World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Disraeli called the unification of Germany in 1871 “a greater political event than the French Revolution” and concluded that “the balance of power has been entirely destroyed.” The Westphalian and the Vienna European orders had been based on a divided Central Europe whose competing pressures—between the plethora of German states in the Westphalian settlement, and Austria and Prussia in the Vienna outcome—would balance each other out. What emerged after the unification of Germany was a dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all the continental countries together. The bond of legitimacy had disappeared. Everything now depended on calculations of power.

Bismarck understood that a potentially dominant power at the center of Europe faced the constant risk of inducing a coalition of all others, much like the coalition against Louis XIV in the eighteenth century and Napoleon in the early nineteenth. Only the most restrained conduct could avoid incurring the collective antagonism of its neighbors. All of Bismarck’s efforts thereafter would be devoted to an elaborate series of maneuvers to forestall this “cauchemar des coalitions” (nightmare of coalitions), as he called it, using the French phrase. In a world of five, Bismarck counseled, it was always better to be in the party of three. This involved a dizzying series of partly overlapping, partly conflicting alliances (for example, an alliance with Austria and a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia) with the aim of giving the other great powers—except the irreconcilable France—a greater interest to work with Germany than to coalesce against it.

The genius of the Westphalian system as adapted by the Congress of Vienna had been its fluidity and its pragmatism; ecumenical in its calculations, it was theoretically expandable to any region and could incorporate any combination of states. With Germany unified and France a fixed adversary, the system lost its flexibility. It took a genius like Bismarck to sustain the web of counterbalancing commitments keeping the equilibrium in place by a virtuoso performance that forestalled general conflict during his tenure. But a country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.

After Bismarck’s forced departure in 1890 (after a clash with the new Kaiser Wilhelm II over the scope of his authority), his system of overlapping alliances was maintained only tenuously. Leo von Caprivi, the next Chancellor, complained that while Bismarck had been able to keep five balls in the air simultaneously, he had difficulty controlling two. The Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was not renewed in 1891 on the ground that it was partly incompatible with the Austrian alliance—which, in Bismarck’s view, had been precisely its utility. Almost inevitably, France and Russia began exploring an alliance. Such realignments had happened several times before in the European kaleidoscope of shifting orders. The novelty now was its institutionalized permanence. Diplomacy had lost its resilience; it had become a matter of life and death rather than incremental adjustment. Because a switch in alliances might spell national disaster for the abandoned side, each ally was able to extort suppo...

By the turn of the twentieth century, military planners—drawing on what they took to be the lessons of mechanization and new methods of mobilization—began to aim for total victory in all-out war. A system of railways permitted the rapid movement of military forces. With large reserve forces on all sides, speed of mobilization became of the essence. German strategy, the famous Schlieffen Plan, was based on the assessment that Germany needed to defeat one of its neighbors before it could combine with others to attack from east and west. Preemption was thereby built into its military planning. Germany’s neighbors were under the converse imperative; they had to accelerate their mobilization and concerted action to reduce the impact of possible German preemption. Mobilization schedules dominated diplomacy; if political leaders wanted to control military considerations, it should have been the other way around.

But history punishes strategic frivolity sooner or later. World War I broke out because political leaders lost control over their own tactics. For nearly a month after the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in June 1914 by a Serbian nationalist, diplomacy was conducted on the dilatory model of many other crises surmounted in recent decades. Four weeks elapsed while Austria prepared an ultimatum. Consultations took place; because it was high summer, statesmen took vacations. But once the Austrian ultimatum was submitted in July 1914, its deadline imposed a great urgency on decision making, and within less than two weeks, Europe moved to a war from which it never recovered.

