Isolating America’s deeply-rooted strategic and economic interests from the tangled web of rhetoric, partnerships, policies. and action, points to the basic driver of its foreign policy: the maintenance of its global military, political, and economic dominance.
After two world wars and the Cold War, the United States stood alone internationally as the unquestionable superpower. Consequently, hegemony has not only endowed the United States with the capability to project and utilise power across the globe, allowing it to influence and shape key geopolitical disputes, but also the ability to dictate the terms of global economic exchanges....
China’s growth is impressive and rightfully causes people to question the longevity of America’s international preponderance. But it is unlikely that China will challenge the United States’ international primacy in the next 50 years at least.
However, there is another hypothetical challenger to American hegemony. One which is rarely mentioned but could, under the right circumstances, be a more potent challenger than China: a united, or at least more closely associated, Eurasia...
The idea of a super-state emerging in Eurasia, incorporating the member states of the EU and Russia, along with neighbourhood countries such as Ukraine and Belarus, is currently ludicrous. The EU experience vividly shows the limitations of integration and the resilience of the nation-state. However, if you allow yourself to indulge the idea of an economically, and loosely political, union of states from ‘Lisbon to Vladivostok’, then it quickly becomes clear why it would, on the one hand benefit the countries of Eurasia and, on the other, challenge America’s international primacy....
Firstly, a united Eurasia would create the world’s largest territorial free trade zone, spanning the shores of the Atlantic all the way to the shores of the Pacific....
Secondly, a united Eurasia would have a practically inexhaustible resource base, especially in terms of key energy resources....
Thirdly, from a geopolitical perspective, a united Eurasia would be only second to the United States when it comes to natural protection from outside aggression...
Fourthly, a united Eurasia would render America’s military presence on the ground in Europe pointless....
Lastly, and perhaps most crucially in the context of the United States, an economically united Eurasia could pose a serious challenge to America’s primacy in the areas of global finance and trade....Open Democracy
Rethinking Eurasia's future
Nicholas Ross Smith. researcher at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in the field of international relations and Zbigniew Dumieński, scholar at the University of Auckland, New Zealand in the fields of political economy and international relations.
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