The New Silk Roads
...trashy protests, the black earth of Donbas, and the big western deflation...
A few summers ago, while lounging around the Munich Airport waiting for a flight to Reykjavik, I bought a book: “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World,” by Peter Frankopan. Frankopan is a senior fellow at Oxford University, and has written a convincing reassessment of world history. It is also a poignant and extraordinarily well-considered forecast of our possible future as a broader, Western culture.
It’s a good enough read that, while spending the weekend moving horse manure from one spot to another on one of the last American-made tractors, I kept coming back to Frankopan’s ultimate conclusion: that what we are witnessing today, in the realms of business and geo-politics and the obvious confusion and impotence of Western foreign policy, is a dramatic shift in the center of gravity, a return of power to the places it resided for thousands of years — the ancient kingdoms and cultures along the old Silk Roads.
From China to Ukraine, from Russia to Iran, from Uzbekistan to Kygyrzstan, a new center of power, anchored by the availability and abundance of natural resources, the home-grown ability and willingness to exploit them — and with a military parity with the global powers not seen since the collapse of the Ottomans — is poised to reassert itself.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Craig Rullman on Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.