All these decisions were made when the differences between the major powers were in inverse proportion to their posturing. A new concept of legitimacy—a meld of state and empire—had emerged so that none of the powers considered the institutions of the others a basic threat to their existence. The balance of power as it existed was rigid but not oppressive. Relations between the crowned heads were cordial, even social and familial. Except for France’s commitment to regain Alsace-Lorraine, no major country had claims against the territory of its neighbor. Legitimacy and power were in substantial balance. But in the Balkans among the remnants of the Ottoman possessions, there were countries, Serbia in the forefront, threatening Austria with unsatisfied claims of national self-determination. If any major country supported such a claim, a general war was probable because Austria was linked by alliance to Germany as Russia was to France. A war whose consequences had not been considered descended on Western civilization over the essentially parochial issue of the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince by a Serb nationalist, giving Europe a blow that obliterated a century of peace and order.

In the forty years following the Vienna settlement, the European order buffered conflicts. In the forty years following the unification of Germ...

and Germany threatened to become congenital. Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.

Europe had constructed an international order from three hundred years of conflict. It threw it away because its leaders did not understand the consequences when they entered World War I—and though they did understand the consequences of another conflagration, they recoiled before the implications of acting on their foresight. The collapse of international order was essentially a tale of abdication, even suicide.

When states are not governed in their entirety, the international or regional order itself begins to disintegrate. Blank spaces denoting lawlessness come to dominate parts of the map. The collapse of a state may turn its territory into a base for terrorism, arms supply, or sectarian agitation against neighbors. Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and Somalia. When one also takes into account the agonies of Central Africa—where a generations-long Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighboring states, and conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasize similarly—a significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of effectively falling out of the international state system altogether.

Of all of Asia’s historic political and cultural entities, Japan reacted the earliest and by far the most decisively to the Western irruption across the world. Situated on an archipelago some one hundred miles off the Asian mainland at the closest crossing, Japan long cultivated its traditions and distinctive culture in isolation. Possessed of ethnic and linguistic near homogeneity and an official ideology that stressed the Japanese people’s divine ancestry, Japan turned conviction of its unique identity into a kind of near-religious commitment. This sense of distinctness gave it great flexibility in adjusting its policies to its conception of national strategic necessity. Within the space of little more than a century after 1868, Japan moved from total isolation to extensive borrowing from the apparently most modern states in the West (for the army from Germany, for parliamentary institutions and for the navy from Britain); from audacious attempts at empire building to pacifism and thence to a reemergence of a new kind of major-power stance; from feudalism to varieties of Western authoritarianism and from that to embracing democracy; and in and out of world orders (first Western, then Asian, now global). Throughout, it was convinced that its national mission could not be diluted by adjusting to the techniques and institutions of other societies; it would only be enhanced by successful adaptation.

At the apex of Japan’s society and its own view of world order stood the Japanese Emperor, a figure conceived, like the Chinese Emperor, as the Son of Heaven, an intermediary between the human and the divine. This title—insistently displayed on Japanese diplomatic dispatches to the Chinese court—was a direct challenge to the cosmology of the Chinese world order, which posited China’s Emperor as the single pinnacle of human hierarchy. In addition to this status (which carried a transcendent import above and beyond what would have been claimed by any Holy Roman Emperor in Europe), Japan’s traditional political philosophy posited another distinction, that Japanese emperors were deities descended from the Sun Goddess, who gave birth to the first Emperor and endowed his successors with an eternal right to rule. According to the fourteenth-century “Records of the Legitimate Succession of the Divine Sovereigns,” Japan is the divine country. The heavenly ancestor it was who first laid its foundations, and the Sun Goddess left her descendants to reign over it forever and ever. This is true only of our country, and nothing similar may be found in foreign lands. That is why it is called the divine country.

