Eurasia – the Pivotal Hinge in the Evolving Global Order
By Alejandro Reyes - Scholar-in-residence, Asia Society Hong Kong Center; Director, Knowledge Dissemination, and Professor, Asia Global Institute
As the global order continues to evolve since the end of the Cold War, coalition building has become the name of the geopolitical game. While there is debate among international relations scholars about where the world is in the spectrum from unipolarity to bipolarity to some kind multipolarity, there is no question that the greater powers – China and the United States – have focused on creating or shoring up partnerships or frameworks across many issues and with varied underpinning concepts or objectives.
The mechanisms that have been forged in this network-building one-upmanship game have been both grand and compact. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched in 2013 essentially to recruit countries across its vast footprint to conduct more trade and commerce with China to help fuel new growth in the Chinese economy. China spearheaded the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which is led by a Chinese executive, to support the infrastructure funding needs of this venture. The US cast the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, agreed among 12 countries in 2015 (and from which Washington withdrew in 2017), as a way to prevent China from writing the rules of the global economy.[1]
China has driven the expansion of new regional and global governance frameworks – the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the BRICS group of emerging markets and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade group that it spearheaded with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The US, meanwhile, co-opted the Japanese “Indo-Pacific” idea to turn it into a strategic concept aimed at containing and countering China, recasting the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad, and putting together the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom to provide nuclear submarine technology to Canberra and promote cooperation on advanced technology for defense and military purposes.
The recruitment efforts of both China and US have picked up in recent years. In 2023 alone, there has been feverish bridge building. In March, Beijing brokered the re-establishment of ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia after years of antagonism. In July, China announced an agreement on law enforcement and security with the Solomon Islands and a strategic partnership with Georgia. In August, the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – invited six countries to join at the start of 2024. And in September, China elevated its diplomatic relationship with American nemesis Venezuela to an “all-weather” partnership.
The US and the Philippines in February rebooted an agreement to allow increased American access to Filipino military bases. In May, the US concluded a defense cooperation pact with Papua New Guinea. US President Joe Biden hosted Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and South Korean leader Yoon Suk-yeol at an August meeting at Camp David to launch a trilateral arrangement, prompted by their common concerns about China. At the G20 summit in New Delhi in September, the leaders of the US, the European Union (EU), France, Germany, India, Italy, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor for cooperation on clean energy, power grids and telecommunications. After the G20 meeting, Biden moved on to Hanoi, where the US and Vietnam announced that they were elevating their relations to a “comprehensive strategic partnership”, deepening cooperation in cloud computing, semiconductors and artificial intelligence, all activities in which the US and China are locked in competition and dispute.[2] Days later, the US and Bahrain signed a strategic security and economic agreement.
In a 2021 lecture to the Lowy Institute, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan outlined how the Biden administration was assembling a “latticework of alliances and partnerships globally that are fit for purpose for the 21st century.” This was “not just about refurbishing the old bilateral alliances,” he said, “but modernizing those elements of the latticework and adding new components as we go.” Sullivan identified as examples the upgrading of the Quad to leader level and the launch of AUKUS.[3]
The rush by China and the US to choose mates and form teams conjures up memories of the Cold War, the end of which is widely regarded as having triggered the ongoing evolution of the international system. In the days from the end of World War II and the Korean War to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were reckoned to be two sides on the global pitch – the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – with a large number (28 countries (including three observers) participated in the Belgrade Conference of 1961, the first summit of the Non-Aligned Movement) at least officially non-committal.
There was then a widely-acknowledged “unipolar moment”, the length of which is a matter of debate. Indeed, many foreign-policy experts argue that, even with the China-US rivalry the focal point of international affairs discourse, the world remains closer to unipolarity than it is to being bipolar or multipolar.[4]
The fluidity of the global system means that the playing field is much less clearly organized today than during the days of Cold War “clarity”. Many countries, even those with close ties to one or the other of the great powers, are asserting – or at least trying to assert – their agency. India is arguably the poster-nation for what the Europeans have called strategic autonomy. Delhi under Prime Minister Narendra Modi retains its traditional alliance and strategic ties with Moscow, refusing to condemn Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. While India and China have a disputed border, where bloody clashes took place in 2020, the two countries are elbow-to-elbow in the SCO And BRICS. The Indians have signed on to Washington’s Indo-Pacific construct, participating in Quad initiatives, as well as in joint naval exercises in the Pacific and Indian Ocean.
ASEAN, meanwhile, has resisted joining in the nomenclature game by providing only an “outlook” on the Indo-Pacific, maintaining its claim of centrality in the traditional Asia-Pacific framework.[5] This has upped the ante in the China-US courting competition, with Beijing and Washington openly pulling certain Southeast Asian countries to their corner – Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are considered to be in the Chinese orbit, while the US has drawn closer to mutual-defense ally, the Philippines, and new comprehensive strategic partner Vietnam. The ASEAN predicament: how to balance the attraction to the China pole for trade and commerce with the strategic drawing power of the US and its security guarantees.
