EURASIA - THE 21st CENTURY SUPER CONTINENT

Eurasia

The Eurasian Super Continent is the world’s largest and most central continent. The world’s two most populous nations, China and India are located in Eurasia as is Russia which occupies the greatest landmass of any nation on earth, straddling Eurasia from east to west. The Caspian Sea lies at the heart of Eurasia, surrounded by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia and Iran. It is a region rich in oil and gas reserves. The Eurasian Super Continent has emerged as the stage for different and conflicting political ideologies. Europe occupies the west of the Super Continent. The geopolitical question of our time is about how Europe and Asia will connect.

The Eurasian “Heartland” was identified more than a century ago by Halford Mackinder who said that whichever state controlled Central Asia would be the dominant world power and it was Napoleon who said, “Let China sleep because when China awakes the world will shake”. Competition for the “world Island” is well underway and it is now led by China.

Infrastructure

The Transcontinental Railway which links America’s east and west coasts reduced travel time from six months to only two weeks. The Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and cuts about 12,000Km off the distance between New York and San Francisco by eliminating the need to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the 21^st Century equivalent of those 19^th-century infrastructure projects and the BRI is proving to be the catalyst for an explosively growing Eurasian Super Continent. The BRI entails a vast development of ports, superhighways, high-speed railways, airports, and pipelines linking the Eurasian region and beyond. One hundred and fifty two nations, including eighteen from Europe have signed up to participate in the BRI.  New financial institutions will provide much of the capital for the estimated US$26 trillion of infrastructural investment over the period to 2030.

China’s high speed rail network now reaches almost 50,000km and the infrastructure of Xinjiang province in China’s west (an area roughly four times the size of California) is being transformed with high-speed railway lines, six lane expressways and massive airports. Kashgar, in Xinjiang’s west is close to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and is being positioned as the transport hub for Central Asia.

America and China

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021, President Joe Biden launched his Build Back Better World (B3W), a vision for a collaborative global infrastructure initiative to provide an alternative to China’s BRI. However, the initiative encountered resistance from the Democratic Party, and Congress held back approval. Countries also required proof that this was a better alternative to the BRI. However, there was a failure to address questions of money, how the participants could work together, and how funding would be linked to these projects. This initiative soon faded away. In 2022, the White House announced the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, promising $600 billion over five years to provide poorer nations with an alternative to China’s “predatory lending ambitions”, but few nations showed any interest in this plan.

A headline in the Washington Post on 1 March 2021 read, “Biden Tells the World ‘America is Back’. The World is Not so Sure.” 

Since China embarked on Deng Xiaoping’s reforms after 1979 it has enjoyed 40 years of peace and unparalleled prosperity. China’s last foreign military intervention was a brief border war with Vietnam in 1979. However, between 1990 and 2016 its military spending grew tenfold and China has amassed weapons to keep US ships and planes at bay. Today, the PRC has the world’s largest Navy while China’s nuclear arsenal doubled between 2020 and 2023.

The rise of China has pulled the centre of gravity eastwards and Eurasia is becoming the epicentre of competition and conflict where two major wars are currently raging, one in the Middle East and the other in Ukraine. The risk of a third World War now threatens. What, one may ask has become of the clichés, “We shall remember them” and “They did not die in vain”? Hal Brands argues that the US must defeat the Axis powers before they gain unstoppable momentum because, if aggressive “autocracies” such as China become pre-eminent in Eurasia, this could fundamentally reshape world order. By Brands’ analysis, geopolitics, tempered by democracy is stark but seldom evil, but geopolitics with an autocratic bent is poison, pure and simple.[i]

Emerging Great Powers

Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping, China’s reform era was underway. 1989 was a major turning point. The Berlin Wall fell and two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Soviet Union out of existence. Beijing would ensure that similar actions would never be repeated in China. 

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, independent Islamic states emerged to the west of Xinjiang – Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. Xinjiang became the conduit into Central Asia.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) was founded in June 2001. Its current members are India, China, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Belarus. It also has numerous dialogue partners. BRICS was founded in 2009 and currently comprises 11 member nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, the BRICS partner countries in waiting are Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

In 1997 Russia and China declared their opposition to the United States as the dominant global power. The Russia/China Treaty of good neighbourliness and cooperation was signed in 2001 and was renewed in 2021. Russia and China commenced joint military exercises in 2005. The Russia-China relationship is based on the principles of absolute sovereignty of each nation-state and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. In February 2022 Russia and China declared their relationship to be based on “friendship without limits”.

Putin views the West as being determined to contain Russia with the eastward expansion of NATO. In 2012 Putin announced his pivot to the east and Russia’s embrace of the West ended in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea which led to Russia being permanently expelled from the G8.

With China’s ascendancy, a new Great Game in Eurasia is in play, one which will profoundly impact the global order. Based on current trends, China will control the Eurasian Heartland and potentially become the dominant global power.

The 21^st Century

By 2020 Washington had formed a consensus that China’s rise had to be resisted. However, America’s unipolar moment had by then become a relic of a previous age. The  21^st century  will reflect the end of the era of Western domination. With the rise of China and the decline of US influence, multipolarity has returned.  According to Kishore Mahbubani “The Unipolar Moment that the United States enjoyed at the end of the Cold War is gone”.[ii]

China has emerged as the pre-eminent power in Asia and is now able to project power globally, in direct competition with the US. However, the US will continue to be a great power with the capacity to balance China but there are doubts about its willingness to continue providing global leadership. It’s national debt has reached stratospheric levels and there is little to suggest that the US will return to Eurasia to contest China in its Heartland. A time may arrive when the US is no longer prepared to guarantee Taiwan’s security. The European Union, although ambivalent, remains committed to cooperation and engagement with China and, unlike Australia it refuses, to be drawn into Washington’s great power rivalry with Beijing.

Australia has always relied for its security on the protection of a great power but the end of the US led order challenges this assumption, even as Australia remains in denial. There is an assumption in Australia of the continuing domination of US power in the region but this is due to a failure to recognise the extent to which the global order has changed. With the return of multipolarity, Australia faces a dystopian future with no good choices.

In 2013, China’s President Xi Jinping spoke of people of different races, beliefs, and cultural backgrounds sharing peace and development, while enjoying mutual benefits, cooperation, and incentives. With China becoming the dominant power in Eurasia and a global maritime power, its ascendancy over Eurasia raises questions of how best the liberal world needs to adjust.[iii]

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[i] The Eurasian Century by Hal Brands, 2025

[ii] The Asian 21^st Century, 2022

[iii] Great Game On, by Geoff Raby, 2024