Japan drew from the Western challenge a conclusion contrary to that of China after the appearance of a British envoy in 1793 (discussed in the next chapter). China reaffirmed its traditional stance of dismissing the intruder with aloof indifference while cultivating China’s distinctive virtues, confident that the vast extent of its population and territory and the refinement of its culture would in the end prevail. Japan set out, with studious attention to detail and subtle analysis of the balance of material and psychological forces, to enter the international order based on Western concepts of sovereignty, free trade, international law, technology, and military power—albeit for the purpose of expelling the foreign domination. After a new faction came to power in 1868 promising to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians,” they announced that they would do so by mastering the barbarians’ concepts and technologies and joining the Westphalian world order as an equal member. The new Meiji Emperor’s coronation was marked with the Charter Oath signed by the nobility, promising a sweeping program of reform, which included provisions that all social classes should be encouraged to participate. It provided for deliberative assemblies in all provinces, an affirmation of due process, and a commitment to fulfill the aspirations of the population. It relied on the national consensus, which has been one of the principal strengths—perhaps the most distinctive feature—of Japanese socie...

The members of the established international order were too exhausted by World War I and too preoccupied with the mounting European crisis to resist. Only one Western country remained in the way of this design: the United States, the country that had forcibly opened up Japan less than a century earlier. As though history contained a narrative, the first bombs of a war between the two countries fell on American territory in 1941, when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American mobilization in the Pacific eventually culminated in the use of two nuclear weapons (the sole military use of these weapons to date), bringing about Japan’s unconditional surrender.

Japan adjusted to the debacle by methods similar to its response to Commodore Perry: resilience sustained by an indomitable national spirit based on a distinctive national culture. To restore the Japanese nation, Japan’s postwar leaders (almost all of whom had been in the public service in the 1930s and 1940s) portrayed surrender as adaptation to American priorities; indeed, Japan used the authority of the American occupation regime to modernize more fully and to recover more rapidly than it could have by purely national efforts. It renounced war as an instrument of national policy, affirmed principles of constitutional democracy, and reentered the international state system as an American ally—though a low-key one more visibly concerned with economic revival than with participation in grand strategy. For nearly seven decades, this new orientation has proved an important anchor of Asian stability and global peace and prosperity.

Japan’s postwar posture was frequently described as a new pacifism; in fact it was considerably more complex. Above all, it reflected an acquiescence in American predominance and an assessment of the strategic landscape and the imperatives of Japan’s survival and long-term success. Japan’s postwar governing class accepted the constitution drafted by American occupying authorities—with its stringent prohibitions on military action—as a necessity of their immediate circumstances. They avowed its liberal-democratic o...

As at other pivotal moments in its history, Japan is moving toward a redefinition of its broader role in international order, sure to have far-reaching consequences in its region and beyond. Searching for a new role, it will assess once again, carefully, unsentimentally, and unobtrusively, the balance of material and psychological forces in light of the rise of China, Korean developments, and their impact on Japan’s security. It will examine the utility and record of the American alliance and its considerable success in serving wide-ranging mutual interests; it will also consider America’s withdrawal from three military conflicts. Japan will conduct this analysis in terms of three broad options: continued emphasis on the American alliance; adaptation to China’s rise; and reliance on an increasingly national foreign policy. Which of them will emerge as dominant, or whether the choice is for a mix of them, depends on Japan’s calculations of the global balance of power—not formal American assurances—and how it perceives underlying trends. Should Japan perceive a new configuration of power unfolding in its region or the world, it will base its security on its judgment of reality, not on traditional alignments. The outcome therefore depends on how credible the Japanese establishment judges American policy in Asia to be and how they assess the overall balance of forces. The long-term direction of U.S. foreign policy is as much at issue as Japan’s analysis.

No mythic founder has been credited with promulgating the Hindu tradition, India’s majority faith and the wellspring of several others. History has traced its evolution, dimly and incompletely, through a synthesis of traditional hymns, legends, and rituals from cultures along the Indus and Ganges rivers and plateaus and uplands north and west. In the Hindu tradition, however, these specific forms were the diverse articulations of underlying principles that predated any written text. In its diversity and resistance to definition—encompassing distinct gods and philosophical traditions, the analogues of which would likely have been defined as separate religions in Europe—Hinduism was said to approximate and prove the ultimate oneness of manifold creation, reflecting “the long and diversified history of man’s quest for reality . . . at once all-embracing and infinite.”

