ON JANUARY 17, 2017, THREE DAYS BEFORE PRESIDENT DONALD Trump took office, Xi Jinping stepped onto the World Economic Forum podium at Davos, Switzerland, that beacon of Western capitalism, and held the banner high for values once championed by the democratic world. He advocated the ripping down of barriers and the boosting of international trade. He flew the flag for globalization, carrying the very same argument that two centuries earlier had brought British gunboats to Chinese ports demanding the right to buy and sell merchandise on Britain’s terms and under its rules.
“Many people feel bewildered and wonder: What has gone wrong with the world?” Xi said, going on to deliver analysis that quoted Charles Dickens; name-checked the Arabian Nights; argued that world crises, such as Syrian refugees, had nothing to do with free trade; referred to inadequate global governance as a failure to meet people’s expectations; and pointed out that globalization was “a natural outcome of scientific and technological progress, not something created by any individuals or any countries.”162
His final words, a blend of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, were written to stir: “No difficulty, however daunting, will stop mankind from advancing. When encountering difficulties, we should not complain about ourselves, blame others, lose confidence or run away from responsibilities. We should join hands and rise to the challenge. History is created by the brave. Let us boost confidence, take action, and march arm-in-arm toward a bright future.”163
The Davos speech marked the end of China’s attempt to forge what it had repeatedly described as a “new model of great power relations” between China and the United States, which led to the idea of the G2 relationship sitting at the pinnacle of the G8, G20, and other groupings of nations. During Xi’s 2015 visit to the United States, the phrase was used time and again in trying to sell an idea of sharing influence between two superpowers, one that concentrated not on conflict and disagreement but on “mutual respect and mutually beneficial cooperation,” in itself a very Asian concept. The model was never accepted by the United States. Too many in Congress, bruised and energized by constant horse trading and win-lose politics, were wary that Beijing was setting a trap to silence them on speaking out over Taiwan, democratic values, human rights and, indeed, the South China Sea.
China shelved the idea and, a month later, in February 2017, as the United States continued to turn inwards after Trump’s inauguration, Xi established his nation as the champion of globalization. At a national security conference in Beijing, in typical Communist Party style, he announced his Two Guidances. The first was that China would “guide the international community to jointly build a more just and reasonable new world order.” The second was that it would “guide the international community to jointly maintain international security.”164
There it was—the launch of Eastphalian values onto the global stage. China would force reform of the postwar Westphalian system. Xi’s reference to international security was a message to the United States not to mess with China’s foreign policy, including its newly built bases in the South China Sea. China had claimed the moral torch of world leadership.
In May 2017 Xi reinforced his vision by hosting the Beijing summit on his infrastructure-building Belt and Road Initiative for twenty-nine heads of government and star attractions from the global autocracies. The other two Asian giants, India and Japan, kept their distance, wary about joining anything that resembled a Beijing-led strategic coalition. The Belt and Road Initiative talked up shared prosperity, open borders, free trade, and glittering skyscrapers, all derived from legends of the ancient Silk Road that connected diverse civilizations. “Opening up brings progress while isolation results in backwardness,” declared Xi. “Global growth requires new drivers, development needs to be more inclusive and balanced, and the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be narrowed.”165
The summit exposed two opposing global views. One was that a swath of territory stretching between Beijing and Moscow may be coming under anti-American authoritarian control, thus conjuring up the specter of the Cold War. The other was that, at a time when there were not many big international visions around, this was one. The West was bereft of ideas and China was now appealing to the global imagination.
Acutely aware that others had trodden this path before, China was keen to show it was not a new colonial power. It was not trying to civilize weaker and poorer countries with any ideology, nor was the Belt and Road Initiative comparable to the postwar Marshall Plan, which poured billions into war-damaged Europe with the goal of bringing democracy and reviving the shattered Westphalian idea of balancing power between independent states.
“The Marshall Plan wanted to impose a system and values on others,” Ruan Zhongzhe of the China Institute of International Studies told me. “It had conditionality. Do it or you won’t receive aid. The Belt and Road Initiative is not the same kind of thing. We want to seek affinity in adjoining areas so we can cooperate with each other on a voluntary basis. You can choose yes or no. Its aim is to promote stability in the region. Many issues stem from poverty. Our greatest test is to help all those young people to be occupied by jobs. We want to create a secure corridor that will make a peaceful environment in a region of prosperity and stability. It cannot be created by China. We are just one country.”
