America has wasted trillions of dollars on senseless wars while China, Russia, and India have concentrated on internal development and building external links to their neighbors. Now, in many respects, they are ahead of the U.S. From Douglas Macgregor at lewrockwell.com:
History’s wheel is turning. China builds, India rises, BRICS surpasses the G7—while America punishes allies and empowers its Enemies.
In the West, the year 1492 is remembered for two episodes: Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and the fall of Granada, last stronghold of Moorish Spain. But its larger consequence was geopolitical: the compass needle swung westward, ushering in a centuries long reversal in global fortunes.
Wealth that once streamed toward Asia turned into rivers feeding Europe’s ascent.
Silver, gold, sugar, and spices from the Americas acted like jet fuel. They powered science, industry, and empire. Spain, France, Britain, and the Netherlands—naval and commercial predators—rose on the tide, hollowing out the Ottoman world and diverting trade from India and China to the New World.
Today another hinge of history is swinging. Washington’s unspoken fear of a 21st century turn is no less dramatic: economic gravity shifts eastward, led by China and—critically—India.
Beijing’s gamble in the 1990s—to let capitalism breathe, to draw in foreign capital, and to pour trillions into domestic infrastructure—proved as consequential as a century of US industrial growth.
The Belt and Road Initiative, worth more than $1 trillion, is less an infrastructure plan than a circulatory system of steel and concrete veins, designed to redirect the lifeblood of trade back across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Pingback: Global Wealth and Power Are Pivoting to the East, by Douglas Macgregor — Der Friedensstifter