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 prevailing norms and institutions embedded in the Bretton Woods architecture. This is a strongly held, but deeply misleading, dichotomy.

As part of an ongoing research project at the University of California, Berkeley, Naazneen Barma (a current TPM contributor), Professor Steven Weber, and I argue in the upcoming edition of The National Interest that, instead of assimilating to or challenging the current US-led order, China is “routing around” the West. The result is what Josh referred to at the end of his first post as a "worst case scenario", in which developing countries are gravitating towards China and away from the United States. Far from being an improbable prediction, this world is already very much upon us.

By preferentially deepening their own ties amongst themselves, and in so doing, loosening relatively the ties that bind them to international systems centered in the West, rising powers in the developing world are building an alternative system of international politics whose endpoint is neither conflict nor assimilation with the West. It is to make the West, and American power in particular, increasingly irrelevant.

What is emerging is a “World Without the West.” This world, led by China, rests on a rapid deepening of interconnectivity within the developing world—in flows of goods, money, people and ideas—that is surprisingly autonomous from Western control, resulting in the development of a new, parallel international system, with its own distinctive set of rules, institutions, and currencies of power.

There is both political and economic evidence for this phenomenon. Though global trade has been increasing as a whole, the twenty largest and wealthiest countries in the developing world are, as a group, preferentially trading with China and the other rising powers that lead the pack—India, Russia and Brazil. And the rate at which they are doing so is rising every year. The critical fact here is that this deepening of interconnectivity in the World Without the West is well in excess of what standard economic models of trade (the gravity model) would predict.

Underlying this phenomenon is also a simple neo-Westphalian bargain: Sovereign states are empowered to set the terms of the relationship inside their borders between the government and the governed. They then deal with each other externally in a market setting and recognize no real rights or obligations other than to fulfill agreed contracts. International institutions have no legitimate business other than to serve and facilitate these ends.

The challenge then for American foreign policymakers is to attract developing countries to participate in the US-led system. This will require some very creative thinking, well beyond notions of simply restrengthening existing multilateral institutions or forming a Concert of Democracies. Though such policies would be pleasing normatively, they will do little to stop the pace at which countries in the developing world are opting out of the liberal democratic order as defined by the United States.