China’s ambition is swept along on a tidal wave of self-belief that has left many of us asking how it could do so much so fast. Back in the 1990s, the chief engineer of Shanghai told me that by 2020 his city would have better infrastructure than New York. His enthusiasm was infectious, like that of a movie hero with the odds stacked against him, yet it seemed only a fabricated Hollywood ending could make his dream a reality. Shanghai was then a mass of construction sites filled with thousands of cranes and bamboo scaffolding from which workers were creating a new skyline. They lived on-site in scrappy tents; they wore rags and rubber sandals and had no helmets, gloves, or safety harnesses. Men from whole villages traveled from a far-flung province and camped together to scrape together a living for their families as did the migrant farm workers in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. At the time, I added skepticism to my reports on China’s modernization. How could it ever happen? This was communist China. Only the developed democratic West knew how to build cities and run governments. I write this long before 2020, and anyone who rides both the New York and Shanghai subways can see that the chief engineer knew exactly what he was talking about.
But then China is no shining angel when it comes to how people are treated. Behind the much-hailed economic miracle lie numerous stories of staff being forced to work in regimented factories making high-tech products for Western multinational companies, in conditions so dismal that wire netting covers balconies and windows to prevent suicide; of lethal dangers in the construction, mining, and other industries; of an absence of health and safety provisions; of inhumane hours, physical abuse and bullying, and arbitrary payment, with wages deducted for food and shelter that leave workers with no or little income.166 China’s modernization has led to thousands of protests around the country. Land and labor disputes are common.
According to the BBC’s former China editor, Carrie Gracie, China’s modernization is controlled from the top with very little say given to those whose lives are turned upside down. Gracie has spent more than a decade tracking the transformation of a tiny farming community in western China into a modern city. In the White Horse Village series, she reported on the personal upheavals there, of family houses being demolished for high-rise blocks, of rice fields covered with highway concrete, of the building of schools and hospitals amid protests as land was expropriated and villagers forced to move.
White Horse Village lies in a narrow valley hemmed by daunting mountain peaks, and its way of life had not changed for centuries. Once a village of three thousand people, it has now become the fast-paced Wuxi New Town, population 200,000, with car showrooms, karaoke bars, and shining office blocks.
“This epic transformation is being replicated in thousands of villages all over China, the biggest urbanization in human history and a giant leap of faith in the name of progress,” writes Gracie, explaining the motivation behind the Belt and Road Initiative. “The pressure is coming from the top. Chinese emperors once claimed to rule all under heaven. With the United States retreating from global leadership on free trade, President Xi has seized his chance. With no other country offering a big idea right now, this is the most ambitious bid to shape our century.”167
It is worth noting that at the time that China announced its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, it also closed the labor camps and prison farms where, at their peak, up to two million people were forced to work under an old communist policy known as “reeducation through labor.” Human Rights Watch then estimated that the remaining camps held about 160,000 prisoners.168 The closures coincided with a UN impetus for multinational companies to ensure their products were not contaminated by prison labor and showed how much China wanted to earn both access and respectability within the international trading system.
Parag Khanna, argues in Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilisation that what is unfolding today with China’s expansion cannot be compared to colonization because countries are no longer invaded. Instead they are bought.
“The path to wealth and peace is for trade to supersede the nation-state,” he writes. “We need a more borderless world because we can’t afford destructive territorial conflict, because correcting the mismatch of people and resources can unlock incredible human and economic potential. Human society is undergoing a fundamental transformation by which functional infrastructure tells us more about how the world works than political borders.”169
While Asia and China are talking about tearing down controls and borders, America and Europe are looking at tightening them, building checkpoints and walls. For many this raises issues such as patriotism and loyalty, questions that apply to Chinese studying in the United States, to staff at American factories in China such as those of Boeing and Motorola, and to the giant Taiwanese tech company Foxconn, which makes Apple products in China and sells them around the world. And what of the components inside the phone that come from France, Indonesia, Israel, the Philippines, and Singapore, an endless globalized list that grows all the time because China is now outsourcing its factories to cheaper labor markets in Bangladesh, Egypt, and Ethiopia. People, clothes, and gadgets have a shared, complex provenance. An iPhone is an American product, except it is not. It’s a gadget from everywhere. Isaac Wang, my guide in Kinmen, is from China, Taiwan, and the United States, and that is comparatively straightforward. But what of a Chinese student who graduates from Columbia Business School in New York, joins a German bank, and is posted to Brazil, where she marries an information technology executive from Mexico who gets poached by Google and posted to Dubai, so she ends up working for the Chinese giant Ali Baba, with her children going to an international school? Where exactly does this family belong? Is their loyalty to their company, their countries—or, where?
