The Rise of China, And the Fall of the US?
Tectonic Eruptions in Eurasia Erode America's Global Power

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From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe. During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, Americaâs wartime commanders â George Marshall in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe, and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific â knew that their main strategic objective was to gain control over the vast Eurasian landmass.
Whether youâre talking about desert warfare in North Africa, the D-Day landing at Normandy, bloody battles on the Burma-India border, or the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, the Allied strategy in World War II involved constricting the reach of the Axis powers globally and then wresting that very continent from their grasp.
That past, though seemingly distant, is still shaping the world we live in. Those legendary generals and admirals are, of course, long gone, but the geopolitics they practiced at such a cost still has profound implications. For just as Washington encircled Eurasia to win a great war and global hegemony, so Beijing is now involved in a far less militarized reprise of that reach for global power.
And to be blunt, these days, Chinaâs gain is Americaâs loss. Every step Beijing takes to consolidate its control over Eurasia simultaneously weakens Washingtonâs presence on that strategic continent and so erodes its once formidable global power.
A Cold War Strategy
After four embattled years imbibing lessons about geopolitics with their morning coffee and bourbon nightcaps, Americaâs wartime generation of generals and admirals understood, intuitively, how to respond to the future alliance of the two great communist powers in Moscow and Beijing.
In 1948, following his move from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-torn Western Europe, laying the economic foundations for the formation of the NATO alliance just a year later. After a similar move from the wartime Allied headquarters in London to the White House in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped complete a chain of military bastions along Eurasiaâs Pacific littoral by signing a series of mutual-security pacts â with South Korea in 1953, Taiwan in 1954, and Japan in 1960. For the next 70 years, that island chain would serve as the strategic hinge on Washingtonâs global power, critical for both the defense of North America and dominance over Eurasia.
After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, Americaâs postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains. For more than 40 years, their unrelenting efforts to dominate Eurasia assured Washington of an upper hand and, in the end, victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the U.S. ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas â the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.
Thanks to diplomat George Kennan, that strategy gained the name âcontainmentâ and, with it, Washington could, in effect, sit back and wait while the Sino-Soviet bloc imploded through diplomatic blunder and military misadventure.
After the Beijing-Moscow split of 1962 and Chinaâs subsequent collapse into the chaos of Mao Zedongâs Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to break out of its geopolitical isolation â in the Congo, Cuba, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan. In the last and most disastrous of those interventions, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to term âthe bleeding wound,â the Red Army deployed 110,000 soldiers for nine years of brutal Afghan combat, hemorrhaging money and manpower in ways that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In that heady moment of seeming victory as the sole superpower left on planet Earth, a younger generation of Washington foreign-policy leaders, trained not on battlefields but in think tanks, took little more than a decade to let that unprecedented global power start to slip away. Toward the close of the Cold War era in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an academic working in the State Departmentâs policy planning unit, won instant fame among Washington insiders with his seductive phrase âthe end of history.â He argued that Americaâs liberal world order would soon sweep up all of humanity on an endless tide of capitalist democracy. As he put it in a much-cited essay: âThe triumph of the West, of the Western idea,is evident⊠in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism⊠seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture.â
The Invisible Power of Geopolitics
Amid such triumphalist rhetoric, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another academic sobered by more worldly experience, reflected on what he had learned about geopolitics during the Cold War as an adviser to two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski offered the first serious American study of geopolitics in more than half a century. In the process, he warned that the depth of U.S. global hegemony, even at this peak of unipolar power, was inherently âshallow.â
For the United States and, he added, every major power of the past 500 years, Eurasia, home to 75% of the worldâs population and productivity, was always âthe chief geopolitical prize.â To perpetuate its âpreponderance on the Eurasian continentâ and so preserve its global power, Washington would, he warned, have to counter three threats: âthe expulsion of America from its offshore basesâ along the Pacific littoral; ejection from its âperch on the western peripheryâ of the continent provided by NATO; and finally, the formation of âan assertive single entityâ in the sprawling center of Eurasia.
