Global Power in a Shifting International Order: The West and the Rest

Welcome, my name is Michael Copps. They call me president of LLC. I'm not sure it's completely right at this point to simply accept the director's job. I'm not sure if I'm one of the LSE co-directors or family co-directors. ideas that I put together many years ago with my good friend Arnie Weston, who is in the audience today, we had a conference on American structural

power

, we started with Jim O'Neill and ended with Barry Buzan, that's not bad for the day when I had a fantastic conference talking about the issues of American structural

power

and what it means economically, militarily, politically and institutionally and I can't think of anyone better to sort of conclude the day's proceedings and Joe Nye josée says it's a living legend. and that's what you are Joe, a legend who is still alive if you can keep both of us together for a few more years.

You know, we're making a merry world. He is sometimes named as the third most influential, the sixth most influential, and the tenth most influential. I ask the scholar of the world. That's not bad, there are reasons for it, because Joe has dealt with so many issues over such a long period of time so intelligently and effectively and with such great communication skills that, with Bob Cohen in the 1970s, he navigated for the whole debate about interdependence and complexity. interdependence on those inte

rest

ing ones in that inte

rest

ing decade called the 1970s, which some of us may remember well, but most of you don't, because he went around, wrote a book on how to lead on issues of American decline, and then Joe came along to the power. largely soft power, which was a term he coined in 2004 and this is one of those academic ideas that took off and I think most of you have probably heard of it, which was a degree since you're all here tonight. soft power smart power what kind of power power wins power to lead power of the future Joe has done it in orange returns he is a great communicator and we can't wait to see what he has in all LSC friend and a very old friend of mine nice to say

global

power and a changing

international

order

West and the rest no one better to talk about it Professor Joe Nye Harvard University welcome once again to the London School of Economics thank you very much BIC that's why kind introduction too kind I must say that I should warn you that when people called my house when my kids were growing up, they said their doctor and I always said yes, but he's not the helpful type, so warning, Emptor has asked me to say something about

global

power changing the

international

order

and the rest and the West and there are many people in this audience that I see here who know as much or more about that than I do, but let me give you some ideas and then we can have some time with our Q&A to talk about it or have different points of view on the matter.

Let me start by defining terms. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but to me power is the ability to affect others to get the results you want. If you think of power in that sense as that definition, then it's basically three ways that you can affect others to get the results you want, you can do it through coercion through payment or through attraction and persuasion and in that sense we should think of power in all these ways, certainly when I was studying power at Oxford or studying international relations years ago, perhaps ancient history, as Mick says.

I remember listening to AJP Taylor his wonderful lectures and for Taylor a power and power itself was the ability to prevail in war and I think that is still relevant, but that is not all that power is or what matters, so that if you remember Tayler's question addressed in his classic book The Struggle for the Dominion of Europe, a great power was a country that was most likely to prevail in a European war, but many people have said that in today's information age sometimes it's more important which story wins than which army wins and maybe that ability to have a winning army and a winning story or the fact that a successful narrative is the secret to power, but In any case, with that low definition, Let me say that as you look at what is happening in power in the world today, there really are, as I argued in my book The Future of Power, two big boats going in one of which is a change if I want you to be able to think about This as something horizontal from one set of States to another set of States and this is sometimes called the rise of the rest, which is what we are going to focus on, but it is equally important and I will get to this later in my talk, there is a second ship of power moving from state actors to non-state actors or you can think of that as a vertical change and in some ways that is more complex or difficult to understand than the first change, the horizontal change and at the end of my talk I will try to relate those two types of changes and indicate what that suggests for future power.

Now, what does international relations theory tell us about the rise of the rest or transitions of power? Well before I answer that question, let me say that it is very conventional to talk about the power of the BRICS and in that same definitional sense let me say that I defer to Jim O'Neill for inventing a term that is very good for investors. who wanted to make money in the stock markets as a political option. The BRICS concept is actually not a very useful concept, the reason it is not useful is because it takes a declining power, Russia, and combines it with rising powers, which of the others and leaves out other powers. on the rise like Indonesia, etc., so I don't do it.

I don't think like I did, it's also fascinating to see that the Russians latched onto the concept that it's a clever acronym to start the first beating of the BRIC countries in Yekaterina, in 2009, with a lot of noise, so it's useful for that guy for diplomatic purposes, but if we are really trying to talk analytically about changes in the world, I think the term brick is not a useful concept for the way we do it, although it is now widely used and basically involves countries, some of which are our pluralistic democracies Great Britain Brazil India South Africa with countries that are relatively autocratic, China and Russia, but I think even more important is that these countries have deep internal differences and the Russian case is really different.

Russia and this is not an anti-Russian comma because I hope it's not true, yeah. I mean, I hope they do something to make what I had to say now a self-fulfilling fallacy, but Russia is a country that is basically a one-crop economy with a serious demographic problem and a terrible health problem: the average Russian man dies at an advanced age. 60 There is no other developed country in the world where that is true. Now there are, in principle, solutions for that and when Medvedev was president he suggested some, but they couldn't actually implement them, so I think Russia is a country that has very serious problems.

I hope they can cure them, but lumping them together with, say, China and India, etc., just in Brazil, is simply not analytically what we need; The other thing, of course, about the BRICS is that most of it is really about China and if we take the economy, more than half of it is China and China is an extraordinary case. The Chinese in three decades may have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and done an extraordinary job of increasing the scale of their overall economy, which is why I don't want an analytical concept that loves Russia with the problems you have with China and call it something called BRICS, well, enough with my definitions of power and the rest is not BRICS, etc., so I think the main thing is that we need to focus.

