By Abraham Denmark

As an Asia specialist, I spend most of my time thinking about the consequences of Asia’s rising powers – China, India, South Korea, Indonesia, etc. – and what it means for the United States and our allies. It’s a simple trend to identify. China’s economy has been expanding rapidly, as have those of many developing countries. Indeed, the entire Asia-Pacific region continues to be the world’s most dynamic and promising for future growth. The inestimable Ian Bremmer has also pointed out that – along with the BRICS, CIVETS and MIST – Africa has also been an important source of growth in recent years. This is what Fareed Zakaria meant when he wrote about the “Rise of the Rest.”

These trends have unfortunately created a general misperception that “The Rest” represents a new political force in geopolitics – one that will fundamentally threaten today’s liberal international order. In reality, “The Rest” – as a cohesive geopolitical whole – doesn’t exist.  Incongruities between political structures, cultural heritages, economic conditions, and strategic interests of the countries who constitute “The Rest” will make real coordination a near impossibility. While they may agree on specific issues (such as environmental policy or sanctions on Iran), long-standing strategic and historic rivalries and dissimilarities will undermine efforts to build real strategic cooperation.

The BRICS offer an excellent example. Agreements on specific issues do not override the reality that China has long-standing strategic tensions with both India and Russia – tensions that will make strategic cooperation almost impossible. Even though Chinese officials routinely call for a more “democratic” international system, does that mean they will support India becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council? Don’t count on it. Ultimately, there is very little mortar holding the BRICS together.

This stands in sharp contrast to the long-term cohesiveness of the West, which is based on a foundation of deeply shared values, interests, and histories that transcends policy disagreements. On key issues of great strategic significance, the United States has a global network of friends it can rely upon. Thus, while one cannot speak of “The Rest” as a cohesive whole, the West is a geopolitical force to reckon with.

Moreover, the West’s resilience, openness, and dynamism have long been its ultimate sources of strength. It has problems, certainly, but the West has seen far worse than the domestic problems it faces today, and we generally know what the answers are. As a foreign diplomat in Washington is fond of saying, the United States is a single budget cycle away from fixing most of its serious problems.

This cannot be said for many of the world’s rising powers, whose problems are more complex and whose solutions are highly fraught. China must navigate itself through multiple challenges – including urbanization, privatization, marketization, globalization, slowing growth, environmental degradation, corruption, and persistent political upheaval – all on a scale and speed previously unseen in human history. There is no easy path to address these challenges, and any failure could lead to disaster. India, similarly, faces tremendous domestic challenges that could quickly undermine economic growth.

Moreover, “The Rest” largely has no casino online intention of seeing the West’s downfall. Most strategists and officials from China, India, and other rising powers will readily admit that they need a liberal international order as much as the West. Export-oriented economies are especially reliant on public goods like stability, open global markets, and stable global commons – all fundamental features of the liberal international order. Rising powers apparently agree with arguments made in recent books by Robert Kagan and Zbigniew Brzezinski that without the United States, the world would rapidly descend into chaos and violence. As such, they will likely continue to look to the West to provide public goods and help solve global problems.

Still, ‘the Rise of the Rest’ will pose two significant challenges for the West in the coming decades. First, the West will be forced to manage the after-effects of those rising powers that are unable to sustain their development. While the relative rate of growth for rising powers has certainly been fantastic, political and social realities on the ground will make continued growth difficult without significant reform. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. When these countries fall, the financial and human costs may be devastating.

The West will also face the daunting task of managing the success of those rising powers that make the transition from “developing” to “developed.” This will require integrating these new great powers into the international system, and making it clear that on issues of fundamental interest – such as open global commons, the power of international institutions, human rights, and preserving stability – they must adjust to the world, and not vice versa.

And there, of course, is the rub. Nothing is certain in international relations – especially when one looks several decades into the future. Yet most indications suggest that the West is likely to survive, thrive, and maintain strategic cohesion. The Rest, on the other hand, face more profound questions about their long-term prosperity and their ability to build, let alone maintain, any degree of strategic cohesion. Ultimately, the long-term health and success of the liberal international order will be dependent on the will and resolve of the West to fix its problems and promote its interests. The West has done it before, in far more dire circumstances, and I expect that it will succeed again.

Abraham M. Denmark is Senior Project Director for Political and Security Affairs at The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR). The views expressed are his own.

