The Asian Eclipse of Europe.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.

A frequent American Diplomacy contributor, drawing on classical as well as contemporary historical analysis, finds that the twenty-first century marks a tectonic shift from four centuries of European-centered geopolitics to a new age of Asian-centered geopolitics. This calls for shifts in U.S. strategic focus, policies, and resources. - Ed.

The age of European-centered geopolitics is over. It lasted, roughly, from the Hapsburg emperor Charles V's bid for global supremacy in the sixteenth century to the fall of the Soviet empire at the end of the twentieth century. For more than four centuries, what happened in Europe affected most of the rest of the world, economically, technologically, culturally, and politically. That is no longer true in the twenty-first century.

Instead, the twenty-first century marks the beginning of the age of Asian-centered geopolitics. What is happening now in Asia - economically, technologically, culturally, demographically, and politically - is affecting most of the rest of the world. American statesmen and policymakers need to accept and understand the consequences of this tectonic shift in global geopolitics.

The great British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, in his masterful paper "The Geographical Pivot of History" (1904), called the age of European-centered geopolitics "the Columbian epoch." Beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, European explorers discovered and claimed new lands for their countries and, as Mackinder noted, European missionaries, farmers, miners, engineers, and conquerors followed in the explorer's footsteps and "New Europes were created in the ... lands discovered." (1) By 1914, as James Burnham pointed out in Suicide of the West (1964)(2) and as Niall Ferguson has more recently pointed out in The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006)(3), European powers (and their offspring, including the United States) dominated the world.

During the four-century time period of European ascendancy, the global geopolitical struggle involved mostly European-based hegemonic powers against coalitions of other mostly European-based powers. Charles V's Spain, Louis XIV's France, Revolutionary France, Napoleon's France, Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet empire challenged the global balance of power and were countered by mostly European-based coalitions of smaller powers, often funded and led by Great Britain. In the twentieth century, the United States, an offspring of Europe, gradually assumed the geopolitical role of the "holder" of the European balance of power previously played by Great Britain.

Seminal Catastrophe George F. Kennan wrote that the First World War was the "seminal catastrophe" of the twentieth century. Old Europe was gone forever. The social constraints of monarchical relations and religion were undermined or seriously weakened. The war unleashed the secular ideological forces of communism and fascism that shaped much of the rest of the century. Hajo Holborn reflected that the First World War initiated, and the Second World War completed, the "political collapse of Europe," meaning the process by which Europe ceased to be a self-contained geopolitical system. The two wars exacted a devastating physical and psychological toll on the old great powers of Western Europe, who recovered physically, but not psychologically. Europe, as Robert Kagan explains at length in his brilliant Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, has turned away from power.(4)

Viewed in this light, the Cold War can be seen as the last gasp of a dying European-centered geopolitical system. The countries of Western Europe that, together with Russia, defined the geopolitics of the previous four centuries, played a...