What's next for international relations theory is what does it mean to have a transition of the kind we're seeing now if this horizontal shift of power that I've talked about and particularly let me focus on China as I mean there are many countries involved in the transition, but let me focus particularly on China, then the role of China, and then the relationship with the US, what tools do we have in international relations theory? Well, we often use the term hegemony and we have two versions of theories of hegemony, one is hegemonic. Transition theory, the other is hegemonic stability theory, well, a hegemonic transition theory, you suppose you could say that Robert Gilpin's work is a good example of this.

It can be traced back to two cities from the famous lucidity and explanation of the origins of the Peloponnesian War. was caused by the rise and power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta and there has been a tendency to say that when such a hegemonic transition occurs in which a rising power creates fear in an established power, it is likely leading to conflict, and to give you an example, even people often cite the First World War, the rising power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain, which is actually a rather simplified view of the origins of war.

World War I, but it is often little mentioned by editorialists and others, but if you look at the world today, there are several people who say that China's growing power will create fear in the US, leading to conflict , and I guess among our colleagues who think of this John Mearsheimer, who would be the closest to someone who has expressed as always, John expresses things very clearly, whether they are right or wrong, he is always clear and John has said and his words are that China cannot rise up peacefully, so there is a prediction there that is quite clear and is based on whether you want a hegemonic transition. theory of the type that Robert Gilpin outlined 30 or 40 years ago, so one tool we have to understand this shift in global power and the West and the rest is hegemonic, the theory of transition, the other is, ironically, the theory of stability almost opposite hegemonic and this is He is often associated with Charles Kindleberger, the famous MIT economist, and basically what Kindleberger said is that you need a hegemon, you need to have a state that can act in the role of hegemon in order to be able to provide public goods for the world and when the hegemonic transition is challenged. when there is no hegemonic stability then those public goods will not be provided and Tarn Kindleberger used to use the example of Great Britain and the United States written on average weakened by World War I the United States strengthened by World War I Great Britain was no longer capable of providing public goods, free trade, a stable monetary system, etc., which it had provided when it was preeminent, but Americans had not grown up, Americans were not prepared to take on that responsiveness, so essentially the big problem with Collective goods, as everyone knows, is the problem of the opportunist, why pay for something if you can ride the bus for free and the Americans were opportunists?

So when Kindle hamburgers from you, the problems of the 1930s were a problem of hegemonic stability, the absence of a hegemony. and the fact that the country that had become the most powerful had not grown up, so to speak, was not prepared to take on this role led to the conditions of the Great Depression which, of course, led to the disastrous political consequences of Hitler and others. and in history, you all know this well, so we have this tool, these two tools related to hegemonic transition, hegemonic stability that we use in our theory, but one of the problems I have with them is that it is never quite clear how we define the term.

What is a hegemony by colleague and trend Bobko Hain if you look at his book After Hegemony, which basically argued that maybe Kindleberger wasn't quite right that maybe you could have public goods provided by institutions that I agree with Co ? Wait, but even in your book on Jevon you will find that if in one place in the book where he talks about the hegemon it is a country with preponderant resources, in another place a hegemon is a country capable of keeping the rules, well, I would say well, country the weighted resources, they can make rules, but actually those are quite different definitions, one is a definition in terms of power resources, the other is a definition in terms of power behavior and those are not always the same, e.g.

If we look at the United States and you say that when in the 20th century the United States was most preponderant in power resources, it would probably be between 1945 and 1960, when everyone else was weakened by World War II. strengthened the US if you knew that some people asked me for 40 to 50 percent of the world product in 1945 there was who was the only country in possession of nuclear weapons and so on, so clearly, by one measure, the power resources, this was the peak of hegemony in terms of behavior. to set the rules or get what it wants, the US in that period of its maximum behavior could not prevent communism from reaching China could not prevent Stalin from obtaining weaponsnuclear power could not prevent Fidel Castro from coming to power right off our coast so here we were at the peak of our hegemonic power by a measure for Germany and in terms of behavioral results we were not doing all that well, not that they were trivial issues, they were important issues, so we have to be very careful when we talk about hegemony and ask ourselves if we are defining in terms of resources in terms of behavior because often they are not exactly the same the other point is that when people make predictions based on These theories of hegemonic stability or hegemonic transition sometimes neglect the role of human agency or leadership that I just mentioned this week.

I published a book called Political Leadership and the Making of the American Era and what I did in this book was go back. and look at the 20th century and ask the question: Did presidents matter? Did feeders matter? So one way of thinking It is at the beginning of the 20th century that the United States is the second great power. At the end of the 20th century, the United States is the world's only superpower. Some people would say that's inevitable if you have a continental scale economy on two oceans and Weak Neighbors is going to happen, it's all structural if that's true.

Does it matter then who was president? Maybe presidents don't matter at all, so what I did in this book was go back and look at the periods of expansion of American power in the 20th century and look at the presidents who were crucial in the decisions. which they did and then I asked you if you did a counterfactual story and you said let's assume that this person was not president and that the next most likely person was president, instead of knowing what your preferences are and what decisions you would make if the outcome had been different .

So if you think back, you know Willie, if McKinley hadn't been assassinated, there would never have been a president, Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican establishment hated Roosevelt, they saw him as a cowboy if Teddy Roosevelt hadn't run for a third term in 2012, which he had once promised not to do, but he did and split the Republican vote so that William Howard Taft was defeated and Woodrow Wilson was able to become president with a minority vote, there would never have been a President Woodrow Wilson and if Franklin Roosevelt would not have done it. he decided to change his vice president in 1944 and replace Harry Truman with Henry Wallace; there would never have been a Harry, a president, Harry Truman, etc., so what I do is counterfactual history and I go back in history and ask what difference the leaders made and The conclusion I come to is that about half of the leaders didn't matter, but about half did, half of them made some decisions that were absolutely crucial to the results and therefore people who predict power shifts in hegemony or preponderance of resources only in the structure .

