The opening years of the present century saw a world running scared of an over-mighty America. The organising narrative of its second decade will be diminished US power.
It seems an age since Germany’s Gerhard Schröder and France’s Jacques Chirac held hands with Russia’s Vladimir Putin as champions of a multipolar world to constrain the US. In an important sense they have got what they wished for. The awkwardness is that the big shifts in global power have been about a hobbled America and a rising Asia rather than a resurgent Europe. The old continent is still trundling down the road to geopolitical irrelevance.
The then German chancellor and French president were not alone in worrying about the US “hyper-puissance”. One of the reasons that Tony Blair was so determined to get close to George W. Bush was that he thought American unilateralism threatened to break up the postwar multilateral order. That anyway is what Mr Blair told me at the time.