The price of freedom

The international order that the US and its allies constructed from the ashes of the Second World War is under strain. The two main challenges to the order are America’s continued ability to uphold it and China’s rise. However, the order is much more durable than the frenzy of concern suggests.

Extrapolating from 40 years of Chinese economic dynamism, Western policies are gearing up for the problems of a rising China. Relying on the metrics of gross domestic product, military expenditure, trade volumes, research and development spending, and manufacturing output, China is indeed formidable. But those are all metrics that exaggerate the effect of large populations, and are poor indicators of national power. China has a per capita GDP of $16,842, which is roughly equivalent to the per capita GDP of Iraq, Botswana, or the Dominican Republic. Tracking, instead, geography (number of dissatisfied neighbours), demography (teetering on a cliff due to the catastrophe of its one-child policy and negligible immigration), political institutions (brittle and its bargain of prosperity for autocracy faltering as prosperity stalls), and soft power (caught stealing, committing genocide, revealing its aggressive ambitions), China is precarious. We may be facing the problems of a stalling China rather than a successful China.

China may prove no less disruptive and dangerous stranded in the middle-income trap than it would have been stampeding towards dominance. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) may perceive a closing window of opportunity to wrest the international order out of Western hands before we realise our relative strength, or are prepared to defend the order we created. Hegemons are often not the wealthiest or even strongest powers in the international order – they are the states willing to set and enforce rules. But we in the West shouldn’t doubt that we have the ability to preserve the order. We often lose faith that the truths we hold to be self-evident are universal, but Xi Jinping clearly believes they are, because otherwise he wouldn’t need the architecture of repression. And, fortunately, the CCP appears to have given us the time to prepare, having activated the antibodies against its continued rise.

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Πηγή: engelsbergideas.com