Freeman Dyson is one of our most eminent public scientists--scientists who make strong statements about public issues. His Weapons and Hope was a vigorous contribution to the debate on nuclear weapons provoked by the freeze movement of the early 1980s. Now professor emeritus of physics at the Institute of Advanced Study, Dyson has a piece in the current New York Review of Books entitled "Our Biotech Future," which makes the interesting argument that biotechnology will develop as computers did, in a decentralized way, and that all manner of genetic-technological wonders will develop as a result because the cumulative wisdom of crowds of experimenters will supersede the top-down monoculture of the corporations who have dominated biotech to date.

This may well be. Collective wishfulness is not always foolish. Who doesn't want humanity to solve some of its problems by restoring some measure of initiative and power to the villages where, Dyson thinks, or hopes, biotech advances may keep people down on potentially more productive farms so that they stay out of ruinous megacities and their favelas?

But I'm haunted by one throwaway line in the middle of Dyson's piece. It is the one I quote as the title of this piece. He drops these words toward the end of a long paragraph and then goes back to the core of his argument.

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I'm sure it's Josh's job to sum up, and certainly not mine, but I just wanted to thank the other commentators--and our readers--for a truly fun and interesting discussion. To have a serious conversation on China, with people (both commentators and our readers) who have been there, really spent time observing it, and are thinking hard about the consequences of our and their actions, is an enormous pleasure. And to do so without the occasional vitriol that goes with blogging has been a joy.

I agree thoroughly both with those deeply worried about China's human rights and environmental record and the "free pass" they have been given (particularly given the golden olympic opportunity to ask for some changes)--and with those who argue that this is an ancient culture, a successful country, and deserves respect as such. I believe both can be true, and hope that China watchers such as those writing here will help us find a way to respectfully accomodate China's rise, while simultaneously encouraging the respect for the rights of their people and others.

A number of commentators in recent years have noted the increasing lack of real-world political experience by Supreme Court judges, but this commentary over at Scotusblog.com hits the point hard:

Many of our greatest Justices came to the Court after substantial involvement in the country’s public life and, frequently, after serving in elective office...The current Court is striking for the absence of even a single Justice with such experience.

Is it possible that the current Court’s rather marked willingness to find constitutional limits on the authority of the Legislative Branch – striking down federal statutes at an unprecedented rate (and limiting State authority as well) – results in part from the fact that no Justice has actual legislative experience?

The result are abstract decisions on everything from racial integration to campaign finance that ignore the give-and-take of democratic debate in favor of abstract principles.

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I think John Feffer is exactly right in his post to say that hawks don’t really give a damn about China’s soft power advantage, because hard power, in their view, solves all. Or, to put it differently, if you’re threatening me with your popularity, then I guess I’ll just have to beat you with a baseball bat.

And I agree entirely Rachel Kleinfeld’s summary of the state of affairs in China today—“What China appears to be doing is raising its own people out of poverty and into an unfair, unaccountable, cronyist system”—as well as with everything else she writes in her post.

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The Supreme Court's decision in Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC has been hailed as a victory for free speech and lamented as a victory for corporate political influence. But no matter how WRTL had come out, candidates would still only be "viable" once they could appeal to wealthy donors and PAC contributors. In other words, middle- and working-class voters would still have little voice in choosing candidates and prioritizing issues. One dollar one vote is not democracy; it's plutocracy, and it's hurting the non-rich in America.

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I’m intrigued by this discussion of the potential benefits of China’s rise, and I agree with Josh and others that the overseas business community could care less about liberal values taking root in China (it’s not just the potential of a billion consumers but the reality of an enormous pool of cheap labor).

But I want to take up T.A. Frank’s question about the “whack jobs” and their take on China’s soft power. I would ask him, and others: Who needs whack jobs when the U.S. military budget is topping $600 billion?

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It’s Friday night in Beijing and I’ve just returned from a stroll through Tiananmen Square. I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on what things look like from this side of the Pacific.

Principally, I’d like to echo Naazneen’s comments that China could be a force for good in the world, and caution against analyses that dismiss this possibility outright.

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Naazneen has a wonderful point, and one I think is too often disregarded--liberty without order (a point Anne-Marie makes in her book) is not freedom at all. It is anarchy, and terrifying. The order that the Chinese model purports to provide is attractive, in and of itself.