What most structural realists like to do is overlook the role of human agency, and I think one of the problems we have in international relations is that we often become so enamored of our structural model that we have maintained that agency matters and there are some agency decisions that are of crucial importance, I mean, let me give you one as an example: in 1955, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended to Dwight Eisenhower that he use nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons, whatever. whatever that meant, against China because, otherwise, it would be impossible. He defends chemotherapy and Matsu, which are off the coast of China.

Eisenhower's comment was my God, we can't use that stuff on Asian kids again in ten years. A pretty extraordinary comment about a moral feeling if you will or a moral choice. Imagine he had it. it would not have been Eisenhower but Douglas MacArthur, another World War II hero who had become president in Eisenhower's place, which is not a far-fetched idea because MacArthur Guan could become president. MacArthur would have used nuclear weapons. What would the world be like today if instead? of a 70 year taboo against the use of nuclear weapons, if we had used nuclear weapons every 10 years as normal tactical weapons or less than 10 years, it would be a very different world, it is a case of human action making a big difference and simply measures resources and thinking in structural terms they do not understand it.

It always amuses me that, according to Walter Isaacson in his biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger when he was teaching at Harvard believed that international relations were structural and that was the answer, but after serving in the government he changed his position, so his position on this issue of structure and agency obviously depends on where you sit, but I guess my point is that the theories we use in IR hegemonic transition or edge monic stability, particularly measuring them in terms of resource preponderance and structural terms They don't really capture everything we need to know to have good international relations, theorize and describe this changing international order with the West and the rest, so I think we need to be very careful about bringing it in if we want to. the first image again in the role of individuals as I said approximately half of the presidents were mistreated, the other half did not turn out to be not the ones that you or at least I expected more, but it is believed that that is not the case.

The topic tonight, but there is also an issue about what narratives are used to explain the context of the change that is occurring and one of the dominant narratives that is used now is the decline of the West or the decline of the United States. I mean, declinism is a very powerful metaphor concept and you know we were raised with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in mind and you know you have the wonderful work of Paul Kennedy, the rise and fall of the great powers, and when You look at this power shift that's happening in the horizontal power shift that I described today, it's very tempting to say, well, you know it's American decline, so decline is a trope, a very popular theme that gets used over and over again. sometimes by editorial writers or television commentators or even some academics, and I think it's a pretty misleading descent.

I think it doesn't really help us understand what the nature of America is. power and where the US is in the world if you go back to Paul Kennedy's book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which by the way is the book I responded to when I wrote for Lead back in 1990. Paul had the opinion that there was a cycle and that the United States was in a position in the cycle that was similar to, say, Philip II, Spain or guardian Britain, etc., and he used the term imperial overstretch and it intuitively satisfies the sense that It means that as a country expands, in quotes it becomes more Hegemonic, whatever that means, as it expands it commits more and more resources to its external position, both military and aid and propping up the allies and the rest of this, so that as you devote more and more resources to this, you starve your own internal economy and eventually get Imperially overloaded Joseph Chamberlain wouldn't like you to know that you started worrying about this and late 19th century Britain, so Paul talks about imperial overload and the argument is that Americans suffer from imperial overload, the problem is that it's actually a pretty good model to explain one. of the superpowers, the Soviet Union, but not the other, let me give you the reason why the Soviet Union reached a point where almost a quarter of its gross domestic product was spent on maintaining its empire or its military position, which is a huge Meanwhile, the Soviet economy internally was not coping with the so-called third industrial revolution, the development of the information age and information technology, so imperial overextension is a pretty good explanation.

It's a good explanation of what happened to the Soviet Union, but it's not a very good explanation. From what happened to the United States today, the United States spends about five percent of its gross domestic product on its external burdens, including both the military and diplomacy and everything that at the height of the Cold War, the United States Joined. I spent 10 percent, so if imperial overextension is the model for what's happening to American power, excuse me, the curves are going in the wrong direction, theory and data don't add up, that doesn't stop people from theorizing. , but it does seem to me that If we are analytically careful, we are not going to apply imperial exaggeration to what is happening to the United States, so I think that in that sense the metaphor of decline in that version is not very useful, either.

It is very useful in the sense that the metaphor of decline has an implicit idea of ​​something that is a life cycle that we can know what the life cycle of a country is, a power, a great power, anything that we can know, the life cycle of an individual human being, it is very rare that any of us can live beyond 120 years, we usually have influence in eighty years or sixty years and ten, so I can look you in the eyes and assure you that I have rejected, can you check my date of birth, you can be, it's a very solid proposal, but yes Ask me what is the prospect of the United States being in decline because it has gone through some natural life cycle that none of us know about and it is not impossible to know the great example of this.

I psyched myself out with this example in the book I wrote about the future of power. It was Horace Walpole in the 18th century who said: Why, Britain, after the loss of the North American colonies, we are now reduced to a miserable island like Sardinia, which was on the eve of Britain's greatest century, fueled by the Revolution. Industrial, so we don't We don't know what the life cycle of a country is and even if we thought we knew, we don't know what the length of the periods in the cycle is, so if we look at the Roman Empire, we do know retrospectively about the decline. and the fall of the Roman Empire, but it's worth remembering that it took three centuries to get from the Apogee to the final collapse, so we don't know where the United States is in terms of life cycle, so when we use a term like decline, we should be careful not to let the metaphor influence how we project the future.

