by Rick Rozoff
The first decade of what more than a generation ago was predicted to be the Asian Century is winding down, marking ten years since the end of the American Century.
China overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy during the second financial quarter of this year and three-quarters of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) nations, the world's largest emerging economies, are entirely or primarily in Asia. During its first heads of state summit in Russia last year, BRIC "urged the creation of a new global financial security system." [1] At the time its members accounted for 15 percent of the global economy and 42 percent of international currency reserves [2] even after the advent of the U.S.-triggered world financial crisis in 2008.
60 percent of humanity lives in Asia and the continent is home to several of the fastest growing economies in the world.
Demographics and economics alike assure a preeminent role for Asia in any natural - which is to say peaceful - course of development.
Asia is in fact part of a broader land mass, Eurasia, which in turn is inextricably connected to the rest of what over a century ago British geographer Halford Mackinder called the World Island: Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The last has recently recorded a population exceeding a billion, making it the second most populous continent.
The Asia-Europe-Africa grouping contains the overwhelming majority of the human race, perhaps as many as 5.6 billion of the world's 6.8 billion inhabitants. The entire Western Hemisphere, by contrast, has a population under one billion and Oceania's numbers are negligible.
But for 500 years a small number of nations in the global West and North, a limited contingent of countries that collectively calls itself
the North Atlantic community, has dominated most of the world.
With the demise in 1991 of an eastern power that for decades had presented them with the greatest challenge in their history, the Soviet Union, the major Western states, a coalition of all the main past colonial empires and the new American global superpower united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance, viewed the entire world as being ripe for penetration and dominance, starting with the former Eastern European socialist bloc and the territories of the former Soviet Union.