China, until the modern age, imposed its own matrix of customs and culture on invaders so successfully that they grew indistinguishable from the Chinese people. By contrast, India transcended foreigners not by converting them to Indian religion or culture but by treating their ambitions with supreme equanimity; it integrated their achievements and their diverse doctrines into the fabric of Indian life without ever professing to be especially awed by any of them. Invaders might raise extraordinary monuments to their own importance, as if to reassure themselves of their greatness in the face of so much aloofness, but the Indian peoples endured by a core culture defiantly impervious to alien influence. India’s foundational religions are inspired not by prophetic visions of messianic fulfillment; rather, they bear witness to the fragility of human existence. They offer not personal salvation but the solace of an inextricable destiny.

World order in Hindu cosmology was governed by immutable cycles of an almost inconceivably vast scale—millions of years long. Kingdoms would fall, and the universe would be destroyed, but it would be re-created, and new kingdoms would rise again. When each wave of invaders arrived (Persians in the sixth century B.C.; Alexander and his Bactrian Greeks in the fourth century B.C.; Arabs in the eighth century; Turks and Afghans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Mughals in the sixteenth century; and various European nations following shortly after), they were fitted into this timeless matrix. Their efforts might disrupt, but measured against the perspective of the infinite, they were irrelevant. The true nature of human experience was known only to those who endured and transcended these temporal upheavals.

The Hindu classic the Bhagavad Gita framed these spirited tests in terms of the relationship between morality and power. The work, an episode within the Mahabharata (the ancient Sanskrit epic poem sometimes likened in its influence to the Bible or the Homeric epics), takes the form of a dialogue between the warrior-prince Arjuna and his charioteer, a manifestation of the god Lord Krishna. Arjuna, “overwhelmed by sorrow” on the eve of battle at the horrors he is about to unleash, wonders what can justify the terrible consequences of war. This is the wrong question, Krishna rejo...

There has never been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.” Redemption will come through the fulfillment of a preassigned duty, paired with a recognition that its outward manifestations are illusory because “the impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal.” Arjuna, a warrior, has been presented with a war he did not seek. He should accept the circums...

While Lord Krishna’s appeal to duty prevails and Arjuna professes himself freed from doubt, the cataclysms of the war—described in detail in the rest of the epic—add resonance to his earlier qualms. This central work of Hindu thought embodied both an exhortation to war and the importance not so much of avoiding but of transcending it. Morality was not rejected, but in any given situation the immediate considerations were dominant, while eternity provided a curative per...

Against the background of the eternal verities of a religion preaching the elusiveness of any single earthly endeavor, the temporal ruler was in fact afforded a wide berth for practical necessities. The pioneering exemplar of this school was the fourth-century B.C. minister Kautilya, credited with engineering the rise of India’s Maurya Dynasty, which expelled Alexander the Great’s...

The Arthashastra’s exhaustive and matter-of-fact catalogue of the imperatives of success led the distinguished twentieth-century political theorist Max Weber to conclude that the Arthashastra exemplified “truly radical ‘Machiavellianism’ . . . compared to it, Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.” Unlike Machiavelli, Kautilya exhibits no nostalgia for the virtues of a better age. The only criterion of virtue he would accept was whether his analysis of the road to victory was accurate or not. Did he describe the way policy was, in fact, being conducted? In Kautilya’s counsel, equilibrium, if it ever came about, was the temporary result of an interaction of self-serving motives; it was not, as in European concepts after Westphalia, the strategic aim of foreign policy. The Arthashastra was a guide to conquest, not to the construction of an international order.

Britain’s Indian realm grew the most, if initially without a fixed design (prompting the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge to say, “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind”).

When London responded to the 1857 mutiny of Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the East India Company’s army by declaring direct British rule, it did not conceive of this act as establishing British governance over a foreign nation. Rather, it saw itself as a neutral overseer and civilizing uplifter of multifarious peoples and states. As late as 1888, a leading British administrator could declare, There is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious . . . You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.

