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Human Events
Facing a
Changing World Balance, Obama Makes Odd Choices
Michael Barone
Friday Jun 26, 2015
Is the world back to where it was around the year 1800? One could come
to that conclusion after reading British historian John Darwin’s recent
book “After Tamerlane,” which assesses the rises and falls of empires
after the death in 1405 of the famously bloodthirsty Muslim Mongol
monarch.
From his Central Asian base, Tamerlane conquered Persia and lands from
Egypt to India, destroying captured cities and piling up enormous piles
of skulls. His fame has endured, from Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan
play to the first name of the slain Boston Marathon bomber.
Darwin’s perspective is worldwide, with as much emphasis on East Asia,
South Asia, the Islamic world and Russia as on Western Europe and its
American offshoots. He argues that from the 1400s to about 1800, China,
India and the Islamic world were about as economically and
technologically advanced and culturally sophisticated as that little
set of peninsulas at the western edge of the Eurasian land mass called
Europe.
In this view, European traders and armies played only a small, mostly
offshore role beyond their homelands. European dominance started not
with Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama but when the British East
India Company started conquering India and North American settlers
started moving west of the
Appalachians.
Today you could make the argument that the major regions of the world
are reverting to the balance that prevailed until the 19th century,
when Europe and the United States suddenly started dominating the world.
That’s certainly the view of China’s leaders and, as far as one can
judge, of the Chinese people. China was riven by civil wars and foreign
interventions between the Taiping Rebellion, which started in 1850, and
the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Its surging economic growth since then
and its increasing military might, in this view, have simply restored
it to the eminence it enjoyed at the time of the Qianlong emperor’s
death in 1799.
President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” is an attempt to cabin in
China’s power without establishing a NATO-like military alliance —
impossible because of distrust between Japan and its neighbors. The
Trans-Pacific trade agreement — made possible by Republican
congressional leaders’ smart maneuvering to outflank congressional
Democrats and pass trade promotion authority — is an attempt to bind
China’s pro-American neighbors together and limit China’s influence...
Read the rest of the article at Human Events
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