As Europe struggles to hold itself together and its nationalist parties preach the virtues of the old nation-state, we find ourselves back in a place that can look eerily familiar. Once again we inhabit a world of great powers jostling for influence. Russia, with its incursions into Ukraine, is once again an aspirational counterweight; and China’s rise has thrown the power balance in Asia into confusion. Meanwhile the likely re-emergence of Iran, following the agreement between Tehran and world powers of a nuclear accord, and the slow ebbing of American power are reshaping the Middle East.
So is this a story, as the doomsters would have it, of western decline? Certainly, it is the ending of that long era in which the US and the Europe between them could assume they ran the world. But rather than indicating decline, this shifting configuration of forces may provide some much-needed intellectual reinvigoration, an end perhaps not only to centuries of the west’s global dominance but perhaps too to the mental laziness that accompanied it.
When the west emerged triumphant at the end of the cold war, many saw the defeat of communism as a vindication of its ideas. They believed history had demonstrated the superiority of democracy and the market over one-party rule and the planned economy. They viewed the US as the guardian of these values and encouraged international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to promote them globally in the form of the Washington consensus.
随着欧洲艰难地维系自身团结，同时其境内民族主义政党纷纷鼓吹旧式民族国家的优点，我们发觉自己回到了一个熟悉到可怕的处境。我们又一次进入了大国争夺影响力的世界。俄罗斯入侵了乌克兰，再次成为一个野心勃勃的抗衡力量，中国的崛起又打破了亚洲的权力平衡。伊朗政府与几个世界大国达成核协议后，该国很可能再度崛起，而与此同时美国的力量却在慢慢衰退，这两个因素正在重塑中东格局。