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the United States to use its commanding global military position to strike bargains with re-
gional powers across security, economic, and political realms. The key is whether the United
States can provide—and be seen as providing—public goods in the area of security (and per-
haps in other areas). If so, it will continue to be able to offer system functions and thereby be
able to negotiate liberal hegemonic agreements over global rules and institutions. If security
becomes a good provided increasingly on a bilateral basis to individual states, the American-
centered order moves more in the direction of a hub-and-spoke system that is less universal
and more fragmented. A second variable is the ability of the United States to actually agree
to reductions in its rights and privileges, sharing rule and authority. This is both a question of
domestic politics—that is, can the United States politically agree to be a more normal state
in regard to rules and institution—and a question of its ability to credibly make commitments
and signal restraint. Finally, a third variable is the degree to which other major states—rising
powers such as China and India—in fact want to operate within a liberal international order
(of one kind or another). To the extent that their demands on the system are primarily about
the distribution of authority and rights, and not about the underlying principles of liberal or-
der as such, it will be more likely that new bargains and agreements can be reached that pre-
serve the basic framework of the existing system.
Finally, I return to the question of whether the United States has basic interests and incent-
ives for operating in a rule-based order. There are reasons to think it does, reasons relating to
the preservation of its hegemonic position, the functional organization of the system for the
pursuit of economic gain, and the search for a fit between its identity and the principles and
logic of international order.
The American-led system of liberal order is evolving toward something new and different.
We do not know how different it will be or, indeed, whether the liberal character of the sys-
tem will endure. But there is reason to think that the liberal character will persist. After all,
the liberal order may have emerged first in the West, but it has spread worldwide. Within
its cooperative frameworks, the world's democratic capitalist countries are engaged in un-
precedented cooperation—policy coordination, investment and exchange, social and cultural
entanglement, and strategic partnership. This is what liberal internationalist thinkers of the
twentieth century envisaged, and this is what they got. But dilemmas and tensions infuse this
order. In many ways, they are inherent in the unresolved intellectual and political tensions
within liberalism itself. But they have been sharply revealed anew in the controversies and
political disputes that have erupted in the wake of American unipolarity and America's glob-
al actions following September 11.
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