The term “Eurasia” may sound unfamiliar to American ears in the modern age, but it was not always thus. It dates back to the late-19th century, when geographers and strategists began to think of the two neighboring continents as a single unified theater. By the interwar years, many intellectuals and military planners had come to understand that Eurasia was critical to the global balance of power. There was good reason that the British polymath Halford Mackinder called this vast expanse of land—extending from littoral Asia in the east to the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles in the west—“the world island.”
However archaic the term might sound today, one way or another it’s poised to make a comeback. Eurasia is not merely where the bulk of the world’s population lives and its economic activity occurs. It is also the locus of global competition and conflict, actual and potential, just as it has been since the birth of the modern world. In the 20th century, imperial Japan, Germany (twice), and the Soviet Union pursued world domination by first seizing a commanding position in the world’s strategic core. Today, a new coalition of great powers seeks to overturn the post–Cold War Eurasian settlement that the United States and its allies imposed after 1990.
In a riveting new book, The Eurasian Century, Hal Brands offers a perfectly timed diagnosis of the mega-region that has long been the world’s strategic hinge and the cockpit of global rivalry. The irrepressible author has written nearly a dozen books on geopolitics, history, and international relations. A professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Brands makes a compelling argument that we are living in a long and violent Eurasian century. To a degree that few appreciate today, the struggle for mastery over the Eurasian landmass and the waters around it has made the modern world what it is, and it remains “the defining feature of global politics.”
The Eurasian Century accomplishes several important tasks. First, it reacquaints readers with the penetrating observations of Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Nicholas Spykman, and other theorists who sought to determine how free societies could thrive in a world where competition was becoming fiercer and tyranny more frightful. It also shows how the balance of power in Eurasia was the great question that forced the United States into successive world wars and the Cold War.
These insights are not merely of historical interest. Brands sheds light on how an aggressive autocracy or alliance of autocracies could bring the world as we know it to a screeching halt. If such a hegemonic force “became prominent within Eurasia,” Brands prudently speculates, “it could fundamentally reshape world order and coerce its rivals around the globe.” Even if it “could not physically conquer the surviving overseas democracies, it could force them into such continual, piercing insecurity that they might struggle to preserve their safety and their freedoms simultaneously.” This may strike some readers as melodramatic, but it isn’t. If powerful and malevolent regimes take control of key strategic areas and choke points, Brands notes, “life would become awful for those they ruled—and precarious even for a mighty America an ocean away.”
If this argument sounds familiar, it’s because it was deployed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the eve of America’s ascent to superpower status. To justify his interventionist policies in the late 1930s, Roosevelt pointed not to any direct threat to American security, but to the potential destruction of the liberal world beyond American borders. In his 1937 “quarantine speech,” for instance, Roosevelt called for moral and material solidarity with democracies confronting “the bandit nations.” He declared the United States the “arsenal of democracy.” A few years later, in 1940, he elaborated that “the future world will be a shabby and dangerous place to live in … if it is ruled by force in the hands of a few.”
At a time of mounting great-power competition, Americans would be wise to refresh their memories about Eurasia being “a single field of operation” and to relearn the nature of their role and responsibilities in that crucible. In this regard, The Eurasian Century is superior to some recent works on the subject, including Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography, since, without succumbing to Kaplan’s pronounced fatalism, it recognizes that history and geography are symbiotic.
Brands has written a highly readable survey of the crucial strategic regions of the earth that are not models of “self-regulating stability” (as many Westerners appear to believe) but rather “incubators of aggression.” No other book known to this reviewer provides a more searching examination of the growing battle between what Walter Russell Mead has called the “Central Powers” and the “Maritime Powers.” For years, the revisionist powers have made impressive geopolitical gains in the Eurasian Rimland, primarily due to the confusion of American strategy and the reticence of American power.
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By now it’s clear that the revisionist coalition of Russia, China, and Iran is eager to redefine the geopolitical norms in Eurasia. This should not come as any surprise. The postwar order reflects the liberal character of its chief architects. Its prevailing norms—democracy, free market capitalism, and respect for human rights—hardly reflect the principles or preferences of autocratic regimes in Eurasia or anywhere else. Under American auspices, then, liberalism—a hostile foreign ideology to these regimes—has become the dominant worldview in the international system. But it is not the kind of system the revisionist powers want. It is not the kind of system they would ever fight for. Indeed, it is the system they are now fighting against.
Whatever the historical and geopolitical differences between these dissatisfied regimes, none can be counted as a liberal democracy. All seek to create a very different global order more receptive to their interests. Moscow seeks to resurrect a world where colonial powers are permitted to carve out a capacious sphere of interest in their “near abroad” without undue meddling from other great powers. Beijing seeks to discredit and overthrow mo-dern legal and political principles—“limited sovereignty,” “responsibility to protect,” etc.—that undermine its rule. Tehran seeks to be unencumbered in its quest for nuclear weaponry to ward off enemies of the Islamic republic, foreign and domestic.