But I don't think we should conflate their "order-based" as opposed to "political-liberty-based" model as automatically entailing good for the poor. The poor of China, yes, perhaps--although their anger at the environmental devestation and ensuing health problems that are occurring in China is a mark that greater purchasing power is not all that they wish for.

More to the point, China's actions have shown no interest in helping the poor overseas, as Naazneen (and I) would hope.

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The discussion has begun to turn to the final aspect of Josh’s book: the question of what the US should be doing in response to China’s growing international influence. As I have been studying China for the last few years, my thinking has moved from the view that the US should work to aggressively assert the appeal of democratic liberalism in order to counter China’s advances in the Third World to the more sanguine perspective that China’s rise could bring with it real benefits that the US should find a way to celebrate.

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The Chief Justice of the United States, at the climactic finale of the most far-reaching Supreme Court decision of this term, lyrically writes: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” How profound. Was it Learned Hand or Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote the comparably unforgettable, “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”

John Roberts’ aphorism, as well as his entire decision in the Louisville/Seattle school district cases, exhibits three features that are characteristic of the conservative movement’s highly effective approach to argumentation by 1) obfuscating real-world evidence and history; 2) inverting liberal values to advance unpopular and unarticulated right-wing ends; and 3) shifting the public’s focus from a genuine problem to an artificial one:

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As if I'd walked into a novel written by the author of Charm Offensive, here in Liberia China is a visible presence. There were ten Chinese on the plane. Then the Chinese state seal on the lapel of some of the security people at the airport. The Great Wall Hotel on the way into town. Hu Jintao recently paid Liberia its first state visit by a foreign leader in decades. A cell phone company is giving away Chinese motorcycles to ten lucky subscribers this month. The exit signs in the foreign ministry are in Chinese because the PRC has just refurbished it.

Liberian officials hope that China will take on some of the large infrastructure projects that Liberia cannot invest in because of its $3.7 billion debt. It will be several years before that debt is forgiven. But China isn't biting yet.

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To follow up on Rachel and Josh's exchange on whether foreign investors in China can alter/influence Beijing's direction:

Josh's pessimism about pressure from foreign firms is hard-earned and quite correct. The prospect of a billion potential consumers has a funny effect on multinational corporations. Regardless of the firm -- be it Google or NewsCorp -- firms will throw out any non-profit-related principle to guarantee a crack at the Chinese marketplace.

That said, market power cuts both ways. The most important lever of influence on Chinese economic behavior will not be Western producers, but Western consumers (and, by extension, Western regulators).

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You may have seen some short news stories this morning about a new report issued yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission about Net Neutrality. It was in all the papers, if not in great length.

It's a cinch that all the lobbyists for the telephone and cable companies saw it and are even now spreading it around Capitol Hill because FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras is taking a skeptical view of the issue, just as she did a year ago.

Every once in a while, it's a useful exercise to look under the hood and to see how those facile conclusions in the headlines about the FTC urging caution on Net Neutrality were derived. Just a warning -- it's not pretty.

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It was expected but the Supreme Court today dealt a body blow to school integration across the country. Two community plans, one in Seattle and one in Louisville, both used race as a factor in assigning students to some schools as a tool for maintaining integration of their schools. A majority of the Supreme Court decided that schools, however much done in good faith, cannot use race consciousness to achieve integration, even if people know that ignoring race will lead to more racial segregation.

I hate the Court as an institution just because they use supposed high principles to supersede democratic struggle over many tough issues. Sometimes in the past (although rarely in our nation's overall history), they have done this with good intent, but most of the time it has been activism that has set back social change and democratic power. This is one of them.

That said, we should emphasize that states and local governments still have options to fight for racial integration, something the swing decision by Justice Kennedy emphasized.

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This week has been a Supreme Court horror show. Today's decision, which comes close to overturning Brown vs. The Board of Ed, is about as horrific decision as any the Court has made since Plessy vs. Ferguson.

Hillary Clinton has it exactly right when she says, "Today, the Court turned its back on the promise of Brown vs. Board of Education that students of different racial backgrounds deserve an opportunity to attend school together. At a time when our nation's schools are increasingly resegregating, we should be championing local efforts to pursue integration and reduce racial inequities in schools."

