Multilateralism By and For the People

KEVIN MALONEY: We are in a moment where the future of the multilateral system seems to be up for grabs. Who is going to shape it, which powers will dominate, and who gets to be at the table?

To unpack this, we are joined today by Heela Rasool-Ayub. She is co-director of the People, Power, and Planet Initiative at New America and formerly of the U.S. government in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Security Council. We get into the nitty-gritty of multilateralism, what is working, what is not working, and why cooperation is still a very popular principle that people are rallying around around the world, and what the future of a more inclusive multilateral system might look like. With that, let’s get right into the interview.

Heela Rasool-Ayub, welcome to Carnegie Council and the Values & Interests podcast. It is great to have you.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: I am so glad to be here.

KEVIN MALONEY: We first met about a year ago. We were at a workshop together with the grandiose title of “The Future of Multilateralism.” I know this is an area around international cooperation and multilateralism that you focus on in your day job. You just put out a great paper on this, and we are going to get into all that, but you have such an interesting personal and professional background, and, as we do on the Values & Interests podcast, I want to start with the personal. I would love to hear a little bit about your own values formation, and then we can bridge from the personal into your career pre-New America, where you are working now, and then we will get into the international cooperation work. Thanks so much for joining us again.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: That is amazing. When you sent out the questions, it actually took me some time to think about the values formation because for me the values formation piece is an ongoing project. It is something I feel is constantly being challenged in ways I never expected: my values as a member of my community, as a citizen of this country and of the world, my responsibilities in the profession we are in, and most of all as a parent. I am sure you can relate to that in particular.

As I continue to build out and think about the challenges to how my values were formed, I do feel like I had a fairly strong starting point. My maternal grandfather played a huge role in how I view the world, how I view faith, and how I view my values, morals, and ethics. If you will indulge me here, one of his favorite poems was from the Persian Sufi poet Saadi. This poem has been hung up in the halls of the United Nations building here in New York City. I will share a certain translation with you. Many of you might be familiar with this:

“Human beings are members of a whole

In creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,

Other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,

The name of human you cannot retain.”

I was brought up in this very humanist tradition, which is also very much rooted in and derives from Islamic tradition, the faith that I follow. The poem draws from the Koranic concepts of the fundamental unity of creation. This is kind of the ethos that brought me up and all of that was compounded by the fact that my family and I were all refugees from one of the most maligned and mistreated countries in the world, Afghanistan.

I have to say, it is bizarre being from a country where cultures and civilizations come together but also use it as a battleground for clashing against one another. It has been this way for centuries. We have seen it in our lifetimes, and yet it is the Afghan people who continue to pay the price. That is something that is deeply rooted in me and embedded in my soul and being, and it is also what drives me to do what I do. You can take it in ways that are not great, but what I have chosen to do is translate that pain into sympathy and empathy for others.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is a lot to unpack there. Thank you so much for being so forthcoming on that point.

We are here at Carnegie Council, and originally Carnegie Council was named the Church Peace Union by Andrew Carnegie. It is funny. You see these parallels in this pluralistic experience no matter where you come from in the world, and Carnegie saw the churches of the day as a moral center.

Of course, religion, because it forms a specific community, is anti-pluralistic in a way, but it also requires pluralism to exist, so he combined this idea that you need morality and you need an open civic space in which to coexist, and these feed each other. It is interesting to hear your own personal experience.

At that time, he was meeting with Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, and rabbis, and there were no Muslim leaders in the world, but if you pull on the thread, this is the international system and the U.S. domestic system he envisioned, which at the end of the day was a project to promote peace, understanding, and dialogue; interrogating shared values, and not putting a door up. It is a beautiful thing to have us both here talking about this right now.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: That is a fascinating way of framing it. Values, morals, and ethics are for me not entirely rooted in faith, but for me at least it helps with creating this container around how I see these things.

KEVIN MALONEY: The universality from a human condition space allows for a lot of positive energy versus a lot of what we are seeing now, where people are attempting to other and silo each other off at the same time when all these massive problems literally and ironically require cooperation. We are going to get into the cooperation side, but thinking about the values that you laid out as your foundation, you have had an interesting career thus far, and you spent a lot of time at USAID, again literally working on cooperation and going around the world. Maybe we can hear a little about that journey and how your view on pragmatic cooperation may have shifted from a more idealistic—or maybe not—younger person who entered this and how that evolution happened.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: It was a long education. I essentially had my political awakening in college in the post-9/11 world. Going into college, I knew I always wanted to do international development work, again because of my background. I was a political asylee at six months old, before I could utter my first words, and yet here I was claiming political asylum. I have always led a very political life, but it was exposure to political theories and decolonial mindsets and frameworks that helped shape what I wanted to do and how I would enter this world.

