Abstract
New emerging powers in the international realm are causing change in the world’s power dynamics. This has also occurred due to new regional and internal conflicts. While it is important to recognize the recently emerging states as they gain power, it is also critical to acknowledge that the United States is not a declining power, but an enduring one. Furthermore, the only significant emerging powers that can potentially begin to challenge the US hegemony would be the BRICS countries, eliminating numerous other emerging powers as threats. Even so, major economic struggles in the BRICS countries make them difficult to be perceived as strong opposition. Ultimately, this chapter explains that while it is crucial to acknowledge the ongoing changes in the current international order, many of the changes should be seen as small reforms as opposed to major revolutions.
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Notes
- 1.
On American decline: Gideon Rachman, “Think Again: American Decline. This Time It’s for Real,” Foreign Policy 184, January/February 2011; Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012. On the rise of the rest: Arvind Subramanian, “The Inevitable Superpower,” Foreign Affairs 90, September/October 2011; Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, New York: Public Affairs, 2008. On the coming disorder and the post-Western world: Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World, New York: Norton, 2008; Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest, New York: Penguin, 2012.
- 2.
Robert Kaplan, “A World with No One in Charge,” Washington Post, December 3, 2010.
- 3.
Bruce Jones, Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013.
- 4.
World Economic Outlook Database, International Monetary Fund, April 2015.
- 5.
Union of Concerned Scientists, “Each Country’s Share of CO2 Emissions,” August 20, 2010, www.ucsusa.org.
- 6.
Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World, New York: Norton, 2008.
- 7.
“China’s Back,” The Economist, October 11, 2014.
- 8.
Gwynn Guilford, “Nope, China’s Economy Hasn’t Yet Surpassed America’s,” Quartz, October 8, 2014.
- 9.
Ben Carter, “Is China’s Economy Really the Largest in the World?” BBC News Magazine, December 16, 2014.
- 10.
Sean Starrs, “American Economic Power Hasn’t Declined – It Globalized! Summoning the Data and Taking Globalization Seriously,” International Studies Quarterly, April 2013.
- 11.
Ibid., 7.
- 12.
Chinese senior national economic official, interview by author, Washington, DC, June 11, 2013.
- 13.
Keith Frey, “China’s Leap Forward: Overtaking the US as World’s Biggest Economy,” FT Data, The Financial Times, October 8, 2014.
- 14.
SIPRI Military Expenditures Database, http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/milex_database.
- 15.
Interviews by author, Delhi, October 2011 and April 2013; Beijing, October 2009 and November 2012; Brasilia, April 2011 and July 2013.
- 16.
“Agencies Listed by Size Categories (as Reported in May 2001).” United States Department of Justice. August 6, 2014. Accessed November 17, 2015. http://www.justice.gov/crt/ix-agencies-listed-size-categories-reported-may-2001-large-agency-category-10000-employees.
- 17.
Peter Martin, “Yoga Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, Snapshot, January 25, 2015.
- 18.
The phrase “gravitational pull” is from Bruce Jentleson and Steven Weber, The End of Arrogance: America and the Global Competition of Ideas, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
- 19.
Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012).
- 20.
Bruce Jones, “The Bursting of the BRICs Bubble,” The American Interest, April 9, 2015, www.the-american-interest.com/2015/04/09/the-bursting-of-the-brics-bubble/.
- 21.
Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, New York: Norton, 2012.
- 22.
George Magnus, “Hitting a BRIC Wall: The Risk of the Middle Income Trap,” UBS Investment Research: Economic Insights – by George, UBS Limited, January 21, 2013.
- 23.
Alonso Soto, “UPDATE 2-IMF Sees Brazil Economy Hinging on Austerity,” Reuters, April 20, 2015.
- 24.
“After the Election, the Reckoning,” Americas View, The Economist, November 8, 2014.
- 25.
Simon Romero, “Brazil’s Slumping Economy and Bribery Scandal Eat Away at Dilma Rousseff’s Popularity,” The New York Times, March 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/21/world/americas/brazils-slumping-economy-and-bribery-scandal-eat-away-at-dilma-rousseffs-popularity.html?_r=0.
- 26.
Bruce Jones, “The Bursting of the BRICs Bubble,” The American Interest, April 9, 2014, www.the-american-interest.com/2015/04/09/the-bursting-of-the-brics-bubble/.
- 27.
Zhiwu Chen, “China’s Dangerous Debt,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 94, No. 3, May/June 2015.
- 28.
Michael Spence, The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011; Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, New York: Norton, 2012.
- 29.
Categorization of these necessary, but challenging, reforms from Chinese scholar “Youwei” (pseudonym), in: “The End of Reform in China,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 94, No. 3, May/June 2015.
- 30.
Raymond Zong and Anant Vijay Kala, “India’s Economic Growth Hits Four-Year High,” The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2015.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order, Princeton University Press, 2011.
- 33.
Bruce Jones and David Steven, The Risk Pivot: Great Powers, International Security, and the Energy Revolution, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2014.
- 34.
World Bank datasets confirm the positive, and at times massive, GDP growth that the middle-income countries have experienced over the past decades. To examine GDP growth rates for the countries in question, see: “GDP Growth (Annual %),” The World Bank. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG.
- 35.
Both Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, and the data gathered by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) have illustrated a decline in both interstate war and battlefield deaths over the past several decades. While competing theories exist as to the root cause of this trend, the norm of non-aggression between states reflects the cornerstone of the UN system, and, therefore, has been repeatedly buttressed by the great powers over the past 70 years. Arguably the US-created UN system serves as the foundation for this decline in conflict.
- 36.
Harsh V. Pant “Restraint No More: India Reassesses Its Hard Power,” The Diplomat, Flashpoints, June 16, 2015. http://thediplomat.com/2015/06/restraint-no-more-india-reassesses-its-hard-power/.
- 37.
Peter Martin “Yoga Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, Snapshot, January 25, 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/india/2015-01-25/yoga-diplomacy.
- 38.
Bruce Jones, “Competitors, Not Cold Warriors,” In Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013.
- 39.
Andrew Mack, Human Security Report 2012: Sexual Violence, Education, and War: Beyond the Mainstream Narrative, Vancouver: Human Security Report Project, 2012.
- 40.
Freedom in the World 2013: Democratic Breakthroughs in the Balance. Washington: Freedom House, 2013.
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Jones, B. (2019). A Not Quite Multipolar World. In: McGann, J.G. (eds) Think Tanks, Foreign Policy and the Emerging Powers. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60312-4_3
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