World War II. The new Asian rivalry could at some point threaten regional stability, a challenge heightened in its destructive potential by the massive populations of the Asian powers and the possession by several of them of nuclear weapons.
There is, admittedly, a basic difference between the old transoceanic imperial rivalry of the European powers and that of the current Asian powers. The key participants in the Asian rivalry do not compete for overseas empires, which for Europe escalated distant collisions into great power conflicts. Regional flare-ups among them are more likely to occur within the Asia-Pacific region itself. Nonetheless, even a regionally confined collision between any of the Asian states (for example, over islands, or maritime routes, or watershed issues) could send shock-waves throughout the global economy.
The more immediate risk of the ongoing dispersal of power is a potentially unstable global hierarchy. The United States is still preeminent but the legitimacy, effectiveness, and durability of its leadership is increasingly questioned worldwide because of the complexity of its internal and external challenges. Nevertheless, in every significant and tangible dimension of traditional power—military, technological, economic, and financial—America is still peerless. It has by far the largest single national economy, the greatest financial influence, the most advanced technology, a military budget larger than that of all other states combined, and armed forces both capable of rapid deployment abroad and actually deployed around the world. This reality may not endure for very long but it is still the current fact of international life.
The European Union could compete to be the world’s number two power, but this would require a more robust political union, with a common foreign policy and a shared defense capability. But unfortunately for the West, the post–Cold War expansion of the European Economic Community into a larger European “Union” did not produce a real union but a misnomer; in fact, the designations should have been reversed. The earlier smaller “community” of Western Europe was politically more united than the subsequently larger “union” of almost all of Europe, with the latter defining its unity through a partially common currency but without a genuinely decisive central political authority or a common fiscal policy. Economically, the European Union is a leading global player; it has a population and external trade considerably larger than that of the United States. However, through its cultural, ideological, and economic connections to America and more concretely through NATO, Europe remains a junior geopolitical partner to the United States in the semiunified West. The EU could have combined global power with global systemic relevance but, since the final collapse of their empires, the European powers chose to leave the more costly task of maintaining global security to America in order to use their resources to create a life-style of socially assured security (from the cradle throughout early retirement) funded by escalating public debts unrelated to economic growth.
As a consequence, the EU as such is not a major independent power on the global scene, even though Great Britain, France, and Germany enjoy a residual global status. Both Great Britain and France have been entitled since 1945, together with America, Russia, and China, to the right of veto in the UN Security Council and—like them—they also possess nuclear weapons. However, Great Britain remains wary of European unity while France is unsure of its larger global purpose. Germany is the economic engine of Europe and matches China in its exporting prowess but remains reluctant to assume military responsibilities outside of Europe. Therefore, these European states can only truly exercise global influence as part of the larger Union, despite all of the EU’s current collective weaknesses.
In contrast, China’s remarkable economic momentum, its capacity for decisive political decisions motivated by clearheaded and self-centered national interest, its relative freedom from debilitating external commitments, and its steadily increasing military potential coupled with the worldwide expectation that soon it will challenge America’s premier global status justify ranking China just below the United States in the current international hierarchy. Symptomatic of China’s growing self-confidence is its state-controlled media’s frequent allusions to the increasing worldwide perception of China as America’s emerging rival in global preeminence—despite China’s residual and still-unresolved internal difficulties: rural vs. urban inequality and the potential of popular resentment of absolute political authority.
A sequential ranking of other major powers beyond the top two would be imprecise at best. Any list, however, has to include Russia, Japan, and India, as well as the EU’s informal leaders: Great Britain, Germany, and France. Russia ranks high geopolitically largely because of its rich stores of oil and gas and its continued status as a nuclear power second only to the United States, though that military asset is diluted by its domestic economic, political, and demographic handicaps, not to mention the fact that from both the east and west it faces economically much more powerful neighbors. Without nuclear weapons or the dependence of some European states on Russian oil and gas, Russia would otherwise not rank very high on the pyramid of global geopolitical power. Economically, it lags significantly behind Japan, and a strategic choice by Japan to pursue a more active international role could elevate it above Russia as a major global player. India, regionally assertive and globally ambitious, is the new entrant into the presumptive top list, but it remains hindered by the strategic antagonism with its two immediate neighbors, China and Pakistan, as well as by its various social and demographic weaknesses. Brazil and Indonesia have already laid claims to participation in global economic decision making within the G-20 and aspire to take regional leadership roles in Latin America and in Southeast Asia, respectively.
The foregoing composition of the current global elite thus represents, as already noted, a historic shift in the global distribution of power away from the West as well as the dispersal of that power among four different regions of the world. In a positive sense, with the self-serving domination of major portions of the world by European powers now a thing of the past, these new realities of power are more representative of the world’s diversity. The days when an exclusive Western club—dominated by Great Britain, France, or the United States—could convene to share global power at the Congress of Vienna, at the Versailles Conference, or at the Bretton Woods meeting, are irrevocably gone. But—given the persistence of historically rooted antagonisms and regional rivalries among the currently more diversified and geographically widespread ten leading powers—this new state of affairs also highlights the increased difficulty of consensual global decision making at a time when humanity as a whole is increasingly confronting critical challenges, some potentially even to its very survival.
It is far from certain how enduring that new convent of leading states will prove to be. One should be mindful of the fact that in the course of only one century—from approximately 1910 to 2010—the ranking hierarchy of global power changed significantly no less than five times, with all but the fourth signaling a divisive deterioration in the global preeminence of the West. First, on the eve of World War I the British and French empires were globally dominant and were allied to a weakened Tsarist Russia recently defeated by a rising Japan. They were being challenged from within Europe by the ambitious imperial Germany supported by a weak Austro-Hungarian and declining Ottoman empires. An industrially dynamic America, though initially neutral, made in the end a decisive contribution to the Anglo-French victory. Second, during the interlude between World War I and World War II, Great Britain seemed internationally preeminent, though with America clearly on the rise. However, by the early 1930s the rapidly rearming and increasingly revisionist Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were already plotting against the status quo. Third, Europe was shattered by World War II, which produced in its wake the forty-year-long Cold War between the American and Soviet superpowers, the might of each overshadowing everyone else. Fourth, the ultimate “defeat” of the Soviet Union in the Cold War led to a brief unipolar phase in world affairs dominated by America as the sole global superpower. And, fifth, by 2010, with America still preeminent, a new and more complex constellation of power containing a growing Asian component was visibly emerging.
FIGURE 1.1 DECLINING IMPERIAL LONGEVITY
The high frequency of these power shifts signals a historical acceleration in the changing distribution of global power. Prior to the twentieth century, global preeminence by a leading state generally lasted for a century or so. But as conscious political activism became an increasingly widespread social phenomenon, politics became more volatile and global preeminence less enduring. The fact that the West remained globally dominant during the entire twentieth century should not obscure the fact that conflicts within the West undermined its once-dominant position.
Indeed, even today the uncertainty regarding the durability of America’s current international leadership, the end of Europe’s central role in world affairs as well as the EU’s political impotence, Russia’s nostalgia for a leading