I went to college and went to law school, a very expensive decision, but I wanted to have that legal thinking going into this career. Immediately after college I had the opportunity to work in Afghanistan. This was in 2004, and I was working a branch of the Ministry of Finance on anti-corruption work, so if you want to talk about how I became a cynic, that is a great starting place, but it was also a place of great hope. You see broken systems, corruption, and fraud, but I also had the opportunity to work with these amazing young people whose task was to go out into various ministries and push: “Minister of X, Y, or Z, you have to give us a budget if you want financing from the Ministry of Finance, and here is why.” It was amazing to work with them.

It was at that point I saw the challenges with the system itself. You had all of these nongovernmental organizations, you had the United Nations, there was so much money, and there was poverty everywhere you looked. None of that money was going to the people.

After law school, I moved to Washington, DC, because if you are going to do international development work, it is not going to be from Sacramento, California. I had the privilege of joining the World Bank’s Integrity Vice Presidency. With them I investigated fraud and corruption on the World Bank’s finance projects. This unit was created after Paul Wolfowitz’s “cancer of corruption” speech, so that was core to our work and our mandate.

Oh, my gosh. That is when the cynicism really found its root because not only was fraud and corruption happening in these places where we thought, Oh, these cultures are inherently corrupt, but it was being aided and abetted by the systems themselves. I won’t name the country or the people involved, but I remember going out to do an investigation of this huge, billion-dollar infrastructure project. I did all the work, got all the approvals, and everything was pretty firm. We got in country, and we were asked by the country director to stop the investigation. We were not exactly booted out, but we were told to just stop, and later I found out that the spring meetings were happening and that same country director was asking for more funds for that particular project and did not want to reflect badly on it. That was a real education.

Then I joined USAID, and it was incredible. At the World Bank, I was looking at projects where things had already gone bad and we could make recommendations on future projects, but at USAID I got to be involved in the development of projects and country plans from the outset. I got to do amazing work with amazing people.

I did not agree with everybody. We were at loggerheads several times, but I have to say that I had respect for almost everybody I worked for. Everybody was mission-driven. Maybe their approaches were different than what I would want, but they were in it for the greater good. What a huge loss for all of us.

Even then, I was growing increasingly frustrated with our lack of recognition of how the rest of the world was changing and how the relationship with the United States was changing. With USAID I was a Foreign Service Officer, so I had the privilege of being able to jump around in different roles, so I got to work on political economy analysis. I was a democracy, human rights, and governance officer as my core role, but I would go out into the field.

My first posting was in Ethiopia, which was fascinating. This was in the mid-2000s, when Chinese engagement on the African continent was hitting a high point. Then I came back to Washington and was offered a stint at the National Security Council, where I got to work on global cooperation. This was under President Obama’s Stand with Civil Society Initiative, which was a way for the U.S. government to stand alongside and in support of civil society around the world.

I think President Obama and those around him who pushed for this initiative really saw the value of interconnectedness in terms of learning but also the power and agency that could be developed through cooperation and through the development of hubs in connection to the spokes. I got to do that, and it was an incredible experience. Walk across the street, and there is the West Wing.

That was the last year of that administration, and then there was the 2016 election and Donald Trump was elected president. I very quickly recognized that the work I was doing was not something that was of value to that administration, so I left and went back to my home, USAID, and there I went to the agency’s front office and worked as a senior advisor to the deputy administrator. This was at a time before we had political leadership.

It was fascinating because here we all were, all civil servants who were not political, at least in our professional lives, and we had to steer this ship with very little guidance. I appreciate the colleague who did that alongside me. We all learned so much. Again, this was during Ebola, and then COVID-19 hit soon after, so managing all of this from that lens was incredibly challenging, but it taught me a lot.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think it is interesting to hear about your earlier days when you reflect back on it. What were the real positives of that? It was mission-driven, we all had a North Star. There was ego and there was climbing the ladder, which you are going to find everywhere, but you were not there to get rich.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: Certainly not.

KEVIN MALONEY: The virtue/value proposition, a lot of what we are seeing now, is that more is better, the means don’t matter, the ends matter, and this is being pushed as virtuous in and of itself. I have talked a lot about this on the podcast.

