Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman

The United States, chastened by its inability to win clear victories in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has hung back from using overwhelming forc...

European Union, wracked by economic crisis, has also been unable to respond effectively to the fires of conflict burning along its borders. Instead, Europe itself has been destabiliz...

I believe that the Obama years will eventually be seen as a hinge point in history in which the erosion of Wester...

the long-run shift in global economic power, which has made it harder for the United States and Europe to generate the military, political, and ideological resources needed to impose order on the world.

The issues that recur in the book—the rise of Asia, the legacy of imperialism, the decline of the West, and the role of America as a global power—are ones that arouse intense emotions and ideological passions.

My main aspiration in writing this book is to understand and report, rather than to advocate or condemn.

The central issue that I want to explore is how the rise in Asian economic power is changing world politics. Within that, I want to understand how the governing elites of the big global powers see their roles in the world and the challenges facing them.

This, in my view, is a task that mainly involves reporting and analysis. In fact, too strong an emotional sympathy with one side gets in the way of analysis, since accurate reporting requires some ability to pu...

own biases and prejudices.

have tried to balance two strands of thought in my analysis. The first is that the rise of Asia is correcting a global imbalance of political power that has its origins in Western imperialism.

My second prejudice, however, is a largely positive view of the role of American power in the world.

The idea of a multipolar world, without dominant powers and guided solely by the rule of law, is theoretically attractive. In practice, however, I fear that just such a multipolar world is already emerging and proving to be unstable and dangerous: The “rules” are very hard to enforce without a dominant power in the background.

My job as the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times has given me privileged access to the thoughts of powerful people around the world. For better or worse, these individuals have the ability to shape the lives of people, the fate of nations, and the great questions of war and peace. Yet at the same time they are buffeted by historical trends that are beyond the control of any individual, no matter how powerful or determined.

At the beginning of the 1400s, China and the Islamic world were at levels of economic and political power and sophistication that were at least equivalent to those attained in Europe.

It was the Portuguese and Spanish who began the process of transforming the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world.

“By 1914, Europeans and their colonists ruled 84 percent of the land and 100 percent of the sea.”

Two world wars and a wave of decolonization led to the collapse of European imperialism during the second half of the twentieth century.

These centuries of European and American dominance were based on economic might.

It is economic might that allows nations to generate the military, diplomatic, and technological resources that translate into international political power. But over the past fifty years, the West’s dominance of the global economy has steadily eroded.

A symbolic moment was reached in 2014 when the International Monetary Fund announced that, measured in terms of purchasing power, China was the world’s largest economy.

“Asia is set to overtake the combined economic output of Europe and North America within the decade to 2020.”

By 2025, some two-thirds of the world’s population will live in Asia.

Hans Rosling of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute puts it nicely when he describes the world’s pincode as 1114—meaning that of the planet’s 7 billion people, roughly 1 billion live in Europe, 1 billion live in the Americas, 1 billion in Africa, and 4 billion in Asia. By 2050, the world’s population is likely to be 9 billion, and the pincode will change to 1125, with both Africa and Asia adding a billion people.

purchasing power parity (PPP)

is a means of assessing the wealth and size of economies that takes into account relative prices and purchasing power.

By 2014, China was already the world’s leading manufacturer and its largest exporter. China was also the biggest export market for forty-three countries in the world, whereas the United States was the biggest market for just thirty-two countries.

“by 2030 Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power, based upon GDP, population size, military spending and technological investment.”

In time, the growing wealth of Asian nations will also translate into political power that will be felt all over the world. For the moment, however, the most obvious consequence of the decrease in Western power is a fraying of international order and a growing risk of conflict around the world.

America’s reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11,

was to try to remake the world—in particular, the Middle East—through a dramatic reassertion of U.S. power, exemplified by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the overthrow of its leader, Saddam Hussein.

Faced with a military quagmire overseas and an economic crisis in the United States, President Obama decided to concentrate on “nation building at home”—an effort to focus American resources on rebuilding the U.S. economy while drawing back from draining and unsuccessful engagements in the Middle East.

Indeed, as the Obama years came to a close, the U.S.-dominated global security order was under challenge all over the world.

In the Greater Middle East itself, several states—including Syria, Libya, and even Iraq—had slipped into violent anarchy.

Before the financial crisis of 2008, the European Union could be regarded as the second major pillar of Western power.

But the profound economic and political crisis that has engulfed the EU over the last decade has instead seen the forces of disorder enter the EU.

Even if the EU survives the next decade, the multiplying threats to its future mean that it is likely to be increasingly troubled and inward looking.

In the South China Sea, China’s program of “island building” to reinforce its disputed maritime claims has led to a sharp rise in tensions between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.

During the Obama years, it became increasingly evident that the United States will struggle simultaneously to remain the dominant power in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America in a world in which economic power is shifting east.

As a result, America depends on its network of Asian allies as a political and strategic counterweight to the growing might of China.

In the self-absorbed world of American politics, this accumulation of challenges to U.S. power was often blamed on President Obama, whose opponents routinely accused him of “weakness.”

However the “weak Obama” thesis—embraced in different forms by both the Trump and Clinton campaigns—misses the point in two crucial respects.

First, the United States is easily the healthiest part of the Western alliance.

By the middle of the Obama years, the United States accounted for almost 75 percent of the military spending of the twenty-eight-member NATO alliance, up from 50 percent in the year 2000.

As a result, the challenge to Western power and the rise in international tensions associated with it are certain to continue well beyond the Obama years.

Locked in a confrontation with the West, Russia’s leadership has seized upon the idea that power is migrating east and has sought ever closer relations with China.

under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has been the dominant political figure since becoming prime minister in 2003 and then president in 2014, the Turkish state has become increasingly estranged from Europe and the United States. Erdoğan is a devout Muslim, given to elaborate conspiracy theories about the West, and has reasserted his country’s Islamic and Ottoman roots—in both diplomatic and cultural terms.

Even within Europe and the United States, recent years have seen the rise of populist politicians—such as Marine Le Pen in France and Donald Trump in the United States—whose political rhetoric is based on the idea that the West is profoundly sick. These politicians look with frank admiration to the more authoritarian leadership of President Putin and even President Xi in China.

However, politicians and intellectuals who anticipate that a weakened West will simply cede global power to an ascendant East are embracing an oversimplified view of the world.

two main impediments to Eastern geopolitical power.

first is the internal political problems of the emerging Asian superpowers. Popular rage about corruption is a common theme that links democratic India and undemocratic China.