Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Several plans have been proposed. All of them entail adding new members—such as Ger-
many, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, and others—and reforming the voting procedures.
Almost all of the candidates for permanent membership are mature or rising democracies.
The goal, of course, is to make them stakeholders in the United Nations and thereby
strengthen the primacy of the United Nations as a vehicle for global collective action. There
really is no substitute for the legitimacy that the United Nations can offer to emergency ac-
tions—humanitarian interventions, economic sanctions, uses of force against terrorists, and
so forth. Public support in advanced democracies grows rapidly when their governments can
stand behind a United Nations-sanctioned action.
Fourth, the United States should accommodate and institutionally engage China. China
will most likely be a dominant state, and the United States will need to yield to it in various
ways. As I argued in the previous section, the United States should respond to the rise of Ch-
ina by strengthening the rules and institutions of the liberal international order—deepening
their roots, integrating rising capitalist democracies, sharing authority and functional roles.
The United States should intensify cooperation with Europe and renew joint commitments to
alliances and multilateral global governance. The more that China faces not just the United
States but the entire OECD world of capitalist democracies, the better. This is not to argue
that China must face a grand counterbalancing alliance against it. Rather, it should face a
complex and highly integrated global system—one that is so encompassing and deeply en-
trenched that it essentially has no choice but to join it and seek to prosper within it.
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The United States should also be seeking to construct a regional security order in East
Asia that can provide a framework for managing the coming shifts. The idea is not to block
China's entry into the regional order but to help shape its terms, looking for opportunities
to strike strategic bargains at various moments along the shifting power trajectories and en-
croaching geopolitical spheres. The big bargain that the United States will want to strike is
this: to accommodate a rising China by offering it status and position within the regional or-
der in return for Beijing's acceptance and accommodation of Washington's core strategic in-
terests, which include remaining a dominant security provider within East Asia. In striking
this strategic bargain, the United States will also want to try to build multilateral institutional
arrangements in East Asia that will tie China to the wider region. China has already grasped
the utility of this strategy in recent years—and it is now actively seeking to reassure and co-
opt its neighbors by offering to embed itself in regional institutions such at the ASEAN Plus
3 and Asian Summit. This is, of course, precisely what the United States did in the decades
after World War II, building and operating within layers of regional and global economic,
political, and security institutions—thereby making itself more predictable and approachable
and reducing the incentives that other states would otherwise have to resist or undermine the
United States by building countervailing coalitions.
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