Instead, the Roberts court is trying to turn the clock back to 1953.

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The news of falling home sales and slumping prices, along with the growing wave of scandals surrounding the mortgage and housing industry may prove to be more fun than the days of Enron and the Nasdaq meltdown. Who knows how many of today’s financial highfliers will join the ranks of the newly poor and convicted felons? It shouldn’t be long until the mainstream of the economics profession falls back on its famous refrain, “who could have known?”

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First, in terms of “lunacy” about China policy, I would put it in more neutral terms: there are and always have been left-right concerns about China. There was a left-right coalition that tried and to block ChinaR17;s ascension to the WTO. On the left, one mostly hears concerns about unfair trading practices, environmental damage and human rights abuses. On the right, the main concerns center around national security challenges. Both sides are correct in raising these concerns. James Mann is correct in pointing out that China policy since Nixon has been a particularly elite endeavor that does not have firm and deep support within the American polity.

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From the files of fawning and jawdroppingly clueless profiles of GOP presidential candidates, courtesy of the Boston Globe. The following is an account of a car trip the Giulianis took in the summer of 1999:

Before beginning the drive, Rudy Giuliani put Judith Nathan, a woman he had met earlier that year, in a “special friend” carrier and attached it to the side of the family car. He'd built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for Ms. Nathan.

Then Giuliani put his family, wife Donna Hanover and children Andrew and Caroline, on notice: He would be making stops to arrest squeegie men and jaywalkers, and that was it.

The ride was largely what you'd expect, until Ms. Nathan was suddenly attacked by a pair of ferrets.

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What a fascinating conversation to walk into halfway through! I thoroughly enjoyed Josh's magisterial new look at China, and how it is already undermining shared liberal values abroad through its aid and trade patterns, largely driven by its mercantalist trade patterns and demand for energy, raw materials, and arms markets--though (probably) not through a conscious decision to build an alternative model. I had not expected to be forced to comment on it with perhaps the best group of new, original China experts in the country!

So far, we've discussed whether this is likely to change due to African backlash, pressure from the Chinese people, or a demand for respect by the people of Southeast Asia.

But we haven't discussed another lever for change: the foreign business community working in China, who could (perhaps) be a small but real source that could affect the way China is doing business from the inside: either by requesting more liberal values, or by modelling and demonstrating the attractiveness of liberal values to Chinese, and providing a new internal model for them to consider.

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I have been arguing for years at TPM Cafe and in other writing that Vice President Cheney had done more than any other single person in the government -- including the President of the United States -- to plant acolytes and followers of his throughout the national security bureaucracy. He has had spies and apparatchiks in the Departments of State and Defense, in the Directorate of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency and the CIA, and elsewhere in government.

John Bolton was one of these at the State Department, as was Robert Joseph -- both of whom held the position of Under Secretary of State for International Security and Arms Control.

Finally, there is a breath-taking, disturbing four-part series in the Washington Post written by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker detailing the most outrageous usurpation of power that this nation has seen in decades, if not in its history. The series is on Cheney's Rasputin abilities and methodologies and is titled "Angler," the term the Secret Service uses to identify the Vice President.

Most outrageous is Cheney's recent claim that his office is not in the Executive Branch and is not an agency of government that fits within the matrix of checks and balances that affect the presidency.

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At the risk of taking us slightly off track, I wanted to bring up the subject of whack jobs. Among us participants, the disagreements have so far struck me as minor, about as bloody as a knife fight between Joe Biden and Dick Lugar. I suggest it's because we’re sane. But where's the fun in that? After all, in Washington over the past decade or so, many right-wing Congressman and think tankers have gone entirely batty over China, sensationalizing every threat and even making up one or two extra for good measure. Their suggested remedies, unsurprisingly, tend to involve a great deal of military hardware.

And this is where Charm Offensive comes in with a clever twist.

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A tasty little partisan spat is playing itself out in the Jewish media right now over who loves Israel more, the D’s or the R’s. The episode speaks volumes about how far AIPAC has positioned itself in the Republican camp, how deeply in denial the Democrats are of this fact, and how deliciously divorced from Israeli reality the American political debate is.

