U.S. and allies must ‘persuade countries, not dictate to them’

Former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday that the U.S. and other powerful nations must “persuade countries, not dictate to them” in an increasingly multipolar world.

Much of the conversation at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has focused on a breakdown of trust between populations and world leaders, and how to restore it.

Allianz CEO Oliver Bäte told CNBC Tuesday that an “increasing detachment of the political elite from the working class” was the “number one risk for our societies.”

And Brown, who served as British prime minister from 2007 to 2010 after 10 years as chancellor of the exchequer under Tony Blair, said leaders needed to consider that they are operating in a “different world from where we were 10 or 20 years ago.

“It’s no longer a unipolar world, it’s multipolar, there are multiple centers of power. It’s no longer neoliberal economics, it’s more mercantilist economics, states doing their own thing, and protectionist trade policies have become ‘in’ and we’ve seen a retreat from globalization,” Brown told CNBC on the sidelines of WEF.

“To get people to operate, you’ve got to recognize you’re in a new world. America and all the big countries have got to persuade countries, they can’t dictate to them, and we’ve got to think about how we can solve the individual problems — so famine in Africa, we’ve got war in Ukraine, we’ve got Gaza, we’ve got energy prices and the energy transition, climate change as a whole.”

He added that leaders need to look at how individual nations can cooperate on each of these issues individually if any progress is to be made.

Netanyahu ‘surrounded’ by one-state extremists

Brown earlier this month penned an op-ed outlining how close a little-known process of negotiations during his premiership in 2007 and 2008 came to achieving a lasting peace accord in the Middle East.

Amid intensive discussions, he described how then-Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud worked through the “parameters of a 22-state pan-Arab agreement to recognise Israel” side-by-side with the creation of an “independent and economically viable Palestinian state.”

According to Olmert’s memoirs and Brown’s recollections, these discussions got as far as maps being drawn up and negotiations over refugee repatriations, security and border enforcement, a security agreement and international economic support for establishing a Palestinian state.

Brown told CNBC Wednesday that he still believes this should be the template for establishing lasting peace in the region, but that it is “incredibly difficult because nobody is trusting each other at the moment.”

He also suggested that such a plan would struggle against the current composition of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Brown said he worked closely with Netanyahu during is tenure as Israeli finance minister between 2003 and 2005.

“My worry is that he’s surrounded by a group of people who actually cannot see anything other than a one-state solution. Perhaps that’s where he is now, it wasn’t entirely where he was when I used to talk to him,” Brown told CNBC’s Tania Bryer.

“What we’ve got to do now is understand that those people who are opposing a two-state solution — and that’s Hamas and those people surrounding the Netanyahu government from the extreme right — they’ve got to be isolated by the force of worldwide opinion.”

He urged the U.S., Europe, Middle Eastern states, China and other Asian powers to “build a coalition” that isolates those on both sides rejecting the aim of a two-state solution.

Yet he acknowledged the difficulties in bringing the two sides to the table, given that Israel is “in trauma” as a result of the “hideous” Oct. 7 massacre of civilians by Hamas, and that Palestinians are growing up witnessing the “totally unacceptable” loss of civilian life caused by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

“We have got huge difficulties to overcome, but my message to world leaders is ‘do not give up on the idea that the only way forward is a two-state solution’,” Brown concluded.

“We can talk about temporary measures, cease-fires and so and so forth, but unless we focus on the lasting, enduring solution to this problem, we will still have the problem many years from now.”