I mean, even if Americans decline one day, I don't know next year or a century from now, I have no idea and I don't believe most people who write about Now one question you can ask is whether America is an absolute decline in their American power, an absolute decline and there you can say, do you know what we know about certain characteristics? It has a lot of problems, it always has from the beginning, but if you look at the American economy today, you know in terms of the top universities in the world, the number of Nobel Prize winners, the amount of R&D, and you know that you can do it through of a whole series of measures about the creativity that is happening in the American economy and if you compare it, let's say that ancient Rome, which had no productivity and was devastated by internecine wars, is really a very different situation, so a absolute decline model seems very useful to me, more interesting would be a relative decline and that is where we get to this rise of the Rest if you think of this as a situation where the Americans are here and we will use China for now, but China was here and as China closes that gap, you can describe it as the rise of the rest or you can reveal it or We can describe that shrinking gap as a relative decline, even if the United States doesn't change, let's assume it doesn't change, so you know you can use terminology of relative decline or use terminology of rise of the rest.

I think it's more useful to use the term. rise of the rest and the reason is that even if the rest closed the gap with the United States it does not necessarily mean that they will pass, although a closing gap could be seen as a relative decrease it does not necessarily turn out to be higher now that people can watch Look at me and tell me Oh my goodness, how can you say that when everyone knows that China is going to have a bigger economy than the United States within a decade and the answer is that there is too much cheap talk about GDP because of the size of GDP? people assume that that's the only measure of economic power and that that's the only measure of power and that's just not the case when China's GDP exceeds that of the US and let's assume that within this decade it will be and let's assume that you measure it either in purchases.

Power parity or exchange rates, it does not matter too much from the point that I am going to explain, it does not mean that China will have an economy equivalent to that of the United States in terms of sophistication, which you may want measured by per capita income. and when China surpasses the US. This per capita income will be approximately the level of the United States. in 1930, so there is a huge gap, one measure that China will have economic power by the size of its economy, which is a measure of the size of its population, by another measure,although China will still be quite poor and much less sophisticated as an economy, so simply measuring economic power the fact that China will have a larger GDP within I'm not saying the number of years you want to choose does not prove that China has more economic power and much unless it has more overall power, for example, if we look at military from memory China is increasing its capacity, it has been increasing its military budget by that 10% a year or more and it has a greater capacity and did you ever have the idea that it will have the ability to challenge the United States as a global military power country within the next 10 to 30 years is not very likely and then if we look at soft power, the third dimension, I will talk about economic power and military power, soft power for the third power, this ability to attract others, China is investing a lot. a lot to increase its soft power and the two Jintaos said at the 17th Party Congress in 2007 that China should increase its soft power and has been spending billions of dollars on this very interesting new book by David Shum Wall about China as a global power . which has a great chapter showing how China is making these efforts to increase its soft power.

One of the problems with China and soft power is the unwillingness to realize that much of a country's soft power is produced not by the government but by civil society and As long as China closely regulates civil society, it is controlling its ability to generate soft power. So to give you an example, I use the speech I gave at Peking University, if you look at the year 2010, when the Shanghai Expo was held, which is a wonderful exhibition. If you ever visited, you couldn't come away without appreciating Chinese culture. It was just something wonderful. What did China do after generating soft power through its successful Olympics and Shanghai Expo?

He closed the you will bow down and let the world. Seeing an empty chair on the Oslo stage is called stepping on your own message in the advertising world, but in other words, until China is able to liberate civil society, and that is going to be very difficult to achieve, it is the nature of control by the communists. The party remains as it is China is not going to be able to match the United States and soft power simply being able to generate a lot of diffusion from the government is not the form of credibility that is needed during the soft hour, so if we go back to the basics argument which is because China's GDP is even bigger than the US.

China has surpassed the US. Sorry not to a measure, if you want to call it GE theism, China will be bigger than us, but in GDP per capita, another measure of each rising power, in military power and in soft power, no, China will not catch up with the US for quite some time. quite a while and in case you doubt my word, last year I had the opportunity to meet with the Prime Minister of China and his comment was that it will take us at least 30 years to catch up with the United States, but In this case, this does not It means that China has not done an extraordinary job; as I said before, it's about arguing that people are using this rise of China and the idea that China is overtaking the United States to predict a hegemonic transition that will be I think they're basically wrong if China was like Germany challenging Britain in 1914 , then it could generate a degree of fear that could lead to the kind of cycle that Thucydides originally described, but if China is in fact going to be quite a bit behind the United States.

In a matter of decades, then there is no reason for Americans to be so afraid. We don't have to overreact when Britain was trying to understand what was going on with German foreign policy. Germany had already surpassed Great Britain in 1900 in manufacturing power. What is it? 1906, when Air Crowe writes the famous memo of him saying: how do we understand German politics? You know, agitate everyone in these strange ways and therefore we have to respond to the German capability because we cannot understand the German intentions which were a situation where fear had a powerful effect if China is, like I mean, 30 years behind the United States. even 10 years 20 years behind us. it's not like Britain and Germany in 1919 14 Americans don't have to respond with that kind of fearful response, so if the hegemonic transition depends on the rise of the power of X, the fear it creates and why, then it's not clear to me In any case, the rise of China's power creates that Mearsheimer-like fear in the United States, so I think the problem of hegemonic transition has been overstated in terms of predicting the conflict that will arise from the rise of China and the effects it will have on the United States. but let me wrap this up in the next five minutes because I said I should shut up at 7:20 getting back to the topic of hegemonic stability and the problem of public goods and the problems that are created by this second change that I described the vertical change of actors state actors to non-state actors and what we see there is that there has been an extraordinary information revolution.

It's not the first time the world has seen an information revolution at Gutenberg, it's seen it before, but if you look at Moore's Law, the ability to double the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months or so, it has taken to an extraordinary shift in the reduction in the costs of computing power, so that, say, between 1970 and 2000, the last quarter of the 20th century, the cost of computing fell a thousandfold. that's very abstract and I sometimes use an example to illustrate if the cost of a car had fallen as rapidly as the cost of computing power, today I would buy a car for about £15 every time the price of something or technology fell.