“There is a new generation that finds its calling beyond national boundaries and pledges allegiance to the Independent Republic of the Supply Chain,” Khanna sums up.170
As if to make the point, in April 2017, Beijing even took its Belt and Road Initiative as far as Britain when a train loaded with Scotch whisky, baby milk, and engineering equipment left London for eastern China. It arrived three weeks later, a month earlier than if it had made a similar journey by ship.
THE CONNECTED WORLD routinely brings the polarized sides of the Sino-American relationship into a single room, nowhere more so than among the think tanks of Washington, DC. In late 2016, I attended a day-long conference entitled “China Power: Up for Debate” held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Among the experts sharing panels were the former US director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair; the former Carrier Battle Group commander, Admiral Mike McDevitt, from the Center for Naval Analyses; Tom Christensen, a former deputy assistant secretary of state; and a Chinese security expert, Zha Daojiong, from the University of Beijing.
Zha was also an adviser to the Communist Party and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He had worked at various times in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. He was in early middle age, with gray-black hair and thin-rimmed spectacles, wearing a dark suit and a maroon patterned tie. He spoke with a tongue-in-cheek-smile and an easy turn of phrase that endeared him to his audience. He began by pointing out that he was Chinese, with English as a second language. “So, anything I say should not be held against me, or anyone else,” he said, drawing a ripple of laughter. “One of the two points of difference between our two great countries is over what happens in the region. Sometimes we don’t appreciate that peace has prevailed since 1975, and if you look at what’s been going on in the Middle East and elsewhere, we should cherish that.”
The conference room itself resembled a banquet hall without the food. We sat at large round tables with wall screens for PowerPoint presentations and roaming microphones for questions. Among us were a sprinkling of military uniforms, casually dressed young staff from congressional offices, consultants and lobbyists in formal suits and ties, the retired and the curious, and a handful of journalists like myself. The debates were being streamed live around the world.
Christensen countered Zha by arguing that the biggest source of instability from China had been its expanding navy and island building. “All of this raises concern that China is trying to create a functional lake in the South China Sea that would prevent foreign militaries from operating there freely,” he said, advocating stepping up the pressure and testing China’s resolve.
Former director of national intelligence Blair, who had also been commander of US forces in the Pacific, put forward a detailed prescriptive solution, spelling out what both the Chinese and US governments could do to keep the region peaceful. He even offered China a carrot by saying that the United States could “sharply reduce, if not eliminate its reconnaissance activities, surface and air, off the Chinese coast and notify China in advance of exercises that would take place in that area.”
“Shipping would be off limits,” he explained, adding,
There would be no cutting of oil shipments to China or blocking shipments to Taiwan, and so on. We would formally or informally agree that this would be something both countries would adhere to even in conditions of conflict. China, for its part, would not further militarize any of the features it claims in the South China or East China seas. It would notify the US of military exercises, and both sides would continue to respond to crises. Anything outside that would mean something serious, and the other side would probably retaliate. If you were of a deal-making disposition, such a deal might be something interesting for both sides to consider.
In the audience was one of Zha’s colleagues, Wu Shicun, who headed think tanks in China and the United States. One, the Institute for China-America Studies, had offices next to a fast food store on M Street in Washington, DC. The other was the much more lavishly appointed National Institute for South China Sea Studies in Hainan. Wu was a key official honing Beijing’s South China Sea policy. His government gave him a fairly free rein to argue its case around the world. A few days earlier he had published a report accusing the United States of “unprecedented military deployments” in the Asia-Pacific. It had “carried out twelve hundred air and sea reconnaissance missions along China’s coast in 2014, an increase of six times from 2009, making China America’s number one surveillance target.”