Arguing for Eurasiaâs continued post-Cold War centrality, Brzezinski drew heavily on the work of a long-forgotten British academic, Sir Halford Mackinder. In a 1904 essay that sparked the modern study of geopolitics, Mackinder observed that, for the past 500 years, European imperial powers had dominated Eurasia from the sea, but the construction of trans-continental railroads was shifting the locus of control to its vast interior âheartland.â In 1919, in the wake of World War I, he also argued that Eurasia, along with Africa, formed a massive âworld islandâ and offered this bold geopolitical formula: âWho rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.â Clearly, Mackinder was about 100 years premature in his predictions.
But today, by combining Mackinderâs geopolitical theory with Brzezinskiâs gloss on global politics, itâs possible to discern, in the confusion of this moment, some potential long-term trends. Imagine Mackinder-style geopolitics as a deep substrate that shapes more ephemeral political events, much the way the slow grinding of the planetâs tectonic plates becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earthâs surface. Now, letâs try to imagine what all this means in terms of international geopolitics today.
Chinaâs Geopolitical Gambit
In the decades since the Cold Warâs close, Chinaâs increasing control over Eurasia clearly represents a fundamental change in that continentâs geopolitics. Convinced that Beijing would play the global game by U.S. rules, Washingtonâs foreign policy establishment made a major strategic miscalculation in 2001 by admitting it to the World Trade Organization (WTO). âAcross the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,â confessed two former members of the Obama administration, âshared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United Statesâ liking⊠All sides of the policy debate erred.â In little more than a decade after it joined the WTO, Beijingâs annual exports to the U.S. grew nearly five-fold and its foreign currency reserves soared from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion by 2013.
In 2013, drawing on those vast cash reserves, Chinaâs new president, Xi Jinping, launched a trillion-dollar infrastructure initiative to transform Eurasia into a unified market. As a steel grid of rails and petroleum pipelines began crisscrossing the continent, China ringed the tri-continental world island with a chain of 40 commercial ports â from Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, around Africaâs coast, to Europe from Piraeus, Greece, to Hamburg, Germany. In launching what soon became historyâs largest development project, 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan, Xi is consolidating Beijingâs geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, while fulfilling Brzezinskiâs fear of the rise of âan assertive single entityâ in Central Asia.
Unlike the U.S., China hasnât spent significant effort establishing military bases. While Washington still maintains some 750 of themin 80 nations, Beijing has just one military base in Djibouti on the east African coast, a signals intercept post on Myanmarâs Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a compact installation in eastern Tajikistan, and half a dozen small outposts in the South China Sea.
Moreover, while Beijing was focused on building Eurasian infrastructure, Washington was fighting two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a strategically inept bid to dominate the Middle East and its oil reserves (just as the world was beginning to transition away from petroleum to renewable energy). In contrast, Beijing has concentrated on the slow, stealthy accretion of investments and influence across Eurasia from the South China Sea to the North Sea. By changing the continentâs underlying geopolitics through this commercial integration, itâs winning a level of control not seen in the last thousand years, while unleashing powerful forces for political change.
Tectonic Shifts Shake U.S. Power
After a decade of Beijingâs relentless economic expansion across Eurasia, the tectonic shifts in that continentâs geopolitical substrate have begun to manifest themselves in a series of diplomatic eruptions, each erasing another aspect of U.S. influence. Four of the more recent ones might seem, at first glance, unrelated but are all driven by the relentless force of geopolitical change.
Image: Afghans stand in the sewage ditch outside Abbey Gate as they attempt to show documents to Marines processing evacuees on Aug. 25. Credit: Mirzahussain Sadid for Alive in Afghanistan
First came the sudden, unexpected collapse of the U.S. position in Afghanistan, forcing Washington to end its 20-year occupation in August 2021 with a humiliating withdrawal. In a slow, stealthy geopolitical squeeze play, Beijing had signed massive development deals with all the surrounding Central Asian nations, leaving American troops isolated there. To provide critical air support for its infantry, U.S. jet fighters were often forced to fly 2,000 miles from their nearest base in the Persian Gulf â an unsustainable long-term situation and unsafe for troops on the ground. As the U.S.-trained Afghan Army collapsed and Taliban guerrillas drove into Kabul atop captured Humvees, the chaotic U.S. retreat in defeat became unavoidable.
