How are we to understand the shift of power towards Asia and what does it mean for those 'old' power centres in Europe and the United States? The most important historical question is probably why nations gain and lose power. Growth provides the most elegant answer and the means to defend that power.
The first time I visited Japan, it was in the still-powerful after glow of the appearance of Ezra Vogel's bestseller, Japan as Number One, originally published by Harvard University Press in 1979, but continually re-published in Japan. To a person, Japanese intellectuals and politicians were excited by that prognostication, although also anxious to avoid giving a neuralgic late Ronald Reagan presidential administration any hint that they were looking forward to America's future relative decline.
I therefore found myself being asked coyly, time and again, what I thought about the ever-moving-westwards theory of international politics. When I asked my interlocutors to explain, the reply was always identical: for thousands of years East Asia had been the centre of the world, the most advanced and productive civilisation, etc…; then that centre began to shift westwards, through the Indian Ocean, and up to the Mediterranean; but Braudel's famous 'Mediterranean world' of the sixteenth century was eclipsed by nation-states north of the Alps, France, the Netherlands, eventually Britain.
This British predominance was impressively long-lasting, but by around 1900 it was losing out to the massive industrial states of the eastern half of the United States; and yet, after 1945 and as if by force of nature, the world's weight shifted steadily to the western side of the US.
So all that was happening, you see, was that the caravan of world wealth and civilisation was moving westwards again, to Japan. And that was why Professor Vogel's book was so impressive and convincing. And it was not Japan's fault it was overtaking America; it is just that it was now its turn to be Number One. No hard feelings.
When I pointed out, politely, that there was no reason why the westwards shift would not continue - in fact, the logic of the argument made that shift inevitable - and thus see China in future replacing Japan as Number One in the world, the
conversations tended to dry up. As we parted company, both sides agreed to think about this matter a bit more.
conversations tended to dry up. As we parted company, both sides agreed to think about this matter a bit more.
GROWTH COUNTS
I have been thinking about it ever since. Without needing a complicated Toynbeean explanation of changes in world history- 'action-response', the saving grace of religion, and all that-there is something fascinating - and important - to all of us about this shifting dynamic of power and influence over the course of time.
It is a story that has captured the attention of the great writers and thinkers of the past - Ibn Khaldun, Raleigh, Vico, Gibbon, Brooks Adams, Ranke, Wells, Weber, Spengler, Mackinder, Braudel, McNeill - and with good reason. Why does one organised human unit - a nation, an empire, a civilization, call it what you will - rise to occupy a greater share of power and influence than the others and then, again, begin to lose that pre-eminence? Is this not the most important historical question of all?
It is at this point that the horde of answers charge in, like cavalry-horses answering the bugle: the answer can be culture, or science, or germs and disease, or a breakdown of morals, or the coming of the steam-engine, or a Roman-like capacity for organisation.
To my mind still, and at the risk of sounding like an out-of date Marxist don, I feel that Lenin himself probably came closest when he pointed to the 'uneven rate of development' as the key. Could anyone believe, he asks his readers again and again, that the unification of Germany and the entry of Japan into the ranks of the Great Powers could have occurred without their successful long-term growth? Of course not.
The beauty about Lenin's approach is that he does not get himself embroiled in debates about some cultures and civilisations being superior to others, or Protestantism and capitalism, or relative resistance to disease, or democracy versus autocracy, or any of the other long-winded stuff, to explain the relative rise and decline of particular economies and their influence in the world. He simply points out - as any natural scientist observing a run of data would - that if the record shows one country's productivity and economy growing faster than others, then there will be a steady shift in the balances of power towards it. The antecedent causes are mere intellectualism. It is what is happening that counts.
And this, it seems to me, is the only sensible way we can discuss the most significant political phenomenon of our new century: the relative rise of Asia, perhaps China especially, and its natural concomitant, the relative decline of the west as a whole and more particularly of both of its two greatest components, Europe and the U.S.
At some stage, somewhere, those two parts need to be treated separately, since their responses to Asia's rise are so different. In Europe - at least according to some recent conferences I have attended - the mood is one of resigned acquiescence, mingled with a weird panglossian assumption that it will all work out well in the end. In the US, the 'declinist' or 'exceptionalist' debate is much more intense, presumably because - as Henry Kissinger might say - the stakes are so high.
It is difficult to judge which of these two debates are the more depressing to watch, or the less intelligible. Probably the European fatalism - occasionally interrupted by Sarkovian calls for the continent to unite or perish - possesses the superior logic.
By contrast, the debate in the US on Asia's rise now borders on the fatuous, but with three quarrelling variants. Either [a] it is not really happening, and the twenty-first century will still be America's century, despite all the statistical evidence and forecasts to the contrary; or [b] it is indeed happening, but there is nothing to worry about since America and Asia are natural and complementary trading partners, so they will all get richer at the same time, as if members of some gigantic trans-Pacific Hanseatic League. This displaying a naivete about power-politics that is breathtaking; or [c] the most puzzling variation of all, though trumpeted by dozens of respectable political scientists and economists - not historians - which goes like this. Yes, the global dynamic proceeds apace; and yes, Asia and China are rising fast, so America's share on virtually all indices is shrinking, relatively; but, notwithstanding all that, the US will continue to occupy a special place in world affairs, over and above all the rest, the indispensable nation.
CALLING THE TUNE
Just how one part of the globe can be relatively rising without other parts relatively falling is neither explained nor admitted. Truly, the first generations of a nation grappling with signs of long-term relative decline have an awfully hard time in being reconciled to that idea.
Yet, once one casts those emotions aside, the facts are clear; the accumulating evidence points to a conclusion which realists from Lenin going back to Thucydides - 'it was the rising power of Athens' - would completely understand. Year on year, decade over decade, Asia is growing at a significantly faster pace than the mature economies of the US and Europe.