It is interesting to hear about the specific programs at the tail end of your time at USAID. Obviously, this is the Values & Interestspodcast, so that values and interests equation in terms of what the Obama administration saw as valuable in its own national interest that also aligned with a certain set of liberal values versus what you saw in the Donald Trump administration.

At the Council, we are not ignorant of power. We want power to be more moralistic and more ethical at the end of the day. Before we pivot to your current work here about the things at USAID that you felt aligned with your values and U.S. values that were also very powerful tools to advance the national interests of the United States, and what you feel strong and proud about in terms of those alignment moments.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: Especially as a USAID Foreign Service Officer, when I lived in these countries—and even when I was back in Washington and would go out to various countries—I was out in the communities, so when I lived in Ethiopia, when I lived in South Africa, and when I made trips to Ukraine, Ghana, and elsewhere, I did not just stay in the capital and meet with high-level officials. I would go out. I shared platters of goat curry with farmers and livestock managers despite my own fear of cows. I spent a lot of time at livestock markets.

KEVIN MALONEY: My son loves cows, so I won’t let him watch this part of the interview.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: Just as a quick aside, more human deaths are associated with cows than with sharks.

KEVIN MALONEY: And he loves sharks too, so there you go.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: I was going out and meeting with factory workers in Lesotho and mining communities that were facing these harms. You do not really get to do that as an American in a lot of other contexts, and we were trusted, for the most part, which was incredible to me. I would go to these health clinics and visit with mothers who came in with their malnourished children, and they would trust this dumb 30-year-old. That was an incredible experience.

I got to learn from those communities and bring that experience back to Washington and tried to continue to sell the story of what is happening in the rest of the world and why we need to continue to be in these spaces. I think that maybe part of the original vision that President Kennedy had when he started this agency is that the American is the connection to the world.

This was not part of my work, but my husband and I went to Tanzania on our honeymoon, and I remember when our tour guide picked us up and was driving us to the safari, he pointed out these bed net factories. He did not know that I worked in development or anything like that. He was like, “Bush did that. He saved so many lives.” I certainly have thoughts on President Bush’s legacy, but I think that is a good part of his legacy in that people remembered it and connected it with something good. I think with the loss of USAID we have a huge gap in that friendship, partnership, and trust that people around the world had with the United States.

KEVIN MALONEY: Two things jump out to me from that answer that are relevant to our work at Carnegie Council, and one of those is the two-way street nature of USAID. We were getting significant intelligence back in terms of what we were able to do moving forward and how we could tweak foreign policy. The other thing, highlighting being in the maternity center, is that they saw you as a good-faith actor. There was trust at the human level and not at the transactional or paternalistic level, and that is very different.

What we are seeing now from a diplomacy perspective, and this is my own opinion here, is an embrace of transactionalism and a rejection of reciprocity as an end and a means that is inherently valuable. I think it is important to hear the stories of being on the ground and looking in somebody’s eyes and realizing this was good for them and valuable for us as a country simultaneously and that those things do not have to be antithetical.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: Absolutely. I spent a lot of time working with USAID when I was back in Washington representing USAID on the Hill, and this was during the first couple of years of Trump I, and that message held resonance across the aisle. We had more supporters from the Republican side than anything. That has shifted and changed, which is hugely unfortunate for the beneficiaries of these programs, and it is not great for the United States.

KEVIN MALONEY: There are more than enough podcasts in terms of analyzing the current state of Washington and Capitol Hill, so I will not subject our listeners to that, but on a positive note let’s turn to your current work.

In a world awash with titles, I think yours is one of my favorites. At New America you are currently co-director of the Power, People, and the Planet Initiative. Maybe you could translate the three Ps for us and what you do now for New America, and as I mentioned earlier in the conversation you released a recent report that we are going to dig into a little bit. Can you give our listeners an overview of your day-to-day now?

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: It is interesting because I joined New America about three-and-a-half years ago, before USAID’s implosion, for a couple of reasons. First off, Foreign Service life was challenging, especially as I had a young family, aging parents, and all that. Second, I do not want to say I could tell what was coming in the future, but there was an inkling and I know it would not be great for the agency or for me personally. Third, as much as I loved working in the government and for the government—it is pretty amazing holding that passport—it was also frustrating being in the bureaucracy where you could see things happening but you could not move as fast, so I thought, Let’s see how I can do it from the outside.

