In the fall of 2018 I read Bruno Macaes for the first time. I wrote a review of his book The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order on the old blog. It’s worth resurfacing on the new blog…as what is old is new again. And what was new is forgotten a bit already.
Originally posted December of 2018 on the Chartwell West Blog.
Added to the growing list of things about the world I assumed over the last few years that were either incomplete or plainly incorrect, is the direction of history and the future of the world order. Bruno Maceas' 2018 book The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order helps a bit with both. Published this past January, it's the best book I read this year.
Maceas, a Portuguese political strategist who served as the Secretary of State for European Affairs in Portugal during the height of the European financial crisis, had a front row seat as the cracks in the European Union. Perhaps visible to critics but seamless to those of us swept up in the globalist strain, those gaps began to widen in the face of the EU's first global financial crisis. Clearly informed by experience, he has an interesting perspective as to the order of things.
What's significant to me as an American is that Macaes wrote a book about the world order that does not include, in fact even scarcely mentions, America. Moreover, the exclusion is not to be taken as a criticism or an indictment of America's future, but a shift in focus to somewhere else; somewhere more dynamic. The books is a search for the middle of the world if we were simply not allowed to say anymore that it was universally understood to be the West.
The book is beautiful. The story is told through a journey over land from the ends of the Eurasian super continent. As a veteran of America's 21st century wars in Middle East and Afghanistan, my eyes and energy have been focused elsewhere. So Macaes journey took me to places I couldn't find on a map that I knew nothing about. He believes they will be at the center of our next hundred years of the world's economic and political development. The journey opens the door, lets you in and invites you to consider that perhaps, you've been thinking about shape of the world the wrong way.
Macaes doesn't believe that the world is heading in a singular direction. He believes that Fukuyama's end of history, the place where all civilizations meet in democratic liberal hegemony, is not a thing. Instead, the world is entering into a different phase of integrated competition, where the tracks laid down by globalism—trade, capital flows, technology, the internet, social media—all remain in place as a new sort of battle ground. The wars of the future will be fought within those domains. And the spoils will not be of territory or the subjugation of others, but through dominance of regional influence and markets.
Within this definition of future conflict, the division of states no longer lives along the fault lines of East and West. But instead along the delineation of modern or traditional. In a world where the line of demarcation from Europe to Asia was not one of geography but instead a difference in modernization of technology and culture, when modernization is uniform, so is the dawn of one unbroken region; Eurasia.
Russia, China, India and the EU all will engage in a grand struggle of integrated competition for dominance. Somewhere, America will fit in. But it will not be the center of the world. Nor will Europe. Nor China. Where exactly, is the stated purpose of the quest. The unstated purpose reads, at least in some part, that the future we will be many things. One happy global family is not one of them. And it's time to start figuring out where that struggle will play out. And by which rules it will be played by.
This is the diagnosis Trump-ism got right. This was the illness Obama/Clinton and the other American Neo-Liberals ignored in hopes that the world simply moved towards the destination they believed it would. Like the medieval physician who knew the symptoms but not the cause of the disease, the cultural leaches and blood letting Trump-ism applies to modern America are more likely to kill the patient than the disease itself. And so it’s hard for an American to see exactly how we’ll enter into the future world order; sick and distressed? We’ll find out eventually.
Which brings me back full circle in the journey of ideas Bruno Macaes started me down. The Dawn of Eurasia paints a plausible and beautifully described picture of a new world order. One that, based on current events, cultural trajectory, economic growth and population demographics seems nearly certain. A future of integrated competition is upon us. Trade wars, cyber espionage and democratic meddling are here now. And they're not going away.
Perhaps we can take some solace in the fact that the objectives of World War III will likely be to win a trade war instead of Nuclear Holocaust.
As an American, the cautionary signal is in the wind though. In a world where the powers of the future don't want to join our club and simply behave themselves in order to gain the good graces of the founding member of the liberal democratic fraternity, we need to figure out how to insist on effective execution of our state responsibilities; a task difficult to envision with existing management.
Bruno Macaes has given us a different thought to think and delivered it to us from places most of us have never thought about. In understanding the world of the future, or at least understanding the rules in which the game will be played, one would do well to start with The Dawn of Eurasia.