Kurt M Campbell and Rush Doshi, as students of history, will know John Bright’s description of the balance of power as a foul idol. They are right to point out in their recent Foreign Affairs essay the need for legitimacy in shaping a regional order in Asia. They are wrong to make an analogy of the Congress of Vienna for judging power relationships there. China today, they admit, is not a defeated power like France in 1814–15. The purpose of the Vienna system was to prevent conflict from taking place amongst the major European powers and not simply to constrain France. The system survived the Revolutions of 1848 but came apart a few years later with the Crimean War. The better analogy would be of the Western Hemisphere at the end of the 19th century. Wisely, Britain and the other leading powers of the world did not act to place a ‘tire’ around the United States. Instead, with their cooperation (and a great deal of their investment), the United States and the other American nations developed a regional community that has on the whole remained healthy and stable. Power relationships in the Americas are not ideally balanced, but this region still offers good lessons in peaceful integration that have served other regions, including Europe, well.
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