As Europe and Asia draw closer together, will the US become irrelevant or can it find a role as deal maker?
Bruno Maçães says the emergence of a Eurasian supercontinent need not leave the US out in the cold if it can capitalise on its outsider status as well as secure control over the connections across the new geopolitical landscape
A new supercontinent is emerging: Eurasia, the combination of Europe and Asia, stretching from Lisbon to Shanghai or Jakarta.
The ties binding it are partly about infrastructure, with new land and sea connections multiplying all the time. They are also about ideology, with the clear lines of separation drawn during the cold war now abandoned. And they are about trade, too. Most readers will be surprised to learn that trade between Europe and Asia – let’s call it Eurasian trade – now vastly exceeds transatlantic and transpacific trade. In most years, Eurasian trade amounts to nearly three times the volume of transatlantic trade.
Above all, the change is civilisational. For centuries, Europeans thought of Europe and Asia as two opposing worlds. Europe was modern, technological, fast-moving and fast-changing. Asia was the opposite: static, backward, undeveloped and hopelessly retrograde. Is this still the case? Hardly.