China’s Ministry of Defense published a white paper, “China’s Military Strategy” in May, only a few months after the United States’ most recent National Security Strategy (NSS) was published. It is revealing to compare the two documents, both to see how each nation envisions the other in a strategic context, and because it adds to our understanding of each country’s self-conception. The United States’ NSS focuses on a panoply of functional threats to national security—proliferation, climate change, terrorism—before moving on to discuss strengthening America’s economy and promoting state-building and human development in troubled countries. Only the final section of the report discusses the question of “order,” including the “rebalance” of American attention to Asia. The Ministry of Defense paper, on the other hand, begins with the claim that although the international system is generally calm and on a peaceful trajectory, Chinese security is adversely affected by “new threats from hegemonism, power politics, and neo-interventionism.” It goes on to describe the “rebalance” and the meddling of external countries in the South China Sea as having negative impacts on China’s security.

The neo-interventionist hegemon is, of course, the United States. This presentation of US policy obviously contrasts sharply with American representations of its role in the world. The NSS, for example, describes the US in rather different, though parallel language. In his preface to the document, President Obama argues that “strong and sustained American leadership is essential to a rules-based international order that promotes global security and prosperity as well as the dignity and human rights of all peoples.” The document’s section on the “rebalance” discusses both the deepening and broadening of economic and security ties to Asian nations. These are really two ways to describe the same phenomenon of far-reaching US involvement in the region. After all, “hegemony” technically means “leadership,” but in a way usually meant to invite our disapproval (in Chinese it overlaps with the notion of “tyranny”). It isn’t always clear to Americans where others would draw the line between legitimate leadership and self-serving hegemony. For example, it is striking that in his book The China Dream, Liu Mingfu attempts to differentiate a “champion” state like China from a “hegemonic” one like the US, yet his description of the benevolent champion is quite close to many Americans’ visions of US leadership. Nonetheless, the language of the white paper should once more remind Americans to be attentive to how their activist foreign policy is perceived around the world, and reflection on the “neo-interventionist” label is a good place to start.

The degree to which American unilateralism and interventionism has alarmed people around the world, including in China, appears to be underappreciated in the US. In fact, the term “neo-interventionist” has no real currency here, although it doesn’t take long to guess that it refers to the sequence of US-led interventions that have challenged any simple interpretation of the UN Charter’s prohibitions on aggression. A recent article by Wu Zhenglong illustrates these problems of “hegemonism” and “neo-interventionism” as constituting threats to the strict principle of Westphalian sovereignty around which the United Nations was built. Wu associates these challenges to the UN order—the prohibitions on interference in domestic politics and military intervention—with such principles as “human rights above sovereignty” and “responsibility to protect,” also known as R2P. For its part, the United States’ NSS overtly confirms the R2P principle—according to which a sovereign state is rightly subject to foreign intervention if it fails to respect basic human rights—and continues the longstanding tradition of embracing democracy promotion as a pillar of US foreign policy.

The R2P issue gets at an important difference in visions of rules-based order. Both Chinese and American statesmen advocate such an order at every turn, yet there are problems lurking in the difference between laws and norms, how rules are applied, and the necessity of “leadership” in their maintenance. While proponents of a strict adherence to sovereignty like Wu focus on the legalistic character of the UN Charter, Americans often operate according the logic exemplified by the International Independent Commission on Kosovo’s “illegal but legitimate” description of the 1999 Kosovo intervention. That is to say, by supporting R2P, the United States invokes an alleged international consensus around deeper norms when international positive law is supposedly inadequate (although R2P does seek to derive intervention authority from the Charter).

This vision of rules-as-norms creates clear difficulties with regard to the question of formal order. First is the obvious problem that loose interpretations of rules are likely to be self-serving, thus undermining the “legitimacy” envisioned in the Kosovo Commission’s formulation. For the United States this means that activities it imagines to be altruistic will be viewed with skepticism in China and elsewhere. A second problem is that the use of norms to override laws presumes that there is some kind of critical consensus about universal values, or that the international system is cohesively evolving towards some set of norms, and thus good leadership entails taking action to support these values. In this view, the United States is a natural leader, since visions of allegedly universal values typically align closely with Western, liberal ideas. The Chinese vision articulated by Admiral Sun at the Shangri-La dialogue clearly promotes a different vision of ordering principles, one which presumes an inherently pluralistic world in which there is less consensus on deeper values. Instead of focusing on promoting certain norms or values, Sun emphasized the importance of “mutual respect” and “inclusiveness” for fostering productive international relations—what some thinkers call a “thin” system of shared principles as opposed to a “thick” one.

This question of how “thick” the content of international politics should be arises frequently in US-China relations in a number of ways. US officials sometimes present the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as an embodiment of shared values between the US and various partners, and emphasize the importance of “standards” both in the context of the TPP and its criticism of the AIIB. At Shangri-La, US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter emphasized the set of principles that has grown around what he called the Asian “security architecture” and implied that Chinese reclamation in the Spratly Islands was violating some more substantive spirit of regional cooperation, even though an unspoken premise of this argument was that such activities are nonetheless technically legal. Admiral Sun, by contrast, seemed to take the position of the “letter of the law:” he presented Chinese activities as unproblematic and manifestly legitimate, and rejected the imposition of other nations’ “subjective preferences.” In anticipation of this last charge, Secretary Carter seemed to make great effort to present the US-led “architecture” as a consensual order of genuinely shared values, where the US was a “partner,” not an arbiter.

Both China and the US need to be conscious of the thick/thin and legal/legitimate dichotomies at a time when international order seems to be at an inflection point. The United States will always advocate democracy and human rights as key values, but in a pluralistic world it must work to develop principles that can help build more substantial relationships with nations that aren’t liberal democracies. As Kevin Rudd has pointed out, Chinese strategic mistrust of the US derives from the impression that America “…has not and never will accept the fundamental political legitimacy of the Chinese administration because it is not a liberal democracy.” Americans must be aware more generally of how sometimes what they regard to be “universal” principles, others regard as domineering “American” or “Western” values. American policymakers should also keep in mind that if the world is to evolve towards thicker conceptions of international order—ones that can focus on more on substance and rely less on formal or procedural understandings of right and wrong—multilateralism plays an essential legitimating function.

Chinese policymakers, for their part, should bear in mind that a thicker principle of legitimacy is often at work international relations, which by nature are more political than legal. China’s protestations regarding the legality of its recent reclamation activities, no matter how well grounded in international law, completely talk past the concerns of potentially affected parties. Unilaterally making formal legal arguments isn’t as constructive as demonstrating a willingness to use international law as a way to settle disputes.

It is interesting to observe that parties in both the US and China regard the other country to be “revisionist” and consider their own nation to be a conservator of a certain rules-based order. It would be encouraging to see both nations to work towards closing this perception gap, with a view towards building a more substantive consensus on principles of order that are genuinely universal and inclusive. In the meantime, if both nations were more conscious of just how “rules-based” their actions appear to be in the eyes of others, we would all be a little better off.

Alek Chance is a Research Associate at the Institute for China-America Studies in Washington, DC