Every empire eventually discovers the same inconvenient truth: It is mortal. The Americans are discovering it now. The Chinese, to their credit, discovered it long ago. They know there will be no Chinese century in the way there was an American one because the age of world order is finished. What we have now is ordering, world-building, a process without end.

This is a problem for Washington, which prefers finality. The prevailing strategy, pioneered by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, is to “slow down” Chinese innovation, a phrase that should be embroidered on a cushion in the museum of imperial decline, somewhere between “the Boxers will disperse by Tuesday” and “Suez will be over by lunch.” One struggles to think of a great power that successfully preserved its primacy by asking its rival, very firmly, to please stop being clever. The Qing tried a version of it against European technology. It did not end well for the Qing.

Washington’s self-satisfied attempts to halt China’s rise represent the belief among superpowers that their status is conferred by nature. When an upstart appears, they moralize the encounter rather than meet it. As the commentator Kaiser Kuo observes, a country accustomed to being the default cannot recognize a peer without first delivering a sermon.

What is needed instead is an order of a different kind altogether. This would not be a new blueprint for a substantive political order, with ethical precepts for citizens or states, which can never be universalized without coercion. Rather, it would be a framework that governs how political orders themselves rise and fall.

Think of it less as a specific formula than a system of equations: Rather than prescribing the content of global politics, it sets the conditions under which the existing rules and values can change. It does not embody a vision; it assumes such visions will succeed one another and seeks to ensure succession happens without catastrophe. If world orders are a snapshot, ordering is a film.

Two principles of ordering can be suggested. First, every country should be free to grow new technologies. Britain led the first Industrial Revolution. The United States led the second. To insist that China must now develop within boundaries drawn in Washington is to confuse the privileges of incumbency with the laws of nature.

Technological revolutions reshape the global hierarchy; the country that diffuses the new technology fastest tends to move to the center. Attempting to freeze the current arrangement is not only futile but contradictory, since the incumbent itself rose by overturning the order before it.

Change cannot happen at the global level without being driven by powerful state actors. With its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China launched a revolutionary project whose final goal is to reshape the global system in ways that place it closer to its core or center. Such profound changes cannot be achieved without bringing about similarly profound changes inside China itself, and in fact, the BRI aims to transform China into a technological powerhouse, a country singularly able to deploy and control the technologies and industries of the future, including clean energy, artificial intelligence, space, and quantum computing.

The U.S. response to the Chinese challenge could take two very distinct forms. First, the United States could try to race ahead of China in these critical industries. There would, in that case, always be an element of uncertainty. The two countries might make different bets in either general technologies or the pathways to develop them. Time or history would decide the winner. There would be nothing certain or final about the Chinese challenge. After all, when in 1971 U.S. President Richard Nixon decided to delink the dollar from gold, it seemed that the reign of the dollar was coming to an end. In reality, it was beginning anew and on much stronger foundations.

The other possible response would be for Washington to try to slow down or even block its adversary. As a response to the challenge, it would be purely reactive. Its premise is that the developments we have witnessed in China for four or five decades can be brought to an end or even reverted so as to preserve the global system in its current form. It is doubtful that such a policy can work. After all, radical change in China was not brought about by the United States in the first place.

Imposing strict export restrictions or tariffs will likely only force China to look for alternative development pathways, and these pathways will become more autonomous or independent. A second reason the policy is likely to fail is that history never travels the same road twice. When deliberating on how to close off certain development possibilities for China, U.S. policymakers will tend to focus on those possibilities that were important for U.S. development.

They will lack awareness of the very different possibilities that are relevant for Chinese technological progress. A specific development pathway only looks inevitable in retrospect.

The second principle of global ordering is that every country should be free to choose. China is now the largest trading partner of more than 120 nations. Most of them do not want a bloc; they want optionality. Singapore, Switzerland, and much of Africa would rather weigh competing offers from Washington and Beijing than be conscripted into either. If one treats the world as a standing election in which the great powers must canvass continuously for support, the resulting discipline improves the candidates.

The principle would exclude all attempts to use force or threats to enlist a country against some other country. Its application is obvious in the case of the competition between China and the United States to create their own spheres of influence. That competition should be free from coercion or force. Whether a superpower is able to appeal to other peoples and countries will naturally determine its future status as a superpower, but this is a test it must pass rather than evade by preventing those peoples and countries from exercising their free choice.

The principle applies just as naturally in the case of Ukraine. The possibility that Ukraine could be forced to exclude a close association with Europe or the United States as a solution to its conflict with Russia offers no basis for a functional global order. It is so far from a solution that it lies, in fact, at the very origin of the war.

These two principles are not norms in the liberal sense. They are conditions for the operation of any norms at all. Liberal rules are too contested, even within the West, to serve as that floor. Principles of change and choice are thinner and for that reason more durable. They do not tell countries what to become. They tell incumbents that they cannot prevent others from becoming something new.

A new United Nations would be the natural vehicle for these principles, though it would look little like the institution that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sketched in 1945. The current body was designed to freeze a moment, and its architecture still reflects that ambition. A new body would enshrine the two principles above.

The first would be enforced through a right of technological development, no exceptions: No incumbent power could lawfully impose export controls, sanctions, or investment restrictions designed to prevent another country from acquiring the industries of the future. The second would be administered through a right of geopolitical alignment and realignment—a geopolitical right to vote. Spheres of influence would have to be earned in open competition rather than fenced off by treaty or by force. The task would not be to preserve any particular arrangement of power but to ensure that power arrangements can succeed one another peacefully.

The alternative is the old method of settling these questions, which is war, and in a nuclear age, it will not be followed by a peace conference. The cycle of empires has always ended in catastrophe when the incumbent refused to accept that the cycle existed. Six centuries after Ibn Khaldun first invented the cycle of civilizations, the least we can do is concede the point. Power, like youth, is rarely persuaded of its own impermanence until the evidence becomes embarrassing.

A version of this essay was published on Substack.