In the digital age, foreign policy won't be decided by presidents

On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced his intention to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. In fact, he cannot follow through on this unless he is re-elected on November 3, 2020, as the Paris Agreement provides for a lengthy waiting period before a stated intent to exit can take effect - until November 4, 2020. Still, he can stop any Federal government efforts to comply with the commitments that the United States made under the Obama administration. His decision was a huge blow for US global leadership on one of the most pressing and existential challenges facing the planet. China and European countries such as France and Germany picked up the baton.

Within hours of Trump's announcement, however, many other Americans had stepped up. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg tweeted: "We can't wait for national governments to act on climate change. For solutions, look to cities. #ClimateofHope." He also announced that Bloomberg Philanthropies would pull together $15 million (£11.4m) to support UN efforts to implement the Paris agreement.

Indeed, Bloomberg Philanthropies has spent years organising more than 7,000 mayors worldwide, representing 600 million people, in what is now the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy.

Not to be outdone by this, the governor of California Jerry Brown announced that he and the governors of New York and Washington state would lead an alliance of states dedicated to carrying out the Paris Agreement even without federal support. The next day 30 mayors, three governors, more than 80 university presidents and 100 business leaders began negotiating with the UN to have their submissions of commitments to reduce carbon emissions accepted alongside other countries. These mayors and other actors are themselves recognised in the Paris Agreement, categorised as "non-Party stakeholders", who nevertheless have a critical role to play in upholding the agreement and reducing carbon emissions.

City and state governments do not have to take the lead here, however. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization was launched by the Gates Foundation, which brought together non-government organisations around the world, big pharmaceutical companies and the World Health Organization. Their goal was to catalyse and co-ordinate a global response both to a deep global injustice - that children born in developing countries continue to die of diseases that children born in rich countries are immune from. They are also tackling the failure to immunise poor children around the world, which could lead to the return of old diseases and the spread of new ones.

In 2018, the digital world will also move into this area. Former director of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Fadi Chehadé has proposed an innovative solution for governing the global internet that is composed of transnational networks of private, public and civic actors to develop and implement open-digital protocols. These would consist of non-legal rules covering everything from cyberwarfare to big-data ethics. They would be developed by experts using feedback and input from the general public. Chehadé imagines three levels of expert networks, accountability networks and a global "network of networks", which would be co-ordinated and orchestrated by a central authority.

This is foreign policy for the digital age. Digital technology, for good or ill, is highly democratising. We hear frequently about the malign dimensions of a world in which non-state actors, meaning the participants in the virtual and physical networks that create a web of global relations, can attack each other or governments. Indeed, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen argued in their 2013 book The New Digital Age that "the most significant impact of the spread of communication technologies will be the way they help reallocate the concentration of power away from states and institutions and transfer it to individuals".

The problem is how to combine the energy, innovation and resilience of decentralisation with the ability to provide some direction and to cumulate and share knowledge, ideas and best practice that comes from centralisation. That is where network design comes in - or, more broadly, strategies of connection.

EM Forster's "Only connect" was not quite right. It would be far less poetic, but far more pragmatic to say: "Only connect correctly." And what is correct differs by circumstance. But we are not rudderless here. The science of network architecture will become as robust and sophisticated as that of physical architecture, the understanding of what structures best serve what purpose: distributed mesh networks for resilience, decentralised pod networks for local teamwork and innovation directed towards a common goal; centralised star networks for co-ordination and cumulation; and many variations on these forms for response, defence, communication and co-operation.

Public-policy schools emphasise the disciplines of law, economics, statistics, politics and psychology to educate their students in the art of public problem-solving. Students learn to write memos to hypothetical bosses laying out the problem and potential legal or regulatory solutions in no more than two pages. For the public policy of the future, including foreign policy, a network map will be the new memo. Public problem-solvers will learn to see the world around them in terms of connection, disconnection and misconnection, and will think about how to design networks to connect the right people or institutions in the right way to solve a specific problem.

States are not going to disappear any time soon. They continue to wield enormous power and more legitimacy than any other arrangements for human government or self-government. They will continue to fight and bargain with each other: waging war, negotiating agreements, trading and establishing institutions. Statecraft will remain an important discipline for the handful of officials able to practise it. But in the 21st century world of the web - the internet and the web of economic, civic, educational, religious, social and criminal networks that span the globe - webcraft is open to anyone.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is president and CEO of public-policy think tank New America

This article was originally published by WIRED UK