I joined New America and had the opportunity to dig into some of these questions on how the world was changing, how power was changing, how alliances were shifting, how the United States was viewed, how the United States continued to view its own role in the world and the rest of countries’ role in the world. With the launch of this new initiative, we had always tried to have our work being people- and planet-centered, not removing the state necessarily. The state is obviously a very important actor in how we think about global cooperation, multilateralism, and all that, but how you better center the well-being of people and the well-being of the planet, and how do we shift thinking so that those remain the center of how and when we make policy?

Then there is the power piece that comes in because this is all an exercise of power, having power, not having power, who has it, who does not, how that impacts how we view the world, how that impacts how we develop policies, implement policies, and the like.

I mentioned earlier that I had done some work in political economy analysis with USAID, and I thought it was important to bring that lens to our work here at New America. Yes, as DC think tankers we can comment and analyze what is happening with the state of geopolitics, geoeconomics, and all of that, but unless we help people see the power dynamics that are driving the outcomes it is hard to understand the solutions that we need.

KEVIN MALONEY: I have been in the weeds on that a lot at Carnegie Council. We did a big transition from Ethics Matter to Ethics Empowered about six years ago, and one day there will be notes from those meetings in terms of hashing that out, but branding is a thing unto itself.

I want to pivot to what you are currently focused on. You released a great new report titled “The Future of Multilateralism is Up for Grabs.” We are sitting in New York right now. The United Nations High-Level Week is happening, Climate Week is happening, and heads of states are 20 blocks away giving their addresses to the General Assembly. You released this report right before that kicked off.

Just to start, can you explain this claim, “The future of multilateralism is up for grabs,” to my audience and the state of play right now on multilateralism and international cooperation from your perspective?

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: I think many in our circles—global policy and international relations—have been bemoaning the failures of multilateralism for quite some time. We have been living for the last 80 years in this multilateral order that was created from the ruins of World War II by a handful of world powers at a time when a lot of countries that hold sovereignty today were under colonial rule. We have been questioning for a while whether the system built then works for the world that we are living in now and for the challenges we are facing now.

I think there were a few things that revealed the fractures of that system at least a few decades ago. For me one of them was the Iraq War, which showed the limits of the multilateral order on holding peace, sovereign agency, and the equality of all countries. COVID-19 for a lot of people, especially in the Global South and poorer countries, brought into high relief this inequality and lack of accountability.

Here we are today. You and I have been part of these conversations in concert with one another on what does multilateralism mean and what is it that we need for the future. In the paper I point to the fact that a lot of polling shows that most people agree that we need forms of global cooperation. Diseases and pandemics do not care about our borders. Climate change reverberates globally, and even if there is a handful of countries most responsible for emissions that are causing the most devastating impacts of climate change, everybody is going to feel it. Yes, maybe there are poorer countries and poorer communities that are feeling it first, but I think as we saw with the heat wave this summer in Europe, the wildfires in Canada, and the various wildfires and coastal erosion in the United States, it is coming for us all, and we cannot work on any of this in isolation. I think there is general agreement there that we need some form of global cooperation and that we cannot be firm isolationists.

How do we approach it? Is it one-to-one transactions? Are these small little clubs that are going to address it? I think that is further breaking down the multilateral order that we built.

What I tried to do with this piece is say that, yes, we need multilateralism—I am going to just take that for a fact and run with it—but what does it look like? Often when we enter into these rooms and have these conversations there are some brilliant people in those rooms who have amazing ideas and have done amazing work, but they come at these questions from very different perspectives, and I think we need to be very honest about where we are coming from, not that anybody has been intentionally dishonest or obfuscating anything, but I think that needs to be part of the frank discussion before we move on to the next steps.

KEVIN MALONEY: In politics we know that there are people who are going to inject themselves in bad faith. I do think that is the difficult part, when people are coming from such different perspectives, to ground yourself in the good-faith environment where you can have intense conversations, like some that we had when we were last together, but, and this goes back to you working at USAID, there is a North Star there, which is peaceful cooperation and access to basic goods for our kids, grandkids, etc.

You made an important delineation and alluded to the idea of cooperation. Cooperation is tangible. People can understand what it is. It is not this thing in the ether like multilateralism that is easier to grab and manipulate by various forces.

Here at the Council we have four principles of action that are informed by ethical reflection, and international cooperation is one of those. We feel it is an inherent good, and we are going to die on that hill.

I think it is very important how you lay out the difference there between multilateralism being a byproduct of cooperation. They are not interchangeable.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: It is not one and the same, no. I think that is an important distinction to make. Again, people in policy circles understand this intellectually and speak about it in that way, but even there I feel like in a lot of conversations we have had people who would talk using both terms. I am like, no, no, no, it is completely different. There is global cooperation, and then there are the institutions that represent or help promote or corral global cooperation, being the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and a whole host of others.