I interviewed him the next day at his small office at the Institute for China-America Studies, which declared that its mission was to “facilitate the exchange of ideas,” particularly in areas “in need of greater mutual understanding.” This was a Communist Party operation in the American capital aimed at spreading soft power regarding its South China Sea policy.
Wu himself was a veteran of Sino-American tension. In April 2001 he was working with the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Hainan Island when a US Navy EP-3 Orion surveillance plane flying about seventy miles off the Chinese coast collided with a Chinese fighter pilot and had to make an emergency landing there. The pilot, who had been playing a game of chicken with the spy plane, died. The Chinese authorities detained the crew of twenty-one men and three women for eleven days. “The American press accused us of holding the crew hostage,” he said. “But it wasn’t like that at all. Nothing like this had happened before, and we were fighting among ourselves as to which government department should be in charge. Was it Hainan Province, the navy, the air force, the Public Security Bureau, the Foreign Ministry? Who?” He gave me a knowing smile. “This was China. These things take time. It is not always as the Americans think.”
With his swept-back silver hair and furrowed brow, Wu looked like a cross between Albert Einstein and Dustin Hoffman. We talked in a long narrow room with two armchairs positioned beneath the American and Chinese flags, the full formal design of a Chinese meeting room except for its size, the Communist Party in miniature.
Wu began by explaining that his report on US military activities in the Asia-Pacific was the first of its kind. It had taken ten researchers six months to pull together the information from what he called “open sources,” meaning there was nothing secret or classified in it. “The US insists on maintaining its supremacy in the Western Pacific,” he said. “That is a worry for the whole international community as to whether China and the US will come to a war.”
We talked for more than two hours, exploring again this concept of a new world order, with Wu insisting that if the United States wanted to retain the status quo, China and other nations needed to be better represented.
“China is now the world’s second largest economy,” he argued. “But the international system doesn’t take into account our interests. The US economy is about eighteen trillion dollars and China’s is ten trillion dollars, yet our stake in the International Monetary Fund is less than Britain’s, less than France’s, less than Japan’s. The current international and regional architecture is still dominated by the US.”
“So what, then, is the risk of war?” I asked.
“I don’t think there is one,” Wu replied genially. “These two countries have an obligation to work together to safeguard peace and stability for the international community.”
“Then how would it work?”
“The US should keep to its commitment of taking no sides over the sovereignty issue in the South China Sea,” Wu replied. “That is the first. Second, the US should convince the Chinese people that it has no intention of using the South China Sea dispute to contain China. And third, the US should refrain from conducting intelligence gathering activities very close to China’s coast; that poses a threat to China’s national security.”
“So that’s the US. What should China do?”
“China, as the owner of the South China Sea islands and as the country with the largest coast of the South China Sea, should respect the freedom of navigation enjoyed by the whole international community. Second, China should be prudent when it comes to island construction facilities which go beyond defensive needs. And third, China should not declare an Air Defense Identification Zone as it will undermine mutual trust between China and the United States. China now feels no security threat, so China doesn’t need to announce it.”
“But your report said the opposite,” I noted. Wu’s recent report had warned that China might set up an Air Defense Identification Zone around the Spratly Islands as it had done in 2013 in the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands row with Japan.
“It said China could possibly set up an ADIZ if the US intensifies its patrols and keeps spying on us,” said Wu. “But it doesn’t need to, now.”
I asked Wu what he thought of Admiral Blair’s list of suggestions, including the United States curtailing its surveillance operations and an agreement to guarantee passage for shipping.
“I do not disagree completely,” Wu responded thoughtfully.
With Blair and Wu, here were two figures who had the ear of their governments, with much common ground, who were both making detailed suggestions on how to stop a war in the South China Sea. It seemed so easy: freeze the prospect of conflict with a couple of informal arrangements, then set an agenda that would include China and other new powers in a reformed world order. Except, of course, things rarely work like that. There were politics and parliaments, and no one should kid themselves that arguments do not rage within the Chinese government just as they do within any American or European one. They are just not so public.
