While Pacific Asia had China as a “solid center,” a place in the middle where most of the people and production was, the West had a “liquid center,” the Mediterranean. Wealth could be pursued and neighbors conquered in different places in the West, leading to competitive, distinct empires rather than to dynastic cycles.

European imperialism in Pacific Asia not only displaced China as the center of its neighbors’ attention but it splintered the region as well. This was sharp connectivity. France established French Indochina, the Dutch tightened their control of Indonesia, the British took over Malaya and Burma, and all of them had pieces of a disintegrating China. Japan avoided colonization and created its own empire, beginning with Korea and Taiwan. China became the vulnerable edge of a global frame, a frame centered on Europe that included the pieces of Pacific Asia. China’s population was now seen as an impediment to modernization, and its artisanal production was swamped by Western mass production. The US replaced European segmented globalization with a hub-and-spoke globalism rimmed by newly sovereign states. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China remained a mostly insignificant other to its neighbors until Deng Xiaoping’s policies took hold. The salience of China’s presence, population, and production began to rise, and China had become a significant other to its region by 1998. But the US remained the center of an unquestioned global order until the financial crisis of 2008.

The United States and China are the primary nodes of the multinodal world order. Together they are the middle third of the global economy, with the world’s biggest military budgets. Their parity makes rivalry inevitable because they are one another’s greatest counterpart. But their parity is asymmetric. China’s power relies on its demographic scale and on its Pacific Asian integration, while the US remains the center of the familiar global system that it created and it is the avatar of the developed world. While a Cold War is unlikely, the dangers posed by global rivalry are profound, ranging from nuclear war to failure to cooperate on global problems. The primary nodes also face asymmetric challenges. The US faces the challenge of adjusting to a central but not hegemonic global role. China faces the challenge of domestic tolerance and a mutually beneficial integration of Greater China and, more generally, of Pacific Asia. Beyond the primary nodes, regional reduction of uncertainties can contribute to the stabilization of world order. Cooperation founded on mutual respect is the prerequisite of successful global governance in a post-hegemonic world.

Since 2008 Pacific Asia has been reconfigured as a region, with China as its center. In economics, China has been the central driver and partner in growth. In politics, China has become the central concern of its neighbors. China’s GDP surpassed Japan’s in 2000, and by 2009 it equaled the combined totals of Japan, ASEAN, and Korea. While this shows China’s demographic power, it is not simply a matter of size. Its per capita GDP is now at eye level with countries such as Malaysia and Thailand. China is again the major presence in Pacific Asia, with a majority of its population and its production. Re-centered China is quite different from premodern China. China and its region are now globally integrated, and its former, cautious thin connectivity has been replaced by assertive thick connectivity. China now tries to maximize win-win contact. However, the new asymmetries worry the neighbors. China’s challenges of integrating Greater China and avoiding hostility with Japan are vital for China’s global prospects as well as its regional stature.

This chapter assesses whether, and to what extent, the mechanisms that underlie this book’s theory still operate in relation to two specific challenges in the current geopolitical landscape: (a) the rise of strategic competition from China and Russia and (b) the rise of nationalist and populist movements and parties in many partner nations. The chapter shows that for now any ambitious leaders who seek to replace the incumbents in their countries can still count on the fact that the United States continues to command large reservoirs of support among their fellow citizens, despite the clout that a rising China and a revanchist Russia may elicit. It also shows that populist parties are not by default anti-international or anti-US as long as aligning with the United States provides a pathway to political power. Hence, the prospects for the US world order might be brighter than usually imagined for no other reason than the United States can still impact the political success of incumbents and potential successors alike in the partner nations.

The chapter sets out the material conditions and social structure of the hunter-gatherer era, emphasising the role of kinship, mobility, egalitarianism and trade. It sees the material and social structures as relatively stable then looks at the long transition between the hunter-gatherer era and the era of congolmerate, agrarian/pastoralist empires, emphasising climate change as the key to population growth, settlement, technological change, and the shift to agriculture. It notes the shift from biological to social evolution, and the link between settlement and a move away from egalitarian relations. Agriculture reinforces settlement rather than causing it.

The chapter sets out the story of the era of agrarian/pastoralist empires (CAPE) in terms of its material conditions and social structures. New materials were hard metals and gunpowder. New sources of energy were wind and animal power. New technologies were the sailing ship, wheeled vehicles, writing, money and paper. Society became much more complex and larger in scale, and developed many new institutions, notable amongst which were human inequality (slavery, patriarchy, economic, monarchy, dynasticism), universal religions, empire, territoriality, sovereignty, trade and diplomacy. This package of material and social conditions proved remarkably stable up to the end of the eighteenth century AD. The core military dynamic of this era was between militarily superior nomadic steppe peoples, and more numerous and wealthier sedentary civilisations.

Brian Rathbun argues against the prevailing wisdom on morality in international relations, both the commonly held belief that foreign affairs is an amoral realm and the opposing By focusing on how states respond to being wronged rather than when they do right, Rathbun shows that morality is and always has been virtually everywhere in international relations – in the perception of threat, the persistence of conflict, the judgment of domestic audiences, and the articulation of expansionist goals. The inescapability of our moral impulses owes to their evolutionary origins in helping individuals solve recurrent problems in their anarchic environment. Through archival case studies of German foreign policy; the analysis of enormous corpora of text; and surveys of Russian, Chinese, and American publics, this book reorients how we think about the role of morality in international relations.