U.S. heg is key to multilateral cooperation that solves a laundry list – including but transition causes instability and conflict

It’s difficult to imagine China defending a rule-based, open international order if it were a unipolar power, much less making an effort to uphold a minimum level of human rights in the world. Regardless of your opinion on U.S. global leadership over the last two decades, however, there is good reason to fear its relative decline compared with China and other emerging nations. To begin with, hegemonic transition periods have historically been the most destabilizing eras in history. This is not only because of the malign intentions of the rising and established power(s). Even if all the parties have benign, peaceful intentions, the rise of new global powers necessitates revisions to the “rules of the road.” This is nearly impossible to do in any organized fashion given the anarchic nature of the international system, where there is no central authority that can govern interactions between states. We are already starting to see the potential dangers of hegemonic transition periods in the Asia-Pacific (and arguably the Middle East). As China grows more economically and militarily powerful, it has unsurprisingly sought to expand its influence in East Asia. This necessarily has to come at the expense of other powers, which so far has primarily meant the U.S., Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Naturally, these powers have sought to resist Chinese encroachments on their territory and influence, and the situation grows more tense with each passing day. Should China eventually emerge as a global power, or should nations in other regions enjoy a similar rise as Kenny suggests, this situation will play itself out elsewhere in the years and decades ahead. All of this highlights some of the advantages of a unipolar system. Namely, although the U.S. has asserted military force quite frequently in the post-Cold War era, it has only fought weak powers and thus its wars have been fairly limited in terms of the number of casualties involved. At the same time, America’s preponderance of power has prevented a great power war, and even restrained major regional powers from coming to blows. For instance, the past 25 years haven’t seen any conflicts on par with the Israeli-Arab or Iran-Iraq wars of the Cold War. As the unipolar era comes to a close, the possibility of great power conflict and especially major regional wars rises dramatically. The world will also have to contend with conventionally inferior powers like Japan acquiring nuclear weapons to protect their interests against their newly empowered rivals. But even if the transitions caused by China’s and potentially other nations’ rises are managed successfully, there are still likely to be significant negative effects on International Relations. In today’s “globalized” world, it is commonly asserted that many of the defining challenges of our era can only be solved through multilateral cooperation. Examples of this include[s] climate change, health pandemics, organized crime and terrorism, global financial crises, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, among many others. A unipolar system, for all its limitations, is uniquely suited for organizing effective global action on these transnational issues. This is because there is a clear global leader who can take the initiative and, to some degree, compel others to fall in line. In addition, the unipole’s preponderance of power lessens the intensity of competition among the global players involved. Thus, while there are no shortages of complaints about the limitations of global governance today, there is no question that global governance has been many times more effective in the last 25 years than it was during the Cold War. The rise of China and potentially other powers will create a new bipolar or multipolar order. This, in turn, will make solving these transnational issues much more difficult. Despite the optimistic rhetoric that emanates from official U.S.-China meetings, the reality is that Sino-American competition is likely to overshadow an increasing number of global issues in the years ahead. If other countries like India, Turkey, and Brazil also become significant global powers, this will only further dampen the prospects for effective global governance.