Introduction: Overture to the American Age
Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the eastern hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital. Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that serious people were claiming that war had become impossible and if not impossible, would end within weeks of beginning, because global financial markets couldn’t withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed: a peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the world.
Imagine yourself in the summer of 1920. Europe had been torn apart by an endless war. The continent was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman empires were gone and millions had died in a war that lasted years. The war ended when an American army of a million men intervened—an army that came and then left. Communism dominated Russia, but it was not clear that it could survive. Countries that had been on the periphery of European power, like the United States and Japan, suddenly emerged as potentially decisive powers. But this was certain—the peace that had been imposed on Germany guaranteed that it would not soon re-emerge.
Imagine now the summer of 1940. Germany has not only re-emerged, but has conquered France and dominated Europe. Communism had survived and the Soviet Union now was allied with Nazi Germany. Great Britain alone stood against Germany, and from the point of view of most reasonable people, the war was over. If not a thousand year Reich, then certainly Europe’s fate was decided for a century. Germany would dominate Europe and inherit Europe’s empire.
Imagine now the summer of 1960. Germany was crushed in the war, defeated less than five years later. Europe is occupied, split down the middle by the United States and the Soviet Union. The European empires are collapsing and the United States and Soviet Union are competing over who will be heir to them. The United States has the Soviet Union surrounded and with overwhelming force of nuclear weapons, can annihilate it in hours. The United States has emerged as the global superpower. It dominates all of the world’s oceans, and with its nuclear force, can dictate terms to the world. Stalemate is the best the Soviets can hope for unless the Soviets invade Germany and conquer Europe. That is the war everyone is preparing for.
Imagine now the summer of 1980. The United States has been defeated in a seven year long conflict—not by the Soviet Union, but by communist North Vietnam. It is seen, and sees itself as in retreat. Expelled from Vietnam, it is then expelled from Iran as well where the oil fields, which it no longer controls, seem about to fall into the hands of the Soviet Union. To contain the Soviet Union, the United States has formed an alliance with Maoist China—the American President and the Chinese Chairman holding an amiable meeting in Beijing. Only this alliance seems able to contain the powerful Soviet Union.
Imagine now the summer of 2000. The Soviet Union has collapsed. Communism has disappeared everywhere. China is still communist in name but capitalist in practice. NATO has advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former Soviet Union. The world is prosperous and peaceful. Everyone knows that geopolitical considerations have become secondary to economic considerations. The only geopolitical problems are in places like Haiti or Kosovo.
Then comes September 11th, 2001 and the world turns on its head again.
At a certain level, the only thing you can be sure of is that the common sense will be wrong. There is no magic 20 year cycle, there is no simplistic force governing this pattern. It is simply that the things that appear to be so permanent and dominant at any given moment change with stunning rapidity. Eras come and go. The one certainty of international relations is that the way the world looks right now is not at all how it will look in twenty years or even less. The fall of the Soviet Union was hard to imagine. That is exactly right. Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long term shifts taking place in full view of the world.
Divide history into three parts. There are events, like the creation of NATO, the Cuban missile crisis or 9-11. Events are of part of eras, which are distinct periods of time consisting of two or more global powers competing and maneuvering with each other. The Cold War Was an era as was the period between World War I and II. These eras are frequently punctuated by wars, but always end in the decline or collapse of one of the competitors. These eras come and go with remarkable frequency. Then there are Ages, which last for centuries, which define the way the world works for a very long time. To understand events, you must understand eras. But to understand eras, you must understand the Ages that they are part of.
People decry the fact that kids today don’t remember Vietnam or World War II or some other era. In one sense it is a pity. In another sense, it reflects an astute understanding of the world. In the end, these things come and go. They define nothing. In this sense, Iraq will not be remembered much in 20 years and certainly not in 100. Events come and go as do eras. Ages come and go as well, but much less frequently. We have experienced a rare event that has barely been noticed and not at all understood: the end of the European Age and the beginning of the American. And that’s what we need to pay attention to.
