By Robert A. Manning
With some foresight and leadership, the postwar system can survive.
For all the hand-wringing about China remaking Asia in its image – as evidenced in the recent controversy over Beijing’s new investment bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank – reports of a U.S. retreat are greatly exaggerated.
Congress’s recent approval of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) and the likely approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama administration’s legacy trade deal, is the sort of economic statecraft that can update and sustain the open, ruled-based order. Yet as the pending demise of the EXIM Bank illustrates, such efforts have been all too rare.
Yes, a global diffusion of power from West to East is unfolding with potentially profound challenges to the international system under which the global economy has flourished since 1945. And yes, a shift in the center of economic gravity to the Asia-Pacific region has occurred.
China’s re-emergence is raising questions about the underlying bipartisan premise in the U.S. that as rising powers like China integrated into the global system, they would develop a stake in the stability of the international system and its norms, and would advance their interests within established institutions, rather than challenge its structures or seek to create alternative institutions.
Read the full story at The Diplomat