In this provocative new book, Charles Kupchan issues a clarion call to the advanced industrial nations of the West. The global order they have built over two centuries—a system based on liberal democracy at home and free trade abroad—is meeting its demise, he warns. New nations have arisen that neither share the West's historical traditions nor aspire to its contemporary values. The advanced industrial West, Kupchan argues, cannot logically expect nations like China, India, Brazil, and Russia to voluntarily comply with an existing order that is alien to their experiences and unaccommodating to their interests. Nor can the West realistically strong-arm such nations. The fulcrum of relative power has shifted too far to make coercion possible. But the West, he asserts, must not stand idly by. Historically, power transitions—save for a few rare exceptions—have tended to engender violent conflict. This time will be no different, says the author, unless the West moves aggressively to foster a new and far more inclusive global order.

Upon what principles should this order be based? First, in Kupchan's view, the system must be grounded in a new approach to governmental legitimacy, one focused not on taxonomical categorizations of regime type, but instead on observed measures of governmental performance. Second, the new order must emphasize respect for sovereignty, presumably privileging noninterference over concerns previously used to justify intervention (i.e., defense of human rights, promotion of democracy, or support for self-determination). Third, the new order must emphasize inclusion for “the rest” in multilaterial organizations. Fourth, the system must tolerate national efforts to tame globalization, whether through financial regulation, currency management, labor standards, or a variety of other market interventions. Fifth, the system, in acknowledging its limited capacities in an increasingly complex world, must embrace regionalization and decentralization. And sixth, the new order must forestall great-power conflict between the existing hegemon, the United States, and its sole likely challenger in the future, China.

For the West to play a role in any of this, Kupchan warns, it must first get its own act together, an immense challenge given how far afield it has strayed. The United States suffers political paralysis at home and overextension abroad. Special interests distort the electoral process and undermine policy, thus leading to huge disparities in wealth, privilege, and access across American society. And overseas, the United States, bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, has abdicated its global responsibilities and failed adequately to manage the rise of the rest. And throughout all, the United States has become more unilateral in its actions, undercutting the multilateralism that had once resided at the core of the West's global order.

The European Union, meanwhile, has performed no better. Harmonization has yielded to fragmentation, as the member nations have split on everything from America's war on terror to the handling of the Greek financial crisis.

For Europeans and Americans alike, Kupchan's message is straightforward. Get your political house in order. Empower the state to engage in domestic renewal. Encourage pragmatic populism. Pursue responsible fiscal policy. And on the foreign policy front, focus on that which truly counts: the building of a new system that can peacefully accommodate the rising rest.

Kupchan's ideas are wonderfully thought provoking, and his policy prescriptions eminently sensible. As a reviewer, however, I find myself in the awkward position of agreeing wholeheartedly with those prescriptions, but disagreeing strongly with the train of logic by which the author arrived at them. Kupchan's analysis, in my view, misconstrues the nature of both the West and “the rest,” and in so doing, overstates the breadth of the chasm dividing them. While he arrives at appropriate calls for greater collaboration and multilateralism, his assumptions, if truly believed, could just as easily support a far more confrontational—and, in my view, far more parlous—approach.

The underlying problem is that Kupchan's argument is premised on a highly stylized historical account, one that is not so much wrong as woefully incomplete. In his telling, Western society emerged from conditions of fragmented state authority, religious ferment, an assertive and highly urbanized bourgeoisie, and dense social networks. What resulted over time were deeply institutionalized preferences for open scientific inquiry, commercial entrepreneurship, political democracy, and cultural tolerance. Those features, in turn, interacted in Promethean fashion to produce unprecedented dynamism for state and society alike. The West's Athens grew to shine over the East's Sparta, the tottering empires of yore—the Ottomans, the Romanovs, the Qing—with their inflexible hierarchies, their overweening bureaucracies, their dogmatic ideologies, and their slavishly loyal landed elites.

In Kupchan's view, however, new circumstances have arisen—whether related to “globalization,” new technology, or something else—that now prevent Western institutions from translating so clearly into dominant state power. Instead, it is the old imperial civilizations that now enjoy the edge, catching up with—and in some cases surpassing—their liberal peers. Thus, it falls upon us, the denizens of the West, to respond by shifting our own institutions and finding ways globally to accommodate theirs.

I certainly agree that the nations of the West must continue evolving and innovating if they are to survive. However, my reading of history is somewhat different from Kupchan's. Pluralism, civil society, and vibrant democracy are certainly part of the Western experience. But so too are totalitarianism, Nazism, industrialized mass murder, and mechanized modern warfare. In America's case, moving hand-in-hand with entrepreneurship, robust property rights, and democracy have been robust histories of slavery, disenfranchisement of women and minorities, suppression of organized labor, and corrupt government. The point is neither to denigrate the West nor to deny its potential as a model for late developers. Rather, it is simply to emphasize that the concept of “the West” encompasses a vast array of values and practices—some admirable, some abhorrent, and many intermingled, often uncomfortably, at key moments in time.

