1 week Ago By Firstpost
Two brutal intra-European wars between 1914 and 1945, which dragged the rest of the world into them, marked the beginning of the end of Western global supremacy. This wasn’t, however, immediately apparent at the end of the Second World War in 1945. The United States was a superpower.
Western Europe possessed dozens of colonies across Asia and Africa. Its cultural influence in film, literature and media held global sway. The West was at the peak of its geopolitical power.
As British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said: “Britain must play Greece to America’s Rome.” Washington, he implied, would provide the brawn, London the brains. The West may eventually lose its colonies, but with US military and economic leadership it could remain the world’s dominant civilisation force.
The Ottoman Empire that had periodically threatened Western supremacy for centuries was gone. Its rump successor, Turkey, was absorbed into the European ecosystem. It joined NATO in 1952.
The oil-rich Middle East the Ottomans had controlled now lay in Western hands. Iran was a Western protectorate. Its luxury-loving Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, allowed US and European companies access to Iran’s vast oil reserves.
In Iraq, the CIA engineered a coup to oust the government of Prime Minister Abdul Karim-Qasim in 1963 and installed the Ba’athist Party in power. Iraq’s oil fields too were now under Western control. Across Asia, Africa and South America, the writ of the West ran large.
Most European colonies became independent decades after India: British-ruled Malaya split into Malaysia and Singapore in 1957 but Britain’s African colonies gained freedom only in the 1960s: Nigeria in 1960, Uganda in 1962, and Kenya in 1963. India was widely resented in the West, especially in Britain, for setting off a domino effect of de-colonisation in 1947 that led to the extinguishment of British, French and Dutch colonial empires, built over centuries, in a matter of years. That resentment continues to fester, especially as India has defied Western predictions of postcolonial balkanisation.
Instead of breaking up, India is on the verge of becoming the world’s third largest economy in 2027. At independence, after 200 years of British colonial rule, India’s absolute poverty rate was 80 per cent. Today it is 8 per cent.
None of this would have caused the US-led West’s undue concern. The West’s economic and military dominance was still overwhelming. Then an old European habit struck.
Just as in 1914, and again in 1939, when Europeans had waged suicidal war on one another, history repeated itself in the 1990s. The Balkan wars stretched through the decade to 1999. Yugoslavia was dismembered into seven new countries ranging from Croatia and Serbia to Slovenia and Montenegro.
But all seemed well in the Western world as 2000 dawned: the Soviet Union had been dismantled. Its diminished successor, Russia, was invited to join the exclusive G7 group of nations, renamed the G8. For a while Russia toyed with the idea of joining the European Union (EU) and perhaps even NATO.
The US, distracted by the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, let matters drift in Europe through the early 2000s. But Europe’s deep-rooted tribal animosities between Slavs, led by Russia, and Anglo-Saxons, led by Britain and Germany, soon resurfaced. The spark was lit by NATO’s relentless expansion towards Russia’s borders.
The CIA meanwhile overthrew the pro-Russian Yanukovych government in Ukraine in 2014. A furious Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Ukraine’s Crimea to protect its Baltic Sea fleet. Russia was immediately evicted from the US-led G8 which was once again renamed the G7 and sanctions imposed on Moscow.
By 2022, Europe had fully turned on itself following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as it had in WWI, WW2 and the Balkan wars. Abandoning Ukraine With US President Donald Trump threatening last week to wash his hands off the Russia-Ukraine war which has killed and wounded several lakh Russian and Ukrainian soldiers, Europe may be left alone to fight its continent’s wars. But as in previous purely European conflicts, it has again dragged in other countries: North Korea in the Kursk region and Chinese soldiers, two of whom were recently displayed in public as prisoners of war (PoW) by Ukraine, flouting international humanitarian law.
The larger problem facing the West now is America’s disengagement with Europe under President Trump. If Trump abandons American peace efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war and also eases sanctions on Moscow, he will be writing the first draft of the obituary of the Western alliance. The simultaneous rise of the China-Russia-North Korea-Iran axis poses the most potent threat to Western global supremacy since the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Powers in 1950.
India leads the Global South, the third axis in this evolving Great Power dynamic. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Saudi Arabia and the India-Nordic summit in Oslo in May reflect India’s role as a balancing pivot between the US-led West and China-led East. The Western colonial era was founded on economic exploitation, military conquest and unfair trade practices that drained the wealth of countries like India and China while enriching the West as it industrialised and built prosperous societies.
The fall last week in the price of US treasury bills, regarded as the world’s safe haven, is an early warning sign that the days of US exceptionalism are numbered. As America withdraws into a Trumpian shell, Europe will be forced to fight its own tribal wars. Postcolonial Europe’s economies are struggling with low growth.
Immigration from Asia and Africa has turned cities like London, which once billed itself as the capital of the world, into a white-minority metropolis. The ratio of British whites in London is down to 27 per cent. Another 20 per cent are whites from other European countries, principally Ireland, France, Germany and Poland.
White Britons have fled to the countryside. Other large British cities like Birmingham and Leicester are also coloured-majority. But the biggest wrench for former colonial nations in Western Europe – Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal – is the ideological loss of their earliest colony across the Atlantic.
The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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