There has been considerable speculation that the rise of China and the developing world spells the end of US global hegemony. It can certainly be seen in the aggregate economic statistics.
In the early 1990s, America, Europe and Japan accounted for about 90 per cent of world GDP. Now, they account for less than half.
The BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and other developing nations have grown steadily (in China's case spectacularly) while Europe has stagnated for at least a decade, America has only sputtered at best, and Japan has been in, or close to, recession for a quarter of a century.
But the fading hegemons, especially America, are not about to cede power easily. The decline in economic dominance has led to what could be described as — in a metaphorical rather than geographical sense — a growing split between the East and the West (the West being America, Europe and, in this metaphorical sense, Japan; the East being the BRICs).
The contest between East and West can be detected in many aspects of geo-strategy, especially the military aggression in Central Asia. But let us look at two economic developments.
The geopolitics of gas and oil
As Forbes commented: 'The real headline here is that there is an organised effort to squeeze Russian energy firms out of Europe.'
In the summer of 2011, just weeks after civil war broke out in Syria, the Tehran Times released a report outlining Iranian plans to export natural gas to Europe through a pipeline that would traverse Iraq and Syria. It would have been the largest gas pipeline in the Middle East, going from Iran's gas-rich South Pars field to the Mediterranean coastline in Lebanon, then to an underwater pipeline into Europe.
Earlier, there had been a proposed Qatar-Turkey pipeline, with one proposed route going through Syria. This was rejected by Syria's leader Bashar al-Assad because, according to an Agence France-Presse report, he wanted to 'protect the interests of his Russian ally'.
Russia's gas supplies to Europe through the Ukraine, linking the East to the West, have been problematic for years, and supplies were interrupted entirely after the upheavals in the Ukraine.
The Russian response was to propose an alternative gas pipeline across the Black Sea directly into Europe, called the South Stream, but this was cancelled when Bulgaria did not cooperate, allegedly under US pressure, according to Russian president Vladimir Putin. A replacement pipeline, called the Blue Stream, was proposed