It turns out that the multipolar world, if that is where we are, is not just about the poles and how they interact but it is all about the “caught-in-the-middle” rest and the extent to which each can exercise agency – their ability to balance their attractions to and repulsions by the two poles. By dint of their population size, geographic location, strategic importance and the voice they have on the world stage, some of the rest may be considered poles of power themselves – if only because they believe themselves to be such and behave as such. India, Russia and the European Union are three of the most obvious – but there are other “smaller” players such as Japan, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and South Africa (and the African Union in future) who might be regarded as power players, though certainly not at the level of the US and China.
And then there are truly small players such as the Solomon Islands or Cuba who because of certain attributes – their location or their possession of certain natural resources, for example – can have outsized influence, becoming the object of assiduous wooing by the great powers. The discovery of large oil reserves in Guyana in 2015 has turned the South American country into an object of great-power wooing. The US has stepped up engagement with regions such as the Pacific Island Countries, Central Asia and Africa, where Washington perceives that China has made significant inroads in economic ties and influence.
The analogy of “poles” is insufficient to capture the importance and essence of agency. The global governance scholar Amitav Acharya offered the concept of the “multiplex world” as an alternative to the conventional “multipolarity” to describe an international order that is neither unipolar nor bipolar. He considers the term “multipolar” to be an outdated and Eurocentric, arguing that the “multiplex” as a concept “conveys the notions of both multiplicity and complexity” – “Multiplicity refers to the growing number and diversity of actors involved in making the global order, including not just states but also international institutions, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, transnational movements, individuals and other non-state actors. Complexity refers to the growing number of transboundary issues, many of which are not completely new but have become more prominent and more urgent.”[6]
The deficiency of the “multiplex” model is that it implies choice, as cinema goers can decide freely which movie they would like to see. It does not capture the challenge of agency – not all countries have the same range of options from which to choose or have the same latitude to decide among the alternatives. Canada, for example, because of its geography must make US considerations a major part, if not the paramount factor, in how it decides foreign-policy questions. Europe may have more room to maneuver in exercising strategic autonomy, but not all countries in the European Union will be able to do so to a uniform extent. And Britain will always have its special relationship (real or imagined) with the United States.
A more appropriate model for understanding what has been referred to as “multi-alignment” in the international system is to think of hinges or pivots. Hinges are not all the same – there are those with sides of the same size, others with one side bigger than the other, and there are hinges that can swing only one way and others that swing in both directions. The hinging ability of countries determines their agency – and as a consequence their dynamic in the international system. In the world of great-power competition, hinging capability defines the geopolitical challenges and risks each country has to address, capturing the complexities of choice and decision making, which keep changing.
In this context, some leading international relations analysts have declared that geopolitics are back – that the world has “rediscovered” geopolitics. “As the atmosphere [of international politics] turns dark, the task of promoting and maintaining world order grows more daunting,” Walter Russell Mead wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2014. “But Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the collapse of the Soviet Union meant: the ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy over communism, not the obsolescence of hard power. China, Iran and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful attempts to overturn it.”[7]
China, Iran and Russia are not alone. The demand for agency among countries from New Zealand to Norway, from Argentina to Armenia, is not so much about pulling down the liberal rules-based order but more about diversifying the voices and representation in global governance. It took the global financial crisis of 2008-09 that spread from the US to topple the G7 from its self-proclaimed position as the premier forum for managing the global economy, ceding that role to the G20. The hobbling of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its multilateral dealmaking capacity has arguably been the result of countries previously kept out of the “green room” demanding greater say and the big boys (really the United States) sabotaging their own creation because they were no longer in complete control of the trade liberalization agenda and the WTO did not seem to be working for them. Washington’s rush to recast the “Asia Pacific” as the “Indo-Pacific”, riffing off the original Japanese idea, was driven to a large extent by spite – the desire to counter or contain China, which had emerged as an economic and strategic rival to the US in the region and was busy building a network of alliances and partnerships.
