Michael Auslin has written an interesting response to several critiques of his “Three Strikes Against U.S. Global Presence,” including my arguments in these posts. Mr. Auslin has given his critics very fair treatment and has offered constructive answers to some of our questions, and I’d like to thank him for that. We still differ on some important points, but I was pleased to find that his original argument was not intended to be as much of an exaggerated lament for eroding hegemony as much as it was a reflection on the uncertainty and unknowability of how the world might change as it moves towards a multipolar order. As Auslin writes:

The point I was trying to make, constrained in an op-ed length piece, is that once the American role diminishes, we really have no way of knowing what replaces it or how other actors react.

That’s true. We can’t know what will replace it. It is appropriate to be wary of any great change in world affairs, but something that we should bear in mind is the extent to which the continued expansion of “free trade and market liberalization” may not have to depend on U.S. power in the future. Many more states have a significant stake in sustaining and increasing global trade. Emerging-market nations are beginning to acquire more economic and political clout, and with this the global balance of power is gradually shifting in the direction of the developing world. It is this part of the world that sees the greatest advantage in eliminating barriers to trade and migration, and it is the reluctance of the major industrialized nations to abandon their agricultural and other subsidies that has repeatedly stalled the Doha round of trade talks. It is developing nations that would like to strengthen the “rules of the game,” so to speak, by opening up markets to their goods and labor even more than they already are. As I have said before, both advocates and critics of globalization have seen it as being closely tied to American power, and for a long time it was. Now what is becoming readily more evident every year is that globalization has facilitated the emergence of many other centers of power. This greatly reduces the desirability of hegemony for all parties, as it makes hegemony increasingly difficult and costly to sustain in the face of its obsolescence. My view is that defenders of this role for the United States have helped to hasten its obsolescence by acting out that role very aggressively and intensively for the last twenty years, and thereby exhausted American resources and the patience of much of the rest of the world.

I certainly don’t see something “closer to a post-Rome” scenario occurring. The collapse of the western empire took with it much of the apparatus of administration, taxation, security and commerce on which the peoples of western Europe and Africa had depended. The decentralization and de-urbanization that followed were at least partly the results of the weakness of the western polities in the late fifth and sixth centuries. Even if Auslin is right that a post-hegemonic world would see much greater security competition and constraints on trade, this is still very different from a post-Roman scenario. If anything, the problem Auslin sees is that there will be too many states fully exercising their military and economic power against one another, when many of the economic and political woes of the territories of the western empire were the product of a lack of state military and economic power.

It’s also true that we can’t know how China would act in a world where the U.S. role is significantly reduced, We can reasonably guess based on Chinese economic activity in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America that Beijing’s overriding goal for the foreseeable future is to operate in as many markets and to acquire as many natural resources as it can to continue fueling its economic growth. What is likely to make China far more actively interventionist abroad is their perception of ongoing threats to their access to these markets and resources. This is why I assume Beijing is more likely to want to avoid disrupting a trading system whose relative openness is very useful to China.