Emma - What with their attention on the Al-Qaeda suiciders and all in Iraq, the Bush administration may have misunderestimated what some call the new Axis of Oil and others call a World without the West. :-)

OK, seriously. While Bush and Cheney were preoccupied with torture plans and renditions, China was gadding about the world making deals with oil countries that were welcome politically as well as economically.

"I think there are a lot of Arab states in the region who are looking to China not just as a potential economic partner, but also as a potential political counterweight to the US. The more they bring the Chinese into the region and the less they will have to do what the US tells them to..."

Meanwhile, back in Russia, Putin was making the same type of deals with the Central Asian countries. The hook in both cases, whether for worldwide US allies or unstable regional regimes under intense US pressure, was the promise of relief from US democratization demands coupled with economic gains.

An article in this month's National Interest, "A World without the West", explains it much better than I can. Unfortunately, sub. required. I have it downloaded, so contact me if you want to read it, and I'll email it to you. Some excerpts:

By preferentially deepening their own ties amongst themselves, and in so doing loosening relatively the ties that bind them to the international system centered in the West, rising powers are building an alternative system of international politics whose endpoint is neither conflict nor assimilation with the West. It is to make the West, and American power in particular, increasingly irrelevant.

What is emerging is a "World Without the West." This world rests on a rapid deepening of interconnectivity within the developing world-in flows of goods, money, people and ideas-that is surprisingly autonomous from Western control, resulting in the development of a new, parallel international system, with its own distinctive set of rules, institutions and currencies of power. This system empowers those within it to take what they need from the West while routing around American-led world order. The rising powers have begun to articulate an alternative institutional architecture and distinct modes of governance that form the skeleton of their own, and very real, sustainable and legitimate (in the eyes of much of the rest of the world) political-economic order.

Wishful thinking and conceptual blinders together prevent Americans from seeing the emergence of a World Without the West for what it really is. Our foreign-policy choices are going to be made tougher than we think.

(One of your questions is answered. No, the US is not 'getting it'.)

THE WORLD Without the West, like any political order, is made up of two ingredients: A set of ideas about governance and a set of power resources that enable, embed and occasionally enforce those ideas. This alternative order rests on wealth drawn from natural resources and industrial production (along with the management expertise applied to those capabilities). And it proposes to manage international politics through a neo-Westphalian synthesis comprised of hard-shell states that bargain with each other about the terms of their external relationships, but staunchly respect the rights of each to order its own society, politics and culture without external interference. Neither of these elements by itself would make for a concrete alternative to the Western system, but together they synergistically stabilize into a robust political-economic order.

The bargain here is simple and straightforward: Sovereign states are empowered to set the terms of the relationship inside their borders between the government and the governed. They then deal with each other externally in a market setting and recognize no real rights or obligations other than to fulfill agreed contracts. International institutions have no legitimate business other than to serve and facilitate these ends. Evolving Western notions of liberal internationalism-particularly ideas like political conditionality on development aid and the "responsibility to protect"-have no place in this framework. Claims about universal human values, the "moral reliability" of democracy and the like that come from Western voices are-self-consciously or otherwise-a power game pure and simple, an attempt to redefine as "universal" what is distinctly the product of a particular culture, and (declining) power base. There's no need to fight these ideas or assimilate to them; they can simply be ignored.

The great irony of the "communist" state in the post-Mao era is that the Chinese have essentially adopted liberal individualism as an economic ideology in full-blown form. But they have done so without the democratic political component that Americans take for granted. "To get rich is glorious", as Deng Xiaoping said. But it is also being promoted as a means of individual fulfillment and self-expression in societies with communal traditions and long histories of relative poverty. "One man, one vote" becomes "one man, one cell phone"-with the goal to create wealth and express one's individuality through consumption. (Russia is arriving at a similar synthesis, albeit in a more tumultuous way.)

Markets and bargains then are the stuff of world politics, not human rights or transcendent moral norms. States appropriately deal with each other over technical standards and trade arrangements. They do not judge others' electoral or legal systems. They may deal on issues of foreign exchange and monetary stability. They do not evaluate others' cultural policies and press freedoms.

This evolving synthesis is finding its expression now in new formal international institutions outside the Bretton Woods system. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), established in 2001 to advance the shared interests of China, Russia, and the four Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is an example. In 2005, the SCO declared its central goal to be the advancement of "multilateral cooperation . . . based on the principles of equal right and mutual respect, non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states." After rejecting the United States's application for observer status it called on Washington to withdraw U.S. military personnel from Central Asia, backing up Uzbek President Islam Karimov in his quarrel with the United States over the aggressive suppression of domestic protesters.

If you are still with me :-), this was in the Asia Times today. Iran plays the Central Asia card

The worst thing you can do to a dogma is give it an empire. Anon

Sigh - that very much sounds like our bozos. Check your Inbox.

The worst thing you can do to a dogma is give it an empire. Anon