Blair’s suggestions directly contradicted the view of one of his successors heading up the US Pacific Command. A couple of weeks earlier, Admiral Harry Harris had argued that he needed to keep track of China’s new submarine-launched long-range ballistic missiles, which could target pretty much anywhere in the United States. “My obligation is to ensure that I know where those SSBNs are,” said Harris. “Right now, I am aware of where they are and how many there are.”171
Harris described China’s claim to 90 percent of the South China Sea as outrageous and destabilizing for peace in the region. “They have manufactured land there at a staggering pace just in the last months,” he told Time magazine. “No one should doubt our resolve to defend the territory of the United States, our people and our interests.”172
THE UNITED STATES directly challenges China’s South China Sea sovereignty claim by deploying warplanes or naval vessels close to its new outposts in the Spratly Islands in what is known as a “freedom of navigation” operation. If China’s sovereignty was recognized under international law, the United States would not be allowed within twelve nautical miles of the islands without seeking permission. By sending its military into Chinese-claimed waters and airspace and refusing to leave when ordered, the United States is testing China’s military resolve.
The administration of President Barack Obama was fraught with disagreement as to how these missions should be used. Harris wanted more, Obama less; and Trump ordered several in the first months of his presidency. China constantly warns that these operations could spark something more serious, but for the time being they are carefully choreographed.
In 2015 CNN recorded a radio exchange on board a US Navy P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane patrolling the South China Sea. The Chinese radioed, “Foreign military aircraft, this is Chinese navy. You are approaching our military alert zone. Leave immediately in order to avoid misjudgment.”
The Poseidon crew replied, “I am a United States military aircraft conducting lawful military activities outside national airspace with due regard to international law.”173
Because of the risk of miscalculation, crews are careful not to say anything that could be misconstrued as being provocative. “The actual transits are heavily scripted,” Mark E. Rosen, an international maritime lawyer at the US Center for Naval Analyses told me. “The crews are given talking points for when they are challenged or queried. Basically, they say, ‘We are operating innocent passage in accordance with the 1983 United Nations Law of the Sea Convention.’”
China is challenging the very concept of international law as it is interpreted by Western democracies. As we saw from the reaction to the July 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling on the South China Sea claims, international law itself cannot do the business because there is no agreed-upon mechanism through which it is implemented. If anything, instead of giving room for the Southeast Asian governments to come to resolution themselves, the Hague ruling has drawn the United States much further into a dispute in which it claims neutrality. According to the tribunal, no nation has sovereignty over any of the Spratly Islands, yet Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, along with China, all have a presence there. The United States is making a point of testing China when there is no evidence that Beijing has any plans to interrupt international shipping. To even threaten such action would sever the very supply chains it is working to secure.
Western democracies have also been taken to international tribunals and rejected the judgments just as China had. Only the previous year, in 2015, the same Permanent Court of Arbitration had ruled against Britain in a case that eerily resembled the one of the South China Sea. In 2010 Britain unilaterally set up a 400,000-square-mile Marine Protected Area around the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Archipelago, whose sovereignty is disputed between Britain and the small island nation of Mauritius. The archipelago contains the controversial atoll of Diego Garcia, which once looked like the disputed reefs and rocks of the South China Sea. In the 1960s Britain leased it to the United States, which was looking for a foothold in the India Ocean, and America transformed it into the military base that it is today, like Mischief Reef, only much bigger. The United States forcibly evicted the Diego Garcia islanders to Mauritius and the Seychelles. In return, America helped Britain with its Polaris submarine program, giving it its first submarine-based nuclear missiles.174
Britain’s declaration of a Marine Protected Area, ostensibly to safeguard fish stocks, was the last straw for Mauritius which, like the Philippines, took its dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration. After four years of hearings, the tribunal ruled that Britain had failed to give due regard to the rights of the Chagos islanders and had breached its obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Unlike China, Britain took part in the hearings and said it accepted the decision. But since then, apart from a single brief meeting when I last checked, nothing has happened. The ruling was ignored. Britain continued to intercept and order away fishing boats that entered the disputed area.
Thirty years earlier, Nicaragua took the United States to the International Court of Justice, also based in The Hague. The 1986 case revolved around the United States mining Nicaragua’s harbors in its support of right-wing Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the government. The United States lost and immediately declared, just as China did in 2016, that the court had no jurisdiction.