By Daniel Kliman

The international order forged after the Second World War has advanced economic prosperity, kept the peace among the great powers, and promoted democracy and human rights. The order is imperfect and today unrepresentative – it accords disproportionate weight in global governance to Western nations. But the “rise of the rest” will not inevitably lead to the order’s downfall.

Unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, no ascendant nation today is ideologically committed to building a new order that will displace the old. The challenge posed by the “rise of the rest” is less direct: selective undermining by some and free riding by many. This, coupled with the West’s financial casino online difficulties, will render the existing order increasingly brittle.

But the United States is not simply a passive observer of this process; it can take actions that will rejuvenate the international system. Aside from China, the world’s leading rising powers – Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Turkey – are all democracies. These four have yet to fully embrace the existing order, reject it, or offer a detailed alternative. All bring considerable capability and legitimacy to any international endeavor.

If the United States can successfully enlarge the order’s current circle of supporters beyond its longtime democratic allies in Europe and Asia to include these “global swing states,” today’s power shift will not culminate in the end of the Western world. Rather, the United States can realize an adapted and renewed international system that enshrines the principles and practices that have enabled the current order to benefit the West and also the rising rest.

Daniel Kliman is a Transatlantic Fellow for Asia at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

By Jeffrey Gedmin

The finest minds of our times have been engaged for some time now in a deep and ongoing debate over the so-called rise of the Rest (particularly India and China) and what this means for the liberal international order. What we know is clear. Nearly a quarter of a century ago, the end of the Cold War signaled an end of bipolarity and a new fluid moment in international relations. We also know that as other nations come on line — by virtue of things like size of population, economic growth, national self-confidence and strategic ambition — relative shifts in global power are likely to ensue (indeed they have already begun).

I suspect we actually spend far too much time, though, speculating about what something like the rise of China means for the new world order. In truth, we can’t possibly know. To those who see a menace, there’s the rebuttal that China’s rising middle class is likely to seek greater political participation in the years ahead; that as a result, Chinese politics may well became more consensual and democratic, with emerging checks and balances that will mute the more malign aspects of nationalism and diminish the appetite for foreign adventurism. To those who see China’s future as a peaceful one, a rising power wrapped (and restrained) in a global web of economic  interdependence, there is the fact that we’ve fallen prey to analogous wishful thinking  before. A century ago, two popular forecasts stood out: one that the advent of international trade would soon make war obsolete; the other, that the one nation poised to play a leading role for peace in the world was Germany.

Of course, let’s keep forecasting, and thinking about economic trends, defense spending, demographics and social stability in a place like China. Let’s think about policy and incentives to shape a new world order that we view as conducive to our interests, supportive of our values and likely to advance world prosperity, peace and security. Let’s also be humble, though. In this respect, it’s quite possible that the keys to nbso online casino reviews the future lie chiefly with us, “not them” — and, like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz, we ought to look right beneath our very nose if we’re concerned about getting home to a future we want and can believe in.

The Great Recession of 2008, America’s crippling debt problems (and our inability to get entitlement spending under control), and the EU’s single currency are serious self-inflicted wounds which, if not properly tended to, may undermine the very foundations of the West and severely curtail our ability to grow, prosper and project power in the decades ahead. What may have started as a crisis in the financial system has become a crisis of values. In fact, the two were always inextricably linked.

In the United States, what made America of the past great — things such as risk, thrift, self-reliance, humility, and deferred gratification — have slowly been fading as central tenets of American life and key ingredients of the American dream. In foreign policy, we’ve always been at our best when we balance interests and values, and fuse American values to universal values, so that we can work closely with and appeal to the enlightened interests of other nations. As humility has declined at home, it’s no surprise that hubris has increased in our dealing with affairs abroad.

In the European Union there is a similar crisis of values. The EU’s crisis is compounded by the grave strategic error of having forced the introduction of a common currency in the last decade. A number of nations did not want this. Others were simply incapable of sensibly adopting the euro. What drove this? It was principally false lessons from history mixed with the vanity and ambition of elites. The result is becoming clear. A project aimed at bringing Europe together has manifestly had the opposite effect.