Barriers to entry drop dramatically, so people who were locked out of the market in the 1970s can now participate; For example, in 1970 you wanted to have the ability to make a phone call from London to Beijing, to Johannesburg, to Brasilia, to Washington. simultaneously, it could be done technologically, it could be done, it was very, very expensive, so it was rationed by price for things like governments or multinational corporations. Nowadays, any of you can do it for free over Skype, so a barrier to participation was created that was launched with great The barrier has fallen or, to give you another example, in the 1970s, when I worked in the Carter Administration, one of the big secrets we had was that we could take a photograph of any place on Earth with a resolution of 1 meter and we spent billions. of dollars about that today any of you can go to Google Earth and get a better picture for free, so being left out of the market doesn't mean governments are suddenly obsolete;

On the contrary, what it does mean is that there are many more capable actors. the stage fills up and non-state actors can now do things that were previously reserved only for governments and that leads to a situation where there are many new transnational problems created by non-state actors crossing borders beyond control. of governments and those are issues where you are actually going to need collective action to deal with these Collective Bads or if you want their alternative for collective goods. Sometimes I use this metaphor of a three-dimensional chess board on which the top board is. of military power, the world is still unipolar, there is no other power capable of projecting military power globally, but on the intermediate board of economic relations between states, the world is multipolar and has been for a couple of decades, this is the field where when Europe acts As an entity, it is actually larger than the United States, but in the lower table of transnational relations there are things that happen outside the control of governments, whether they are financial transactions that are larger than the budgets of some countries or whether the climate change or pandemics. or if it is terrorism, these types of problems, these transnational problems are often generated by non-state actors and states can only deal with them if they have the capacity to organize collective activities, there is no way that a single state can deal with them. with this hegemony alone. or not, that is why we must think about the second aspect I described.

Charlie Kindle's Hamburger Theory of Hegemonic Stability. I am less worried because I suggested that the hegemonic transition leads to a battle between the US and China; There could be a battle between us. People make mistakes from mystical formations. I mean, it's not totally ruled out, but that worries me less than the question of how we are dealing with the shift of power to non-state actors and whether we will be able to organize to create the institutional structures, whether formal institutions or informal networks, to address the collective goods problems that are generated by this vertical shift in power, which for me is an issue that actually worries me more than I worry about Gilpin Mearsheimer's traditional power transition. side by side, so as we address the topic of global power changing the international order, I think we want to remember that power has a zero-sum dimension where you act on the power of others and that's still the relevant thing. is to maintain a balance of power in, say, the South China Sea or the East China Sea.

You are still very important, that tends to be Sol zero, but there is also power with others, as well as power over others, and that is where collective action comes into play. or another way of saying it to go back to my original definition if power is the ability to affect others to get the results you want and many of the issues we are dealing with, such as international financial stability, climate change, pandemics, transnational terrorism, our Issues that we cannot handle alone, so we can only be successful if others are also successful, only if we have power with others, not just power over others, and one of the great challenges is to address the issue in the What we are thinking about: the changes.

What they're going through is: are we ready to think clearly about this power and the power over vertical responses to vertical change and horizontal change? Not long ago, the National Intelligence Council that I once headed issued a report. about what they thought the world would be like in 2030 and what they said is that the US is not going to recover primacy or hegemony if that term was used that it had in the 20th century, but it is going to be the leading state, it is going to be a premise that you intervene what is different with the rise of the rest is that we are We will have to pay more attention to the parties and the United States.

You're going to have to learn to work with others better than you do now if you're going to address things that are very important to our citizens and to others in terms of being global public goods, so to me the challenge we face in The answer to this is how Let's adjust our thinking about global power and a changing international order so that we don't get caught up in traditional metaphors of decline or prolonged period or threats arising from China's rising power, etc. We can also think about the question of whether I will be able to create both formal and informal institutions to address the public goods problems that this vertical shift is creating for us.

To me, that's really the crux of the question, so thank you very much. a lot for your time it's a humidity, it was fantastic and a fantastic conclusion to my day and a fantastic opening to what I think will be a great discussion and I'll start Joe, you're objectively right, you're right, your conclusions are Solidly optimistic and liberal It's just that how policymakers in Washington and Beijing are thinking these days is my concern. I share with you. I sympathize so much with your announcement that it is actually overwhelming for the most part and when we write our next book together maybe we can do it.

That as a whole is good, but the only thing that worries me is that, whatever you say in objective terms, the power of you knows that it is not changing in the way of speaking of China, which is much weaker than it is said which is blah, blah, blah, the United States should not be afraid and China should not put too much pressure on the ground. It seems a little more problematic now, says this man. perception is understanding or whatever, every time I go to a conference, John Mearsheimer never seems so happy. I mean, continue like I told you, so you know, because a few years ago he was arguing this against the great Basinski about the inevitable.

Power transition conflicts, so I agree with his analysis, the question is are mr. The leadership in Beijing listens to you or someone else and all the people in Washington start to think there is an American government. is declining and China is rising and I respond that the tilt towards Asia, the turn towards Asia, is at least interpreted in some circles as a response to what is perceived as the rise of China and is triggering this security dilemma that is being trying to solve. avoid it let's start with that and then open up to the rest of us yeah well your points are very good in the sense ofwhich you know is why, as I said in this book, structural explanations are not adequate questions of human agency. and people who make the wrong decision or I have misperceptions or make miscalculations and derail things that structurally shouldn't happen.

