Strengthening existing alliances creates incentives for China to cooperate and reinforces a stable multipolarity

Rather than seeking to confront China directly -- a strategy that could itself lead to conflict -- the United States should determine how to change the order to reinforce its own power. To begin with, this means recognizing that a challenger is far more likely to disrupt than disfigure the order. In Tanzania, for example, China has established an academy where young leaders from various African ruling parties are taught about the subordinate position of courts and the importance of rigid party discipline. But even this project seeks only to offer -- rather than impose -- -China's authoritarian model of governance and development. And at any rate, Beijing's broader efforts to spread its ideology on the continent have had mixed success. The United States, by contrast, has the power and authority to press for changes in the order that could strengthen African support or existing institutions. Yet Washington's management of the order has been underwhelming. The Biden administration's 2021 Summit for Democracy, for example, was intended to shore up liberalism. But the meeting included countries such as India and Nigeria that today are hardly considered paragons of democratic practice; it also largely sidelined civil society and had no concrete agenda or outcomes. On economics, the United States has to a significant degree abandoned its long-held belief in trade liberalization, yet it has not even bothered to frame its aggressive use of tariffs and industrial policy as part of a systematic rethinking of the global economic order. MORE FRIENDS, MORE POWER If recent power transition theory makes clear that the United States needs to rebuild the liberal order to sustain American power, it leaves open how. One promising approach is to address issues that are not yet governed by international norms. Take cybersecurity. To address the growing threat of Chinese and Russian hackers, the Biden administration has made cybersecurity a national priority, yet it has failed to establish broader international cooperation, including by setting down international regulations and penalties for cyberattacks. Other issues for which international standards are deficient or lacking include social media, cross-border data flows, food security, pandemic preparedness, and artificial intelligence. To truly restructure the order, however, the United States also needs buy-in from its allies. An international order cannot be built or rebuilt by the hegemon alone; it takes a coalition of the willing. Consider the Cold War, which could be described as a successful case of a power transition that did not end in direct conflict between the hegemons themselves: confronted by the rise of the Soviet Union, the United States was able to use its alliances to build a liberal international order in ways that strengthened the West and helped contain the Soviet challenge. Indeed, the communist threat gave Washington's allies and partners an unambiguous rationale for supporting such efforts. The new Western-led order was expressed both in military alliances such as NATO and in international institutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the WTO. Today, the rationale for supporting U.S.-led innovations to the order is not as clear. Many countries are glad to do business with both China and the United States and want to preserve that flexibility. Nonetheless, the United States has an advantage. Building on its decades-old alliances and international relationships, it has introduced several new formal arrangements with other countries, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with Australia, India, and Japan, and AUKUS, with Australia and the United Kingdom, which are both underpinned by the desire to contain China. By contrast, China has no special friendships or strategic partners, let alone formal military allies; its emerging partnership with Russia is still fragile. Not surprisingly, the international institutions that Beijing has spearheaded, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of Eurasian countries and the BRICS -- the group founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- have limited influence. Still, as power transition theory shows, Washington cannot rest on its laurels. For several decades, the center of gravity in world politics has been shifting away from the West. China and India have been vying to lead the developing world, and both have sought to highlight the divide between the global South and the West. The United States needs to show that its interests are not in opposition to non-Western countries. At the WTO, for example, Washington has wisely supported changes that aim to be inclusive but are also pragmatic and efficient. These include the increasing use of multilateral negotiations, or negotiations that are in principle open to all parties but are in fact mostly undertaken by only those members that are particularly interested in the issue at hand -- an approach that is endorsed by most developing countries but opposed by India. Similarly, the Biden administration's promotion of "friend shoring," or bringing supply chains out of China and onto less hostile territory, holds tremendous potential for building more trade links with developing countries. But Washington needs to go further. With friend shoring, it needs to explain what its criteria for friendship are and what exactly its friends will get, beyond merely more bilateral trade. By taking such steps, the United States can better respond to rising powers that may reject important elements of the international order yet still buy into much of it. India is the chief example here. Although it is one of Washington's strategic partners, New Delhi holds positions on trade and liberalism that depart significandy from the principles endorsed by the United States. India has a lax approach to intellectual property rights, for instance, and under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, its government has been accused of dramatically eroding civil liberties. But given both countries' wariness about China, they need each other. By rebuilding the order to include new areas or issues in which India has a deep interest -- technology and cyberspace, for example -- the United States can induce more buy-in from India and set the norms for future cooperation or restraint. For now, however, the main focus should be China. A power transition is coming: China is still rising and could soon have the capability to revise the international order, which could ultimately unseat the status quo great power. That is what challengers do once they have risen. If the United States hopes to avoid that outcome, it cannot simply rely on confronting China or complaining about how China is playing the game. It will need to change the game itself.