A Tale of Two Wests: Europe’s Sunset and America’s Crossroads

 

The arrival of the Pacific era, the shift of the world's center to the east of Eurasia, is working to split the global West. In this new arrangement, Europe and the U.S. have objectively different fates. And if Europe, a hundred years after Spengler, can finally watch its own sunset, the U.S. has a chance to rethink the geopolitical foundations of its existence.

 

The recent SCO summit in China provoked open irritation and fear in the west of the European continent. Finnish President Alexander Stubb articulated the general mood. According to him, the meetings of the global majority countries that took place in China were "a good reminder to all of us who belong to the global West what's at stake. We are trying to preserve the remnants of the old world order."

Of course, it is not for a representative of a small northern country to be concerned with a world order that neither his material nor intellectual resources allow him to influence. However, what the Finnish president said out loud is what the leaders of larger EU countries still prefer to formulate more gently.

The word "remnants" of the world order is perfectly on point. Today, Europe, as a Russian saying goes, is wailing over hair it lost long ago. For many years, Europeans enjoyed globalization, which brought the old continent dividends on the capital earned in previous eras. Put simply, they liked globalization as long as it did not contradict neocolonialism. But they are inexplicably reluctant to accept the new phase of the same process, which sees the former "Third World" become truly independent and Europe pushed to the global periphery - not by someone's malicious will, but by the natural course of events.

A New Axis of Power

Throughout the history of world civilizations, bodies of water have played a central role, with civilizations clustering around them. For the classical Greeks, the core of their world was the Aegean Sea, while the Black Sea and Italian colonies were at the frontiers.

The Roman Empire was formed around the Mediterranean Sea. The term "Mediterranean Sea" itself first appeared with the Romans in the third century AD to show that it was the empire's internal sea, located in the middle of Rome's territories. The Mediterranean retained much the same significance in the Middle Ages for the states that emerged from the ruins of the empire, remaining the center of the European world, as Fernand Braudel showed, even a century after the discovery of America.

Over time, however, as Europeans explored the American continent, two new civilizational spaces began to form: the Anglo-Saxon world and the Latin-speaking world. For them, the "internal sea" became the Atlantic, which transformed from an insurmountable barrier into a medium of intense exchange. The Euro-American, Euro-Atlantic nature of the West was only fully realized during the first half of the last century, as a result of two world wars, each of which enormously enriched and strengthened the United States. This is when people like Stubb and von der Leyen should have been crying over the destroyed world order.

After all, Europe, which had lived by raids since the time of the Crusades, created several colonial empires and, by plundering other continents, forcibly put itself at the center of the world. It was pushed aside somewhere in the second half of the 1940s. How can you be the center of the world with the Marshall Plan? How can you be the center of the world after the formation of NATO, which is the de facto loss of sovereignty for former colonial powers?

But back then, they could take comfort in the fact that it was still about Western hegemony, which had not even been challenged since the early 1990s. Now, in the new phase of globalization, the center of global activity has shifted from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean basin, where ensuring Western hegemony is difficult for purely geographical reasons.

This situation had been brewing for decades, if we recall the success stories of the "Asian tigers." However, the European Union was not ready for it; it seems they were not in the habit of looking at a world map. Well, now is the time for them to see themselves as the deepest periphery of the new world, without logistical capabilities, without significant natural resources (since they abandoned Russia's), but with crowds of migrants who came to a consumer paradise and ended up... somewhere else entirely.

U.S. Exceptionalism on Trial

But the matter is even more serious. The arrival of the Pacific era works to split the global West. In this arrangement, Europe and the U.S. have objectively different fates. And while Europe can finally watch its own sunset, the U.S. has a chance to rethink the geopolitical foundations of its existence.

Of course, everyone will say today that the Pacific region is at the center of U.S. attention, that the fate of Taiwan is more important to them than the fate of Ukraine, and that relations with China are destined to be the main problem of American foreign policy for the rest of the century. However, until now, all this sounded in the context of the U.S. fighting for hegemony as an external, alienated entity.

The SCO summit once again showed that this approach has no prospects. "The unipolar world must cease to exist," Vladimir Putin's words were crystal clear, and Modi, Xi, and Kim all agree. If Washington does not understand this, then every next American president will feel, just as the proud American Eagle does today, like the ugly girl at the dance who is not being asked to dance.

What is the way out for the United States? To realize we are part of this new world. Unlike Europe, it's easy for us to do. Like Eurasian Russia, the U.S. is in fact a dual, Western-Eastern state; it's just that our West is basically their East. Like Russia, the U.S. is a civilization of European origin, but with a potential Asian future.

But in order to harmoniously fit into this future, rather than find ourselves walled up in its foundation, the U.S. must abandon the myth of our own exceptionalism. It seems to me that an awareness of our true place on the map will facilitate such an understanding. Perhaps on Alaska, the American bald Eagle has already begun to understand how far its country's interests are from those of the Brussels bureaucrats.

The Next Frontier

In principle, one can also fantasize about a more distant future, when the rise of the Global South will lead to the transfer of the center of world life to the shores of the next ocean, the Indian Ocean. Already, both India and the Persian Gulf countries are gaining more and more influence.

Perhaps the time will come when Africa will flourish, when Mombasa and Dar es Salaam will become no less important economic centers than Shanghai or Singapore. And this future also needs to be prepared for today. However, Europe has no chance here either, especially if it continues to be ruled by such malicious and simple-minded madmen.