The United States As Powers Within The International System

The rising of China will be America’s greatest long-term threat because it breaks the world power balance. The relative power logic shows that the increase in the China’s power will make the America’s power decrease. Chinese defense budget grows from $100 billion in 2011 to $215 billion in 2017 while American defense budget decline from $708 billion to $611 billion in the same period. Although the America’s military investment still remarkably higher than China’s, the gap is closer. Once China achieves the regional hegemon, it will attempt to expand its influence on other regions. Moreover, the benefits form institution liberalism system such as the role in UN will encourage China’s desire to replace American’s position. Therefore, when China reaching higher dominating position, it will do not want a peer. In other words, China will gain more power and reach regional hegemon to overcome America, and America will seek to prevent their great powers or, so the predictable outcome may be war.

In his article, “The Future of the Liberal World Order”, John Inkenberry discusses what he sees as a global shift in power, from the Western and Northern powers such as the United States and Great Britain to the more Eastern and Southern developing states like China, India and Brazil. This potential shift in power has sparked a fear in many people. This fear, as the global power switches from West to East and North to South, stems from the thinking that these new nations that are coming to power will abolish the liberal world order that we all know. I however believe that instead of challenging the United States for power and changing the world order to more reflect their ideologies, these emerging nations will instead seek a greater position of leadership in the already existing world order. Firstly, I will provide an argument of Inkenberry’s main arguments and why realists’ have started to worry. Second, I will show how China is rising to threaten the United States superpower position in today’s world order, and finally I will illustrate ways which show that China is not challenging the Liberal World Order and why.

Hegemonic stability theory can be defined as an international leader established from the last global war (a hegemon) that provides the international public goods of security and rule enforcement, allowing cooperation to take place. The lack of a hegemon, or a severely weakened, leads to a return of anarchic conditions and states suffer from fear in a security dilemma. Power transition can also explain preponderance theory. “A dissatisfied challenger rises in capabilities, the international system moves from stability-promoting structural clarity to crises-prone structural ambiguity” (Packer

As a result, the U.S is beginning to decline its influence, especially with deprioritizing some of its longest allies. The United States is starting to afoot its decision by retrenching in frontier region, as Grygiel and Mitchell state, “U.S. retrenchment from these regions creates a permissive environment for rising or reassertive powers” this can potentially be a problem for smaller states because, once the U.S. decides to leave the area unattended, provisional powers like China will try to assert its influence and Grygiel and Mitchell talk about low-cost revision, in which rising powers try to have marginal gains by not moving in too aggressively than what their ability allows them for. Furthermore, once the United States leaves, there will not be a global power that restrains these emerging rising powers from attempting to allocated themselves as leading power. The reason why the U.S. influence is declining, is due to technology, budget cuts and geographic location which all have major play with the U.S. deprioritization of alliances. Consequently, the U.S. has reached a certain point in which it cannot have a smooth transition from departing away from its alliance, especially since it has kindred them for so long. Commitment to its alliances does

The article “China’s Challenge to US Hegemony,” by Christopher Layne was a wonderful article talking about the China challenges the U.S hegemony. In the beginning Layne said that against popular belief the period of American hegemony is drawing to an end and the rise of China is the biggest reason for this. Layne describes how throughout history the emergence of new power in the international system have been “geopolitically destabilizing” and China is no different therefore they are major doubts that they will rise peacefully. To illustrate this Layne used the example of the rise of Japan, United States, and Germany all contributed to the “international political frictions that culminated in two world wars.” Layne address the ideas of engagement

In a brief 2012 interview with PBS Newshour, Zbigniew Brzezinski offered his opinion on how the United States will need to act during the ongoing changes in the world’s power structure: the rising influence of China and the East, the decline in power of the United States and the West, and a shift in state interactions to focus on global issues. Brzezinski suggests that, in response to these issues, “America ought to strive to create some sort of balance, global equilibrium, so that we can all collectively address the problems that the world faces ” (PBS Newshour, 2012). There are three main components of his argument: first, that America needs to expand the West to include Russia and Turkey as future allies. Next, America needs to re-evaluate

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of its economic system the United States became more powerful than ever. Now as world hegemon, the United States continued to trump its cultural values in their quest to spread the American ways around the world. It is during this period that we adopted the grand strategy of promoting a more liberal international order. The world experienced a proliferation in international organizations as well as more open and inclusive trade

The United States focused on itself taking the years after the Civil War to rebuild and to become a stronger society. The slaves being granted there freedom, the rise in technology helping business to make more money, and yet women weren’t able to vote. The Reconstruction faltered and a bigger disappointment in relation to women, since the Fourteenth amendment only commented on males not females. Society as a whole were going through changes, from family dynamics, progressive reform, federal government passing laws that affected all, and international relations fluctuating.