Like it or not, the “Indo-Pacific” concept has been widely adopted with over a dozen countries and some key international organizations adopting Indo-Pacific strategies, most identifying China’s rise as a motivation. In their recent analysis of the Indo-Pacific construct in Global Asia, Asia specialists Paul Evans and Cheng-Chwee Kuik argue that, underlying to the nomenclature shift are structural changes: “If the Asia-Pacific rested on unilateral American dominance, an optimistic view about the prospects of convergence around a Western-defined system and middle power leadership, the Indo-Pacific rests on a new foundation of dynamic multipolarity, deep anxiety about the future of US-China relations and great power assertiveness.”[8]
That may be the hope but the reality is that the Indo-Pacific idea is tainted by the exclusion motive. As Evans and Kuik acknowledge, “realists are correct that the transition from the Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific is never likely to be complete because the one major country excluded and targeted, China, is too powerful to disappear, even if it is not powerful enough or attractive enough to create an alternative hegemony.” The publishing of an Indo-Pacific strategy has seemed to be a requirement for US alignment or at least buying into the “China-as-threat” narrative. But it is not a positive stance, hardly flattering to alternative partners in the region, who would think that they are suddenly much more attractive because their suitor’s relationship with China has soured.
A more productive and perhaps fruitful geopolitical framing might be the idea of Eurasia. The regard for “Eurasia” as a useful concept in international affairs discourse has been undermined to some extent by the lingering perception that the study of Eurasia is confined to understanding the regions that had been part of the Soviet Union and their economies, societies and cultures or the areas where the continents of Europe and Asia meet.[9] But this narrow view denies the geographical fact that Europe and continental or mainland Asia are a single land mass that the Silk Roads ancient and present have proven are well and truly connectable and connected. Eurasia is physiographically a single continent – a “supercontinent”, as Asian studies scholar Kent Calder put it.[10]
“Eurasia is home to most of the world’s politically assertive and dynamic states,” US strategic thinker Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1997. “All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world’s most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world’s overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones… Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America’s.”[11]
What makes Eurasia a more attractive frame for understanding the evolving world order and the “new” geopolitics is that the portmanteau itself evokes the idea of a hinge, a pivot (albeit a very large one) which links East and West, Eastern and Western civilizations. Eurasia also defuses the false idea of separate oceans (there really is only one ocean) and de-emphasizes the idea of ruling the waves as the main way to project of power in favor of greater consideration for the connectivity and tactical advantages offered by this vast landmass. Indeed, the growing strategic importance of the Middle East and Central Asia and the increasing linkages of Europe and Asia to Africa all underscore the value of taking a Eurasian perspective.
Eurasia as a geopolitical framing is arguably more constructive than either Asia Pacific or Indo-Pacific – and it is not politically or ideologically charged, though etymologically the word does derive from a Western perspective. Eurasia is not just about the post-Soviet republics, the cauldron zones where Europe and Asia and their cultures collide and mix. It is the pivotal hinge region of the global economy and the evolving world order – how Europe, Central Asia, India, ASEAN and other players from Scandinavia to the South Pacific exercise their agency, the agency they have, will determine not just the balance of power in the international order but that order’s very operating system.
[1] The White House. (October 5, 2015) “Statement by the President on the Trans-Pacific Partnership”, Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, Washington, DC, USA.
[2] The White House. (September 10, 2023) “FACT SHEET: President Joseph R Biden and General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong Announce the US-Vietnam Comprehensive Strategic Partnership”, Briefing Room, The White House, Washington, DC, USA.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/09/10/fact-sheet-president-joseph-r-biden-and-general-secretary-nguyen-phu-trong-announce-the-u-s-vietnam-comprehensive-strategic-partnership/
[3] Sullivan, Jake. (September 11, 2021) “2021 Lowy Lecture”, Lowy Institute, Sydney, Australia.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/2021-lowy-lecture-jake-sullivan
[4] Brooks, Stephen G; and Wohlforth, William C. (May/June 2023) “The Myth of Multipolarity: American Power’s Staying Power”, Foreign Affairs, vol 102, no. 3, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY, USA.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/china-multipolarity-myth
[5] ASEAN Secretariat. (2020) “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific”, ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta, Indonesia.
[6] Acharya, Amitav. (July 29, 2019) “Understanding the Emerging Multiplex World Order”, Global Governance Institute, University College London, London, UK.
https://multiplexworld.com/author/aacharya2014/page/2/
[7] Mead, Walter Russell. (May/June 2014) “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers”, Foreign Affairs, vol 93, no. 3, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY, USA.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483407?seq=2
[8] Evans, Paul; and Kuik, Cheng-Chwee. (September 2023) “Middle-Power Agency in an Indo-Pacific Era”, GlobalAsia, vol 18, no. 3, The East Asia Foundation, Seoul, Korea.
[9] Gleason, Abbott. (January 2010) “Eurasia: What is It? Is it?, Journal of Eurasian Studies, vol 1, pp 26-32, SAGE Publishing, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232415551_Eurasia_What_is_it_Is_it
[10] Calder, Kent E. (2019) Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, USA.
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=30855
[11] Bzezinski, Zbigniew. (September 1, 1997) “A Geostrategy for Eurasia”, Foreign Affairs, vol 76, no. 5, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, NY, USA.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1997-09-01/geostrategy-eurasia