America as no. 2

by
Danny Quah
Sep 2024

What do Third Nations want, those that are not Great Powers in the heat of contention?

We spend so much time asking what America wants, what China wants, we forget that 85 percent of humanity lives in neither Great Power. What do Third Nations want?

It is not unique to us, of course, to lose sight of this simple arithmetic. While the world fully understands how economics needs to take care of the weak and vulnerable in society, when it comes to geopolitics, everyone lapses into fundamentalist Thucydides-Realism, "The Great Powers do what they will; the rest of us suffer what we must". The Great Powers, after all, are the ones with the bombs.

But since the end of WW2 the world has also devoted considerable effort to building a system of benevolent hegemony with heavy overlays of multilateralism. We have all tasted what it means to trade and engage in a multilateral rules-based system, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, founded on the consent of the governed and shaped by the organized opinion of humanity.

Sensible world leaders know this to be the formula for peace and prosperity. Even if outright collaboration is made impossible by sharp ideological differences, inadvertent cooperation already gets us a long way.

Foreign Policy published as a letter to the next US President an essay of mine, taking this Third Nation perspective. The essay describes three concrete steps that, it seems to me, would go a long way on that vision, and without America giving up anything actually substantive. (Gift link, free to read.) A Chinese translation appeared a few days later on Weixin.

Do you know what will happen to the American people's way of life and the US system of government if the US becomes No. 2? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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