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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2020
As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay focuses on the “Kindleberger trap,” a term coined by Joseph Nye Jr. referring to the situation in which no country takes the lead to maintain international institutions in the international system. President Trump's destructive policies toward many international institutions seem to push the current international order to the brink of the Kindleberger trap. Ironically, China has pledged, at least rhetorically, to support and even save these existing international institutions. Based on an institutional-balancing perspective, we suggest that the worry about the Kindleberger trap is unwarranted because the international institutional order will not easily collapse after the decline of U.S. hegemony. Institutional competition among great powers and institutional changes within the institutional order have become two remedies to maintain international institutions and to avoid the Kindleberger trap during the international order transition. What states, including the United States and China, should do is to reembrace and reinvigorate the role of multilateralism in world politics so that the dynamics of institutional balancing and consequential institutional changes in the context of U.S.-China competition do not deprive international society of the public goods and normative values of international institutions. The future international order should not be led by a single country, but by dynamic and balanced international institutions.
This project is supported by the Australian Research Council (grant number FT160100355) and a policy-oriented research grant from the Korea Foundation. An early version of this paper was presented at a workshop sponsored by the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University in Australia on February 24, 2020. This workshop is part of the Global Research Network on Peaceful Change (GRENPEC). The authors are thankful for the constructive comments and suggestions from all the participants, especially Roland Bleiker, T. V. Paul, Chris Reus-Smit, and Anders Wivel. All errors and omissions are the authors’ own.
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5 Barack Obama, “Remarks of President Barack Obama—As Prepared for Delivery State of the Union Address” (Washington, D.C., January 20, 2015), White House: President Barack Obama, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/20/remarks-president-barack-obama-prepared-delivery-state-union-address.
6 Jonathan Swan, “Scoop: Trump's Private Threat to Upend Global Trade,” Axios, June 29, 2018, www.axios.com/scoop-trumps-private-threat-to-upend-global-trade-f6ca180e-47d6-42aa-a3a3-f3228e97d715.html.
7 Donald Trump, quoted in David Smith, “Trump Halts World Health Organization Funding over Coronavirus ‘Failure,’” Guardian, April 14, 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/coronavirus-trump-halts-funding-to-world-health-organization.
8 Bessma Momani, “Xi Jinping's Davos Speech Showed the World Has Turned Upside Down,” Newsweek, January 18, 2017, www.newsweek.com/davos-2017-xi-jinping-economy-globalization-protectionism-donald-trump-543993.
9 Alastair Iain Johnston, “Is China a Status Quo Power?,” International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003), pp. 5–56; and Alastair Iain Johnston, “China in a World of Orders: Rethinking Compliance and Challenge in Beijing's International Relations,” International Security 44, no. 2 (Fall 2019), pp. 9–60.
10 For more definitions of the international order, see Joseph S. Nye Jr., Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (New York: Longman, 2003); Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977); and Christian Reus-Smit, “Cultural Diversity and International Order,” International Organization 71, no. 4 (Fall 2017), pp. 851–85.
11 For a similar conceptualization, see Henry Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (London: Allen Lane, 2014).
12 Barry Buzan defines these institutions as “primary institutions.” See Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Christian Reus-Smit labels these institutions as “fundamental institutions,” especially contractual international law. See Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).
13 See Huiyun Feng and Kai He, eds., China's Challenges and International Order Transition: Beyond “Thucydides's Trap” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).
14 G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
15 Kai He and Huiyun Feng, “Leadership Transition and Global Governance: Role Conception, Institutional Balancing, and the AIIB,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 12, no. 2 (Summer 2019), pp. 153–78.
16 It is worth noting that though Ikenberry recognizes the evolution of the liberal international order from 1.0 to 2.0 and 3.0, he argues that “precisely because the crisis of liberal order is a crisis of success, leading and rising states in the system are not seeking to overturn the basic logic of liberal internationalism as a system of open and rule-based order.” See G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal Internationalism 3.0: America and the Dilemmas of Liberal World Order,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 1 (March 2009), p. 84. See also G. John Ikenberry, “Why the Liberal World Order Will Survive,” in “Rising Powers and the International Order,” special issue, Ethics & International Affairs 32, no. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 17–29.
17 Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
18 For institutional balancing, see Kai He, Institutional Balancing in the Asia Pacific: Economic Interdependence and China's Rise (London: Routledge, 2008); and Kai He, “Institutional Balancing and International Relations Theory: Economic Interdependence and Balance of Power Strategies in Southeast Asia,” European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 3 (September 2008), pp. 489–518.
19 See Kai He, “Role Conceptions, Order Transition and Institutional Balancing in the Asia-Pacific: A New Theoretical Framework,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 72, no. 2 (March 2018), pp. 92–109.
20 For soft balancing, see Paul, T. V., Restraining Great Powers: Soft Balancing from Empires to the Global Era (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Kennedy, Paul, “A Time to Appease,” National Interest 108 (2010), p. 15Google Scholar.
22 Donald Trump, quoted in “Trump Threatens to Pull US Out of World Trade Organization,” BBC News, August 31, 2018, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45364150.
23 Larry Elliott, “WTO Faces Crisis over Settlement Disputes unless Trump Backs Off,” Guardian, December 8, 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/08/wto-faces-crisis-over-settlement-disputes-unless-trump-backs-off.
24 See He and Feng, “Leadership Transition and Global Governance.”
25 For discussions on U.S. revisionism, see Hurd, Ian, “Breaking and Making Norms: American Revisionism and Crises of Legitimacy,” International Politics 44, nos. 2–3 (2007), pp. 194–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lind, Jennifer and Wohlforth, William C., “The Future of the Liberal Order Is Conservative: A Strategy to Save the System,” Foreign Affairs 98 (March/April 2019), pp. 70–80Google Scholar.
26 We focus on state-driven institutional changes in this essay while acknowledging that institutions can play an autonomous role in shaping states’ interests as well as in generating institutional changes. See Barnett, Michael N. and Finnemore, Martha, Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.
27 Victor Mallet and Roula Khalaf, “FT Interview: Emmanuel Macron Says It Is Time to Think the Unthinkable,” Financial Times, April 17, 2020, www.ft.com/content/3ea8d790-7fd1-11ea-8fdb-7ec06edeef84/.
