TRANSNATIONALISM IS USEFUL FOR FRIGHTENING CHILDREN:

The secretary of state is hardly the first American politician to dismiss international organizations as bloated and stodgy. He will not be the last. But he is wrong on two basic points. 

The first is that other nations are addicted to treaties--in reality, diplomats are increasingly wary of binding multilateral instruments. The second is that cosmopolitan bureaucrats are proliferating at a dangerous rate. Although the U.N. secretariat and its agencies employ over 100,000 people worldwide, in addition to nearly 100,000 uniformed U.N. peacekeepers, the organization's leaders are pushing to keep staff numbers down and cut bureaucratic red tape.

The Trump administration is tilting at a rapacious multilateral system that does not exist.

Take Pompeo's line about treaties first. It is true that, in the immediate post-Cold War period, states signed off on a raft of new treaties and expanded their commitments under existing ones. The U.S. frequently struggled with these, failing to ratify important agreements like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Rome Statute authorizing the International Criminal Court. Pompeo and U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton often cite these as cases of multilateral overreach.

But recently, international negotiators have increasingly shied away from inking formal treaties of this type. In part out of deference to U.S. concerns, they have tended to forge international pacts, like the Paris accord on climate change and the Sustainable Development Goals, that involve political commitments and ambitious goals, but are explicitly not legally binding treaties.

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