in tackling the core challenges facing global governance.
Old alignments based upon geopolitical divisions do not sufficiently address transnational threats affecting societies across the globe, such as irregular migration, terrorism and violent extremism, illicit trade and environmental disasters precipitated by climate change.
China is not immune to these threats, yet working with China to strengthen collective security arrangements presents challenges as well as opportunities. In the case of counter-terrorism, the dilemma over how to secure the nation against terrorist threats while protecting civil liberties is particularly acute — the Xinjiang ‘people’s war on terror’ has blurred the line between internecine struggle and counter-terrorism.
More recently, the involvement of Chinese nationals in global terrorist networks has led to greater cooperation within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) — particularly in sharing intelligence, repatriating terrorists and financing counter-terrorism operations. The consensus over terrorism is weak at the global level, so countering violent extremism has the potential to provide a common platform for achieving a greater balance between strategy and the rule of law — if not a means of bridging the normative divide between the SCO and Europe’s Organisation for Security and Cooperation.
At the regional level, the initial political furore over Chinese sponsorship of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) shows how mistrust on both sides can undermine positive intentions. At the time of its establishment, it was seen by many as a prelude to the creation of an alternative World Bank — or even a new economic order.
Such claims were grossly exaggerated. Ongoing projects are co-sponsored with the World Bank, and the articles of agreement confirm a partnership model with other multilateral institutions.
Similarly, the Belt and Road Initiative — China’s expansive transcontinental infrastructure and development framework — poses a dilemma concerning the overlap between strategic and developmental objectives. But just like the AIIB, it will be hard to achieve successful outcomes in the absence of international financial, economic and environmental safeguards. The United States’ withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership means that China is now the lead player in regional integration and hence far more exposed to international criticism.
As a counterbalance to ideological competition, enhanced cooperation on climate change presents a bright spot on the horizon. Yet, while Beijing’s commitment towards reducing emissions on a voluntary basis will likely endure, burden-sharing remains a central prerogative in negotiating international cooperation, and domestic priorities continue to drive China’s low-carbon policies.
Can a cautious, common-ground approach towards international cooperation with China lead to the effective delivery of public goods?
Joseph Nye recently questioned whether China could fall into the ‘Kindleberger trap’. Charles Kindleberger, the intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan, argued that when the United States replaced Britain in the 1930s as the largest global power, it failed to carry the burden for the provision of public goods, leading to the Great Depression and war.
While this prediction merits attention, it fails to recognise China is not acting alone. Beijing is still playing catch-up and in some respects benefiting from being a late developer — emulating, learning and re-inventing. In particular, the intellectual ideas underpinning China’s role in global governance are still in the making and rely on interactions with the outside world.
Under these conditions, it is not enough simply to set up more representative institutions and hope that better governance will prevail. An approach that seeks open, fair and legitimate governance in dealing with the challenges of the contemporary era is our best option for maintaining a political equilibrium during a period of structural transition. Perhaps this approach, reviving political theorist David Mitrany’s traditional functionalist principle of a ‘working peace’ across continents, would be more effective than some grand universal design.
After all, the preservation of principled arrangements for governing international affairs lies in cooperation. In a speech at Chatham House in 1948, Mitrany introduced his transcontinental perspective: ‘It seems to be the fate of all periods of transition that reformers are more willing to fight over a theory than to pull together over a problem. At this stage, I can only be given credit for the claim that I do not represent a theory. I represent an anxiety’.
Today, our anxiety is of a different kind — that the rules-based international order appears now on the verge of disintegration. China’s stronger political leverage means that international politics is likely to become less transformative and more transactional over time. We are likely to witness more bargains over the rules, but not necessarily more conflict over strategic priorities — and it is this pragmatic orientation that provides optimism for the future of global governance.
Katherine Morton is Professor in China’s International Relations, School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield.
This article appeared in the most recent edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Strategic diplomacy in Asia’.
No doubt, this is an interesting piece.
And it is true that “the intellectual ideas underpinning China’s role in global governance are still in the making and rely on interactions with the outside world.”
But let’s hope that China adheres to her policy of a peaceful rise, based on the Principle of Meritocracy and not adopt Liberal Democracy as a desired template of future governance and its so-called “Western Values”, which were proudly extolled by President Donald J. Trump in his “Western Civilization” speech in Poland recently.
Why? Because according to Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey “Western Values” are egregious and destructive. He wrote:
“We saw Western values as cowards in London and Paris and Washington drew lines on maps and signed away the livelihoods of peoples who only wanted to make an honest living farming and gathering and fishing.
We saw Western values as people were enslaved, the Negro Holocaust, claiming up to seventy million lives and livelihoods, as young men and women were torn away from their families,..
We saw Western values as Europe and North America interfered in every single corner of the planet, imposing friendly regimes, elevating the second most powerful group to a position of prominence, knowing that this group would support the foreign power, this being the only way to guarantee their position and we saw the horrific consequences of these endemic imbalances in the socio-economic tissue of countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
We saw the Western values in Operation Condor in Latin America where people were tortured and raped for their political beliefs, not so long ago, we saw Western values in the autocratic and Fascist regimes the West supported and the repression and terror they brought upon their populations.
We saw Western values in the twin atomic terrorist strike against the people of Japan. This was after the Japanese had presented the same conditions for surrender which were accepted after this act of terrorism, rendering it utterly and totally unnecessary.
We saw Western values in Korea, where the USA and its allies murdered millions of North Korean soldiers and civilians.
We saw Western values in Vietnam in massacre after massacre. (3 million innocent men, women and children were killed. US Troops also dropped 21 million gallons of carcinogenic Agent Orange defoliants in Vietnam, which still cause deformed births and cancer today. Brackets mine).
