No Leadership impact.

One of the most repeated ideas in international affairs discourse today is that after World War II the United States created a “free and open international order” and that this order has been responsible for keeping the Indo-Pacific “largely peaceful” for the last 80 years.4 China is then typically said to be promoting a vision “incompatible” with this order—something that should make us worry, as it may herald the return of violent power politics.5

Michael Lind has summarized the perspective:“in my experience, most members of the U.S. foreign policy elite sincerely believe that the alternative to perpetual U.S. world domination is chaos and war.”6 It is indeed true that the years since World War II have been peaceful when compared with most of European history and that violence of all kinds has declined.7 This phenomenon has been dubbed the “New Peace,” and the United States certainly played some role in bringing it about.8

However, there is no consensus among scholars to what extent US actions—or more abstractly, the supposed “order”—contributed to the decline in war and violence. Existing academic explanations stress the role of nuclear weapons restraining states from major war;9 the evolution of territorial norms (as well as regimes and institutions, like the United Nations);10 the development of globalized markets and “trading states”;11 the longer-term spread of reason, sympathy, and feminization alongside the rise of stronger states;12 the settlement of territorial disputes after World War II;13 the spread of democracies;14 the declining utility of war as a rational instrument of statecraft;15 and hegemonic stability, which emphasizes (in its liberal form) how the United States helped create global institutions and shape norms16 and (in its “realist” form) how US power has deterred or compelled rivals to behave.17 This is not the place to judge between the various explanations, but it should be clear that they are diverse and the overall explanation is likely multivariate. Only the realist version of hegemonic stability directly supports the narrative of the free and open international order. Christopher Fettweis has recently sought to test the theory by looking at the changing pattern of global peace/violence relative to US military spending, frequency of intervention, and selection of grand strategy across four presidential administrations (Bush Sr. to Obama). He found no relationship at all. “As it stands,” he concluded, “the only evidence we have regarding the relationship between US power and international stability suggests that the two are unrelated.”18 If US officials and strategic pundits are going to claim that peace is dependent on an abstract order created and maintained by American power, they need to provide serious evidence for their claims. Until then, while we can be thankful that the United States contributed to postwar institutions like the United Nations, helped delegitimize colonialism, and did not abuse its power (as much) as many other states would have, policy makers and scholars should be highly skeptical of more sweeping claims.

Laying aside the question of how the New Peace came about, another oft repeated notion is that China is determined to undermine the contemporary international order, according to Friedberg, by corrupting, subverting, and exploiting it.19 The proof for this claim is generally said to be China’s “militarization” of the South China Sea (SCS) through “salami-slicing” and “grey-zone tactics,”20 and occasionally, a retired Chinese official or Global Times commentator is quoted as representative of China’s official (even if unarticulated) policy and intentions. In the abstract, such claims are alarming—in context, and in balance, rather humdrum. In fact, the evidence of any Chinese intention to destroy, or even merely undermine and exploit, the current order is slight. China is certainly using its growing military power to defend its claims in the SCS and even—on occasion— to coerce its neighbors. It uses protectionist economic policies to boost the prospects of Chinese companies and reduce competition. It employs economic statecraft to serve its interests abroad. And it certainly is opposed to America’s policy of global democracy promotion. However, none of these positions fundamentally challenge the existing order, none of them radically depart from America’s own actions when it was a rising power in the nineteenth century, and none of them obviously surpass America’s own contemporary record of order subversion.

When the United States was a rising power, it took half of Mexico and considered taking the rest, it colonized the Philippines and Hawaii, and it unilaterally seized the maritime choke points of the Caribbean (Puerto Rico and Cuba).21 The United States used tariffs—which by 1857 averaged 20 percent22 and by the end of the nineteenth century were “the highest import duties in the industrial world”23—to protect its industries. It stole intellectual property,24 and it ideologically challenged the governments of the “Old World.” Today, despite no longer being a rising power, the United States has launched two disastrous invasions, tortured prisoners, and dispatches drone strikes at a whim with little international legal authority.25 The point is not that two wrongs make a right; it is that international order is much more resilient than critics seem to realize,26 and it is utopian to expect any rising Great Power to act in a way that uniformly satisfies one’s moral scruples, evolving, in Friedberg’s words, “into a mellow, satisfied, ‘responsible’ status quo power.”27

Friedberg or Harris might object that America’s rise took place in the context of a different order. This is perfectly true, but the more important point is that the long nineteenth century (1815–1914)—the era of America’s rise—was the first iteration of the New Peace.28 The implication is that relative peace can and has coexisted with limited wars, property and territorial thefts, acts of coercion, and aggressive assertions of status. This does not mean any of these are desirable— they are not—but it shows that they need not be fatal to the system. Insofar as there is a lesson from that first period of relative peace, it is that Great Power confrontation is the one thing that is fatal. Accepting this does not mean capitulating in every instance, as implied by some,29 but it does mean rediscovering the rules of Great Power competition30 alongside the art of strategy.31

Focusing only on areas that China’s rise violates the scruples of the established powers, moreover, downplays the extent to which China, has, in fact, conformed to the existing order. As a RAND Corporation report published in 2018 concludes, China has been a supporter—albeit a conditional one—of the international order: “Since China undertook a policy of international engagement in the 1980s . . . the level and quality of its participation in the order rivals that of most other states.”32 The way in which Xi Jinping, following his 2017 Davos speech in defense of globalization, has been heralded as the most prominent champion of international order and defender of globalization underscores the fact that there are different elements of this order, and that China supports many, if not most, of them. Even in places where China is supposedly “altering” the current order, Beijing tends to simultaneously affirm that order. China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, for instance, actually mirrors existing structures, and China has intentionally copied elements and “best practices” of the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. China is playing the same game, even if it is seeking a bigger role within it.33