Europe
The European Age began in October 1492, when Columbus landed on the tinyisland of Hispaniola and ended in December 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated. The European Age lasted almost exactly 500 years. In between those two dates, Europe did an extraordinary thing. It conquered the world. In fact, it did more that that. It welded the world together into a single system of relations. Not peaceful and not equitable, but nevertheless, extraordinary, inventing the reality of a single world and a single human race, fully aware of itself.
Until the 15thcentury, humanity lived in self-enclosed, sequestered worlds. Humanity did not know itself as consisting of a single fabric. The Chinese didn’t know of the Aztecs, and the Mayas did not know of the Zulus. The Europeans may have heard of the Japanese but they didn’t really know them and certainly didn’t interact with them. The world consisted of broken fragments. The Tower of Babel had done more than make it impossible for people to speak to each other. It made civilizations oblivious to each other.
Europeans living on the eastern rim of the Atlantic Oceanshattered the barriers between these sequestered regions and created the world into a single entity in which all of the parts were aware of each other and all of them interacted. What happened to Australian aborigines was intimately connected to British relations to Ireland and the need to find penal colonies for British prisoners overseas. What happened to Aztec kings was tied to the relations between Spain and Portugal. The imperialism of Atlantic European created a single world.
Atlantic Europe became the center of gravity of the global system. What happened in Europe defined much of what happened in the world. Other nations and regions did whatever they did with one eye on Europe. From the 16thto the 20th century hardly any part of the world escaped European influence and power. That’s what made Europe the center of gravity. Everything, for good or evil, revolved around it. And the pivot of Europe was the North Atlantic. Whoever controlled that controlled the highway to the world.
Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in endless civil wars. There was never a European Empire; there was instead a British Empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire and so on. The European nations exhausted themselves in endless wars with each other while they invaded, subjugated and eventually ruled much of the world.
But in the end Europe exhausted itself. It tore itself apart in the 20th century in two vicious wars which ended in the political, military and moral exhaustion of the continent. Occupied by Americans and Russians, the final act of the European Age was acted out. The European empires dissolved. The Soviet Union collapsed, and global power passed to the United States.
America
The rise of the United States to global preeminence is of great importance. The fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a single global power represented the end of an era and the opening of a new one. But something else was going on at the same time. A new age was beginning and ages are not about nations as much as they are about geographical entities, places. The European Age was not about Portugal or Spain. It was about Atlantic Europe as a geographical entity, independent of the particular nations that were dominant at any one time.
The military, political and cultural collapse of Europe after World War II closed an era. It also created a vacuum. What filled the vacuum was a single, major and unprecedented fact. In 1980, as the U.S.-Soviet duel was moving to its culmination, trans-Pacific trade equaled trans-Atlantic trade for the first time in history. Ten years later, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, Trans-Pacific trade had soared to fifty percent greater than trans-Atlantic trade. Asia-European trade surged as well, but much of that moved through the Pacific.The entire geometry of international trade, and therefore of the global system, was undergoing an unparalleled shift.
The North Atlantic had been the key to European power. Control of the North Atlantic meant access to North America and the rest of the world and whatever European country controlled the North Atlantic could dominate Europe. For centuries, if Europe was the center of gravity, then the North Atlantic was the key to European and global power.
After 1980, the North Atlantic became only one of two keys. The other was the Pacific. The United States Navy controlled both and therefore the United States was powerful. But beneath that there was a geographical truth. To control the Atlantic a nation had to be an Atlantic nation or exert tremendous resources. To control the Pacific, a nation had to be a Pacific nation for the same reason. Only a Western Hemispheric nation was native to both bodies of water. If control of the Atlantic and the Pacific was the basis to controlling global trade, then countries native to the Atlantic occupied uniquely advantageous positions. That means that a countrythat is in the western hemisphere and is trans-continental would be the center of gravity.
