administration’s strategy of developing a loose network of security relationships,” said Lisa Curtis, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Curtis said the minilateralism approach is likely to outlast the Biden era, whether he wins a second term or not. Both the Biden and Trump doctrines on the Indo-Pacific are remarkably similar, she said. Moreover, initiatives such as AUKUS meant to counter China are widely popular across the political spectrum in Washington, and Donald Trump’s Republican Party harbors deep skepticism of the U.N. and WTO systems.
It’s still unclear if the strategy is paying off. The Biden administration has scored high-profile wins in starting up what it refers to as a “latticework” of these diplomatic initiatives in the Indo-Pacific, but whether they can actually restrict China geopolitically remains to be seen.
These minilateral efforts could also run aground, though, if Washington isn’t careful. “If a future administration narrows the focus of U.S.-led minilateralism to just countering China rather than sustaining a more comprehensive agenda that also recognizes country needs in areas like climate or economics, the U.S. risks scoring narrow wins against Beijing but losing much of the region,” said Prashanth Parameswaran, the author of the ASEAN Wonk newsletter.
“Minilaterals build more flexible coalitions that get things done,” Parameswaran added, “but they work best when calibrated with bilateral and multilateral engagement so they don’t look like a series of exclusive clubs that undermine existing institutions, which is the very bogeyman China is trying to create with some of its messaging.”
Either way, Biden administration insiders say the new minilateralism approach is a direct reflection of how the post-World War II international system that the United States built and sustained for decades is no longer fit for purpose.
“The multilateral order we built and relied on for 80 years is getting too old-timey and unwieldy,” said one senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to comment candidly. “We need to find workarounds for constant impasse at the U.N. and other big institutions.”
It’s working at a feverish pace to do so. Administration officials and several foreign diplomats familiar with the matter said Biden plans to attend a G-7 summit in June in Italy—following the meeting of G-7 foreign ministers there next week—and an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru later this year. Biden officials are also laying the groundwork for a potential visit by the U.S. president to India in late November or early December for a major Quad summit in New Delhi—though those plans could hinge on whether Biden wins reelection or not.
Though the term might be relatively new, the notion of minilateralism as a way to circumvent diplomatic gridlock at bodies such as the U.N. is nothing new. The G-7, for example, was originally set up in the early 1970s as a forum for major industrial powers—France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to tackle top financial issues in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis outside the strictures of the WTO and International Monetary Fund (IMF) systems. (Italy and Canada were later added as members, and the European Union also now joins as a “non-enumerated member.”)
But minilateralism has become even more appealing to some in Washington in recent years due in large part to the constant racking up of high-profile international institution failures and misfires, such as the deadlock over Russia’s war in Ukraine, the bungled response to the conflict in Myanmar, distrust over China’s growing influence in such institutions, and missteps as Sudan spiraled into a civil war. These have led even diehard proponents of these traditional systems in the Democratic Party looking elsewhere for solutions.
On the economic front, the United States has opted to coordinate sanctions against Russia at the G-7 level, predicting that such efforts would get nowhere in the U.N. Security Council, where the main aggressor of the war in Ukraine holds a permanent seat and veto power. The Biden administration also used the G-7 platform—rather than the WTO, IMF, or other institutions—to overhaul global corporate taxation rules and to launch a high-profile international infrastructure investment program in response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
“The White House looks at the world, and it sees a lot of institutions fraying, and it sees it’s very hard to get what it wants out of the U.N. on some fairly significant issues,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director at the International Crisis Group.
Two of the biggest geopolitical flash points in the world now—the war in Ukraine and tensions in the Indo-Pacific—both involve permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, Russia and China, which have no qualms wielding their veto power to halt U.N. efforts to address those tensions. (Just last month, Russia derailed what was widely considered a successful 15-year program to monitor U.N. sanctions on North Korea, all as Moscow upgrades its ties with Pyongyang in exchange for weapons deliveries to aid its war in Ukraine.)
The United States has also kept the U.N. at arm’s length in its efforts to tackle the world’s third major geopolitical flash point—the Israel-Hamas war—causing successive Security Council resolutions calling for a cease-fire to founder. One finally passed last month, with a U.S. abstention that angered its close partner, Israel, but it didn’t alter at all Israel’s war strategy.
A historic 2022 U.N. General Assembly vote, where an overwhelming majority of countries around the world condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, similarly didn’t alter Moscow’s calculus on that war.
And when the United States raised alarm bells over possible Iranian strikes against Israel this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken didn’t take those concerns to the U.N., where Iran holds a permanent diplomatic outpost, but rather did an end-run around the traditional system and called the foreign ministers of Turkey, China, and Saudi Arabia, urging them to back-channel with Tehran to de-escalate tensions.
Middle and rising powers, including India, South Africa, and Brazil, assert that the U.N. Security Council is woefully outdated and doesn’t reflect the growing role of the so-called global south in international affairs, but efforts to reform the system have all foundered.
Even for issues that don’t ostensibly involve great-power competition—such as the security crisis in Haiti or the wars in Ethiopia and Sudan—the Biden administration has seen the U.N. role as woefully lacking. When Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s envoy to the United Nations, first entered the job in 2021, she pushed hard to have the Security Council publicly tackle the deadly war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. Yet it took months to even have an open meeting on the crisis.
This has led U.N. diplomats, initially hopeful that the Biden administration would heavily reinvest in the world body after the Trump era, to come away disappointed by Biden’s pivot to minilateralism, Gowan said.
“The Biden administration sees that the U.N. is helpful when you want to get a big majority of countries to pay lip service to Ukraine’s sovereignty, but when you actually want to get something done, it is smarter to go somewhere else,” he said. “There’s a real sense [at the U.N.] that ‘we weathered the Trump storm, we thought that Biden would bring sunshine, and instead we got drizzle.’”
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