In remarks delivered to Chinese participants in the Cambridge Executive Leadership Program, Chas Freeman argues that 500 years of Euro-Atlantic dominance has come to an end.

Five hundred and thirty-four years ago, for the first time, the world became one. Christopher Columbus – an Italian adventurer – was looking for a faster way to Asia. Instead, he erased the Atlantic as a barrier between Europe and America. This transformed the globe. It fused ecosystems that had evolved separately for millions of years, triggering almost immediate demographic collapse in the Americas, fuelling long-term population booms in Europe, Asia and Africa, creating new global agricultural and industrial realities, and catalysing new cuisines everywhere. For the first time in history, there were true “world powers” – countries whose interests and policies could not be ignored anywhere in the world – and they were all European.

Europe gained access to huge mineral resources: gold and silver in quantities previously unimaginable. Europe, Asia and Africa also benefitted from the arrival of new foodstuffs developed over millennia by native Americans: cacao, cassava, chiles, maize, papayas, peanuts, potatoes, pumpkins, squashes, sweet potatoes, tapioca, tomatoes, turkeys, pineapples and vanilla. Can anyone imagine today’s national cuisines without these ingredients?

The Americas gained bananas, citrus fruit, coffee, grapes and wine, rice, sugarcane and wheat. Its peoples added donkeys, horses, mules and oxen as beasts of burden, and cattle, chickens, goats, hogs and sheep as sources of protein. They also saw the introduction of many technologies they had lacked.

This so-called “Columbian Exchange” is the foundation of the modern world and its immense populations.  But it came at a horrific initial cost.

Animal-vectored diseases like influenza, malaria, measles, mumps, smallpox, typhus, whooping cough and yellow fever almost immediately killed well over 90 per cent of the original inhabitants of North and South America – about 95 million people. Native Americans had no inherited immunity to these illnesses. Those who survived are the ancestors, with European, African and Asian settlers, of the mixed-race populations of the Americas today.

Our recent experiences with climate change and pandemics remind us that, however great the benefits, planetary integration can give rise to planetary problems that demand planet-wide answers.

The five centuries that followed “the Columbian Exchange” have seen a succession of world orders. In the first three of these centuries, Europeans settled the Americas and Australia, forcibly transported Africans to the Americas, underwent scientific and industrial revolutions, conquered West Asia and North Africa as well as India and Southeast Asia, and extended their rivalries to the globe.

In the late 18th century, they also attempted to establish relations with China in accordance with the principles of “state sovereignty” that they had worked out in the hard-won 1648 Peace of Westphalia. But China expressed disinterest in European science and technology and rejected the notion that other states could be equal to it.

By the early 19th century of the international calendar, European settlers in the Americas had rebelled and established themselves as newly independent states. Their actions separated the Americas from the rest of the world, where imperialism reigned unopposed. European great powers, having refused to take no for an answer from China (then still the world’s largest economy) began to carve the globe into “spheres of influence.”  In 1884, at Berlin, they agreed to subdivide Africa among them. As the 19th century came to an end, the United States crossed the Pacific to join the ranks of European imperialist powers, overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy and conquering the Philippines. It then opposed the division of China in its “Open Door” policy.

The 20th century began with an outbreak of war that challenged Europe’s imperial structures, then dissolved them, replacing them with new nations based on ethnolinguistic nationalism. The vindictive peace that followed the First World War excluded both Germany and the Soviet Union (as the successor to Czarist Russia) from roles in managing European security and established no alternative to European imperialism abroad. These failures laid the groundwork for the Second World War. Japan, left out of a world order still dominated by Europe, began a rampage through China that culminated in its erasure of Euro-American colonialism in Pacific Asia.

The war ended with the Soviet Union occupying and imposing its politico-economic model on the territories it had conquered from Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, the United States imposed its own system in the European and Asian countries it had liberated from German or Japanese militarism. China, like Russia before it, underwent a traumatic revolution. In the ensuing bipolar order of the Cold War, European colonialism evaporated amidst a proliferation of new states. India sought to remain aloof from post-colonial realignments. China emerged as a swing state. Beijing first allied itself with Moscow, then identified with the nonaligned movement and broke with the Soviet Union, cooperating with Washington while avoiding an entangling alliance with America.

As the 20th century ended, the Soviet system died of its own defects and, amidst much disorder and suffering, Moscow turned inward and abandoned its ambitions for global hegemony. The Cold War and the bipolar world order were over. There was no longer any apparent check on American power, which inherited a network of alliances it began to treat as an empire with behaviour that validated Lord Acton’s aphorism “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

The United States replaced foreign policies based on comity and respect for the views of allies, partners and friends with coercive unilateralism that increasingly ignored all but its own interests. Like the Soviet Union in its terminal phase, the United States boosted military spending to irrational and ultimately unsustainable levels. Islamist reprisal for American policies in Palestine and elsewhere in West Asia drew America into a series of wars with no clear objectives or termination strategies. By the third decade of the 21st century, the United States, among........

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