Will America turn its back on the liberal West?

We live in one of those rare moments in history when the political and economic axis of the world is shifting. Four or five centuries ago, it shifted West. Europe, for so much of its history a quiet backwater, came to rule practically the whole globe. Now this axis is shifting East. We know what this means for Asia. We have seen the majestic skylines and the bullet trains and stations quickly replacing the old camel routes and caravanserai. But what does it mean for the West? Might the colossus that used to bring change upon others be now forced to change in response to the new political and economic winds blowing from the East? Suddenly what happens almost anywhere in Asia affects us more profoundly than we would like to think, especially since we now feel these influences are in some important respect beyond our control. Our world has expanded, but expansion of this sort is not always welcome.

China’s middle class to rise to more than third of population by 2030

In just a decade or two, three of the five largest economies in the world will be in Asia: China, which most likely has already overcome the US; Japan; and India. And, yet, if you talk to people in Asia, they are less ebullient. They know their societies are still – with the exception of Japan – pursuing the hard path of modernisation, and they lag behind the West in a number of crucial dimensions: the innovation edge, soft power and, of course, military might.

Let us forgo the more spectacular pronouncements and settle on a compromise: this century will not be Asian, but neither will it be Western, as the previous 500 years so clearly were. I suggest calling it Eurasian, as a way of signalling this new balance between the two poles.

When it comes to the history of such terms, one can point to an earlier one when European hegemony came to be replaced by the concept of a “Western” alliance encompassing Europe, the US and a number of former European colonies, but effectively under American leadership. How the new hybrid affects the previous one forces us to ask what role the US will occupy in a Eurasian world.

The country of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson never had many qualms about its ambitions. It knew that the world was ruled by Europe and according to European ideas and quickly made them its own. We need a particularly sharp eye to understand that the US was never really European. It was a child of the Enlightenment and it would embrace the most universal and advanced principles available, no doubt as a way to ride the crest of history and grow into the role of a powerful nation, in time the most powerful nation on earth. At the time, those principles happened to be European. Does this mean that Americans will tend to mirror the global order and, therefore, that at a time when the global order is no longer infused with European values, we shall see the US become increasingly less European, less Western? I am afraid that is exactly what it means.