The dominant framing in Washington is that the United States and China will in the final analysis sink or swim together, and carry most of the rest of the world with them. [...] There’s an academic foundation to this worldview. It assumes that rising powers, now as in the past, face a clear choice when they confront a prevailing international order that was established by a previous generation of great powers. They can either assimilate into the international order or challenge it. [...] In an essay in the National Interest magazine in the summer of 2007 (“A World Without the West,” July/August 2007), we argued that these academic theories were dangerously inadequate and that the consequent mental map was wrong. We reasoned that emerging powers, and China in particular, would most likely neither challenge, nor assimilate to the U.S.-led order, because neither of these options is remotely attractive. Why would the Chinese government embrace a liberal system that largely runs counter to its domestic and international interests? And why pick a fight with the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world and its many wealthy and powerful friends? To see China as boxed-in to choosing between two unattractive options was to take imperfect academic theory too seriously, and, even worse, to misinterpret the behavior of rising powers. Looking beyond this false choice, we noted that rising powers were instead beginning to build a “World Without the West” that “routed around” the existing international order. Upon closer empirical inspection, it was increasingly clear that the emerging powers were preferentially deepening ties among themselves in economic, political, and even security domains. In so doing, they were loosening in relative terms the ties that bind them to the liberal international system centered in the West. [...] This argument made a lot of people uncomfortable, mostly because of an endemic and gross overestimation of the reach, depth and attractiveness of the existing liberal order. Now, seven years later, the World Without the West has come into full view. The biggest story in international politics today is not whether Beijing will be seduced, incentivized, or even compelled to sign onto or buy into the existing international system. Nor is it about how the United States and China are headed into a downward spiral toward World War III—although, as areas of competition intensify, the traditional (assimilate vs. challenge) mindset forces analysts, wrongly, to see conflict as the only and likely alternative. What is happening instead is a concerted effort by the emerging powers to construct parallel multilateral architectures that route around the liberal order and will likely reshape international politics and economics in fundamental ways. The latest and most vivid example of this dynamic is the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which aims to provide an alternative to the iconic Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and their regional sibling, the Asian Development Bank. The AIIB is Beijing’s brainchild and will likely remain firmly in China’s control. India and twenty other developing countries have already signed up as founding members. But the AIIB is only one of many emerging international institutions that are routing around the Western-led order and, according to a recent comprehensive study of these trends, are “complementary or parallel to existing ones, rarely challenging them head-on.” Other examples include political organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation (SCO), the BRICS mechanism, development initiatives such as China’s New Silk Road and economic groupings such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. The list goes on. [...] U.S. strategists will also have to acknowledge that the liberal international order that Americans commonly talk about “defending” is actually more of an aspiration than a reality. This is not to diminish the importance of building an open, rules-based international system, but rather to observe that such a thing hardly exists outside of the confines of narrow geographic and issue areas. [...] The rise of the World Without the West should put to bed for now the persistent post–Cold War dream of a universally accepted and legitimate liberal order. In its place, the United States should aspire to build and expand networks and pockets of economic and political liberalism where and when the best opportunities present themselves. This will mean working with like-minded states and forgoing the rhetoric that the United States can’t advance its interests and can’t manage big problems without the cooperation of China and the other emerging powers. In some cases (like climate change), this is probably true as a matter of numbers. But in most cases it is not. ********************** As Ive said before many, many, times. Liberties and rights are fundamentally contingent upon an underlying order or imperium to enforce and defend those liberties. This is not to say that I like the contemporary liberal order which is simply a cacophony of chaotic contradictory notions. However, this idea that the vague nebulous abstractions like liberty has an intrinsic appeal which would make everyone magically love it and work for it is just stupid. Anyway, times change and we change with the times. Poor USA, still clinging on desperately to their End of History while history has moved on. Guess its our turn now to say tell the liberals that their ideas are outdated. Time to wake up into the 21st century.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 01:46:16 +0000
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