In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but it is also likely to be the very last....
Economic power is also likely to become more dispersed. In the years to come, no single power is likely to reach the level of 30 percent or so of the world’s GDP that America sustained throughout much of this century, not to speak of the 50 percent at which it crested in 1945.
The long-lasting political domination of the world by the West has been fading for some decades. For a brief moment in the 1990s, however, it looked as if the West, despite Europe’s twin attempts at collective suicide during the first half of the twentieth century, might stage a historical comeback. The peaceful end of the Cold War, culminating in the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, signaled the final step in the rapid ascendance of the United States as the first truly global superpower. That internationally dominant power, together with its politically motivated and economically dynamic partner, the European Union, appeared capable not only of reviving the West ’s global preeminence but also of defining for itself a constructive global role.
Twenty years later, few expect the European Union to emerge soon as a politically serious global player while America’s preeminent global status seems tenuous. Because the West as a whole is now less capable of acting in unison, its lasting political legacy is thus also more in doubt. Once upon a time, though briefly, it did seem that worldwide democracy, international peace, and increasingly even a comfortable social compact would be the West ’s enduring bequest to humanity. However, basic changes in the distribution of global power, the impact of the new phenomenon of global political awakening on the exercise of that power, and the negative consequences of recent US foreign policy moves and of growing doubts regarding the vitality of the American system have cumulatively put that more hopeful legacy of the West in question.
1: THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL POWER
The very notion of a globally dominant power is a recent historical development. For millennia, people lived in isolated communities, unaware of the existence of their more distant neighbors. Migrations and sporadic collisions with outsiders took place in a setting of total ignorance of the world at large. It has only been within the last eight hundred years or so that an initially vague awareness of the presence of distant “others” permeated the human consciousness, first through expeditions and mapping of once-unknown areas and then through colonization and large migrations. Eventually, that knowledge led to imperial rivalries, which in turn led to two destructive wars for world domination, and then to the global systemic confrontation of the Cold War. In recent times, space exploration has dramatized the new appreciation of the relative “smallness” of the earth, while photographs from outer space taken at night have conveyed the vivid contrast between the illuminated concentrations of urbanized humanity—especially in what is usually described as the West—and the darker, less technologically advanced, but increasingly crowded regions of the rest of the world.
MAP 1.1 THE EARTH AT NIGHT
The states located on the Western European shores of the North Atlantic Ocean were the first to set out, self-consciously and vigorously, on the world at large. They were driven by a potent mix of maritime technological advancement, proselytizing passion, visions of monarchical and personal glory, and out-and-out material greed. Partially as a result of this head start, they controlled territory far away from their continental home bases for nearly half a millennium. The geographic scope of the West thus expanded—first by conquest and then by settlement— from Europe’s Atlantic shores to the Western Hemisphere. Portugal and Spain conquered and colonized South America while Britain and France did the same in North America. Eventual political independence from Europe by both Americas was then followed by large-scale European migration into the Western Hemisphere. In the meantime, the Western European maritime states bordering on the Atlantic also reached into the Indian and Pacific Oceans, establishing dominion over today’s India and Indonesia, imposing a patronizing presence in parts of China, carving up almost all of Africa and the Middle East, and seizing scores of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well as in the Caribbean Sea.
EMPIRES AT THEIR GREATEST EXTENT
1.British Empire (1920) 34,000,000 km2
2.Mongol Empire (1309) 24,000,000 km2
3.Russian Empire (1905) 23,000,000 km2
4.Second French Colonial Empire (1920) 15,000,000 km2
5.Manchu-Qing Dynasty, China (1800) 15,000,000 km2
6.Spanish Empire (1800) 14,000,000 km2
7.Umayyad Caliphate (720) 11,000,000 km2
8.Yuan Dynasty, China (1320) 11,000,000 km2
9.Abbasid Caliphate (750) 11,000,000 km2
10.Portuguese Empire (1815) 10,400,000 km2
11.Achaemenid Empire, Persia (480 BC) 8,000,000 km2
12.Roman Empire (117) 6,500,000 km2
From the sixteenth century until the midpoint of the twentieth, this combination of cultural and political outreach made the European states of the North Atlantic politically dominant in areas spanning the globe. (In that respect, their imperial domains differed fundamentally from the much earlier but essentially isolated and contiguous regional empires—such as the Roman, Persian, Mughal, Mongol, Chinese, or Incan—each of which conceived of itself as the center of the world but with little geographic knowledge of the world beyond.) Tsarist Russia massively expanded its land-based empire from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, but it similarly absorbed only adjoining territory with the brief exception of Alaska. The same was true of the Ottoman Empire’s expansion in the Middle East and Southeast Europe.
But while the European maritime powers on the Atlantic Coast ranged over the world, the prolonged conflicts among them weakened their geopolitical position relative to rising powers from within the European continent and from North America. The material and strategic cost of prolonged war in the Low Countries and German provinces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exhausted Iberian power, while Dutch prominence began to wane during the late seventeenth century in the face of ascending Britain on the seas and assertive France next door on land. By the time the smoke cleared in the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain and France stood as the only remaining competitors in the struggle for imperial dominance.
Their transoceanic rivalry for colonial possessions expanded during the nineteenth century into a contest for supremacy over Europe itself, before turning early in the twentieth century into a joint alliance against a rising European continental power that not coincidentally also had entered the global colonial competition—Germany. From the consequent two world wars, Europe emerged devastated, divided, and demoralized. Indeed, after 1945 a vast Eurasian land power, the Soviet Union, victoriously ensconced in Europe’s geographic middle, seemed poised— like the Mongol Empire some seven hundred years earlier—to sweep even further westward.
Meanwhile, across the North Atlantic, the United States spent the nineteenth century developing its industrial and military capabilities in felicitous geographic isolation from the devastating continental and imperial rivalries of Europe. Its interventions in the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century were decisive in preventing the preponderance of German power in Europe, and it did so while shielded from the unprecedented destruction and carnage of those conflicts. Moreover, America’s enviable economic and geopolitical position at the