There are lessons. To build a strong, liberal international order, it’s indeed important that we soundly reject isolationism and the folly of those who call for us to retreat into our shell. America and its allies must remain engaged and seek to shape the new emerging world order. But let’s show a little modesty. Let’s understand those spheres where we have more control, and those where we have less. Centrally, let’s assume responsibility for the health and vitality of the West and see the current crisis for what it is: an immense challenge, but also an opportunity. It’s time for self-critique, self-examination and self-control. It’s time to adapt, and grow again. If the West cannot solve its problems and set a convincing agenda for its own future, how can we pretend to influence and manage the peaceful rise of the Rest? 

Jeffrey Gedmin is President and CEO of the London-based Legatum Institute.

By Myron Brilliant

For much of the last fifty years, the international system – its structure, operations and goals of its key institutions – remained remarkably stable.  Now that is all changing.  The international system — as we know it today and as represented by such organizations as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, WHO, OECD, United Nations and NATO — has to reform or the institutions at the core of the system will become marginalized or even obsolete.  Moreover, we should expect new institutions to develop that will contribute to a reshaping of the global landscape with profound implications for America and the Western world in geopolitical, security and economic terms.

The reasons why are obvious.  With the economic rise of China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and other emerging economies, these countries rightly are exerting more influence in world affairs and changing the way business is conducted in the international system.  Witness the growing role of China and other leading economies in the global response to the financial crisis of 2007.  Already the G-20 group of developed and developing countries has assumed a more prominent role than the G8 forum, comprising only developed economies, in mitigating the risks associated with the financial crisis and in setting forth a global response.

Building a consensus in any of these institutions for global action in areas as diverse as security and trade is now increasingly difficult, with the addition of more players in decision-making and due to the fact that emerging economies often have very different immediate goals and agendas.  It was never easy to negotiate a multilateral trade round when Europe and the United States largely drove the agenda.  Yet, now we struggle to even get to first base with India, China and other emerging economies in setting forth a serious effort on market access, let alone addressing new impediments to trade and investment stemming from regulatory divergence and state-owned enterprises (SOEs).   When China and India dug in and resisted our charm offensive for more market access and improved disciplines on subsidy practices, it was hardly a surprise that the Doha Round went into deep freeze.

Change will be more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it will be significant. For instance, Europe and the United States may have retained their leadership roles in the IMF and World Bank institutions for now, but these institutions have already had to reform in subtle and not so subtle ways to reflect the growing might of the emerging economies.   No doubt the shape and size of the table (i.e., international system) is evolving today, and will do so even more significantly in the years to come, to reflect the growing weight of China, India, Brazil and other rising economies.

One thing is for sure: in assessing the impact of these rising economic powers, we should be careful about how we group them.   Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs gets credit for coming up with the BRIC concept (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, and China) years ago.  There now are other countries that have become developing economies of significance — like Mexico, Indonesia and Vietnam.   This is a diverse group with differing interests and challenges; it’s hard to say that they are united in policy or actions.   If you look ahead to 2030, the lines thought leaders often draw between developing and developed countries may in fact further blur; scenarios we forecast today might alter significantly as countries like China, in particular, behave vastly differently than some of the other countries with which they are often grouped.

As this evolution occurs, I see five key questions we will confront:

First, will the emerging economies — led by China, India, Russia and Turkey — take on greater global responsibilities or will they remain preoccupied with internal challenges for much of the next decade and beyond?  Many of these so-called rising players are consumed by internal challenges.  Russia may RHIPE sample program (Map only) MapReduce problem definition: The goal of this MapReduce sample program is to test the RHIPE installation by using the min and max functions over numeric hard drive clicking with the Hadoop environment. have re-elected a strong leader, but the country itself faces enormous obstacles in creating legal reforms and modernizing its economy away from dependency on oil.    Similarly, India needs to reform its economy but faces political constraints with no obvious solutions in the short or even medium term.  While China has had (in contrast to India and Russia) tremendous economic success including lifting 500 million people out of poverty in less than 20 years, political reform has been slow in coming; leaders there increasingly are aware of the developing strains on their society resulting from the resentment building up from those left behind and from perceptions about a developing privileged class in that country.

There should be hope that the United States and the West, more generally, can find common ground with China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies to pursue pragmatic approaches to some of the most challenging issues in the world today.  In the past few decades, one billion people have been lifted out of poverty.   With another billion and more people making this social and economic migration between now and 2030, we can and should be optimistic about our collective future.  Can we move quickly enough with the developing world to pursue “win-win scenarios” that advance the welfare of these societies?   Will these countries work with us in tangible ways in supporting innovation, promoting environmental collaboration and fostering stronger health care?   To date, the picture has been mixed, but the hope is that these governments will be more open to partnership in each of these areas.

