The Global Order That China Doesn’t Want Us to Build

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, in July. Japan and the EU plan to launch a “competitiveness alliance” to enhance their economic and trade cooperation. (David Mareuil/Anadolu Agency/Bloomberg)

About the author: John Austin is a senior fellow with the Eisenhower Institute and an associate fellow with the Academy of International Affairs – NRW.

America’s dramatic rejection by its current leadership of the oft-referenced “rules-based” international economic and political order crafted after World War II has set leaders and foreign policy analysts scrambling. New economic and political partnerships are being sought and formed, and a new alignment of nations is slowly emerging. I call it a new Global Opportunity Order.

However one wants to refer to the changing international landscape, China’s Xi Jinping hasn’t been shy about his aims to dominate it. He is loudly asserting an alternative world order, with China as leader flanked by the heads of the world’s largest democracy, India, and the world’s leading rule-breaker, Russia. Meanwhile, Japan and the U.K. are accommodating America’s mercantilist behavior. They are folding under economic pressure to get the best tariff deal possible and limit the damage. Other former U.S. allies are reconsidering what had once been a useful turn away from economic ties with China and Russia.

But there is a better path for the world’s democracies than cozying up to China, Russia, and the authoritarian bloc or blithely accepting America’s illiberalism. In comes the Global Opportunity Order. This new order would increase economic activity and prosperity, forge partnerships that enhance economic interdependence and shared growth, and encourage freedom of thought, movement, work, and expression.

Already, some countries are pursuing this alternative route. At the same time Xi was making his pitch to lead the crafting of a new world order, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Norway, and nearly a dozen other small and medium sized nations announced a new Future of Investment and Trade Partnership to boost trade openness and commit to rules-based international relations. Canada and other leading suppliers of advanced manufacturing components to the U.S. are seeking new global co-production partnerships in the U.K. and Europe.

The European Union is forging new multilateral free trade agreements with South America and pursuing new partnerships with a 12-member Indo-Pacific trade bloc. Germany’s coalition government included in its governance agreement earlier this year a call for a new North-South Commission to help fill the global void of a dismantled USAID.

These are all encouraging signs that the interest in and commitment to a rights-respecting set of international economic operating rules isn’t dead but alive and well—as much as authoritarian leaders and policy pundits want to bury it.

If anything, as the U.S. increasingly mimics China and Russia’s nationalistic, state-directed economies and transactional global engagement model, it is imperative that other world leaders commit to an open, free, rules-based international order. Working together is the only way that they can strengthen their individual economies—and muster the collective economic strength needed to counter China, Russia, and now America’s economic and political coercion.

Yes, the U.S. has the largest and most dynamic economy, at roughly $30 trillion in annual gross domestic product. But the EU ranks second (ahead of China) with an annual GDP of $19 trillion. If the EU teamed up with Japan, the fourth largest national economy at $4 trillion, and the U.K., the sixth largest at $3.3 trillion, it could create an economic bloc on par with the U.S.

Add into this alliance Canada ($2.1 trillion), Mexico ($1.7 trillion), Australia and South Korea (both at $1.7 trillion), and Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines (all at $.5 trillion). Such an economic bloc would be the world’s largest.

Look again at the countries assembled for Xi’s new bloc of nations. Yes, there are big economic players like China and India. But add up the dozen or so other countries that form the supposed vanguard of this new world order: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan. Their collective GDP is $26 trillion, smaller than the U.S. and less than the EU plus the U.K. and Japan.

China’s vision for a new world order has problems beyond economics. It is largely an assembly of unsavory regimes with egregious human rights abuse records—think Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and China itself—alongside some of the world’s most noxious, oppressive, and aggressive dictatorial regimes like Russia and Iran.

The world needs a better choice. The world has a better choice—if it chooses to pull itself together to offer it.

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