Going into this UN High-Level Week, the United Nations is an easy target, and for good reasons sometimes but not always. People then equate whatever dysfunctions they perceive about the United Nations and other bodies as being equal to this is how they feel about global cooperation. I think we need to be very deliberate about separating those two.

KEVIN MALONEY: In the paper you talk a lot about the mechanisms that make up multilateralism and you lay out four potential futures for multilateralism. We were talking before we started recording, and it can seem a little arduous to do that, but in a world where people are just throwing cooperation and multilateralism out into the information ecosystem in positive or negative ways, it is important to attempt to collect those different perspectives and weigh those against each other literally on a piece of paper so that you are not just grabbing at variables and having an emotional response to something, but there are options out there that you can put your time, effort, and maybe money behind if you want to shape the world.

The United Nations did not exist 80-plus years ago. I think people tend to forget this. These things are not set in stone.

Before I let you respond to that, I think there is an interesting framing that I’ve talked about a lot on the podcast: Andrew Carnegie pours money and effort into all of these things for peace and security, and then World War I happens, and he dies soon after. In his mind he might have been an epic failure when it comes to that, but then you see his legacy, the intellectual and moral points that he inculcated into politics then show up in a big way later on. Thinking about this longer term and understanding that institutions rise, fall, and change, but it is the type of world you want long-term that is incredibly important. Maybe you could about the scenarios you have gamed out.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: As I shared with you before we started recording, it was hard building out this taxonomy because we all reject being put in boxes. If you were to ask me, I would say, yes, I fit into a number of them.

There is the first camp, which I name as the “return to the old order” camp, and I think they are the most vocal and the most well-resourced, which is probably why we hear more from them. They are not going to say, “Yes, the old world was good; let’s stick to it,” but they will call for change on the outside of it, but really they do not want to deal with the power structure systems underlying this shift. So maybe we won’t call the United Nations the United Nations. We can call it something else, but let’s keep those power dynamics in place because they have worked really well for us. It has maintained the U.S.’s hegemonic power for however long, the Europeans have also benefited, and many others. Why change things if they are working for you, which I think is why a lot of people are puzzled by the Trump administration’s stance on the existing system. It is like, “Wow, it has really worked well for us. This is actually ‘America First,’ so why are you rejecting or pushing back on it?” There is that camp.

The second camp is one that rejects this current system, and this camp is actually split into many parts. First, I go into the Chinese perspective, which I find to be fascinating because they take on this dual approach. On one hand, the People’s Republic of China is wholeheartedly into the current multilateral system. I have never seen any other country put as much effort as they have into placing Chinese nationals in positions across the system. I remember when I was still in government there was a big push for who was going to be the director-general of the International Telecommunication Union, the body that manages our telecommunications systems globally. It might seem very boring, but it was very strategic because that is big.

KEVIN MALONEY: The devil is in the details.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: It depends on who sits on the World Health Organization among others. The Chinese have called for “true” multilateralism, and they are also backing it up with financing, maybe not as much as the United States and others, but they are putting a significant amount of funding there.

At the same time, they are continuing on the track of creating parallel structures outside of that system, whether it is through the New Development Bank or through the Belt and Road Initiative, and they are creating different sets of relationships, rules, and systems that operate completely outside of the multilateral system in which most of us operate.

Then you have the Russians, who are very vocal about the current system and who it is benefiting and who it is not, but at the same time they are also benefitting. Russia has a seat on the Security Council, which is one of the most powerful bodies in our current system, so that is an interesting perspective to hold.

Then you have the middle powers like India, Brazil, and others who are like: “The system is not great. We were under colonial rule when all of this was being built, and we did not have a say in how it was structured. We need something completely new, maybe not a Chinese or Russian model but something maybe more multipolar, in effect.”

Within that camp, there are people who are like: “No, de-center states. We need to throw out the entire system and come up with something completely new, something that is rooted in de-colonial principles, in feminism, in Indigenous thought and practice, and that centers the planet in a more holistic way.” They all kind of fit into this box but don’t fit into this box, but they are all the ones who are like, “No, this is not the system that we want.”

Then, the third camp are those who say, “The system is not great, not fit for purpose, but we can reform it. Give us the chance. We can change it. We can make it more inclusive, we can bring more people to the table, two more African states on the Security Council, here and there.” That is tinkering on the edges, but it is there.