Kupchan is absolutely right to emphasize the existence of multiple versions of modernity in the contemporary world. Those multiple versions, however, are as well represented within the Western tradition as beyond it. As a case in point, China over the past century and a half has careered through repeated efforts to assimilate practices and ideologies that at any given time were understood to be the essence of Western modernity and power. There was Marxism, and Leninism, and fascism, and state planning, and industrial capitalism, and yes, even democracy. The absorption process was often brutally disruptive and violent. And the institutional vestiges—including authoritarianism and nationalism—are still evident today. We can have a serious debate about whether these vestiges are more reflective of the Western models they were intended to mimic or the indigenous traditions that such models were supposed to replace. But it is analytically unjustifiable to assert that the mere existence of these societal features—all of which have counterparts in modern Western history—signifies ipso facto some kind of Manichean clash of civilizational values between East and West. To do so would reflect a lack of awareness not just of “the rest” but also of ourselves—who we are, how we behave, and where we have come from.

In a more straightforward policy sense, the differences between the West and “rest” might not be as vast as Kupchan suggests. The United States, and to a lesser extent the nations of Western Europe, view themselves—understandably and justifiably—as exemplars of free trade, open markets, and minimal state regulatory intervention. Much of the rest, however—equally understandably, and equally justifiably—sees in the West nations with monumental barriers against imported agricultural products, vast defense budgets supporting indigenous high-tech industries, expansive governmental structures for funding “big science” and applied industrial research and development, and highly sophisticated central banks capable of managing critical prices in the domestic economy. One could be forgiven for interpreting the state-building efforts of at least some of the rest as aspirational attempts to duplicate Western practices rather than supplant them.

Indeed, it is conceivable that at least some members of the rest, though seemingly out of step with the West at any given moment of time, are actually on a Western-style developmental path. Take the cases of Taiwan and South Korea, entities that during their authoritarian phases in the latter half of the twentieth century borrowed extensively from the illiberal aspects of the Western tradition, but are flourishing multiparty democracies today. Neither place during the 1970s and 1980s could have reasonably been considered democratic. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can now look back on those periods as part of a longer democratization process.

And that brings us to the challenge of interpreting contemporary China, the one country Kupchan rightly, and with all appropriate caution, identifies as a potential great-power competitor to the United States. As an authoritarian, one-party regime, China could not be more different from the advanced industrial democracies of the West. Yet, in profound ways during the reform era, China has latched onto critical elements of the Western liberal tradition. The nation has thrown itself open to trade, outsourced the education of its elites to the West, reintegrated many of those elites into key positions in the domestic establishment, and increasingly promoted Western notions of citizen-focused, accountable governance. The results on the ground have been mixed. Extraordinary growth has been coupled with rampant corruption, gross abuses of power, and terrible environmental degradation. In some corners of Chinese society today, one can easily encounter self-satisfied celebration of the nation's newfound economic power, as well as jingoistic demands for more assertive application of foreign policy muscle. But one can hear plenty of other voices as well, even from within the state, openly ruing the flaws of the Chinese system—its clumsy excesses of governmental hierarchy, its relative paucity of social capital and trust, and its glaring lack of the legal protections believed to foster the accountable government and vibrant entrepreneurship associated with the West. China is a society in a self-described state of becoming. The very legitimacy of the system itself, one might argue, depends on a society-wide understanding that tomorrow must look different from today. And in the context of that imperative for change, the key point of reference—in essence, the key aspirational target for the future—is not some sort of idealized version of Chinese values, but rather that which is observed in the advanced industrial West today.

China today has no “ism” of its own. Neither state nor society has articulated any unique set of indigenous values or institutions that citizens can embrace. Nobody is celebrating—or even really talking—about institutional alternatives to the West. The imperative is to catch up and, by implication, to converge. But the questions are how quickly and toward exactly which elements of the West's decidedly complex, and sometimes contradictory, liberal traditions.

I believe that if the global system were to evolve in the direction advocated by Kupchan, such questions would more likely be resolved peacefully. Perhaps because I view China as developing along a trajectory generally compatible with the Western tradition (which itself constitutes an evolving set of norms and values), I believe that Kupchan's system is actually well within our reach. Attaining it, at least with respect to China, would require the West not to accommodate a revisionist ideology or alternative vision of modernity but, instead, to negotiate the far more circumscribed claims of a fairly standard aspirant to advanced industrial status. China, in my view, is more eager to join the club than to burn down the clubhouse. Like any nation, particularly one with unresolved claims in a historically fraught region, it will at times threaten unilateral action. Other nations can, and should, stand up in resistance. My fear, however, is that those sharing Kupchan's assumptions about the rising rest's alien qualities will mistake fairly standard interstate friction for an existential threat to the global order. In so doing, they risk leading us into an escalatory spiral necessitated by neither the structure of the system nor the aspirations of its newest rising members.