The story is about the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill voted on in the House last week. With the House back in the Democrat’s hands, language was included to amend what is known as the “Mexico City policy” and to again allow US funding for overseas groups, whose positions on women’s reproductive rights may include the promotion of contraception and the option of abortion. In opposing this clause, 164 GOP Members voted against the entire foreign aid bill. So, how did the rubber hit the road, in this case the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway? Well, in opposing the Bill, the GOP of course found itself voting against aid for Israel.

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Many Western analysts and policymakers rely on the transformative logic of the path to modernization taken by the West in predicting the demise of the Chinese Communist Party based on the notion that escalating demands for political participation from China’s middle classes will compel the country to democratize. I side with Josh’s skepticism on this and would add that it is not only China’s elites who have benefited from the current system—its middle classes seem quite satisfied too.

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Mike Allen reports in The Politico that although I-Am-the-Branch-in-Chief Cheney has backed down on his claim to be a trans-executive creature, Rahm Emanuel still plans to move his legislation cutting off funding for the vice-president's office tomorrow:

Emanuel, who has scheduled a vote on Cheney’s funding for Thursday, said the change makes it clear that the White House “told Cheney that he would have to come up with another excuse – that this was not sustainable in the public arena.”

Emanuel said the vote is still planned, and said the new position means the vice president needs to comply with National Archives requirements.

Perhaps this means that the legislation will be rewritten to suit the Cheney backdown. Stay tuned.

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Devin offers an optimistic take on China's future, but I'm not so sure. He says:

The first trend is the demand from the Chinese people for a better, more accountable government and more personal freedoms. As many of you know, many Chinese see their government as the biggest problem in China, while the Chinese government’s biggest fear is its own people. Meanwhile, annual labor and environmental protests are reaching the hundreds of thousands in China, and there is a growing civil society movement on environmental issues in China. In other words, the CCP cannot act with impunity and as the Chinese population gets more prosperous, the pressure to reform grows.

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I would like to try to synthesize some of the points made in the book club so far and apply them to Josh’s thesis. Recent posts have identified several weaknesses in China’s soft power, what I call the vulnerability of China’s brand, and the limitations of soft power as a tool of statecraft. Others have pointed to increased trade flows between China, Russia, Brazil, and others and the emergence of counterbalancing groupings, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as evidence of an alternative to U.S.-led institutions and norms—or simply an expansion of options available to these states, as Nick Gvosdev put it yesterday at our Carnegie Council meeting on the G8.

Perhaps we can use these points to ask of China’s use of soft power, charm, sticky power, economic diplomacy, etc.—so what?

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John Feffer raises some of the questions that Chinese officials themselves raise when asked about their influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America - and China's response often is legitimate. Why, they ask, as John does, should China promote good governance, or the rule of law, in Africa, when the US has a close relationship with a nation like Equatorial Guinea?

However, I must disagree with John's point that China has no incentive to compete in a positive way with the US.

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Yesterday lefty analyst David Sirota argued that Dems had brought up the Employee Free Choice Act in a perfunctory manner that doomed it to fail in the face of a Senate filibuster. For bills Dems seriously want to pass, they attach it to must-pass legislation, such as when they attached the minimum wage to the Iraq funding bill.

Well, the rightwing Wall Street Journal editoral page agrees with Sirota, writing today that the Dems were obviously not serious in wanting to pass the bill:

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Any way you slice it, thirteen posts in three days--almost six thousand words altogether--is a lot to read. Some people call it a dissertation chapter. Others call it a back-and-forth on the policies and influence of a near-superpower. But just like that volume in the university library, it's none too easy to start reading somewhere in the middle.

That's why we have put together this summary of the Book Club discussion thus far, in case you have just come across it, and don't know where to begin--at a tenth the size, no less.

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[Video montage opening]

WH Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino: Look, I’m not a legal scholar. There’s plenty of them that you can find in Washington DC. Just that very point that you’re making there shows that he has functions in both the legislative branch and the executive branch...

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Today's Washington Post article on the VP and his efforts to gut environmental law reveals that former EPA administrator Christie Whitman resigned in August 2003 to protest the administration's decision to ignore the law and allow "some of the nation's dirtiest plants" to continue operating "without installing costly new pollution controls."

