THE EURASIAN CENTURY

World history since 1900, with an emphasis on geopolitics.

Brands, Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China, reminds readers that Eurasia, Earth’s largest landmass, remains the world’s strategic center. When the modern age began, its powerhouse was Western Europe—until the post–World War II recovery of Japan and breathtaking rise of China pulled the economic center of gravity east. The first of Brands’ five long chapters introduces Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), an obscure British civil servant who excelled in explaining geopolitics, a discipline focused on the relationship between land and political power. Mackinder emphasized that maritime nations like his own could pursue positive-sum strategies in trade and cooperation, whereas continental powers existed in cramped, cutthroat conditions where the surest route to safety was to conquer your neighbors. What follows illustrates this unsettling theme. World War I was so searing that no democratic statesman wished to repeat it, but it left many potential troublemakers. The big winner, the United States, acted as though geography guaranteed its security, although it did not. Learning from its mistakes, after 1945 “the United States pursued a generous, positive-sum vision of cooperation” and oversaw 80 years of peace and unrivaled prosperity. Sadly, peace and prosperity aren’t a priority among autocrats. “They want glory, greatness, and empire.…By late 2023, both Eastern Europe and the Middle East were ablaze,” and few doubt the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Today, a return to history’s horrors is all too plausible. Americans need to learn the lessons of the first Eurasian century if they are to survive the second. A fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Brands delivers a worshipful portrait of President Reagan but approves of liberal democracy as opposed to “would-be authoritarian” Trump, making a convincing case that democracy is in trouble.

Thoughtful and disturbing.