The era of the superpower is over. The new missile and drone technologies have made naval dominance impossible and ended the ability to devastate relatively advanced nations without them being able to shoot back. There is no power in the world that has the capabilities and might of the old USSR and the USA from 1945 to 2010 or so.
We have three great powers: China, the US and Russia.
There are regional powers: Brazil and Iran and the EU and Turkey and Japan and even India, which punches way below its population numbers.
But even a backwards, bombed to hell country like Yemen can defy America’s hold on the seas.
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The EU is particularly amusing, in that they could have been one of the great powers, but over and over again chose austerity, contraction and vassalage to America. The ship is sailing out of port, it’s theoretically possible they could turn it around, but politically impossible. Their day: indeed, their centuries, are done. Pathetic.
This is going to be a fair different and more constrained world. There will be more wars and revolutions. Great Powers will actually have to seriously compete for the allegiance of important minor powers, though China’s been doing this for a couple decades now, offering huge benefits compared to the US.
Russia’s getting in on the game. Where China offers development, Russia offers to fix your military problems for you, or at least make them manageable and to sell you oil and grain cheap.
America and its allies offer your elites membership in the club, in exchange for impoverishing or otherwise screwing over your own population. If you don’t do what they say, they lecture the hell out of you and try to sanction you into an early grave, if they don’t launch a coup or use you as a cat’s paw in a war.
If America wants to compete, it’s going to have to start offering some deals that don’t suck.
Nations will be more free to act as they choose than they have been in, literally, centuries. Since they were forced into unnatural shapes and relations by the great powers and superpowers, this will lead to significant changes, especially in places where ridiculous borders were drawn which ignored geography and ethnicity. (This is most true in Africa, but not only there.)
But the most important thing is simply that the age of the military colossus is over. China is the new industrial colossus, but climate change and environmental collapse is likely to spike that before they reach their full growth.
Welcome to the post-European Age.