Imagining an alternative institutional and normative architecture for global governance must proceed on the bases of an identification and understanding of the principal challenges facing the international system. In my view, the gravest challenge facing the international system, and perhaps the greatest political drama of the twenty-first century,Footnote ¹ is the ongoing shift in the global balance of power. As we move from a U.S.-led unipolar system to a world in which non-Western powers, particularly China, exercise greater influence in international affairs, the foremost priority for global governance is to ensure that this transition proceeds peacefully and to minimize the potential for Great Power conflict, especially between the United States and China.

For several centuries, the North Atlantic region has been the center of gravity of world politics. While non-Western powers, such as Tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Imperial China exercised influence either globally or within their regional spheres of influence during various historical epochs, Western Europe and the United States enjoyed supremacy over the international system since at least the early nineteenth century. These states acquired unsurpassed military power, accumulated unmatched economic wealth, and developed unparalleled productive and innovative capacities, which ensured unrivaled western dominance over world politics.Footnote ² This enabled Western powers to formulate the rules that governed international relations and design the institutions that facilitated global governance.Footnote ³ Indeed, contemporary international law and the existing regulatory regimes of the international system are largely Western creations that were globalized often through conquest and colonization, but also occasionally with the consent, cooperation, and participation of non-Western societies.Footnote ⁴

We are currently witnessing the denouement of Western supremacy in world affairs. In addition to the meteoric rise of China as a global economic powerhouse,Footnote ⁵ various developments are contributing to the relative decline of Western power. These include Russia's resurgence, the growing prosperity and regional influence of pivotal states such as India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey,Footnote ⁶ the aftereffects of the global financial crisis and the secular stagnation of Western economies,Footnote ⁷ and the rise of far-right populism and the retreat of liberal democracy.Footnote ⁸ The combination of these factors has precipitated what the policy commentariat is calling the crisis of the liberal world order.Footnote ⁹

In this era of uncertainty, disorder, and ongoing power shifts, the most serious threat to international peace and security is the possibility of Great Power war, especially between the United States and China. As a declining hegemon, the United States perceives China as a threat to its security and global standing.Footnote ¹⁰ While China, the rising peer-competitor,Footnote ¹¹ perceives the United States as an obstacle to its ambitions for regional, and possibly, global hegemony. Graham Allison and other scholars refer to this relationship of mutual insecurity between declining and rising powers as the Thucydides Trap. According to Thucydides, the origin of the Peloponnesian wars was Sparta's fear of being overtaken as the leading Greek city-state by a rising Athens. The historical record since the Peloponnesian wars is ominous. Twelve of sixteen cases of major power transition in the past five hundred years have led to Great Power war, which leads Graham Allison to conclude that “[i]ntentions aside, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception.”Footnote ¹²

Such a confrontation would be catastrophic. Moreover, even if the United States and China avoid direct armed conflict, heightened tensions between these states would negatively affect every aspect of global governance. Achieving even a modicum of effective governance in any policy area, such as nonproliferation, trade and investment, climate change, maritime security, cyber security, and outer space, requires maintaining peaceful relations between Washington and Beijing. Preventing Great Power war and preserving cooperative relations between the Great Powers, especially the United States and China, must be the principal policy objective of global governance and the international legal order.

Translating this overarching objective into specific recommendations that apply to the infinite variety of institutions of global governance is not possible here. However, as a general matter, any reconfiguration of the global institutional infrastructure should be guided by three priorities:

First, international organizations and governance regimes should be designed in a manner that facilitates communication, cooperation, and compromise between the Great Powers. In this regard, an important role for international organizations is to act as authoritative sources of scientific data and impartial facts, which are scare commodities in today's post-truth political climate. These organizations can also use their convening power to facilitate compromise and encourage trade-offs within and across regimes and issue-areas,Footnote ¹³ which promotes a sense of diffuse reciprocity and interdependence between the Great Powers.Footnote ¹⁴

Second, the composition and structure of international organizations must reflect the changing balance of power and contribute to ensuring that the ongoing power shift remains peaceful. Many academic and policy conversations about institutional reform focus on increasing the legitimacy and effectiveness of governance regimes by granting greater access and participatory rights to nonstate actors, such as corporations and civil society organizations. These ideas, while laudable, might have the unintended consequence of disrupting the balance of power. Nonstate entities, even organizations advocating praiseworthy causes, are not neutral actors. They promote policies and agendas that usually align with the interests of particular states, including Great Powers. Therefore, while increasing the involvement of nonstate actors might inject fresh ideas into policy discussions, provide access to private financial resources, and ameliorate the legitimacy-deficit of some governance regimes, doing so must not come at the expense of undermining the incentives for Great Powers to cooperate through global governance institutions. Similarly, proposals to expand the UN Security Council to improve its legitimacy should not lose sight of the reality that the Council is not a collective security or law enforcement regime. Rather, it is a Great Power Concert.Footnote ¹⁵ The Council is not a representative body that draws its legitimacy from broad participation in its decision-making process. Instead, it was envisioned as, and should remain, a forum for Great Power consultation and co-management of international security.

Third, the United States and China are not irreconcilable ideological foes. This makes it unlikely that the world will revert to a Cold War-like standoff between opposing alliances.Footnote ¹⁶ Nonetheless, institutional reform strategies should beware of the emergence of parallel governance regimes and normative orders sponsored by competing Great Powers. Examples of this, such as the establishment of the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, have appeared in recent years.Footnote ¹⁷ While a measure of regionalism is inevitable, reforming the processes of global governance should incentivize the continued engagement of the Great Powers and discourage institutional fragmentation and duplication, which would ultimately weaken collective responses to global policy challenges.