By deciding after the mutiny to administer India as a single imperial unit, Britain did much to bring such an India into being. The diverse regions were connected by rail lines and a common language, English. The glories of India’s ancient civilization were researched and catalogued and India’s elite trained in British thought and institutions. In the process, Britain reawakened in India the consciousness that it was a single entity under foreign rule and inspired a sentiment that to defeat the foreign influence it had to constitute itself as a nation. Britain’s impact on India was thus similar to Napoleon’s on a Germany whose multiple states had been treated previously only as a geographic, not a national, entity.

The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a “balancer” in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side—as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests. Emerging into a world of established powers and the Cold War, independent India subtly elevated freedom of maneuver from a bargaining tactic into an ethical principle. Blending righteous moralism with a shrewd assessment of the balance of forces and the major powers’ psychologies, Nehru announced India to be a global power that would chart a course maneuvering between the major blocs.

From its unification as a single political entity in 221 B.C. through the early twentieth century, China’s position at the center of world order was so ingrained in its elite thinking that in the Chinese language there was no word for

In keeping with this perspective, in classical China what would now be called “foreign policy” was the province of the Ministry of Rituals, which determined the shades of the tributary relationship, and the Office of Border Affairs, charged with managing relations with nomadic tribes. A Chinese foreign ministry was not established until the mid-nineteenth century, and then perforce to deal with intruders from the West. Even then, officials considered their task the traditional practice of barbarian management, not anything that might be regarded as Westphalian diplomacy.

The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily. China’s most imposing architectural achievement, the Great Wall eventually extending over roughly five thousand miles, was begun by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who had just defeated all rivals militarily, ending the period of Warring States and unifying China. It was a grandiose testimony to military victory but also to its inherent limits, denoting vast power coupled with a consciousness of vulnerability. For millennia, China sought to beguile and entice its adversaries more often than it attempted to defeat them by force of arms. Thus a minister in the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 220) described the “five baits” with which he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to China’s northwestern frontier, though by conventional analysis China was the superior military power: To give them . . . elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach . . . and, as for those who come to surrender, the emperor [should] show them favor by honoring them with an imperial reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their mind. These are what may be called the five baits.

When the first British envoy, George Macartney, arrived in the late eighteenth century, bringing with him some early products of the Industrial Revolution and a letter from King George III proposing free trade and the establishment of reciprocal resident embassies in Beijing and London, the Chinese boat that carried him from Guangzhou to Beijing was festooned with a banner that identified him as “The English ambassador bringing tribute to the Emperor of China.” He was dismissed with a letter to the King of England explaining that no ambassador could be permitted to reside in Beijing because “Europe consists of many other nations besides your own: if each and all demanded to be represented at our Court, how could we possibly consent? The thing is utterly impracticable.” The Emperor saw no need for trade beyond what was already occurring in limited, tightly regulated amounts, because Britain had no goods China desired: Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the State; strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to dispatch them from afar . . . As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things.

China in the late Qing Dynasty had neglected its military technology partly because it had been unchallenged for so long but largely because of the low status of the military in China’s Confucian social hierarchy, expressed in the saying “Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers.” Even when under assault by Western forces, the Qing Dynasty diverted military funds in 1893 to restore a resplendent marble boat in the imperial Summer Palace.

The rich fertility of China’s plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political, economic, and cultural influence—even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards. Its comparative advantage resided in the wealth of its economy, which produced goods that all of its neighbors desired. Shaped by these elements, the Chinese idea of world order differed markedly from the European experience based on a multiplicity of co-equal states.

The “rise” of China to eminence in the twenty-first century is not new, but reestablishes historic patterns. What is distinctive is that China has returned as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization and as a contemporary great power on the Westphalian model. It combines the legacies of “All Under Heaven,” technocratic modernization, and an unusually turbulent twentieth-century national quest for a synthesis between the two.

The imperial dynasty collapsed in 1911, and the foundation of a Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen in 1912 left China with a weak central government and ushered in a decade of warlordism. A stronger central government under Chiang Kai-shek emerged in 1928 and sought to enable China to assume a place in the Westphalian concept of world order and in the global economic system.

