I am grateful to Edward Steinfeld for his thoughtful review of No One's World. I focus my response to his critique on three issues: the rise of the West, the implications of China's ascent, and the challenge of preserving a rules-based international system.

Steinfeld charges that my take on the rise of the West airbrushes the darker side of the story and is “highly stylized” and “woefully incomplete.” But I hardly overlook the intolerance and bloodshed that accompanied the birth of capitalism and democracy, and my reliance on synthesis and broad cross-regional comparison was in the service of demonstrating that the West followed a historically contingent developmental path, based on unique cultural, socioeconomic, and political conditions. Today's emerging powers are similarly forging their own developmental models, leading to a world of multiple modernities, not, as Steinfeld sees it, global convergence along Western lines.

For instance, it is of great consequence for international politics that the Islamic world has not experienced a transformation similar to that of the Protestant Reformation. Mosque and state remain intertwined in the Middle East, meaning that the region is embracing a very different kind of participatory politics than the secular variant that emerged in many parts of the post-Reformation West. Divergent political norms hardly preordain a collision between Western Christendom and the Muslim Middle East, but they do foretell different approaches to domestic and international governance. It is of similarly fundamental importance that China's rising middle class has become a stakeholder in the one-party state—a stark contrast with the clash between bourgeoisie and monarchy that cleared the way for the onset of liberal democracy in Europe. A compact between the Chinese Communist Party and the country's economic elite gives state capitalism considerable staying power.

I examine these non-Western developmental paths not to denigrate them but to make the case that the world is headed toward growing ideological and normative diversity, as well as a multipolar distribution of power. I do not foresee, as Steinfeld suggests, a “Manichean clash of civilizational values.” Rather, the redistribution of global power will be the main driver of geopolitical rivalry, and divergent norms will make it more difficult to tame the competitive dynamics awakened by structural change.

On China, Steinfeld and I share considerable common ground. We agree that China must confront mounting economic and political challenges and that, particularly when it comes to commerce, it is borrowing from the Western model to do so. However, we part company on the political front. He believes that China takes the West as its “key aspirational target” in pursuing reform. I agree that the Chinese government is searching for greater legitimacy and accountability—but in a Confucian and communitarian political milieu, not in a liberal and republican one. Steinfeld maintains that China sees no institutional alternatives to those of the West. Instead, I see plenty of evidence—the Shanghai Cooperation Council, the BRICS grouping, China's support for a regional trade group that excludes the United States—that Beijing is actively seeking to circumvent institutions dominated by the West.

Finally, while Steinfeld and I agree on the need for a more inclusive global order, he suggests that I overstate the differences in interests and values between the West and the rising rest. He sees China as a “fairly standard aspirant”—a country that will soon look like a big Taiwan or South Korea. In contrast, I see China's rise as potentially setting the stage for significant Sino-American rivalry over interests and norms. By exaggerating the “alien qualities” of emerging powers, Steinfeld claims, I mistake “fairly standard interstate friction for an existential threat to the global order.” I fear that he makes the opposite mistake. By raising expectations that China will “play our game,” he mistakes the perils associated with a hegemonic transition for nothing more than business as usual within the Western order.

Western leaders need to head into this period of transition with eyes wide open. If so, there is a good chance of arriving at the compromise and consensus needed to craft a new and more diverse rules-based order. In contrast, to assume that China and other emerging powers are about to dock their ships of state in the Western harbor is both illusory and dangerous.