Whitman first protested by going to the President himself and explaining how disastrous the administration's plan was. But then, in her words, she realized "that the decision had been made."

So she quit! She walked out to the North Lawn of the White House and announced to the media that she was going back to New Jersey because she could not serve as chief of EPA for an administration that violated environmental laws.

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Several of the preceding posts have made the important point that, rather that being wooed by China’s ‘charm’, a number of countries in the developing world will begin, if they have not already begun, to backlash against China’s foreign policies. The argument goes that as China becomes increasingly entangled overseas, it will use its growing power to push, prod, and coerce foreign governments. And to the extent that those governments are relatively oppressive and their people deprived, affected populations will blowback against the Chinese.

It is worth thinking a little further about the consequences of an erosion of China’s ‘soft power’.

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I don't think there is another book that gives as complete and analytic a picture of what China is up to abroad than Charm Offensive, as I concluded in my review of it.

But China's heightened profile in what used to be called the Third World cannot be attributed to the popularity of China as a culture or as a political system, nor to the appeal of its "ideas", which I have never heard anyone in Africa discuss. No one wants to emulate China per se, and it is always a third or fourth choice for higher education.

A friend of mine who encounters many Chinese traders as a customs inspector in Congo spoke for many 19th century Orientalists when he told me, "You never know what these Chinese guys are thinking. Their faces are empty. In fact I can't tell one from another. To me they are like the fishes in the sea."

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Dan makes some important points, as he does in his review of my book. The term "soft power" has perhaps gotten too confused at this point,which is why, in the book, I try to define my own use of it as broader than Nye's. However, I think Dan overlooks an important aspect of China's rise that perhaps differentiates it from South Korea or Singapore. Indeed, in some respects China's own economic reforms are similar to those pursued in other Asian high-growth economies. But none of the other countries in any way attempted to promote their reforms to other nations, and their relatively small size meant that they did not command the tools to promote their reforms.

Now, as I mentioned, I'm still unsure whether China wants to export an ideological model, but I think there are clear signs that it is at least implicitly touting its model and its success. Singapore and South Korea did not train thousands of African officials, or create programs to take opinion leaders from Southeast Asian nations to their countries for junkets. In other words, China clearly has the potential to wield the tools of exporting its model.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion so far, as I enjoyed Josh’s book. Let me follow up on Dan Blumenthal’s useful suggestion that China is employing rather traditional statecraft (which is not inconsistent with the thesis of Charm Offensive).

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The international system today is still fundamentally unipolar. The cost of American hegemony is the burden it has borne—in times past, much more gracefully than today—of providing some measure of global public goods. Josh and Devin make the important point that one dimension of China’s rise to watch carefully is the extent to which it begins providing any form of global public good. At the same time, Dan observes: As governments and populations become aware of how China engages the world, however, it is quite possible that familiarity will breed contempt. The sum of these two insights is that there might be a strategic advantage for the United States to exploit here: the potential to “engage to contain.”

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Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” is drawing positive reviews—even from some who bristled at “Fahrenheit 9/11” Nevertheless, many dismiss “Sicko’s picaresque finale, where Moore transports a group of 9/11 volunteers to Cuba in search of the healthcare they can’t afford in the U.S. Critics call it yet another of Moore’s “polarizing stunts.”

Moore knew, from experience, that by including Cuba in his film, he was leading with his chin. In the 1990s, when he had a show on NBC, he created a “Healthcare Olympics,” sending camera crews to ER’s in Fort Lauderdale, Toronto and Havana. There, they waited until someone came in with a broken arm or leg, and then filmed a play-by-play of the treatment, documenting how fast it was, how cheap, and how satisfied the patient was.

Cuba won. But when Moore turned in the show, he received a call from “Standards & Practices” at NBC: “Mike, Cuba can’t win . . . we can’t say that on NBC.”

What would Jack Welch say?

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I am coming late to this interesting discussion and have had a chance to read all the posted comments.

