From time to time, you’ll hear about some transnational problem, inevitably followed by a call for common action or global solidarity or some kind of international initiative. “Global problems require global solutions!” This was common with Covid, and it’s the default one-line response to dealing with climate change. It sounds nice but contains a serious theoretical flaw. In fact, international problems often require national solutions, while national problems may be amenable to an international approach.
You can see why by considering the nature of problem-solving. Someone with a problem generally has that problem on account of some inability or defect: if I could fix the problem easily, I wouldn’t have it. When you have a problem, it’s often good to find someone else, preferably without the problem, to help you fix it. Imagine that we have fifty individuals. All of these individuals are poor. All of them together cannot fix the poverty issue, because none of them has the resources to do so. They will simply go ahead and be poor together. The only real option is to let each person try something different. Perhaps, eventually, someone will hit upon a solution.
But if only ten people are poor, and forty rich, the solution is very simple: all of them can act together to help the ten who are poor, because, acting jointly, they possess the surplus wealth necessary to do so. (Any one of them probably can't do much.)
The same is true of countries: imagine that every country suffered from civil war. This would be a global problem. All of them could join together, but that would hardly fix things, because countries embroiled in civil war are peculiarly ill-equipped to fix civil war somewhere else. But if only one country has a civil war, then a regional or global coalition is usually the best choice to end it.
So, if anything, we’re now at the opposite of where we began: global problems require local solutions, but local (or asymmetric) problems require transnational solutions. In general, problems must be solved at a level other than the one at which they arise. This is an over-generalization, but it helps show the flaws in the reflexive global/global talking point.
And practice follows theory. Think about Covid: we learned much more from differing national attempts to control the virus than we did, say, from the WHO. The EU’s vaccine procurement didn’t work well, but national vaccine procurement and dissemination campaigns—like those in Britain, Israel, or America—were far more successful. The same is true for climate change. International agreements, like the Paris Accords, never do very much because national conditions differ so widely, and because nations can leave as they wish. The real incentive for a nation like China to switch to clean energy is an unwillingness to fall behind the United States, and the main reason why a nation would work hard to create a green transition is the desire to gain a productivity advantage—maybe even a military advantage—over other countries. Nations that navigate the energy transition better, mostly by developing the right technologies and adopting a smart mix of energy sources, will have a competitive advantage. Sometimes this works against an immediate green transition—look at how badly Germany is doing! But other nations don’t want to follow Germany’s lead in substituting natural gas for nuclear energy precisely because the German attempt failed so badly. We learned a valuable lesson from national experimentation.
But national problems are often best solved internationally. The First Gulf War is the most obvious example: an international coalition quickly and efficiently resolved a national (well, two-nation) problem. International support for Ukraine is similar. So is any humanitarian intervention in case of famine or localized epidemic.
There are exceptions: perhaps issues related specifically to international exchange or the international system must be addressed regionally or globally: systemic issues require a systemic response. (I am using “systemic” in the strict technical sense, that of relating to a system of rules or institutions.) Hence the utility of the WTO. Maybe nuclear non-proliferation is similar. There might also be unique situations in which a problem afflicts many nations, and various nations afflicted have some, though not all, of the resources necessary to correct it. If the problem requires an input of all these resources, an international solution may be appropriate. (This might be an “asymmetric” problem—to make this theory more sophisticated, we’d need to talk about asymmetric problem-solving resources instead of global vs. national issues.) Of course, many national issues are also better left at the national level—though it is sometimes possible to fix them at the sub-national level. The principle may sometimes apply to internal as well as international affairs.
Still, be skeptical of appeals to global solutions for global problems. Sometimes those appeals are correct. But they aren’t correct by default.