Smart Power Blog

Very interesting. I would add that it's about combining economic and military with regime/norm power. Part of what China is doing is playing off of lack of global consensus on what it is "appropriate" for countries to do.

The current system has an unresolved conflict -- what do you do when geo-political or human rights demands are in conflict with national economic self interest? All countries face this conflict at least sometimes, and any system of rules will have some sort of problem like this.

For small countries, the choice is clear. They have to follow along with the group against their own self interest. They must toe the line on norms or face isolation and punishment. Big countries have a choice, they can play along but they don't have to.

The reasons to not play along and serve one's own interest should be self-evident. But why should a big country toe the line? The reason is because the norms, or at least control of the norms, serve as power against other big countries. In other words, there is a cost to hegemony. If you want to control the norms to which all of the small countries adhere, you have to adhere to certain rules -- you have to follow them yourself, basically, to some degree. This exposes you to other big countries who don't really have to follow the norms, since they are big enough to sustain being shunned. So the hegemon kind of needs for them to "act like they are playing along" so that the norm structure holds.

Think of big shot tenured professors and faculty meetings. The big shots don't need to come to the meetings, but the chair would very much like them to come as their absence makes the smaller profs question the chair's strength/sway. So suddenly, the big profs have a threat against the chair. So in exchange, the chair has to offer something.

China is playing this game with us. In particular, they are refraining from undermining two norms that are crucial to U.S. hegemony: 1. Our enormous military advantage over everyone 2. Free market economics. The deal is basically that they will toe the line on this stuff, but will otherwise not heed any informal requests from the U.S. They will trade with whom they want, how they want, so long as it's "free market" and they will not try to military coerce other nations. They announced this for Paulson's visit to remind the U.S. that they are being not-so-military by choice.

This is not the place to go on about this but the U.S. has put itself in a really weak position here. The basic problem is that the U.S., like the department chair, is trying to ward off an unpleasant truth, which is always costly and the costs just increase over time. The unpleasant truth is that China is way too powerful already to be put in the same pool with the assistant professors. Both countries play like "we are trying to integrate growing but still backward China into the global world." You know, we're facilitating the "peaceful rise of China."

Bullshit. They are already risen. Our "global power" is a sham, at least in Asia. They are the big player there, we are just visiting. The right move for us would be to acknowledge that and play the game back against them. Switch positions. Let them be the hegemons over Asia and let us be the demure 2nd power. That is what it is going to be eventually, anyway. But if we give it to them, rather than waiting for them to take it from us, we will control the process. Suddenly we start telling our little friends in the region "well, we'd like to help you there, but China is your boss now." See how popular the Chinese are then.

Power and responsibility must always be matched or there will be big problems. We have less power than we think we do, the Chinese have less responsibility than power. We should shift some to them and let them squirm.