The relative decline of the West - its global reputation, influence and share of buying power - is set to be theme of this half of the twenty-first century. If more politicians were amoral, cynical geographers, it might have been avoided.
Part 1: China's debt to the West.
There is one respect in which Donald Trump's view on American trade with China has some reasoned basis: there can be little doubt that China's meteoric economic growth over the last three decades has been primarily fuelled by international trade. In short, a nominally communist, totalitarian, one-party dictatorship has derived an enormous benefit by cunningly channelling the proceeds of globalised capitalism, via its abundance of cheap labour, into the coffers of the state and of state-owned companies.
If China is a rising threat to Western hegemony, the West really only has itself to blame.
Integrating new countries into world trade will inevitably result in them getting richer: in the case of demographic behemoths like China and India, this is bound to eventually affect not just regional but global geopolitics. Where mere capitalism is the cause of that rise, there is no sense of moral debt to the West: companies have merely been acting in their own interests, and certain countries have grown more powerful as a by-product.
In brief, since China's rise is due not to foreign aid from the US and Europe, but merely to corporate self-interest in rich countries, it has been able to decouple the idea of prosperity from the Western political model - democracy based on freedom of expression; having done this, there is really no reason for China to aspire to that model. Freedom - individual freedoms, as distinct from market liberalisation - has lost its biggest selling-point to the developing world.
Part 2: Decolonisation and development: Western policy towards low-income countries 1945-2000.
Bluntly, if (and only if) Western nations wished to retain their global influence, then it was ultimately in their interests for the rest of the world to remain at least relatively poor - or at least, only to get rich in an obviously indebted way.
One would have thought this would have been obvious to post-war policy-makers; if it were, then it is quite remarkable how badly they have managed it since WW2. Perhaps mere arrogance led them to assume that ethnic West Eurasians ran the world by default; that their authority would never really be challenged; that even if or when "the Third World" became more well-off, living standards in the West would always remain so far ahead that Western countries would remain the goal to aspire to. Perhaps the rise of China, for example, only seems predictable with hindsight; the enrichment of low-income countries was not at all apparent during decolonisation. Perhaps corporate interests, the engine of capitalism, carried more weight in twentieth-century policy-making than geopolitical predictions.
In my view, the primary explanation is probably that simple morality made such cynical views of the national interest, if not unthinkable, then at least un-actionable. Corporate interests, lack of geopolitical foresight, and other more pressing agendas, such as demonstrating the superior merits of capitalism over communism, doubtless also played an important role.
Part 3: Geopolitics and emerging powers: 2000-2050.
On the bright side, tensions with rising powers, such as the South China Sea disputes, may be the exception rather than the rule: there are few other areas of the globe where the geopolitical interests of an emerging power conflict so markedly with an established one. India, for example, can expand its regional influence considerably without really touching a Western country's residual sphere of influence (as a capitalist democracy it is, helpfully, ideologically close to the West anyway). The same can probably be said for Nigeria.
It is difficult to know just what China's endgame is in the Western Pacific. If it seeks to expand, it will probably get away with it: when one regional power is so much bigger than its nearest competitor (Japan), it is difficult to see how any balance of power would be maintained - without American involvement. Perhaps, however, the end of US involvement with its old Pacific allies will never come. China's rise will not be meteoric forever; its geopolitical ambitions may, for all we know, be limited to the South China Sea. Compromises may be possible. Perhaps a long-term US/China strategic standoff is the new equilibrium.
