Introduction
Empires come and go. We are living through such a change, a Thucydides trap marking the end of the American empire. The rise of Asian hegemons and the fear it instils in America and her allies made war inevitable. In Thucydides’ time it was the 27-year Peloponnesian Wars. Today it’s also a series of wars, culminating in Ukraine and Iran.
The founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder had an interesting take on it. In his 1904 The Geographical Pivot of History, he pointed out that European nations had been melded by attackers from modern-day Russia and beyond — “A remarkable succession of Turanian nomadic peoples — Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Magyars, Khazars, Patzinaks, Cumans, Mongols, Kalmuks. A large part of history might be written as a commentary upon the changes directly or indirectly ensuing from these raids.” But he argued that Western Europe and America’s time in turn is now up.
You could maintain that despite the loss of earlier Asian ethnicities it is a process which continues today, chipping away at us. However, the difference is that Western Europe and the US have lost their moral compass, essential for the maintenance of a cohesive state. Consequently, the Asian hegemons need do nothing to make Western Europe and its American allies disintegrate as nations.
Mackinder called the current era Columbian, the rise of American power from the discovery of the New World. He thought it was peaking in 1904, but thanks to two world wars and the migration of global bond markets to New York it continued into the middle of the last century. The disintegration of the currency began in 1933, confirmed by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 until it was finally suspended in 1971.
Since then, US power has continued to dominate world affairs, but that is coming to a Thucydidian end. The Asian superpowers taking over are three in number: Russia,
China, and Iran. Not only do they have strong moral compasses, but their defence systems are in advance of the West’s which is based on sea power. The Asian hegemons are bounded in the north by frozen seas and to the south by land. This makes them militarily invincible to navies and invading armies. Furthermore, the development of China’s railway silk roads gives great military and economic mobility across the entire continent.
Just as the Turanian nomads melded European nations, now the Americans have melded the three Asian hegemons.
