Sometime by year-end, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) will vote on the proposed UN Convention Against Cybercrime. The treaty is opposed by most civil liberties organizations and Internet businesses, although the US position appears uncertain, mostly for reasons of foreign policy. The Convention was recently approved without any government objecting by a special UNGA committee consisting of most countries and may now be given final approval by the UNGA and sent out for ratification. This would not be the first time a majority of UN members approve a high-tech-oriented agreement that is not actively supported by the US and its allies…and it won’t be the last.

It’s important to understand the foreign policy issues underlying the UN’s Cybercrime Convention since these issues will grow in an increasingly multipolar world. The US and its allies opposed the 2019 creation of a UN committee to draft a new cybercrime agreement, partly on the grounds that the Council of Europe had already created a cybercrime convention in 2001. Nonetheless, with support from many countries from the Global South allied with Russia, China and their friends, the UNGA voted to develop a new UN convention on cybercrime. Serious negotiations began a few years later. Along the way, the US and its allies decided that, given the support for a new UN cybercrime treaty, it was preferable to participate in the negotiations rather than boycott them. Three years of contentious negotiations followed, leading to this committee adopting the UN cybercrime convention last August.

Many opposed the decision by the US and its allies to participate in these negotiations on various grounds, perhaps most prominently that these negotiations were being led by interests inimical to human rights and Western values. While there are numerous human rights-based objections to the UN’s cybercrime convention, the West’s decision to participate in these negotiations was evidently based on its assessment that a Western boycott would not have sidelined the process; but simply left Western interests out of the negotiating process.

The foundation of any foreign policy-based assessment of troublesome UN projects like its cybercrime convention is whether it is preferable for the US to boycott the process in hopes that other countries will join America and the troublesome project will derail…or engage, keep a seat at the table and make the best of a difficult environment. The US has experience boycotting UN projects that it didn’t believe reflected American interests or values, ranging from America’s boycott of the UN’s Law of the Sea treaty and the Genocide Convention to America’s boycott of UNESCO, the WHO and the International Criminal Court.

There certainly was a time when a boycott by the US of any UN project would have put an end to that project. Recently, that has not been the case. Such programs—UNESCO, the UN Law of the Sea, WHO—simply continued without the US, often to the benefit of America’s competitors or adversaries. Sometimes, US unilateral boycotts of UN projects gains little support from allies, essentially self-isolating the United States. Such US self-isolation is undoubtedly celebrated in Moscow and Beijing.

On the other hand, engaging in a UN project that the US believes is inevitably headed down the wrong path legitimizes the harmful UN project, encourages other nations to join and may make any US critique more difficult. Consequently, assuming that the critiques of the cybercrime convention are valid, the calculation of whether the US should have engaged in the negotiations and should now vote for the convention must consider the diplomatic assessment of whether a US boycott (hopefully with allies) would actually derail the cybercrime convention. Or whether a US boycott would simply leave the development of global cybercrime rules by participating nations in the hands of America’s competitors and adversaries.

While a US decision to engage in the UN cybercrime convention can be compared to US decisions to boycott the UN Law of the Sea Convention, UNESCO and WHO, any cybercrime convention is obviously quite distinct.

Historically, computer technology has played an important role in military and economic conditions in most Western nations since the 1960s; in all nations since the 1990s. Since the US has been the source of most computer technology and businesses—from mainframe computers to artificial intelligence—America has also been the principal international source of IT standards, rules and regulations. Allowing America to generate global IT standards and rules was historically not much noticed by nations in the Global South… until the 21^st century.

By the early 21^st century, the merger of the Internet and smartphones began to make this technology visibly central to politics, geopolitics, banking, consumer commerce, education, media and crime in all countries. This much wider impact of IT has meant that international standards and rules for IT now have an important and highly-visible impact on every country in the Global South. The result has been a basic shift in attitudes towards international IT standards and rules among developing countries.

It’s no secret that Russia and China have worked to stimulate a wedge between the West and the Global South by emphasizing a history of American-centric international IT standards and rules they describe as hegemonic and self-serving. Were it not for the importance of the Internet and smartphones—super-charged with AI and deepfake hype—to the daily politics and economics of the Global South, efforts to convince the Global South to part ways with the West on such things as cybercrime treaties might not have gotten much traction. Paradoxically, the more that American high-tech businesses and Western civil society complain about the UN cybercrime convention, the more that America’s adversaries point to such criticism as evidence of self-serving US objectives.

As the Biden administration wraps up its term, it will likely decide whether the US will support the widely-criticized UN cybercrime convention. Diplomacy is sometimes deciding to take the least harmful pathway since the ideal pathway is often not available.