Major Power Coordination and Conflict Resolution

Plenary Presentation to World Peace Forum, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 4 July 2025

For an outstanding example of how major power cooperation and coordination can work to prevent deadly conflict, and the risks associated with the collapse of that cooperation, one need look no further than Iran.

Ten years ago, in July 2015, six of the world’s major powers – the UN Security Council Permanent Five (China, Russia, the US, UK and France) plus Germany, together with the European Union – came together to conclude with Iran the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which Iran agreed to very significantly limit its nuclear program for the next fifteen years in return for sanctions and other relief. The agreement brought to an end years of anxiety and debate, in the region and globally, about Iran’s nuclear weapon intentions, and effectively removed the possibility of destructive and destabilizing military action in response to fears about its program.

Three years later, however, the US tore up the deal, in a shocking abdication of sense, decency and respect for international agreements of the kind with which we have, unhappily, become all too familiar with President Trump. This irresponsible unilateral action undercut the moderates in Tehran, provoked a hard-line backlash, and set the stage for the most recent round of hostilities, in which the US joined Israel in major attacks on Iran, without any pretence that there was an imminent threat from Iran of the kind that might, under international law, justify Israeli self-defence.

All this with the result, not certain but now very likely, of convincing Iran’s leaders once and for all – in a way they have not been decisively convinced in the past – that actually building nuclear bombs is the best way of securing the regime’s survival. If there is an Iranian nuclear threat, it is only cooperative diplomacy of the kind we saw in 2015 that can end if, not US bombs.

Of course, among the world’s major powers, it is not only the United States that, in recent years, has endangered peace and security by acting unilaterally, and with indifference or contempt for international law. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been almost universally condemned as flagrant and indefensible under the UN Charter.

And it has to be acknowledged that China itself, while understandably wanting to complete the country’s reunification, and to claim its own secure strategic space in its maritime surrounds, has jangled many nerves. By refusing to rule out the use of military force against Taiwan. And by making territorial claims over the South China Sea, and militarizing a number of reefs and islets within it, without regard to the international law of the sea.

The world as a whole is certainly now more fragile, volatile, prone to conflict, resistant to peacemaking efforts and reluctant to engage in international arms control, than has been the case for many years. There seems very little left of that confident optimism that certainly prevailed during the early post-Cold War years when I was Australia’s Foreign Minister. I remember with particular warmth the Cambodian peace process of 1989-1993 which brought to an end a horrific period of genocide, war and protracted civil war. We were able, with the United Nations playing a crucially central role, and with every major player entering into negotiations in the right spirit, to overcome profound divisions between China, Russia and the US and their respective partners and clients in an outstandingly cooperative enterprise, which brought the long-suffering Cambodian people peace at last.

In the current fraught environment, it has never been more important to stand up for the principles of cooperative security that were the currency of that early post-Cold War period.

By ‘cooperative security’ I mean an approach to the geopolitical issues which are dividing and troubling the world which is not confrontational, but focuses on finding security with others, not against them. Which focuses on confidence-building strategies, and on seeing security as multidimensional, with many economic and social as well as military and other hard-edged traditional components. And which, above all, focuses on building habits of dialogue, consultation, and a cooperative approach to addressing global and regional problems beyond the capacity of any one country, however rich and powerful, to solve alone – most critically the existential risks to life on this planet as we know it posed by global warming, pandemics and nuclear weapons.

Achieving a commitment to such an approach in the current generation of political leaders who most need to embrace it will be anything but easy. But what the world can least afford is a confrontational, might-is-right mindset becoming entrenched. The best expression I have ever heard of the mindset required – above all in ensuring that the strategic competition between the US and China that is now playing out does not end in tears – was a comment by Bill Clinton at a private function I attended in October 2002, two years after he had left the Presidency (and had acquired all the wisdom that seems to come with hindsight, and removal from the daily front-line):

The U.S. has two choices about how we use the great and overwhelming military and economic power we now possess. We can try to use it to stay top dog on the global block in perpetuity. Or we can use it to try to create a world in which we will be comfortable living when we are no longer top dog on the global block.

Clinton never repeated this on the public record with anything like that clarity. And the tragedy is that so many American policymakers have still, to this day, found it so politically difficult to acknowledge publicly that the days of unchallenged US primacy are over, and that the only chance of achieving a safer, saner and more prosperous world is for that reality to be acknowledged, and a genuinely cooperative mindset to be adopted.

There are some who believe that the best way for world geopolitics to evolve will be to recognize that the major powers each have their own geographical sphere of influence, and should be allowed to act more or less as they please within them. I don’t believe that is the right approach, not only for what it implies for the autonomy and safety of those much less powerful countries within each such sphere. But also because it denies the reality of our common humanity, and the need sometimes for a genuinely cooperative global response when that humanity is grievously threatened.

As was agreed, for example, by the UN General Assembly twenty years ago, unanimously, in endorsing the principle of the responsibility to protect peoples from genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. As nearly all of us now agree must be the case in responding to the existential threats posed by climate change, and future pandemics. And as I hope will be agreed when it comes to nuclear arms control – non-proliferation, risk-reduction, and ultimately the complete elimination of the most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented, and the only ones really capable of destroying life on this planet.

We won’t achieve any of these goals by adopting an instinctively confrontational mindset. We already have the institutions we need -- including globally with the UN and G20, and in our own region with the East Asia Summit, APEC and other ASEAN-centred leaders’ forums – for the dialogue, confidence building and creative policymaking needed to prevent and respond to conflict, and to address some of its most obvious underlying causes. What we need to do is learn again how to use those institutions – winding back the chest-beating rhetoric, and remembering always that the best way to achieve security is cooperatively: acting with others, not against them.