Whoever controls the sea ultimately controls global trade. The cost of sea lane control is enormous. Most trading countries can’t bear the cost of sea lane control, and therefore depend on nations that do have the resources to do so. Naval powers therefore acquireenormous political leverage and other nations don’t want to incite them. The cost of controlling an adjacent body of water is expensive. The cost of controlling a body of water thousands of miles away is overwhelming. Historically, there have been only a handful of nations that have been able to bear the expense—and it’s no less today. Take a look at the U.S. defense budget and the amount spent on the Navy and on related space systems. The cost of maintaining carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf is a greater outlay than the total defense budgets of most countries. Controlling the Atlantic or Pacific without a shoreline on both would be beyond the economic capability of just about any nation. So we can understand why being native to both oceans matters a great deal.
It may seem that a South American country should be able to evolve into a trans-continental country as easily as one in North America. That isn’t so. A simple, if strange, map will show why and will serve as our first introduction to geopolitics:
A conventional view of SouthAmerica shows it to be a solid land mass divided into different countries, but with the possibility that one of them could evolve into a transcontinental nation one day. But Latin America is not as solid as it looks. If we treat its impassable jungles and mountains as bodies of water, separating land masses, South America looks much different. It is hollow in its center. With great effort you can get from the east coast to the west coast, but you can’t build a single integrated nation across the barriers.There can be no transcontinental power in South America because South America is impassable in its center.
North America alone can house a transcontinental nation capable of projecting power simultaneously into the Atlantic and Pacific. Therefore North America is the center of gravity of the international system. At the dawn of the American age, the United States is far and away the dominant power in North America. It is a country that simultaneously invaded Europe and Japan in 1944-45. It took military control of both bodies of water and retains it to this day. So, where North America is the center of gravity of the international system, the United States is both the preeminent global power and dominates the center of gravity. That places the United States in an extraordinarily powerful position. It presides over the new Age.
But it is important to recallthat Spain once dominated Europeand presided over the opening century of the European age. While we expect that North America will be the center of gravity of the global system for the next few centuries, we also expect the United States to dominate North America for at least a century. But as with Spain, the statement that North America is the center of gravity does not guarantee that the United States will always dominate North America. There is no guarantee that the AmericanRepublic, with its capital in WashingtonDC, will continue to preside over the continent or the world. Many things can happen from civil war, to defeat in a foreign war, to other states emerging on its borders over the centuries.
Over time, there is no guarantee. But we will argue that not only is this the beginning of the American Age, it is also going to be the century of the United States. Its power is so extraordinarily overwhelming and so deeply rooted in economic, technological and cultural realities, that we see the power of the United States, which we will refer to as America for convenience sake, surging through the 21st century, buffeted though it will be by wars and crises.
Maybe it is hard for us to envision this level of power as the United States stumbles and bumbles in the first years of the new age. The United States has indeed created massive disorder in the world. It cannot help it. Like an adolescent, it has more power than experience. It is clumsy and unaware of its clumsiness. But the disorder it creates is transitory. From a historical perspective it is of little note and doesn’t even threaten the United States’ power let alone the centrality of America to the international system. Living through the chaos can be disconcerting. The Europeans took centuries to move from barbarism to civilization and a full century to descend into decadence. The United States is only beginning to define itself andhasn’t yet started to understand its power or its interests. It will look clumsy and ugly, but could it look worse than Europe’s first encounters in the Western Hemisphere? Barbarism is the nature of a new age.
The Framework of the 21st Century
The American Age represents a transformation of the structure of global power. But that transformation is against the backdrop of other, vital transformations. The European Age was bound up with a global population expansion that turned into a population explosion. The 21st century will see the end of the population explosion globally. Some European countries will see their populations contract by as much as 25 percent by mid-century. But this is not confined to the advanced industrial countries. Birth rates are plunging all over the world. By the middle of the century, countries like Brazil will be approaching zero population growth. By the end of the century, the total population of the world will stabilize or perhaps even begin declining. The doubling of world population we saw from 1950 to 2000 is over and will not occur again.