end of World War II hoisted upon it a novel status—one of global preeminence. As a result, the subsequent American-Soviet Cold War precipitated the emergence of a redefined cross-Atlantic West, one dependent on and therefore dominated by the United States of America.
America and the independent western remnants of Europe—bonded by the common goal of containing Soviet Russia as well as by similar political and economic systems and therefore ideological orientations—became the geopolitical core of the newly delineated Atlantic world, defensively preoccupied with its own survival in the face of the trans-Eurasian Sino-Soviet bloc. That bond was institutionalized in the realm of security with the creation of the transoceanic NATO, while Western Europe, seeking to accelerate its postwar recovery, integrated economically through the adoption of the European Economic Community, which later evolved into the European Union. But, still vulnerable to Soviet power, Western Europe became almost formally America’s protectorate and informally its economic-financial dependency.
Within four or so decades, however, that same cross-Atlantic and defensive West emerged suddenly as the globally dominant West. The implosion in 1991 of the Soviet Union—in the wake of the fragmentation two years earlier of the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe—was caused by a combination of social fatigue, political ineptitude, the ideological and economic failings of Marxism, and the successful Western foreign policies of military containment and peaceful ideological penetration. Its immediate consequence was the end of Europe’s half-century-long division. Globally, it also highlighted the emergence of the European Union as a major financial and economic (and potentially perhaps even military/political) powerhouse in its own right. Thus, with the unifying Europe still geopolitically wedded to the United States—by then the world’s only military superpower as well as the world’s most innovative and richest economy—the Atlantic West on the eve of the twenty-first century seemed poised for a new era of Western global supremacy.
The financial and economic framework for that global supremacy already existed. Even during the Cold War, the Atlantic West, due to its capitalist system and the extraordinary dynamism of the American economy, had a clear financial and economic advantage over its geopolitical and ideological antagonist, the Soviet Union. Consequently, despite facing serious military threats, the Atlantic powers were able to institutionalize their dominant position in global affairs through an emerging network of cooperative international organizations, ranging from the World Bank and the IMF to the UN itself, thus seemingly consolidating a global framework for their enduring preeminence.
MAP 1.2 NATO MEMBERS, 2010
The West’s ideological appeal rose similarly during this period. In Central and Eastern Europe, the West was able to project its appealing vision of human rights and political freedom, thus putting the Soviet Union on the ideological defensive. By the end of the Cold War, America and the Western world found themselves generally associated with the globally attractive principles of human dignity, freedom, and prosperity.
Nonetheless, while the resulting appeal of the West was greater than ever, its geographic scope of control had actually shrunk in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The Western imperial powers had emerged from the two world wars profoundly weakened, while the newly dominant America repudiated the imperial legacy of its European allies. President Roosevelt made no secret of his conviction that the US commitment to the liberation of Europe during World War II did not include the restoration of the colonial empires of Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, or Portugal.
However, Roosevelt’s highly principled opposition to colonialism did not prevent him from pursuing an acquisitive US policy determined to gain a lucrative position for America in the key oil-producing Middle Eastern countries. In 1943, President Roosevelt not so subtly told Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, while pointing at a map of the Middle East, that “Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.”[1] So began America’s subsequently painful political involvement in that region.
The end of the European empires was even more so the product of the growing restlessness of their colonial subjects. National emancipation became their battle cry, while Soviet ideological and even military support made repression too costly. The new political reality was that the dissolution of the old colonial empires of the European- centric West was unavoidable. The British wisely withdrew—before being forcefully challenged to do so—from India and later from the Middle East (though they left behind religious and ethnic violence that produced a colossal human tragedy in India and an intractable Israeli-Palestinian political conflict that still haunts the West in the Middle East). With US encouragement, they then made a semivoluntary withdrawal from their colonies in Africa. The Dutch in the East Indies (Indonesia) chose to stay and fight—and lost. So did the French in two bloody colonial wars fought first in Vietnam and then in Algeria. The Portuguese withdrew under pressure from Mozambique and Angola. The West’s geographic scope thus shrank even as its geopolitical and economic preeminence rose, largely due to the expanding global reach of America’s cultural, economic, and political power.
At the same time—obscured from public awareness by the fog of the Cold War—a more basic shift in the global distribution of political and economic power was also taking place. Eventually, it gave birth to a new pecking order in the international system, seen more clearly for the first time as a consequence of the financial crisis of late 2007. This crisis made clear that coping with global economic challenges now required the strength not just of the world’s only superpower, or of the West as a whole, but also of the states that hitherto had been considered not yet qualified to take part in global financial-economic decision making.
The practical acceptance of this new reality came with the 2008 admission of new entrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the G-8, a hitherto exclusive and largely Western club of financial decision makers, transforming its previously narrow circle into the more globally representative G-20. Symbolic of this change was the fact that the most significant leadership roles in the first G-20 meeting held in the United States in 2009 were played by the presidents of two states: the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China, respectively.
The cumulative effect of these events was to make self-evident a new geopolitical reality: the consequential shift in the center of gravity of global power and of economic dynamism from the Atlantic toward the Pacific, from the West toward the East. To be sure, economic historians remind us that in fact Asia had been the predominant producer of the world’s total GNP for some eighteen centuries. As late as the year 1800, Asia accounted for about 60% of the world’s total GNP, in contrast to Europe’s 30%. India’s share alone of the global product in 1750 amounted to 25% (according to Jaswant Singh, former Indian finance minister), much like that of the United States today. But during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the intrusion of European imperialism backed by Europe’s surging industrial innovation and financial sophistication, Asia’s global share declined precipitously. By 1900, for example, under prolonged British imperial rule, India’s share shrank to a mere 1.6%.
In China, just as in India, British imperialism followed in the wake of British traders. The latter had run up huge monetary deficits by purchasing Chinese tea, porcelain, silk, and so on, for which they sought remedy by selling opium to Chinese importers. Beijing’s belated efforts to ban the import of opium and restrict the access of foreign merchants then precipitated two armed interventions, first by the British and then by both the British and the French, which further contributed to a precipitous decline in China’s role in the global economy.
The historic fact of China’s and India’s past economic preeminence has led some to argue that the current economic rise of Asia is basically a return to a distant but prolonged normality. But it is important to note that Asia’s earlier superiority in GNP was attained in a world of basically isolated regions and thus of very limited economic interactions. The economic links between Europe and Asia involved trade based largely on barter, transacted primarily in just a few ports (notably Calcutta) or transported by periodic caravans slowly traversing the Silk Route. A global economy, continuously interactive and increasingly interdependent, did not then exist.
Thus, in times past, Asia’s statistically impressive but isolated economic prowess was not projected outward. In the early part of the fifteenth century, China chose a policy of vigorously enforced self-isolation, having even earlier refrained from exploiting the technological superiority of its commercial fleet and oceanic navy to assert a political outreach. India under the Mughal Empire possessed great wealth, but it lacked political cohesion or external ambitions. Indeed, the only significant case of assertive westward projection of Asian political power occurred under the leadership of Mongolia’s Genghis Khan, whose horseback-riding warriors carved out a vast Eurasian empire. However, they galloped from a country with a miniscule GNP of its own—thus demonstrating that at the time military prowess was not handicapped by economic weakness.
