In a widely debated recent article in Bloomberg, historian Niall Ferguson forecasts the end of Pax Americana. The article has enraged Americans on both right and left even as the United States prepares to face one of the most polarised presidential elections in its history.
Ferguson is a British historian who has long been an apologist for colonialism. He has lived in the US for years and is regarded by his students at Harvard University (where he is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) as something of an oracle.
His Bloomberg piece is an attempt to downplay his reputation as an imperial apologist by adopting a more neutral historical tone on the interplay of great power politics.
Ferguson writes: “I was not in principle against a Pax Americana in succession to Pax Britannica of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I took (and still hold) the now heretical position that most history is the history of empires; that no empire is without its injustices and cruelties; but that the English-speaking empires were, in net terms, preferable for the world to the plausible alternatives, then and now.”
In other words, Ferguson believes English colonists were cruel, but less cruel than French, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish colonists.
Ferguson writes that the Ukraine and Gaza wars will hasten the demise of Pax Americana just as the two World Wars in the 20th century ended Pax Britannica.
“Western sanctions have imposed costs on Russia’s economy,” he writes. “Yet they have failed to prevent Russia’s war machine growing more powerful. Thanks to a concerted effort to increase arms production — with factories working multiple shifts and the labour market at full stretch — Russia now enjoys a five-to-one artillery advantage. Granted, the insistence of Russian commanders on frontal assaults reduces the impact of this ratio, but it still bodes ill for Ukraine.”
In order not to unduly upset his American audience, Ferguson glosses over the Gaza war. All that he has to say on the subject is this: “The fate of… Israel… hangs in balance.” He adds blandly: “Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched their bloody rampage into Israel…”
Not a word on Palestinian civilian deaths. That wouldn’t go down well with his US academic constituency. Criticism of the Israel assault on Gaza (which has killed over 23,000 Palestinian civilians, including an estimated 9,000 women and children), would have enraged his American audience further.
Ferguson knows the fate of the presidents of Harvard University (Dr Claudine Gay) and the University of Pennsylvania (Elizabeth Magill) who did not condemn Hamas unequivocally at a Congressional hearing and were forced to resign.
After Pax Americana?
What is disappointing about Ferguson’s article is the absence of analysis on which Great Power formulation could be a successor to Pax Americana.
For three centuries, from the 1600s to the 1900s, Europe colonised the rest of the world. Spain and Portugal carved out South America between them. France occupied North Africa and Indo-China. The Dutch took Indonesia. The British took whatever was left.
Not satisfied with colonial genocide (of Aborigines in Australia and Native Americans in North America) and the brutal transatlantic slave trade from Africa to America, the leading powers of Europe met in Berlin in 1884-85 to carve out the rest of Africa among themselves.
Britain took east, south and west Africa, France took north-west Africa, Belgium took Congo, Germany took Namibia and Portugal took two slices on Africa’s south-west and south-east coasts.
Africa thus suffered twice over in 300 years: first losing their most able-bodied men to the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to Europe’s American colonies; and then, in the late 19th century, losing their land, freedom and mineral wealth to the same former European slave traders.
Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and other colonial apologists skirt around these historical colonial crimes that carried on well into the 20th century when the world was fighting Nazi fascism. It was all in the same era.
But if Pax Americana is on its last legs, as Ferguson argues, what will replace it? In recent year-end global debates organised by Western academic institutions and media, the possibility of a future multipolar world was roundly rejected. America and its democratic allies will still run the world was the consensus.
That consensus is flawed. In the second quarter of the 21st century, from 2025 to 2050, three poles will emerge. One, the US-led coalition of democracies. Two, the China-Russia axis allied to Iran and North Korea. Three, a group comprising sovereign nations in Africa, South America and Asia led by India, the largest economic and military power among them.
Ferguson hints at how the axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea synchronised their assaults on Western interests.
“Pax Americana,” he writes, “faced a well-coordinated challenge from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea in the early 2020s. The first move was the invasion of Ukraine. The second was the war of Iran’s proxies against Israel. The third will most likely be a Chinese challenge to American primacy in the Indo-Pacific, perhaps — if Xi Jinping is bold — a blockade of Taiwan.”
Pax Sinica and Pax Indica?
Pax Britannica morphed smoothly into Pax Americana in the early 1900s. There was a common cultural and racial heritage. The changeover to Pax Sinica or Pax Indica will not be as easy.
Both China and India were advanced civilisations when European tribes of Saxons, Vikings and Slavs were still fighting one another in bloody wars across the forests of Europe.
Colonisation and transatlantic slavery transformed Europe even as the age of “enlightenment” dawned. The Industrial Revolution was fuelled by captive new markets and captured manpower.
Meanwhile, India and China had fallen into a stupor, their ancient civilisations invaded by foreigners in search of land and lucre, tea and opium.
Whatever replaces Pax Americana in the next 25 years will lead to more balanced global power sharing between geographies and cultures. India, China and a racially transformed, coloured-majority America will be the three leading poles of counter-balancing power.
An article in China’s state-run daily newspaper Global Times on January 2, 2024, by Zhang Jiadong, director of the Center for South Asian Studies at Fudan University, noted pointedly that “India has rapidly shifted towards a great power strategy. It is becoming a pole in the multipolar world. India is a major power.”
The year 2024 will be seen historically as India’s year of reckoning at the start of a new era in great power politics.
The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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