We saw Western values in Iraq, where the USA and its favourite pet bed-boy, the UK, breached international law by attacking a sovereign nation (based on lies of WMD) against the precepts laid down in the UN Charter. (Brackets mine.)
We saw Western values in Libya, where military hardware was again used to strafe civilian structures, where the electricity grid was targeted “to break their backs” and the water supply was bombed. And where is the war crimes trial?
And today we see Western values in Syria, interfering, placing troops on the ground without invitation, launching missile attacks without any basis whatsoever, and siding with terrorist groups destabilizing the country, raping nuns, raping little girls before and after they are beheaded, and murdering policemen, ambulance drivers and soldiers.
If these are Western values, who needs the Devil?” Unquote.
We also saw Western values wiping out the Native Americans North, Central, and South America. We also saw Western values murdering labor union activists, striking workers, and left wing, progressive, and socialist people all over the world.
And we saw with our own eyes how the West, under the pretext of Western values, invaded and/or bombed seven Muslim nations using lies, in the past 16 years after 911, which was an inside job (see confession on his death bed by the CIA agent, Michael Howard, who brought down WTC7 using controlled demolition) and destroyed these seven countries and their infrastructures, and killing many million of innocent people and displacing millions of refugees into Europe.
We saw how Western values were used as a pretext to kidnap, torture hundreds of Muslim suspects in Europe and Asia and then detained them at the Guantanamo Bay prison, without charges or due process, violating the Constitution of the United States and their Human Rights.
We also see how Western values manipulate the price of precious metals, currencies, interest rates, oil and other commodities at the expense of other nations.
Will Western values precipitate WW3? The jury is still out.
“Will Western values precipitate WW3? The jury is still out.”
We nearly had it with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 with the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanting to go to war. In addition, the American government thought about using nuclear weapons to stop the Communists during the Korean War, Vietnam War, and if the Russians had invaded Western Europe during the Cold War because NATO could not match the Russians in manpower, airpower, tanks, etc.
1 “We nearly had it with the Cuban Missile Crisis with the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanting to go to war.”
You are right. The RT report below shows that an American Captain and a Soviet Naval officer saved the world from a Doomsday scenario in 1962:
“Revealed: US almost launched nuclear weapons during Cuban Missile Crisis”.
Published time: 28 Oct, 2015 22:11
Edited time: 28 Oct, 2015 22:14
“During the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an Air Force airman says that his unit was ordered to launch a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. His captain’s use of common sense over 50 years ago may have saved the world from a nuclear apocalypse.
An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists paints a picture of John Bordne, an Air Force airman who was stationed at one of four secret US missile sites in Japan during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the US Air Force has not come out and verified the claims, Bordne’s account is that, in the early morning hours of October 28, 1962, his unit of 32 Mace B cruise missiles inexplicably received launch orders.
Each Mace B cruise missile had an enormous payload 70 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Within strike range were various communist countries: the capital cities of Hanoi, Vietnam; Beijing, China; and Pyongyang, North Korea, as well as the Soviet military facilities in Vladivostok.
Bordne says that a few hours before his shift began, the commander at the Missile Operations Center on Okinawa began a routine radio transmission to the missile sites, giving a string of characters that normally did not match the ones that the crews had. But this time was different: For the first time in history, the codes matched.
The fate of the entire world hung in the balance when US Air Force Captain William Bassett had clearance to open his pouch to see if his personal string of characters matched the last part of the code that was transmitted. They did. This authorized him to open an envelope to read his site’s launch instructions, but the captain declined to fulfill the order of launching a nuclear strike.
Bassett then saw that three of his four targets described in the envelope were not located in the Soviet Union. This was a fact that was corroborated over telephone correspondence with an officer at a different site. Indeed, the fact that they were only at DEFCON 2 added to the incredulousness of the orders: If they were actually supposed to launch their nuclear missiles and kick off World War III, they should have gone to DEFCON 1, the maximum possible level of alert, which is necessary for such a strike to occur.
The crew, with their fingers on the button, were ready to launch the nukes, but Bassett stalled them, as Bordne recalls, and ordered two armed airmen to “shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.”
“If this is a screw up and we do not launch, we get no recognition, and this never happened,” Bordne recalled the captain saying.
On October 27, 1962, just a day before Bordne’s experience occurred, Soviet Navy officer Vasili Arkhipov also saved the world from destruction in the middle of the Cold War’s tensest moment. He was the second-in-command of a B-59 submarine when American destroyers began to drop depth charges on it, trying to force the Soviet vessel to surface.
The submarine’s captain assumed that the Americans were trying to destroy his nuclear-armed submarine and that a catastrophic war had broken out. He ordered the B-59’s ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to prepare for firing on an enemy aircraft carrier that was leading the American task force near Cuba. The launch of the B-59’s torpedo required the authorization of all three senior officers aboard the submarine, and Arkhipov was alone in denying permission. His level head, like Bassett’s, may have saved the human species.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, best known for its Doomsday clock, is now calling on the Air Force to release details on the harrowing Okinawa event. Other organizations have attempted to uncover this information through Freedom of Information Act requests, but the Bulletin notes that these requests could take years, if they are successful at all.” Unquote.
2 “In addition, the American government thought about using nuclear weapons to stop the Communists during the Korean War, Vietnam War,…”
Gen MacArthur was sacked by President Truman for wanting to nuke China during the Korean war.
Last year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 3 minutes to Midnight, the closest in 64 years. With Nato troops and tanks in Poland, US nukes in the UK and THAAD in South Korean, a simple miscalculation can easily end the world as we know it, when a Nuclear Winter sets in.
Lets hope good sense prevails.