In fact, one could argue that this is counterfactual, that World War I really is not just a structural issue, but also involves certain explanations. In the miscalculations that the leaders made I mean basically I think the Germans felt it was better to have the war before the railroads were built that allowed the Russians to get their troops to the border. The Schlieffen Plan with them is obsolete anyway. The point is that people make calculations and miscalculations, so you can imagine, for example, when in the East China Sea a situation worries a local Chinese ship captain he does something that is not designed by the people of Beijing but confronts, pushes people in Beijing into a difficult situation of either backing down and losing face or taking a solid alternative, he says, so that's not a funny example in 2010, you might remember there was a Chinese fishing boat that crashed into a Japanese Coast Guard ship and it wasn't something on Beijing's orders, turns out the fishing captain was drunk, but one time it happened that it was impossible for the leaders in Beijing to say "oh, forget it" and it ended up leading to the Chinese embargoing rare minerals exported to Japan and a strong shift of Japanese opinion towards the Chinese at a time when Japanese opinion was actually more than just Billington.

In theory, some politicians in Japan had made some efforts to improve relations with China, so one of my Japanese friends said that China's behavior in the survey was strongly an own goal, although it really hurts China more than it helps, but from the point of view of a Chinese leader who says: "I'm going to be criticized in the blogosphere and in the bureaucracy for being weak and giving in to the Japanese, no, so you can get, I mean, no, I didn't want to say with my description give a vision of Pollyanna". world, but and that is again the recent purchase in this new book.

I put a lot of emphasis on the interaction between structure and agency. What they say is that it is structurally. I don't see the need for this, so if we can persuade people that that's the case, but it's not like Britain in 1914 or whatever, then maybe you won't have the stories of misperceptions and calculation errors for surprises, so I'm not predicting, I'm just writing structural circulation capacity, okay, let's lose what we say, we want it. It was the people, yeah, come on, let's get right to the middle here to declare it equal. I want to bring I'm just going to pick two people that I know quicker and then I don't know.

I know Danny. We start with Professor Danny Crowes. part of economics here, okay, thank you very much professor nyah. I am intrigued by your reformulation of a Gemini stability theory in your description of a move from a horizontal power shift to a vertical power shift and part of the idea here, of course, is that in moving to the dimension of change of vertical power, we make it much clearer what are the global public goods that the hegemony should try to achieve, but I wonder if they are one of the real problems of the theory of the stability of hegemony as a way of understanding international relations. actually relatively few and far between issues on which we can agree on what the global public good is, it's true, no one wants pandemics, it's true, we don't want more international terrorism, but in terms of something like international financial stability, Our opinions differ sharply on the measures needed to restore global international financial stability, the fact that a hegemony is justified through the instability theory of hegemony seems to be problematic.

Well, I think that's a very good point and I also think that if you look at the response to the 2008 financial crisis, which occurred largely in the United States, MidAmerican's fault is that the interesting thing is that the way in which responded the Obama administration was a way in which it began to attract other states, so the use of the creation and the use of the G20, but also the discussion about the realignment of quotas in the IMF, are basically ways, I mean . Americans learn slowly, and I would say this is an example of their learning that John Ikenberry uses here tonight and has written very well about this, which is that there is something about the openness of American hegemony, an openness in the sense of willingness to share power and others are getting help somewhere in the whole some of the rules I think are encouraging so I think your point if Americans use the Kindle burger theory in a simplistic way and say we are Great Britain and that we are all good, then I think I would not be very optimistic, but the idea that Americans can learn to share more power not entirely.

I mean, there are a lot of limits to the way they do things. I think it's a source of some optimism, so I think your point is well taken. straight up, very universal, Mike, you dislike him. I was going to ask what do you think that in a changing international order, the internal structure of the West and the rest could make a difference in their soft power capabilities, as we have seen recently? There has been a highly publicized hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay where over 100 people are on hunger strike, but if hundreds of Chinese prisoners go on hunger strike in the middle of the forest, do they make a sound and are there obviously restrictions? budget? if the relative balance is changing and the West should release the budget and develop greater scrutiny than disputes potentially affecting soft power capabilities and also if I can, another question: China has been quite successful in soft power in West Africa, especially and other parts of the developing world, so do you think the West still has a chance to preserve some software?

If you really look at before the invasion of Iraq, you could measure that the attractiveness of the United States fell by about 30 points per country in all Western European countries and fell even more than that in Muslim countries, so They can sow actions that Americans take, which reduces American soft power, but at the same time, a lot of American soft power comes from non-state actors in civil society, so the fact that people may be protesting by American policies but still wanting to go to American universities is something that indicates the diverse nature of the sources of American soft power.

I hate the Chinese, they are the ones who haven't gotten to that point of unleashing civil society, so the Chinese got a certain amount of soft power from the success of their government. The economy is a model that attracts others, that is the case of West Africa, they also get a certain amount of soft power from their culture, it is a very Chinese traditional culture, very attractive, so these Confucius Institutes can create attraction , but when you close up Me, Weiwei or Leo, I will take a bow, you are just not going to compete in Paris or London, you may not do so badly in Lagos or in the car, I don't know, but in terms of the countries that they are probably more important in terms of power.

I think the Chinese will have, I mean, they may have some degree of soft power, which is important. I'm not putting it down, but it's not clear that it's going to be greater than American or British soft power when you put it. on a larger scale, so I don't really worry much about Chinese activities in Africa. I'm serious, Africans can mind their own thoughts and I don't think the fact that there is an attraction to the Chinese situation sometimes instigated by Chinese aid, you know, I think for me it's not a big concern that I don't be a permanent factor, so I think there is a problem.

