Demonizing China Is Bad Policy For Everyone

Professor Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard recently wrote an interesting piece for Foreign Policy where he posed the question of whether the rest of the world might prefer China’s “world order” to that of the United States. As Walt poses the question, “Are the liberal norms the United States and its closest allies espouse likely to be more attractive to others than China’s vocal defense of national sovereignty, its repeated emphasis of noninterference, and its insistence that different states should have the right to evolve political institutions that are consistent with their own cultures and historical experiences?”

Ultimately, Walt concludes that “Americans (and others) who favor liberal ideals cannot assume such truths (i.e. that these ideals are superior and universally preferred) are “self-evident” or that the long arc of history inevitably favors them. If that arc bends toward justice, it will not be due to divine intervention, some hard-wired tendency in human nature, or deep historical teleology leading inevitably toward a predetermined (liberal) outcome. That arc will bend only if its proponents are more successful at demonstrating the superiority of their ideals, especially when compared with the alternative.”

I don’t agree entirely with Walt’s take on this question, but his exploration of it is…