Another judicial body in The Hague, the International Criminal Court, received a blow from the developing world in 2016 when three African governments, Burundi, Gambia, and South Africa, announced they would quit, claiming the court was biased in favor of white Europeans. “There are many Western countries, at least thirty, that have committed heinous war crimes against independent sovereign states since the creation of the International Criminal Court, and not a single Western war criminal has been indicted,” said Gambian president Yahya Jammeh.175 Under international pressure, South Africa later said it would retain its membership.
International law, therefore, has itself come under scrutiny. Judgments are ignored or adhered to only according to national interests, underlining a truth that the rule of law, legitimacy, military force, and other elements jostle together when balancing international power.
The ultimate arbiter of international law is the UN Security Council, but some resolutions, such as those passed against Israel, are routinely ignored, while those against Iran or North Korea tend to be enforced.176 Hardeep Singh Puri, a former Indian ambassador to the UN who sat on the Security Council during his country’s rotating membership from 2009 to 2013, argues that adherence to international law has reached a crisis point: “The structures for international peace and security are being tested as never before. It is in everyone’s interest to reestablish the authority of the Security Council and reassert the primacy of law.”177
But how could that happen, when the legitimacy of the Western-built system is under such strain? In June 2016, China and Russia joined forces to issue an unprecedented joint declaration “on the primacy of international law,” pointing out that the concept of stability being guaranteed through nuclear weapons was now outdated. They emphasized that international law should be applied “on an equal footing” and that governments should “refrain from the threat or use of force.” They condemned “unilateral military interventions.” In a direct challenge to the US-led system, they ended resolving to uphold and promote international law, in “establishing a just and equitable international order.”178
While the Permanent Court of Arbitration was deliberating on the South China Sea dispute, China announced that it had set up its own International Maritime Judicial Center that reported to the Supreme People’s Court. In 2016 alone it had heard more than sixteen thousand cases over all maritime territory within its jurisdiction, meaning 90 percent of the South China Sea. And, like Britain in the Indian Ocean, since 1995 China has declared its own unilaterally protected areas with an annual fishing ban that runs from May to August.
“We have followed the letter of the law,” defense analyst Ruan Zongze told me. “We adhered to article 298 of the Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows a choice whether to accept arbitration or not. Thirty countries so far have refused arbitration, including Britain. So, it is not just China, and we said back in 2006 that we were not going to be subject to any kind of arbitration. We prefer to settle on a bilateral basis, case by case, which is how we have succeeded in solving twelve of our fourteen disputes on demarcated land borders.” Those still unresolved are with Bhutan and India, and saw the Chinese and Indian armies standing off against each other in 2017.
Taiwan also lashed out against the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling, which described its coast guard base in the Spratly Islands as neither a rock nor an island. President Tsai Ing-wen issued a blistering attack against the tribunal that its finding was unacceptable and had no legally binding force.179
Taiping, or Itu Aba Island, is Taiwan’s only Spratly base, but it covers forty-six acres and is almost a mile long, with a twelve-hundred-foot runway. There are six hundred coast guard and support staff. It is also the best developed, with a solar power station, freshwater plant, Internet connection, and a post office. Taiwan has also released expenditure figures for the recent upgrading of the island, giving us an idea of how much China would be spending, too. Taiwan invested $23.3 million in a new runway, $66 million for the port and jetty, and a total of $1.1 billion for all modernization.180 China’s costs in building up seven islands from scratch would run into tens of billions of dollars. “We know how much maintaining a South China Sea base costs,” said David Y. L. Lin, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister from 2012-16. “It’s very expensive.”
The South China Sea dispute, therefore, goes to the core of Beijing’s demand for an overhaul of the current global order. What legitimacy does America have to challenge China’s foreign policy with warships because a tribunal of freelance lawyers has ruled one way or another in a court that is accountable to no international institution? Why should the head of the World Bank always be an American, and the head of the International Monetary Fund a European? And it is not only China asking these questions. Brazil, India, South Africa, and others are challenging the lopsidedness of global institutions and of the UN Security Council itself, which is the ultimate arbiter of international law.