I think Americans should be more careful about how they manage their soft power. a good case, but are we going to lose a soft power battle with China in Africa or elsewhere? I don't think so, okay, I'm going to take this right here, there's a lady up there and there's someone here, yeah, and there's someone waving. I'm going to take three, get it shortened quickly, good mind, thank you, yes, sir. Knight, you very briefly mentioned the role of digital diplomacy or this online space that a lot of people say is an extension of a public sphere for the same reasons that you said it comes down to the cost of entry and a lot of people can do it. . but at the same time you mentioned that generating broadcasts from the government doesn't give you credibility, so I'm wondering if you can comment on all these digital diplomacy efforts, for example, from the UK, from the US, from non-state actors and Similarly, when there are media organizations, for example like Al Jazeera, that also take advantage of online space and media to project their own variations of soft power, it is not sexual and there is something, yes please sir, yeah, that's great, no. good question I want Kevin to have as many people as possible, that's what's good, thank you very much for the interesting talk.

My name is Jim Blowhole from the Overseas Development Institute. My elaboration is somewhat similar to Professor Quas's and is about global public goods and whether the legitimacy of being Cashman has to do with one's ability and willingness to provide sustainable global public goods to the rest of the world. How do you think the formation of the BRIC economy is going to contribute to that, especially in the economic sphere? Stop me, thank you. thank you very much in green hi my name is Sarah just a quick question about the importance of democracy and the creation of soft power or at least eliminating a soft power and wondering if the final sacrifice of the Chinese administration will be a transition to democracy before that China can actually wield any kind of considerable amount of soft power in the world.

Great, yes, well, the first question about changes in communications technology, the existence of the Internet, the blogosphere, the Twittersphere, etc., makes things much more complicated and is very interesting if we are trying to do public diplomacy as a government and we are doing it by simply broadcasting, the big danger is that in an information age where there is such a plethora of information sources, scarce resources are focused on credibility and government broadcasting is not always very credible, I think A rare exception to this is the BBC and one of the reasons the BBC maintains its credibility is because it is able to bite the hand that feeds it.

Now that your country's self-criticism is a way to maintain credibility, so it's not like government broadcasts can't generate any soft cars. I think Britain shows that it can be done, but if you ask about China's efforts, I'm using China's example, but I don't want to say that you can do it for other countries as well. if we take these huge expenditures on CCTV to become CNN or if we take the channel down to zero if it is considered as the voice of the Masters, then it has no credibility and it does not generate soft power, then if you are doing smart public diplomacy today, you really want to figure out how to use the Twittersphere in the blogosphere to get a lot of voices from citizen to citizen.

The problem with that is that it is very uncomfortable for ministers in Parliament who say they expect a At the moment when you say that a foreign service officer of Her Majesty's Government criticized Guantánamo, you know, publicly in the Twittersphere, but If you don't allow that you don't get credibility, so that's the problem, how is public diplomacy organized today? it has to go beyond broadcasting, but once you go beyond broadcasting, all the problems of democratic accountability arise and it is not an easy problem now on the question of global public goods. Can BRICS contribute well to global public goods?

Like the term BRICS, can China contribute to global public goods? Yes, India can, yes, Brazil, yes, in kind. I suppose Russia could do it if it wanted to summon the resources for it, but as an entity, the BRICS announced an investment bank as a rival to develop a The bank could be a rival, I suppose, to the World Bank, but it doesn't seem to have taken off, so which in principle I suppose you could say that the BRICS as an organization could contribute to global public goods, something we have not seen yet. the question of democracy and China if China became democratic then the restriction I saw or described on Chinese soft power would probably disappear if it were democratic it would unleash its civil society and an unleashed Chinese civil society would be like a British French United States unleashed German civil society : There would be some good things and some bad things that would make you think about American civil society.

There are some aspects that are attractive. There are some that are treatises on American culture. But China would then be like others and would not have theproblem that I described what is the fact that you can't, you can't let it go, no, I was giving a speech in Shanghai and a student stood up at Fudan University and said how can we increase Chinese soft power and I said , relax, is not very useful. What did he do? he said and answered: it's okay, I was quiet, yes, yes. I wonder why there's a question back there and there's a question ahead.

No, come out to the balcony in a moment. Yes, back from the street. Jude again and I'll continue with a little bit more, yes please, thank you very much. I had a question about how to answer Fess Cox's question about whether human agency will find a relatively positive fulfillment that we presented and it was really present, I mean, it seems to me that the United States is following the only credible strategy that the race was trying and engaging and protecting at the same time, but striking the right balance is clearly the trick and what I have not seen is an articulation of what a peaceful adaptation of China as a regional power in the Asia-Pacific actually looks like what compromises will be required from both sides and I will quote that both parties are willing to do it, do you have an opinion on what they might consider in this regard? well, commitments in the region, yes, one of the front bodies, so I profess and my name is for each one, I'm sure, so I used to be a student here at the LSE, in fact, I'm Scott, so as a professor of mine, well done, see you.

Later I want to take the topic away from China for a second and return to your point about the monstah law, as you mentioned, now share the stage with the States and take the specific example perhaps or a growing trend, particularly in the MENA region, by the which We have non-state actors that have actually now transitioned and become state actors, so many of the United States, as interlocutors in the post-Arab revolution countries, were previously oppressed by the same regimes in the United States . For many decades he intentionally remained in power and how one felt that he knew that those particular cases could develop specifically, we have had to do so with reference to the US encourage these nascent states to understand representative government in the way that US The US, Europe and most of the West understand and call liberal democracy.

Well, yes, I'm the first. How can you imagine an agreement with China? A certain amount of agreement is already occurring. I mean Americans complain bitterly about China's undervalued currency and basically if you look at the situation, about 90 percent of that problem is solved now, you can get objections from economists. I mean, solve it in part through some adjustments to the exchange rate. Part B, due to inflation, partly due to some accommodation. but certainly the United States and China have had a strategic economic dialogue that goes back several years and in that process you know that in the end you don't say "wow, we just agreed on everything which is weird at the press conference, but if you look at the net question of whether China's exchange rate is still seriously undervalued and whether it is hurting American industry I know my colleagues tell me who are economists, so I'm better people to judge. the problems, but I solve them. in recent years, so there is an example of adaptation, but one area where I think we should put more effort is energy and climate China builds a new coal-fired plant every week.