On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, the victorious Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the words “The Chinese people have stood up.” Mao elaborated this slogan as a China purifying and strengthening itself through a doctrine of “continuous revolution” and proceeded to dismantle established concepts of domestic and international order. The entire institutional spectrum came under attack: Western democracy, Soviet leadership of the Communist world, and the legacy of the Chinese past. Art and monuments, holidays and traditions, vocabulary and dress, fell under various forms of interdict—blamed for bringing about the passivity that had rendered China unprepared in the face of foreign intrusions. In Mao’s concept of order—which he called the “great harmony,” echoing classical Chinese philosophy—a new China would emerge out of the destruction of traditional Confucian culture emphasizing harmony. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, would serve as a precursor to the next. The process of revolution must be ever accelerated, Mao held, lest the revolutionaries become complacent and indolent. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote Mao: The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative.

Sounds exactly like hegel

In the end, this upheaval was designed to produce a kind of traditional Chinese outcome: a form of Communism intrinsic to China, setting itself apart by a distinctive form of conduct that swayed by its achievements, with China’s unique and now revolutionary moral authority again swaying “All Under Heaven.”

This seems very similar to the advice that “One has to come up with one’s own philosophy” Cannot follow a “How to guide” by another champion - Will not make you a champion - Have to chart your own way

Like the founder of China’s first all-powerful dynasty (221–207 B.C.), the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Mao sought to unify China while also striving to destroy the ancient culture that he blamed for China’s weakness and humiliation. He governed in a style as remote as that of any Emperor (though the emperors would not have convened mass rallies), and he combined it with the practices of Lenin and Stalin. Mao’s rule embodied the revolutionary’s dilemma. The more sweeping the changes the revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar. The revolutionary prophet is ever tempted to defy his mortality by speeding up his timetable and multiplying the means of enforcing his vision. Mao launched his disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 to compel breakneck industrialization and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge the ruling group to prevent its institutionalization in a decade-long ideological campaign that exiled a generation of educated youth to the countryside. Tens of millions died in pursuit of Mao’s goals—most eliminated without love or hatred, mobilized to foreshorten into one lifetime what had heretofore been considered a historical process.

Red Guards,

Revolutions, no matter how sweeping, need to be consolidated and, in the end, adapted from a moment of exaltation to what is sustainable over a period of time. That was the historic role played by Deng Xiaoping. Although he had been twice purged by Mao, he became the effective ruler two years after Mao’s death in 1976. He quickly undertook to reform the economy and open up the society. Pursuing what he defined as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he liberated the latent energies of the Chinese people. Within less than a generation, China advanced to become the second-largest economy in the world. To speed up this dramatic transformation—if not necessarily by conviction—China entered international institutions and accepted the established rules of world order.

Yet China’s participation in aspects of the Westphalian structure carried with it an ambivalence born of the history that brought it to enter into the international state system. China has not forgotten that it was originally forced to engage with the existing international order in a manner utterly at odds with its historical image of itself or, for that matter, with the avowed principles of the Westphalian system. When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese—including senior leaders—has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked—and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed—to adhere to rules they had had no part in making. But they expect—and sooner or later will act on this expectation—the international order to evolve in a way that enables China to become centrally involved in further international rule making, even to the point of revising some of the rules that prevail.

Mao Zedong

Deng Xiaoping

Jiang Zemin,

Hu Jintao,

Xi Jinping

Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about, and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action. The United States may be able to adjust the application of its views on human rights in relation to strategic priorities. But in light of its history and the convictions of its people, America can never abandon these principles altogether. On the Chinese side, the dominant elite view on this subject was expressed by Deng Xiaoping: Actually, national sovereignty is far more important than human rights, but the Group of Seven (or Eight) often infringe upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practice power politics. No formal compromise is possible between these views; to keep the disagreement from spiraling into conflict is one of the principal obligations of the leaders of both sides.