The fourth camp are those who call for more of a multi-stakeholder system, and in some ways this further decenters the state. We have seen this in practice. Under the first Trump administration we pulled out of the Paris Agreement. Mayors and governors across the United States said, “The administration may say we are out, but no, America is not out. We are part of this, we are committed to this, we can practice global cooperation outside the Executive, and that is exactly what we are going to do.” I thought that was just incredible.

Then you have companies and corporations, who play an incredibly outsized role, and they always have, but I think we are seeing a moment of greater concentration right now with artificial intelligence (AI), these technologies, and their ability to shape our systems and shape how we interact with each other and how we socialize with each other. I think it will go beyond just influencing governments to outright capture, so we have to be mindful of what that multistakeholder model looks like, but there are good things to pull out from each too.

KEVIN MALONEY: When I read the last scenario there with the rise of nonstate actors always being influential but accelerating lately in terms of wealth concentration and compute, the “walk and chew gum approach” in terms of, yes, reforming a state-centric but not missing the boat on the fact that this new power center is being formed—I just had an interview the other day on the rise of new American oligarchs, and we talked a lot about the difference between the former robber barons and those of today. The high level from it is that the robber barons, while very problematic, seemed to be constrained by a strong national allegiance and national interest whereas the transactionalism of today is cross-border.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: I would also say that the acceleration impact is not to be discounted. It took the robber barons of the past time to build their wealth, whereas now it is happening very, very quickly.

KEVIN MALONEY: The initial public offering makes the valuation skyrocket, and you are basically a trillionaire overnight. I have a series of conversations coming up on this issue of AI sovereignty posed around two primary ethical questions: One is, if basically the amount of compute is so focused on the United States and China and the rest of the world is left with 10-15 percent, as a middle power, as a smaller country, do you make the tradeoff of giving up some of your sovereignty for access to technology or do you try to build new coalitions or go it alone, and what does that look like at the end of the day?

On the other end of the spectrum is the individual question: Are we giving up more and more agency, and therefore the citizens who make up these states that are part of a state-centered model are not really made up of citizens anymore but people just outsourcing their agency and their citizenship, et cetera.

I am going to use inverted commas here: The next few years are going to be “very interesting” I think from a geopolitical perspective around which variables are driving order, disorder, and inequality. More episodes to come on that. I was glad that you hit that at the end as a variable we need to be watching out for.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: Actually, it is one of the things our program is working on and will be working on, the question of how we build coalitions. Right now we are calling it “Middle Powers and AI,” but I think the “middle powers” terminology can be a little squishy because who is a middle power and who is not, but I think it is how do you build coalitions that understand the urgency of the moment and the need for collaboration and cooperation and help find opportunities and ways in which they can set standards.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to close with hopefully a positive outlook. If you take your four scenarios and you are sitting across the table from somebody who is in a decision-making seat in government or in the private sector and you have identified them as a good-faith person, that they are there for the right reasons and want to engage—at Carnegie Council we feel like the manifestation of our moral political framework, which is ethical realism, and the manifestation of that in practice would be the pragmatic idealist. If you are making a pitch to a pragmatic idealist right now about where to support or try to take multilateralism in these scenarios, what is the pitch? I don’t want to put you on the spot, but maybe we can grasp at some ideas that seem to be an ethical and politically responsible place to start or put your energy.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: I think it starts with accountability. If I am talking to somebody who is more of a political animal, I think there is an appeal to the political side, because we can very clearly say that people, whatever the system is, don’t want it. They recognize that it is not working for them. Maybe they don’t recognize what can come next, but they realize that this thing is not working for us.

There is growing inequality around the world. We are here in New York City while high-level officials are speaking on developmental indicators. We are nowhere near meeting the Sustainable Development Goals that were created in 2016, and in fact we are falling back on several of them, which is incredibly disheartening. I guess this does not answer the question of how I would appeal to them, but there is a public demand, and how do you capitalize on that?

This is something I try to allude to in the piece but don’t quite get there: We don’t have to know where we are going. We don’t have to say, “This is the charter,” and write it all down right now, but what we can all say is, “This system is not working, and we need to work together on something that is better because there are bad actors who are trying to shape things right now.”

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is a great place to end. I am going to summarize: People-centric, we need to understand the moment we are in, and we should not sacrifice long-term perfection for short-term thinking here and thinking in a positive way.

Heela, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

HEELA RASOOL-AYUB: Thank you for having me.