Of the revisionist powers, the challenge from Iran is at this moment the least severe. After the Iran nuclear deal effectively recognized it as a Middle Eastern great power, the Islamic republic sustained two heavy blows. The first was its strategic overreach in frontally challenging Israel via its proxy and surrogate forces. After Hamas’s savage invasion on October 7, Tehran’s scheme of surrounding the Jewish state with a “ring of fire” backfired dramatically. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s own Revolutionary Guard Corps have all suffered terrible losses in the war they initiated. The fall of its client regime in Damascus is the surest proof of the meltdown of its Islamist imperium. The second recent blow to the clerical regime in Tehran was the eviction of Democrats from the White House. Both the Obama and Biden administrations shared an instinct to acquiesce to the mullahs’ attempt to dominate the Fertile Crescent in exchange for promises to end their nuclear program. Such passivity should now be over.
Russia presents a more serious threat to the security of Eurasia. Despite Western sanctions after the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, Russia has weathered the economic shocks and has not relented in its “special military operation.” After Syrian rebels gained the upper hand against the Assad regime late last year, Russia lost the air and naval bases that it had secured during the Syrian rebellion. But Russia’s dream of a Eurasian empire hinges on the fate of Ukraine, where Russia has failed to bring down the government in Kyiv but remains in possession of nearly a quarter of Ukrainian territory. Without absorbing Ukraine, Russia will be in no position to threaten the rest of Europe. Thus, bringing an end to the war must not occur before assuring the genuine independence of Ukraine and deterring future aggression. This will require the West to issue credible security guarantees, likely with European troops stationed indefinitely on Ukrainian soil.
The greatest danger of all comes from China, which has long aspired to lay the foundation of a hegemonic Middle Kingdom. In recent years, Beijing has expanded its power in the Far East despite America’s oft-discussed “pivot” to the region. After adopting a quiet strategy in its neighborhood—summarized by Deng Xiaoping’s “peaceful rise” formula—China has begun to flex its muscles by fortifying strategic islands in the South China Sea, eviscerating the freedom and sovereignty of Hong Kong, and menacing Taiwan, a democracy of 23 million with only the desire to determine their own destiny. For the Chinese mainland, to subdue Taiwan would mark the end of American hegemony in the Pacific Rim.
Against this concerted challenge to the liberal order, a coterie of “realists” in the Trump orbit holds that the United States can safely withdraw from most European and all but a handful of Middle Eastern issues while managing to safeguard its vital interests. Some Republican strategists have even made their peace with the ascendancy of a Chinese empire. But most suggest that a policy of “offshore balancing” in Europe and the Middle East permits greater focus on the main issue: the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Against this persistent temptation to pivot to the east, Brands adamantly insists on regarding Eurasia as a “coherent whole.” Though he readily grants that an Asia bereft of U.S. military protection would find itself “at China’s mercy,” he maintains that America’s allies in Europe and the Middle East “would struggle to stop their rivals without the backing, reassurance, and coalition management Washington provides.” The logical consequence of U.S. retrenchment in either theater would be a return to ferocious geopolitical rivalry and war. Spykman’s words continue to hold true: “No great state” can treat the world’s continents as “water-tight compartments.”
The U.S. must shore up its military strength to deter or defeat hostile measures from the revisionist powers. As Brands makes clear, Eurasia is “the fulcrum of world order,” where the future of freedom will be decided. Whichever country or alliance dominates its vital regions will have “unmatched resources, wealth, and global reach.” It is unnerving that, more than at any time in the postwar era, Eurasia is now in real danger of falling to an axis of autocracies. This outcome is hardly inevitable, but neither U.S. political party has covered itself in glory to head off such a tragic occurrence. By neglecting America’s defenses, Democrats have already provoked wars of conquest in Europe and the Middle East. Meanwhile, by neglecting America’s alliances, Republicans in the age of Trump have undermined the sources of American power. Without giving into determinism, Brands understands that just as history did not follow a predetermined arc, today’s contests will be decided above all by the “quality of our leaders and the choices they make.”
In his second inaugural address, President Trump proclaimed the birth of a “new golden age.” If we are not careful, the hue of an Eurasian century will be much darker and drenched in blood. Addressing the dangers and opportunities of this new era will require deft and sophisticated statecraft, and policymakers will not find a better guide than Brands’s latest work. It is a blueprint to ensure that the century will remain an American century.
Photo: Getty Images
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