Second, will these rising economic countries believe they need to develop their own strong separate institutional frameworks — or will they increasingly share the burden of global leadership with the U.S. and EU within the existing albeit reformed international system?  It is easy to say that the burden is on these countries to demonstrate that they want to be “responsible stakeholders” within international institutions, to borrow Bob Zoellick’s phrase, but we also have the burden to encourage their active and appropriate participation.  The key is for government leaders in the developing and developed world to understand this shared burden.

While it is true that leaders from Brazil, Russia, China and India now meet to discuss regional and global issues, this is at this time casino spiele largely a talk-shop;  nothing profound has come out of these discussions.  Certainly, it is hard to see these countries agreeing to map out a radical departure from the existing international system through alternative institutions.   However, these countries will begin to demand changes to the existing system or they won’t play ball with the mandates issued by these governance organizations.

It is worth noting that most of these countries see directional alignment with the United States as essential for global online casino canada stability — even if they at times have different views on critical geopolitical issues (e.g., five plus one on Iran or six-party talks with North Korea).  Certainly, China sees itself as more of a partner of the United States on economic and security matters than it would India or Russia, where the dependency and trust factor is even lower.  And Brazilian President Dilma made it quite explicit when she articulated in Washington, D.C. during her winter visit that her country’s aspiration is to have a strategic relationship with the United States; in contrast, she said Brazil only wanted a commercial relationship with China.

Going forward, we should ask more of China, Brazil and other rising economies with increasing resources and capacities to take on greater responsibility, and to work more closely with us in solving some of the world’s greatest challenges.

Third, as they emerge on the world stage, will these countries increasing flex their new powers in ways that promote strategic cooperation, or undermine it in favor of more nationalistic objectives?  We have seen China increasingly expand its core interests to include vast claims in the South China Sea; can regional cooperation withstand a redefinition that limits the sovereignty of a half-dozen or more neighboring nations?  Can India work with us and others to combat terrorism in South Asia in ways that invite more collaboration among the key actors in that region, with the close cooperation between the security and intelligence communities that requires?   Trust will be a key factor here.

Fourth, will these countries adopt a market-based approach to their economies, or will they implement approaches that undermine the principles of national treatment, level playing field and open markets?  The economic and financial crisis of 2007 has fed oxygen to the argument that “managed capitalism,” or a hybrid state-backed mercantilism, is a sturdier economic model for development.  This argument will play itself out in the 2030 scenario much as those capitalist-socialist models contended in the second half of the 20th century.  Moreover, the period in which the U.S. and Europe account for 50% of world trade is passing.  A new and far more multipolar world of trade powers and regional hubs is emerging.  Managing this concert of commercial powers will be every bit as challenging as balancing military and security relationships in the 19th century.  We can hope to work with China, India and Brazil to combat protectionism.  Yet recent trends are discouraging, as these countries do not yet see as a core strategic interest the promotion of national treatment, competition and open markets in a meaningful way.

Fifth, will the growth of these economies put an inevitable strain on global resources and increase competition for water, oil and other commodities, culminating in a zero-sum race for resources — or is a collaborative approach possible?  In India and China natural energy and water resources are scarce.  Food wastage is a growing problem and developing a farm-to-market supply chain is evolving.   Pressure is rising as we see increasing competition for resources (e.g., China’s appetite for securing resources in Africa).  Global challenges require global solutions.   We need to find ways to address these issues now before they become even more significant.

We know that the world is changing in profound ways.  How we respond to the increasing influence of China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies reflects as much on our own leadership as it does on these countries.   We cannot advance the twin concepts of “strategic trust” and “cooperation” if we are not willing to adapt ourselves and acknowledge that the size and shape of the table has to change to reflect the needs, values and interests of these countries.   We should have a desire to share the burden of global governance and prosperity with these states — and in return have every expectation that they will increasingly act as responsible stakeholders.

This will not happen overnight, this will not happen without challenges, and it will not happen if America is not strong.   But we can advance a “win-win” agenda where our interests and those of China, India, Brazil and others coexist — if we are proactive, frank, open and transparent in our convictions and engagements.

Myron Brilliant is senior vice president for international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.