Fareed is right that we're living in unusually peaceful times, by historic standards, notwithstanding jihadist terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ethnic battles, many of them generations or centuries old. Here I suppose I am as "state-centric" as Fareed is, according to Anne Marie. Great power cooperation is essential to addressing most of the issues she raises, and great power struggle would make many of them worse.
That's why I agree with Fareed's warning about cheap talk of a new cold war with Russia, China and a supposed "axis" of authoritarian states. Such talk is blatantly hypocritical--what is America's ally Pakistan if not a rogue state, and what is Saudi Arabia if not a petroleum-fuelled autocracy? The "concert of democracies" alliance proposed by McCain and endorsed, in various forms, by most neoconservatives as well as many Democrats like Anne Marie, John Ikenberry, James Lindsay, and Ivo Daalder, would treat China and Russia as pariah states. By treating those countries as enemies, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact that the "concert of democracies" school wins the support of reputable thinkers of various political persuasions suggests that it cannot be dismissed as right-wing scare politics. What we have here is a serious philosophical disagreement about which version of liberal internationalism we want the U.S. to promote. Call these the 1945 Postwar version and the universalized Cold War model.

The Postwar version of liberal internationalism is the one envisioned by American internationalists during and immediately after World War II, as well as by traditional liberal internationalists like the first Bush after the Cold War. International security will rest with a loose concert or concerts of nonaggressive, but not necessarily democratic, great powers. And the basic international norm, to which there are exceptions for genocide and anarchy, will be nonintervention in sovereign states.

That's the old liberal internationalism (which, though realistic, is not Realpolitik). The new liberal internationalism is a product of the 1990s. In essence, it is an attempt to universalize the norms of NATO and the EU as the basis for world order, as an alternative to dusting off the never-implemented Postwar system after half a century. Global NATO in practice means permanent U.S. hegemony in an alliance limited to democracies. And universalizing EU ideas about post-sovereign order means whittling away at sovereignty, the basic norm of the 1945 blueprint for world order.

In the past generation, post-communist Russia and post-Maoist China have accepted the norms of Postwar liberal internationalism. Now many Americans are telling them, while you guys in Moscow and Beijing were embracing the norms of America's 1945 global order like peace, nonintervention and sovereignty, we Americans and some avant-garde Europeans replaced it with a democracy-only, post-sovereign system in the 1990s. Didn't you guys get the memo?

In my view, that's the real tragedy--and danger--of the present moment. When they were radical revisionist powers, we denounced Russia and China for not accepting the norms of the 1945 system like sovereignty. Now that they have finally embraced those norms, we are denouncing them for not scrapping them for new norms that the U.S. and EU have just recently announced on their own authority.

David is certainly right that China, Russia and other rising powers are going to reject subordinate roles in a world run by North Atlantic democracies that claim the right to strip other countries of sovereignty and that treat them as being on perpetual probation. I'm not sure that they would reject the much more minimalist norms of the Postwar system of the 1940s, which after all was designed to accommodate Chiang Kai-shek's autocratic China and an autocratic Soviet Union which, it was hoped in vain, would act as a status quo power. In order to avert another round of great-power conflict like the three catastrophic rounds in the twentieth century, we should at least give the minimal version of internationalism a serious try.