On Saturday I introduced my World History Tour of World Powers. This series will loosen up fixed ideas about the history of five great ‘civilization states’ (USA, China, Europe, India, and Russia) and take a detour through twentieth century modernism, the way our culture sees the ‘modern world’.

Each Saturday post will recommend a quality book to help you reimagine the world with history in this ‘time of monsters’.

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

Every Wednesday I will post a deep dive on the main ideas I draw from the book.

This week I dive into the three world history changes that struggle to be born, which I referred to in my Saturday post. These changes are:

• The Fall of American Primacy

• The Erosion of the Partition of Eurasia, and

• The Breakdown of the Ways of Seeing the ‘Post-1945’ World of the West.

Why Five Great Powers or Civilization States?

But first, before we dive into that topic, let me recap why I focus on these five Great Powers in my World History Tour.

Great Powers could also be called superpowers, or great states, or empires, or a recently adopted term of ‘civilisation states.’ I discussed the idea briefly in my Geopolitics and History Guide - “Imagine you are a Foreign Minister” here (part of the service for paid subscribers).

In that guide I set out seven sources of power in world politics:

• population

• territory

• economic resources

• military capability

• diplomatic influence

• cultural reach, and

• state capability.

Many analysts of geopolitics reduce these seven factors of power to a simpler formula. John Mearsheimer, for example, says power is determined by population and economy. But this approach is too reductive. It treats politics as a fight to be the “biggest guy on the block”. It misleads people about the many ways that states can find a source of power to pursue objectives, other than being the “global hegemon.”

For me the role of cultural reach, diplomatic influence and state capability are especially important, but often neglected. In many ways the idea of ‘civilization state’ is a way of reinstating these dimensions into thinking about world history. ‘Realist’ international relations thinking strips power down to money and guns. It over-simplifies the interpretation of the behaviour of states by treating them as unitary, rational actors in a death-match for power. It assumes all political institutions and cultures work in the same way, modelled on the USA. It misreads the map of the world by blinding itself to the complex ecosystem of power generated by these seven sources of power.

‘Realist’ international relations thinking has gone hand-in-glove with the Age of American Dominance and the Unipolar Illusion. The historical reality is that power is broadly and unpredictably distributed. As Dr S. Jaishankar has said the world’s natural state is multipolarity. World history is better interpreted with the plurality of the Mahabharata, rather than the dualism of Pilgrim’s Progress. For a while after 1945, the over-sized economic, military, and cultural power projection of the USA created an illusion of a simpler world, which could be treated as a two-dimensional chessboard of white and black, good and evil, freedom and tyranny, democracy and autocracy. But the historical ‘chessboard’ of geopolitics is multidimensional and multiplayer. There are no longer just two kings and two queens. The players need to adapt to new dynamics, which are as much defined by culture as economics.

Below the paywall I explain in more depth three big changes that I outlined in my Saturday post. I also offer my early assessment of American prospects under Donald Trump. How will he adapt to these three big changes.

This post is coming out the day after Trump’s 2025 inauguration. You might also like to check out my live stream on YouTube from 22 January that discussed Trump’s inauguration and prospects for the USA in a changed world.