In multi-polar theory, world order is achieved through the cooperation of multiple power systems. In this system powerful states counter-balance each other. It is mainly achieved through international law, international cooperation and economic coordination. The negative side of multi-polarity is that it leads to vulnerability and interdependence, modernization, national interests, multilateralism and problems with international

Today, the United States is known around the world as an independent world power that strives to lead the world in granting freedom and independence for all of it’s citizens. But our country’s first colonists had a much different experience than American’s do today. They had little control over the colonies themselves. The colonies were taxed randomly, and were given no representation in their government. As the colonists began to be greatly displeased with this situation they began a revolution that would bring about the creation of one of the most important documents in our country’s history.

Snyder claims that realism failed to predict the Cold War. Given this, Mearsheimer states “China cannot rise peacefully.” Since realists describe the world as a self-help system, according to Posen, every country “must look to its own interests relative to those of others” and because “security is the preeminent issue in an anarchic world, the distribution of capabilities to attack and defend should matter.” Thus, because China’s strive for regional hegemony inevitably threatens the power dynamic of the global system, the U.S. will, according to Mearsheimer, take an offensive realist approach that will eventually lead to war. In addition, as seen in post-Cold War, economic stability greatly determines the distribution of power. Friedberg notes, that the projected “speed and magnitude of China’s growth in recent decades appears to be unprecedented” and as early as 2015, “China’s economy could overtake that of the United States.” Although the U.S. faces an unprecedented challenge to economic power, according to Ikenberry, China has signaled cooperation by “redoubling its participation in existing institutions, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit or working with the other great powers in the region to build new ones.” Nevertheless, following the actions of the U.S. post WWII, China strategically makes “itself more predictable and approachable” to reduce “the incentives for other

International change takes place when great powers rise and fall and followed by the shift in the balance of power (Jackson and Sorensen, 2003).

The promotion of the Westphalian system at the core of the United States foreign policy is not possible with the challenge of global governance (Sarkar, p. 2). If the United States continues to promote unipolarity through the promotion of the Westphalian order, opposing major powers will being to work together to weaken the hegemon because they have a mutual interest to de-thrown the United States. Instead of promoting the Westphalian order (i.e. unipolarity) at the core of foreign policy the United States should promote a multipolar order by way of détente.

As he notes that over the last half century, the international order has assimilated many rising powers into the political and economic landscape (Ikenberry, 58). Ikenberry claims this international order, or liberal order, is built upon the system of Westphalian relations (Ikenberry, 60). Furthermore, the liberal order became established when Britain advocated free trade (Ikenberry, 60). After the great wars, in the twentieth century, the United States took reign of the Liberal order and pushed liberal ideologies upon the world (Ikenberry, 60). Such leadership is seen through the creation of the UN, which created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Ikenberry, 61). Notions of rights, sovereignty and global order followed, leaving us with the concept, as Ikenberry put it: “the responsibility to protect” (Ikenberry, 61). The United States led Liberal order expanded further with the development of multilateral institutions, alliances, free trade deals, and client states (Ikenberry, 61). Consequently, the United States created an order of ideals about markets, openness, and social stability (Ikenberry, 65). However, from these ideals states such as China have risen in power greatly, which creates worry in neighboring states (Ikenberry, 65). Nevertheless, China cannot act aggressively unless it is willing to face severe backlash (Ikenberry, 65). As a result,

At this point in time, the main actors in the international system are nation-states seeking an agenda of their own based on personal gain and national interest. Significantly, the most important actor is the United States, a liberal international economy, appointed its power after the interwar period becoming the dominant economy and in turn attained the position of hegemonic stability in the international system. The reason why the United States is dominating is imbedded in their intrinsic desire to continuously strive for their own national interest both political and economic. Further, there are other nature of actors that are not just nation-states, including non-states or transnational,