Suchergebnisse

I am grateful to Edward Steinfeld for his thoughtful review of No One's World. I focus my response to his critique on three issues: the rise of the West, the implications of China's ascent, and the challenge of preserving a rules-based international system.

Whether emerging powers embrace or instead challenge the current international order will be an important determinant of international stability in the years ahead. The material primacy of the traditional Western democracies will wane as emerging powers like China, India, and Brazil continue their ascent; that much we know. What remains unclear is how this change in the distribution of global power will affect the rules and institutions that are the infrastructure of international order.

The advanced industrial democracies are facing a crisis of governability. Globalization is widening the gap between what voters demand and what their governments can deliver. Unless the leading democracies can restore their political and economic solvency, the very model they represent may lose its allure. Adapted from the source document.

This essay is one of ten in a special journal issue discussing a 2002 article, "Power and Weakness" by Robert Kagan, which assessed the structural underpinnings of foreign relations between the United States and Europe. Kagan's observations formed a double argument: First, that the relative power of the United States and the relative weakness of Europe frame the way Americans and Europeans approach international politics; and second, that ideas about the efficacy of power also shape the extent to which one pursues and uses it. Adapted from the source document.