BRAD GLOSSERMAN
I was called out by a punk — a smart young Ph.D. student, actually — for referring to “the West” during a discussion of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
She called it a dated concept that had little meaning in today’s geopolitics. She was right. “The West” has aged poorly. It lacks contours and credibility. We need a new construct to describe the ideas and the polities that can hold the international order together. I vote for ROPES, which stands for rules-oriented, process-embracing societies. I am claiming the trademark here and now.
“The West” has been with us for awhile. Derived from the Latin word “occidens,” meaning setting down or sunset, it was opposed to the “orient,” where the sun rose. Those distinctions assumed institutional significance with the split of the Catholic Church into the Western Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches. The two compass points took on an ideological tinge with the association of the West with ideas like democracy and market capitalism, while the East was tarred with the brush of despotism and similar concepts. (Writing history has its advantages.)
This cleavage was consolidated in the Cold War, when the United States and its allies were “the Western bloc,” embodied by NATO and U.S. alliances in Asia, and stood for democracy, capitalism or, more accurately, anti-communism. “The Eastern bloc” was composed of the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact. The groups were sometimes referred to as the First and Second World, respectively, and other countries were lumped into “the Third World,” which purported to remain neutral between the two blocs and was given voice through the Nonaligned Movement.
“The West” was always a lazy, awkward and inaccurate signifier. It didn’t fit geographically, as it included countries located further east than the Soviet Union (at least on the standard Mercator projection map). Some of those same countries were “Asiatic” and foreign to the social traditions from which the term originated.
The poverty of our vocabulary has been evident since the Cold War ended. We entered “the post-Cold War world” and struggled to come up with a better organizing principle. The “Unipolar Moment” had its minute and vanished.
After acknowledging the role of rogue actors — terrorists or a purported “axis of evil” that aligned with nonstate actors — we’ve returned to a focus on great power competition that, while reminiscent of the Cold War, is fundamentally different — hence our problem.
At this point, the dividing and defining line separates democracies from autocracies. While it has been discussed for some time, this fault line has become sharper in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Typical of this thinking is U.S. President Joe Biden’s warning that “We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression.”
There are similar soundings in Europe. For Richard Youngs, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at Carnegie Europe, the European Union’s strategic compass and its assertion that security policy must now be framed around a “competition of governance systems” is proof that “this cleavage (is) more central in structuring the international system.” The EU’s description of China as a “systemic rival” is another brick in that wall.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson sought to institutionalize that approach when he hosted the Group of Seven in 2021. He invited the leaders of Australia, India and South Korea to the group’s summit, aiming to turn the forum of leading industrialized powers into a venue for democratic nations, the D10. (Donald Trump had a similar idea when he hosted the G7 the year before, although his desire to include Russia exposed that plan as incoherent.)
Some advocate a T12 or League of Digital Democracies, an alliance of leading technological powers — Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. — to counter China’s digital ambitions, protect the West’s technological leadership and ensure that liberal democracies and their values shape emerging technologies. Since this is based on D10 principles, it’s probably best considered an application of that design.
But, as I continue to point out, a values-based approach is problematic if the goal is to muster the broadest possible coalition against revisionist powers. There are countries that might support the existing regional and international order whose democratic credentials are questionable or for whom values-driven motivations are just not enough.
They don’t consider the spread of authoritarianism to be as threatening as do countries like the U.S. They might fear endorsing a campaign to spread and impose values such as that which unleashed the Iraq War and its ensuing devastation. Others just aren’t prepared to sacrifice the very real economic benefits afforded by access to the Chinese market for some abstract ideological concern.
This suggests that the best rationale for creating an international coalition to protect the status quo against revisionist powers is simple: prevent them from redrawing borders unilaterally or by force. Elbridge Colby, the former U.S. deputy assistant director of defense, dismisses arguments that the U.S. needs “to make the world democratic or liberal in order to flourish as a free republic, nor does it need to dominate the world in order to be secure.” It does, however, need to deny China hegemony in Asia, the most dynamic region in the world. The unifying purpose for multilateral action, then, is denying Beijing the means to exert control over this vital region.
Colby focuses on defense as the way to do that: being a Pentagon official tends to promote that sort of thinking (or maybe that sort of thinking helps make one a Pentagon official). There is a more expansive set of tools.
Japan’s concept of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific is one of those tools, an application of Colby’s anti-hegemony logic. Since its articulation, Tokyo has steadily retreated from the harder lines of that policy — first a strategy, it’s now a vision — and shed its values component to minimize objections and to maximize its appeal. Japan emphasizes the inclusiveness of the idea to avoid the charge that FOIP is “anti-China” in aim and purpose.
While the idea has gained currency, we haven’t been able to come up with a shorthand referent to countries that endorse FOIP — the analogue to “the West.” FOIPsters? FOIPistas? FOIParrati? FOIPophiles? (Say that three times fast.)
How about ROPES? These are rules-oriented, process-embracing societies, a description that captures the key elements of this mindset. Its emphasis is on order in the most literal sense — rules and procedures — rather than the content of those decisionmaking guidelines. By assuming that those processes will reflect values with which we are comfortable — a description of the status quo — this sidesteps the ideological debate.
Not only is it accurate and easy to say, but it works as a metaphor. We hold on to ROPES and ROPES support the international system, binding like-minded governments together in ways that make the world stronger. That should satisfy even sharp-tongued Ph.D. students.
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