This is so well known that there is no need to throw in a lot of statistics - per capita gross domestic product, annualised growth-rates, Goldman Sachs projections - at this stage. But two changes are worth pointing to, apart from this massive shift in the relative productive outputs of each nation's goods and services.
The first is the stunning transformation of the world's capital balances over the past twenty years. This is not the place to discuss in detail whether the gigantic Asian capital surpluses - China, Japan, South Korea - will last forever, probably not; but no historian can resist pointing out that surplus bank savings have usually accompanied the alterations in the military-political balances of power, either running ahead of them or following them: from the Lombard cities to Antwerp and Amsterdam; from there to London; from London, after a long time, to New York; and from New York… to where? Shanghai? Does it not matter when, as a Great Power, you owe an awful lot of money to someone else? He who pays the piper will, sooner or later, call the tune.
SEA DENIAL
The second accompanying shift is in military balances, especially at sea. In brief, we see a triangular situation which looks like this: Europe's maritime capacities are evaporating fast, and without there being a single substantive debate on what that means; Asia's maritime capacities are exploding in both power and reach, but no-one wants to talk about it; and the US Navy is worried.
The first of these deserves a far lengthier examination, but in essence the roster of European warships is shrinking so steadily, decade by decade, that it is fair to conclude that the five hundred-year-old Vasco da Gama era in world affairs is now well and truly over; an occasional run-in with Somali pirates by a French frigate makes for little.
Contrast their collective shrinkage, then, with the soaring naval expenditures of all the navies of East Asia, the Pacific, and South Asia, the frenzied attention to gaining naval-base rights, the drumbeat of propaganda on protecting one's vital sea-lines of communication.
Admiral Mahan has gone east. The Japanese Navy, for example, eclipses any European navy, and is in turn eclipsed by the Chinese Navy. What do those Asian governments know about the future of global power-politics that European governments do not? No politician will say.
Then there is the US, frantically trying to figure out what this rise of Asian sea-power means for its own overstretched world position. The bug-a-boo is of course China. Why is Beijing spending so much on defence; though probably about one-eighth of the Pentagon's budget? Why this heavy investment into cyber-warfare?; into military satellites?; into commercial espionage? What about those medium-range sea-skimming missiles that fly below the radar screens of US warships, and those ultra-long-range rockets that can cross the wide Pacific? Or the super-quiet diesel submarines, now wrapped in an anti-detection 'stealth' coating? How valid are all these rumours about the first Chinese aircraft-carrier?
Overall, then, are we not watching an older-fashioned American blue-water surface navy being pushed ever further away from the Asian coasts, and facing the problem of 'sea denial'? The Chinese navy is not planning to anchor off the entrance to Long Beach, California; but it does not imagine that Nimitz's navy will be in the western Pacific for much longer, either.
STRATEGY LIGHT
Since it is the US which is much more exercised about Asia's rise than the limp but hopeful Europeans, one might expect to glean some idea of Washington's thinking by perusing the two most important documents so far issued on this topic in the present year: namely, [a] the February Quadrennial Defense Review Report, a Pentagon document requested by the Congress, and [b] the May National Security Strategy, emanating from the White House and signed off by President Barack Obama himself. But if one reads and attempts to de-construct those documents, one will have looked in vain; talk about the hunting of the Snark!
The presidential document is especially vacuous. One must wait until pages 43-45 - of a 52-page document - to discover a section called Build Cooperation with Other 21st Century Centers of Influence, and indeed there is a paragraph on China and another on India. But they are followed in rapid succession by paragraphs on Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, the Middle East, Africa; interestingly, no reference to Japan, so much for the round-the-world movement of history! And there are a lot more pages on 'our most cherished values…' than there are on hard strategic issues.
The Quadrennial Defense Review seems at first to be a bit more relevant, in part because each of the services is putting in a bid for a large slice of the total Pentagon budget, and therefore has to say something about threats and capacities, or lack thereof. Even so, it looks like a bulky, multi-page menu in an expensive Manhattan restaurant; there is something in there for everyone, carriers, air wings, army groups, the Marines. But, in essence, there is little there. Charming sections on 'Supporting Families' and on 'Strengthening Interagency Partnerships' lead to nothing.
For understandable diplomatic reasons, no doubt, there is no discussion on what are the best ways to intimidate China's military growth; or how best to reach out to India to be your largest global ally, like reaching out to Britain after 1941; or how much it might take to get the shifty Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin onto your side, a sublimely Bismarckian stroke that the Joint Chiefs simply dare not suggest. It is all very sad. Since Kissinger, or perhaps since the Bush-Baker-Scowcroft team, nobody in Washington thinks strategically.
So the shift in the world's power balances will go on. Asia will rise, though not without a stumble here and there, and China in particular seems likely to encounter some environmental or social difficulty before resuming its forward path, difficulties which will give hope to all those who hate the idea of the return of the Middle Kingdom. And the rest of Asia - India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea - will also advance, in a ragged though obvious direction.
And Europe will sit back, feeling quite exhausted by all these transformations, getting ever more obsessed about immigrants, high taxes and hedge funds. Meanwhile the US will, I fear, not have a clue where it is going, and whatto do. Ninety years ago, Mackinder wrote that democracies, unless they are forced into war, simply cannot think strategically. Is that true? I hope it is not. But the evidence increasingly suggests he is right.
And so the centre of the world rolls, always to the west, to Asia and China. If we wait long enough, it might end up again in Lombardy; but that could take quite a while. Today, most roads seem to be leading to Beijing. Truly, as the Chinese curse puts it, we live in interesting times.(Paul Kennedy, Professor of History, Yale)