On another note, of possible interest to both the Joining the Party and Post-Contact Hilarity threads, not to mention first contacts in general, is the disruptive effect on this order of suddenly being plunged into a bigger world.
Now, this could go smooth.
So the international system, embedded in organizations like the IMF, WTO, the World Bank and to a degree the United Nations, is institutionally structured to prefer the free movement of goods, ideas and capital and to discourage the revision of the status quo by force.
Rather than being simply an expression of American power (though they are that), those institutions are also an expression of the collective interests of this informal collection of rich and free countries, what we might call the status quo coalition .
There is, after all, a compatibilist approach. The institutions of the Worlds are also very much structured to prefer the free movement of goods, ideas, and capital - although to an even greater extent - and discourage at least large (“…to the detriment of the Accord…”) forcible revisions of the status quo. So, in theory, the status quo could just be quietly subsumed into the status quo with a minimum of muss and fuss.
But institutions have organizations, and organizations have inertia and incentives all their own that makes them reluctant to go gently into that good night, and the WTO may not wish to quietly turn everything over to the GTA and close up shop, never mind those financial institutions whose counterparts are awkwardly private-sector. Never mind any incentives for polities to defect in order to get a better deal.
…and then there’s the United States, which currently enjoys its status as, to use a term from the post, “Team Captain” of the current status quo coalition:
The United States’ position as ‘team captain’ of the status quo coalition is almost over-determined: it is the second largest bloc member by territory, has more than twice the population of any other member, the largest economy (six times larger than the next bloc member), one of the highest GDP-per-capitas, the most powerful military and is also ideologically one of the founders of the bloc, being both one of the origin points for modern liberal democracy and largely responsible for creating the bloc during the Cold War.
And is unlikely to be willing to peacefully accept demotion to merely “local captain” when much of that changes in the larger context. While I by and large agree with the point that:
What that means is that United States leadership in the coalition (and consequently, US global leadership) is tied to the perception that the United States is, on net, a reliable guarantor of the status quo. What is going to shake the coalition is not outside pressure (which is, as we’ll see, a weak lever), but the United States as ‘team captain’ acting in ways that destabilize the status quo.
Outside pressure, in this case, doesn’t include Outside Context Problems. More relevantly, while the incentives that drive the status quo coalition are strong enough to survive, at least for now, our bipartisan collection of morons who are against the free movement of people, goods, information, and capital - well, especially when stressed by the presence of an OCP, one can always count on the US government to do something incredibly stupid.
Food for thought.