I’ve enjoyed the discussion so far, as I enjoyed Josh’s book. Let me follow up on Dan Blumenthal’s useful suggestion that China is employing rather traditional statecraft (which is not inconsistent with the thesis of Charm Offensive).

Beijing protects its industries as assiduously as Washington protects farmers. Beijing helps Chinese companies abroad much as Washington has used export supports (and has invoked the “national security exception” in trade bills to subsidize U.S. arms sales overseas). What is so unusual about Beijing securing access to oil and natural resources – in Africa, in Latin America -- without regard to authoritarian dictators and human rights violations? The Politburo is simply following the advice of Henry Kissinger, placing national interest above abstract principles. Sure, Washington supported Pinochet, Karimov, Saddam (pre-1990), and a host of other dictators for reasons other than simply resource extraction. But oil, natural gas, and copper certainly played a part in the calculations.

So, China can play balance of power games like the rest of us. It can ignore human rights violations like the rest of us. And it can intervene – while always spouting rhetoric about inviolate sovereignty – just like the rest of us.

While on this issue of traditional statecraft, let me add that I don't think that China is necessarily interested in replacing the United States in East Asia, at least in the foreseeable future. It, too, is a free rider of sorts. Beijing is disgusted with what’s going on in Pyongyang, doesn’t want an unpredictable nuclear power on its borders, and certainly doesn’t want a flood of refugees from a failed state. So, at a certain level, Beijing has welcomed U.S. pressure (which is why it has backed sanctions). Beijing is uncomfortable with Japan’s move away from its constitutional pacifism, which has traditionally been at the center of the U.S.-Japanese alliance, and doesn’t want to wave goodbye to U.S. carriers only to wave hello to a new, powerful Japanese fleet. U.S. protection of the shipping lanes is a regional good that China, too, enjoys. And although Taiwan remains a major sticking point in relations with Washington, Beijing certainly looks at terrorism the same way that the Bush administration does and welcomes most of Washington’s efforts to combat Islamic fundamentalism in the region.

More generally, I don’t see China creating a new axis, a so-called world without the West, any time soon. Sure, it sees its economic model as a cut above the Washington consensus. Sure, it sees its culture as universalistic in Nye’s sense of the word, at least as universalistic as the culture of Baywatch and McDonald’s. Sure, it is building close ties with Venezuela, Central Asia, and key African states. But China is still copying from the United States, benefitting from U.S. military and economic power, and profiting from an international economic system that tilts in favor of the powerful.

As Naazneen Barma asks, when will China begin to provide global public goods of its own? China has already begun to think this way regionally, because it recognizes that only a stable regional environment will provide the conditions under which sustained economic growth is possible. I hope that China begins to understand this concept globally as well.

But with the United States showing no leadership on climate change, critical international institutions like the recently proposed Arms Trade Agreement, and many other global public goods, Beijing has no incentive to compete in a positive way with the United States. When American leaders and American analysts stop looking at the U.S.-China relationship in zero-sum terms – they gain at our expense, we must somehow regain at their expense -- and begin to see a more nuanced and complex set of political and economic relations, we will begin to understand China’s “charm offensive” as more than just a threat to a U.S.-led international order.