February 16, 2025
N.S. Lyons:
For China, the newfound unity of this bloc, and its persistent economic and military dominance, is the greatest of all possible problems. It could be a decade or more (if ever) before China and the shabby band of developing countries that could be called its own bloc of pseudo-allies (currently representing at most maybe around 25% of global GDP) can close the economic gap. That really only leaves China with one option in the near term: to somehow split the developed countries of The Sixty Percent, convincing a sizeable part to either join Team China or at least abandon Washington and commit to neutrality. And that means that -- to the certain exasperation of all those young Asianists and others who thought we must surely by now be past such anachronisms -- the future of the geopolitical balance now once again fundamentally hinges on Europe.
Given recent developments re Ukraine and J.D. Vance’s speech at Munich, I finally read this 18,000-word beast from 2022. It’s interesting to see what assumptions he made back then about inexorable global homogenization and how they’ve fared despite the best efforts of elites.