THREAD: Great piece by @Scholars_Stage What jumped out at me: "what spooks them more than American weapons and soldiers are ideas—hostile ideas they believe America has embedded in the discourse and institutions of the existing global order” 1/: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-plans-global-order

I’ve got a paper under review that among other things touches upon this question. While there is no doubt that the postwar order has embedded within it a set of ideas, and is in (big) part a product of US power 2/

If you agree with the research of scholars like Robert Axelrod, Bob Keohane & later John Ikenberry, and many who have followed them, you can also see a rational logic behind the design of the order, and its constituent institutions and governing arrangements. 3/

In short, there are numerous barriers to international cooperation, some of which can be characterized as a prisoners’ dilemma (PD). Institutions--whether formal treaties and organizations, or less-formal practices and norms--offer one pathway to solving PD (and related) games 4/

By increasing the amount of info, establishing behavioral focal points & otherwise increasing (somewhat) the credibility of states’ commitments, institutions can facilitate cooperation (I spent a long time in grad school reading this lit, & have forgotten much of it sadly) 5/

It’s not a perfect system. It can (and has) been abused by the US & other powers (hi, realism), large-n cooperation games become unwieldy esp when there are too many veto points (see WTO), & sometimes interests are just too opposed (zero-sum) creating a deadlock situation 6/

Still, buttressed by US power (necessary but not sufficient) it did a decent job in the postwar era. To be sure, many institutions have issues now (for me, see erosion of embedded liberalism and Polanyi's revenge), not to mention the loss of ballast that came from US hegemony 7/

But what I’ve not been able to answer is: what is the alternative solution to the cooperation problem proposed by China? Empire? That’s expensive and not realistic. You can change the game through side payments (something the paper discusses), but that also gets expensive fast 8/

So the ideas the CCP (probably rightly) sees as threatening—especially regarding info sharing and transparency—are important not as only instruments of (Western) power, but as (more mundane) mechanisms to solve cooperation problems. Both can be true. 9/

I don't want to be too Hegelian. And maybe there is some part of the current system (a narrow/lighter version of rules, info sharing) that can be carved out, to solve some (many?) problems in a China-led order. But Covid-19 shows us how quickly things can get sensitive 10/

In her great recent report, @RollandNadege says "there is no explicitly elucidated vision about how world affairs would be managed and organized" (p.48). I think her formulation of a "partial, loose and malleable" hegemony is right, but does this solve cooperation problems? 11/

Hence my question to the Twitterverse: What’s Beijing’s solution to the problem of international cooperation? And I mean beyond the proximate political/strategic goals of the CCP. What does the model look like, theoretically and practically? Or is it just less cooperation? 12/12

Curious for thoughts: @SheenaGreitens @JeffDColgan @CourtneyFung @APhillipsIntRel @dandrezner @Ben_G_Scott @natashaskassam @NickBisley @CharlesEdel @BeverleyLoke