The question of whether China is trying to create an alternative order is an important one. As far as I can tell, if one believes what the Chinese write and say about their intentions, the first order of business is preventing a "Gorbachev" model. The CCP must stay in power. To do so it must be the only group in China seen as "safeguarding the interests of the Chinese people." It must grow its "comprehensive national power" (the Chinese term), reverse the century of humiliation, during which it lost Taiwan, and gradually re-take its position of centrality in Asia. Along the way, Beijing realized that it must engage in good neighborly relations in order to prevent a counter balancing coalition forming out of fear. And, it has become a net oil importer which has been a prime motivator of its presence on the world stage.

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Last Friday, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) introduced a bill to remedy a long-standing tax inequity that allows private equity fund managers the right to claim performance fee income as capital gains rather than ordinary income. This tax break, based on the misnomer "carried interest," means they pay a 15 percent capital gains tax rate on fees that everyone else pays up to 35 percent in ordinary income tax on. The cost to taxpayers who don't benefit from this break totals $4-6 billion a year.

By industry custom, private equity fund managers' fees are largely, if not entirely based on the investment performance of the funds they manage. This fee structure rewards managers commensurately with the appreciation of the assets under their management. It is a contingency fee, similar to the fee that an attorney earns from a case taken on a contingency basis. Yet no one would suggest that the lawyer's contingency fee income be taxed at the lower capital gains rate.

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It is impossible to think about international relations today without contemplating what the rise of China means to patterns of World Politics. Josh's book details one clear pathway through which China is exercising its influence -- the deployment of its economic power and soft power to win friends and influence people. The contrast with U.S. foreign policy in recent years could not be starker, and Kurlantzick deserves credit for writing an accessible and challenging book that takes on this topic.

A theme Josh makes in the first part of his book is that U.S. policymakers have been behind the curve in realizing the potency of China's new charm offensive. However, current events make me wonder if Kurlantzick is also behind the curve a little. Beijing is already beginning to suffer some blowback from its diplomatic offensive. The interesting question is where things go from here.

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I think that Devin makes some important points, and he is correct to point out that there may come a point in which China's influence will be tested, and possibly found wanting. The question he raises, at times implicitly, is what kind of public goods China will provide other nations as it becomes more influential. If China is to create the kind of world without the West, as Ely refers to, what will its role in that world be? Can such an interlinked world without the West exist without one leading nation, among many, trying to enforce trade rules, mediate disputes, deal with natural and manmade disasters, police shipping lanes, et al? And if, in such a world, China is going to be the leader, can it provide these public goods? I must admit I am still skeptical, since China still suffers from a low level of trust from other nations.

In today's Wall Street Journal, editorial page editor, Brett Stephens celebrates the end of Palestine.

"Palestine," as we know it today, will revert to what it was--shadowland between Israel and its neighbors--and Palestinians, as we know them today, will revert to who they were: Arabs.

"Whether there might have been a better outcome is anyone's guess. But the dream that was Palestine is finally dead."

Marty Peretz, the Harvard TA who destroyed the New Republic, says the same thing. He is dancing the hora over the end of the two-state solution.

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Rahm Emanuel plans to introduce an amendment (see details in the update below) to delete spending for Cheney's office on the ground that Cheney claims, when convenient, that the vice-president's office is not "an entity within the executive branch." Rep. Emanuel, who's taken a beating from the liberal wing of the Democrats for refusing to stand up, is standing way up. The House is supposed to vote later this week.

Is this not one of those extraordinary moments when the people's representatives will actually vote on whether to fund the horrific farce that is this administration?

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So it seems the Southern Baptists are launching a new ministry in support of immigrants, legal and undocumented, causing great gnashing of teeth by some on the right.:

"We have responsibilities as citizens of the United States and the Kingdom of God," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. "As citizens of God we have an obligation to reach out and try to meet the emotional, physical and spiritual needs of visitors in our midst and that certainly would include people who are illegal aliens."

For those who need a refresher, this is the same Richard Land who anchored the rightwing swing of the Southern Baptists largely into the GOP camp.   So immigration is the wedge issue that just keeps wedging the rightwing into further chaos and division.

As evidenced by the discussion so far, perhaps the most pressing question in contemporary international politics is how the rise of China will affect the current US-led international order. Both political science theory and traditional American foreign policy thought offer the same two alternatives: China can either assimilate to the liberal international system, as exemplified by Robert Zoellick’s notion of being a “responsible stakeholder”, or it can "balance" against the United States, by challenging and seeking to overthrow the pr