Just six months later in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin massed an armada of armored vehicles loaded with 200,000 troops on Ukraineâs border. If Putin is to be believed, his âspecial military operationâ was to be a bid to undermine NATOâs influence and weaken the Western alliance â one of Brzezinskiâs conditions for the U.S. eviction from Eurasia.
But first Putin visited Beijing to court President Xiâs support, a seemingly tall order given Chinaâs decades of lucrative trade with the United States, worth a mind-boggling $500 billion in 2021. Yet Putin scored a joint declaration that the two nationsâ relations were âsuperior to political and military alliances of the Cold War eraâ and a denunciation of âthe further expansion of NATO.â
As it happened, Putin did so at a perilous price. Instead of attacking Ukraine in frozen February when his tanks could have maneuvered off-road on their way to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, he had to wait out Beijingâs Winter Olympics. So, Russian troops invaded instead in muddy March, leaving his armored vehicles stuck in a 40-mile traffic jam on a single highway where the Ukrainians readily destroyed more than 1,000 tanks. Facing diplomatic isolation and European trade embargos as his defeated invasion degenerated into a set of vengeful massacres, Moscow shifted much of its exports to China. That quickly raised bilateral trade by 30% to an all-time high, while reducing Russia to but another piece on Beijingâs geopolitical chessboard.
Then, just last month, Washington found itself diplomatically marginalized by an utterly unexpected resolution of the sectarian divide that had long defined the politics of the Middle East. After signing a $400-billioninfrastructure deal with Iran and making Saudi Arabia its top oil supplier, Beijing was well positioned to broker a major diplomatic rapprochement between those bitter regional rivals, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Within weeks, the foreign ministers of the two nations sealed the deal with a deeply symbolic voyage to Beijing â a bittersweet reminder of the days not long ago when Arab diplomats paid court in Washington.
Finally, the Biden administration was stunnedthis month when Europeâs preeminent leader, Emmanuel Macron of France, visited Beijingfor a series of intimate tĂȘte-Ă -tĂȘte chats with Chinaâs President Xi. At the close of that extraordinary journey, which won French companies billions in lucrative contracts, Macron announced âa global strategic partnership with Chinaâ and promised he would not âtake our cue from the U.S. agendaâ over Taiwan. A spokesman for the ĂlysĂ©e Palace quickly released a pro forma clarification that âthe United States is our ally, with shared values.â Even so, Macronâs Beijing declaration reflected both his own long-term vision of the European Union as an independent strategic player and that blocâs ever-closer economic ties to China
The Future of Geopolitical Power
Projecting such political trends a decade into the future, Taiwanâs fate would seem, at best, uncertain. Instead of the âshock and aweâ of aerial bombardments, Washingtonâs default mode of diplomatic discourse in this century, Beijing prefers stealthy, sedulous geopolitical pressure. In building its island bases in the South China Sea, for example, it inched forward incrementally â first dredging, then building structures, next runways, and finally emplacing anti-aircraft missiles â in the process avoiding any confrontation over its functional capture of an entire sea.
Lest we forget, Beijing has built its formidable economic-political-military power in little more than a decade. If its strength continues to increase inside Eurasiaâs geopolitical substrate at even a fraction of that head-spinning pace for another decade, it may be able to execute a deft geopolitical squeeze-play on Taiwan like the one that drove the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijingâs grasp.
Should such a geopolitical gambit prevail, the U.S. strategic frontier along the Pacific littoral would be broken, possibly pushing its Navy back to a âsecond island chainâ from Japan to Guam â the last of Brzezinskiâs criteria for the true waning of U.S. global power. In that event, Washingtonâs leaders could once again find themselves sitting on the proverbial diplomatic and economic sidelines, wondering how it all happened.
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Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. His newest book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change(Dispatch Books).
Featured image: Chinese Military, Forbidden City â Beijing, China by Patrick Rodwell is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 / Flickr
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