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By Root 1247 0

or reject it, becoming a rogue nation and facing the penalties of excommunication. In fact, rising powers appear to be following a third way: entering the Western order but doing so on their own terms—thus reshaping the system itself. As the political scientists Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner, and Steven Weber point out, in a world where everyone feels empowered, countries can choose to bypass this Western “center” entirely and forge their own ties with one another.9 In a post-American world, there may be no center to integrate into. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker suggested in 1991 that the world was moving toward a hub-and-spoke system, with every country going through the United States to get to its destination. The twenty-first-century world might be better described as one of point-to-point routes, with new flight patterns being mapped every day. (This is true even in a physical sense: in just ten years, the number of Russian visitors to China increased more than fourfold, from 489,000 in 1995 to 2.2 million in 2005.) The focus has shifted. Countries are increasingly interested in themselves—the story of their rise—and pay less attention to the West and the United States. As a result, the urgent discussions on the presidential campaign trail throughout 2007 and 2008 about the need to lessen anti-Americanism were somewhat off-point. The world is moving from anger to indifference, from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.

The fact that new powers are more strongly asserting their interests is the reality of the post-American world. It also raises the political conundrum of how to achieve international objectives in a world of many actors, state and nonstate. According to the old model of getting things done, the United States and a few Western allies directed the show while the Third World either played along or stayed outside the box and remained irrelevant as a result. Nongovernmental players were too few and too weak to worry about. Now, look at something like trade negotiations, and you see the developing world acting with greater and greater force. Where they might once have taken any deal offered by the West or ignored the process altogether, countries like Brazil and India play hardball until they get the deal of their choice. They have heard Western CEOs explain where the future lies. They have read the Goldman Sachs BRIC report. They know that the balance of power has shifted.

The Kyoto accord (now treated as sacred because of President George W. Bush’s cavalier rejection of it) is in fact a treaty marked by its adherence to the old worldview. Kyoto assumed that if the West came together and settled on a plan, the Third World would adopt the new framework and the problem would be solved. That may be the way things have been done in international affairs for decades, but it makes little sense today. China, India, Brazil, and other emerging powers will not follow along with a Western-led process in which they have not participated. What’s more, governments on their own can do only so much to tackle a problem like climate change. A real solution requires creating a much broader coalition that includes the private sector, nongovernmental groups, cities and localities, and the media. In a globalized, democratized, and decentralized world, we need to get to individuals to alter their behavior. Taxes, tariffs, and wars are the old ways to do this, but states now have less room to maneuver on these fronts. They need more subtle and sophisticated ways to effect change.

The traditional mechanisms of international cooperation are relics of another era. The United Nations system represents an outdated configuration of power. The permanent members of the UN Security Council are the victors of a war that ended sixty years ago. The body does not include Japan or Germany, the world’s third- and fourth-largest economies (at market exchange rates), or India, the world’s largest democracy, or any Latin American or African country. The Security Council exemplifies the antique structure of global governance more broadly. The