Henry Huiyao Wang: Trump has buried liberal world order but what comes next could be better
The US and China have an opportunity to move beyond ideological confrontation towards coexistence, strategic stability and managed competition
Below is the latest opinion column piece by Henry Huiyao Wang, Founder & President of the Center for China & Globalization, in the South China Morning Post.
Trump has buried liberal world order but what comes next could be better
The US and China have an opportunity to move beyond ideological confrontation towards coexistence, strategic stability and managed competition
The two terms of US President Donald Trump have shaken the old style of US liberal internationalist leadership. Yet, as some doors close, others open. The summit between President Xi Jinping and Trump in Beijing last month suggests that the United States and China might now have an opportunity to move beyond ideological confrontation and towards a more realistic framework of coexistence, strategic stability and managed competition.
For decades, Washington has held global primacy and pursued a liberal internationalist foreign policy of promoting democracy, open markets and stewardship of global institutions. Trump’s more realist foreign policy has been more transactional, sovereignty-centred and more openly sceptical of the post-war order.
Its focus on tariffs, alliance burden-sharing and resistance to Western progressive social values has changed the narrative that American power serves a universal project larger than itself. Further, even if Trump left office tomorrow, his tenure has made any future attempt to re-embrace old-style liberal internationalism less credible.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the transatlantic partnership. The Trump administration’s criticism of Europe’s reliability, defence posture and direct interference in European politics has weakened the idea that the Atlantic alliance can remain the unquestioned core of global order. Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy is now part of a wider reassessment of a world no longer disciplined by US-led blocs.
Multipolarity has also arrived. Middle powers are hedging, alliances are looser, regional institutions matter more and countries across the Global South increasingly resist fixed ideological camps. That creates an opening: with strategic stability newly recognised, the US and China can work to avoid the Thucydides Trap and the Kindleberger Trap.
Avoiding the Thucydides Trap – describing the potential danger when a rising and an established power come into conflict – requires both changing the narrative and de-securitising the relationship. Yet, this trap is by no means an ironclad law that cannot be crossed but, rather, is a subjective construct.
And, while national security concerns are real, they cannot justify cutting every commercial, technological, educational and diplomatic link. Thankfully, the recent Xi-Trump summit has started to move things in the right direction, with three more in-person high-level meetings planned for this year. If the two nations can keep the momentum going, a mutually destructive and pointless war can be avoided.
One priority is establishing a dialogue between these leading powers on the global governance of artificial intelligence (AI). This is vital to reduce the risks of AI weaponisation and misuse, and to get to grips with the upheavals in daily life that AI could bring.
There is also space for selective security cooperation. China and the US have overlapping interests in preventing an escalation of the Iran war, advancing a political settlement to Russia’s war with Ukraine, denuclearising the Korean peninsula and preserving stability across the Taiwan Strait.
China’s relations with Iran and Pakistan give it channels Washington lacks, as demonstrated by the high-level exchanges involving Islamabad and Tehran last month. The US should also avoid using Taiwan as a bargaining chip, support peaceful cross-strait dialogue and reaffirm that it does not support secessionism.
The second danger is the Kindleberger Trap. Named after Charles Kindleberger’s account of the disastrous 1930s, it describes the breakdown of the global order when the established power no longer provides public goods, while the rising power is not yet ready, accepted or empowered to do so. If the US retreats from global governance and China’s contributions are treated as threats, the result will be a governance vacuum.
Beijing has made it clear it is willing to do more. Its five major initiatives – which span the Belt and Road Initiative, development, security, civilisation and global governance – form part of a broader effort to supply development finance, security dialogue, cultural exchanges, infrastructure connectivity and institutional reform.
Last year, China pledged an additional US$500 million over five years for the World Health Organization as global health financing comes under strain. At the World Trade Organization, it has supported the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, helping to preserve rules-based dispute settlement while the body’s appellate mechanism remains paralysed.
Beijing has also moved to institutionalise mediation as a tool of global governance. In May last year, China and more than 30 other countries signed the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organisation for Mediation in Hong Kong.
Tariff-free treatment for exports from 53 African nations and regional summits with nations from Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, the Gulf states and Southeast Asia all point in the same direction: China is offering the world new development opportunities, market access and a fresh institutional voice.
Instead of engaging in competition, a better direction would be to embrace the narrative of human security and the concerns of human development to transcend the overextension of national security concerns. All countries can benefit in a world where global public goods are supplied by more than one power and through more than one institutional pathway. A system that excludes either will be unstable; a system that allows both to contribute will be more resilient and more prosperous.
The US and China must continue to move away from disordered competition and towards more managed competition and the Olympic ideal of competition that drives us towards self-improvement, to go “faster, higher, stronger – together”. In this way, the world can avoid the Thucydides Trap and the Kindleberger Trap and instead embrace the alternative of a more prosperous and secure world.