CO2 is a collective evil, a global public evil and if we could. Help China develop its shale gas capabilities by helping to ease export restrictions on technologies related to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. It could reduce admission admissions from China. Sorry, emissions in half without reducing their growth rate. I could imagine this being the case: where China gets better at this and we get better at that? We're both better off, so I think energy and climate would be an area where I would put quite a bit of emphasis on another area of ​​adaptation. Regarding the question of non-state actors in the Middle East, it is interesting that if you look at the experience of Tahrir Square, what was called the Arab Spring two years ago, we had a generation of people who were empowered by the new technologies to overcome collective action problems. that could actually communicate with each other came together and, as we saw, produced a situation in which the Mubarak regime had to respond to an event in which she left office, as it turned out that They didn't have the ability through Facebook or Twitter or whatever to organize political parties. that could win in the elections, so if you ask if it produced a democracy, it will produce something different than what was before, but I think it is not yet known what will happen in terms of democracy, but if you ask how should the United States or How should it did the US?

Reply, what's interesting to me is that Obama made a bet and when he was communicating with Mubarak he bet on the Tower Square generation and some people said it was a big mistake, for example the Saudis said this is something terrible and Obama basically made a bet. that long-term history was going to be on the side of the square tower generation, we don't know if he made the right bet or not. I mean, it's too early to tell, but it's interesting that instead of following the traditional policies that like you described them of siding with the stable autocrat because you know the stable autocrat took something different and I hope it turns out well.

I went up to the balcony who is there, who has the first one there and another one there and then there is a lady in the middle, you know, so I just take this that can bring us together. I apologize. I've been trying to bring as many people as possible, so yes, please, yes, okay, hello professor and just a quick question. Russia brings up the topic. Russia in the context of the global power shift, where do you see Russia? How can it wisely use its soft power and what can Russia do to achieve a positive image?

Yes, okay, I think about it and I'm sorry, I'm so biased, I'm terrible, gentlemen, please, yes. So yes, I would like to return to China and I would like to know if you say that the hegemonic translation of the theory should not be taken too seriously on the grounds that China still has a long way to go to match the United States in terms of its capabilities, how do you explain China's so-called new certificates for 108? I mean, how do you explain the fact or how do you explain Chinese intentions regarding the Senkaku Islands, for example? Thank you, okay, last question for the evening, yes please, yes, my question is about local elected officials on the global stage.

I think we see more of them because it's easier to get on the global stage. Do you consider local elected officials on the global stage as non-state or state actors? actors and then what are the implications for state sovereignty and the balance of power in Russia. I think after the elections in Russia and Vladimir Putin won the election but basically lost in the streets, there was a generation that was protesting against him and they basically turned to nationalism to generate domestic political support to delegitimize the protesters and I think that has been very damaging through Russian soft power.

I mean locking up these young women, Riot, who made the song in the Cathedral, prosecuting people for protests, etc. this is their Russian soft power and I think it is a shame. I mean, if Russia wanted to increase its soft power, think about the glories of traditional Russian culture, music, literature, paintings, I mean, there are so many attractive things in Russia, but it's a shame. To see that appealing to nationalist and xenophobic ways to maintain their domestic political support has happened like this, I grew up on a foreign policy blog. Well, why China and I don't get some power, some of my thoughts are explained in more detail. there but I would like to see Russia change its musical policy I think it has many admirable characteristics over China and a new assertiveness I think what happened after 2008 China grew 10% annually USA. was in a severe recession, there are many Chinese who thought this showed that America was in decline and China was on the rise and I think the new assertiveness was a miscalculation and I think it actually turned out to be quite costly for China if If you look at China's relations with Japan, Korea, India and with Korea and South Korea, India, Vietnam and several other countries, they were much worse after this new assertiveness, so it was a costly gamble for China that the United States United States was in decline and it was on the rise.

The Chinese are starting to realize that top leaders are starting to realize this around the end of 2011, diving in, a state councilor writes an essay saying maybe we should go back to Dong Zhou Qing's council, take your time, but I think before they went back to that. position, they had done themselves considerable damage if you take the last question about local elected officials in the sense that they are state actors but they can also play a very important transnational role. I guess it was in the 1970s with Bob Kane and I coined this transgovernmental phrase. distant relations parts of governments not necessarily the top level of governments but the lower bureaucracy lower level elected officials can form coalitions across the state and can affect relations between states, in the sense that when there are, say , local government officials who go to conferences have different ways of communicating with each other in the blogosphere and whatever they become what we call transgovernmental actors, the trans government coalition.

I think that many of the problems that we face in terms of these problems created by the information revolution that I call the vertical power ship are both transnational and transgovernmental coalitions will be needed to try to produce networks that are useful in solving them. Yeah, okay, first of all, I apologize, so now the number of hands had gone up and I couldn't get everyone together, so I try. bring as many as possible, but I apologize, it's always good, always a good idea. I think I always end on a high note, with lots of hands raised and none at all.

This has been a great day for us in ideas. It's been a great. day talking about the United States Craig Calhoun, our new principal said this morning that we have to take the United States even more seriously, what they will do in school and I think this is at least one of the contributions, so thank you for his many contributions. Good questions, but more importantly, thanks for Joe Knight. Joe is doing a lot of things, but the one thing he's not doing right now may have noticed him slowing down, so can we join hands not to reject them?