by Parag Khanna
Other upheavals shook the Arab and Islamic domains. In early 1979, more than two thousand years of Persian monarchic tradition collapsed as the Ayatollah Khomeini ousted Iran’s Pahlavi monarchy and declared an Islamic Republic. Later that year, Sunni extremists held 100,000 worshippers hostage at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran began to push their respective strains of Islam outward, especially in Pakistan. In December 1979, amid political chaos in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union invaded the country to install a loyalist government, inspiring fierce resistance from Muslim nations backed by the United States. In 1980, motivated by fears that the Iranian Revolution would inspire Iraq’s own Shi’a majority, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, igniting a decade-long war in which Sunni Arab nations rallied behind Iraq while Iran sought to empower Shi’a movements elsewhere in the region such as the Hezbollah political party in Lebanon. As Iraq expended its energy on warfare and Iran consolidated its revolution in theocratic isolation, Saudi Arabia raised its profile as the world’s largest oil producer and a pillar of regional security, bringing together Arab Gulf monarchies in 1981 to form the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which aimed at achieving a single market, unified military force, and common currency with its petromonarchy neighbors. In 1985, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan formed the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) to promote greater cross-border trade and investment.
By 1985, the drain of the Afghanistan war and economic hardship at home forced the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev to undertake a concerted reform program toward greater political, economic, and social openness (perestroika and glasnost), establishing détente with the United States and abandoning its policy of overt interference in Communist Eastern European nations. Grassroots revolutions spread in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Soviet client states, each prevailing eventually. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself splintered into fifteen independent republics. The Cold War came to an end, sparking geopolitical and ideological realignments favorable to Asia’s return to center stage in the global order.
Asia Reawakens
As the Cold War ended, West Asia grabbed the spotlight away from Europe. In the aftermath of the 1988 cease-fire between Iran and Iraq, Iran was weakened by war, economic isolation, and the death of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomini, in 1989. Iraq sought to rebuild its strength by turning on its oil-rich southern ally Kuwait. Within months, the United States sent 200,000 troops to defend Saudi Arabia, which became the staging ground for the liberation of Kuwait and massive retaliation against Saddam Hussein’s forces. With US military preponderance established in the region, the United States pursued a policy of “dual containment” against both Iraq and Iran. Despite long-standing US efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian question, Israel’s relations with its Arab minority continued to deteriorate. In 1987, a Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israeli occupation began, led by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the pan-Arab Muslim Brotherhood, and a new Islamist faction called Hamas. The intifada calmed only five years later with the Oslo Accords, which set down principles for establishing Palestinian autonomy in the occupied West Bank (and the Gaza Strip).
Between 1990 and 1991, the Soviet Union’s collapse thrust new states into independence. Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus and Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan in Central Asia all came to be ruled by their Soviet-era party chiefs. But bereft of Soviet economic support, the reformulated Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) soon succumbed to conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan along with a civil war in Tajikistan. The victory of the Islamist mujahadeen in Afghanistan over Soviet forces just three years earlier had made the nearby Muslim societies of former Soviet Central Asia fertile ground for the rise of new militant groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and Hizb ut-Tahrir. The Soviet collapse also meant that China bordered more former Soviet republics in Central Asia than did Russia. China settled its outstanding boundary disputes with these Turkic neighbors and used its largest province, Xinjiang, as a portal to access the raw materials of Kazakhstan, investing in new pipelines stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Tarim basin. As a way of establishing regional coordination with the newly independent republics, it also founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 1996. Turkey also pressed for stronger ties with its Turkic brethren in Central Asia, but a succession of pragmatic Turkish prime ministers continued to focus on Europe, bringing Turkey into the European customs union in 1995 (though tensions with Greece flared over numerous island disputes such as Cyprus).
East Asian economic fortunes continued to shift with the 1990s expansion of globalization. As the Cold War backdrop faded, South Korea reopened diplomatic ties with its former foes China and Vietnam. China continued its rapid economic liberalization but maintained its centralized political regime, as evidenced by the brutal suppression of protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Western leaders such as US president Bill Clinton, elected in 1992, sought to sanction China for its suppression of political freedom, but Western commercial interests focused on accessing China’s massive customer base. Japan’s economy, meanwhile, suffered a “lost decade” due to the bursting of a speculative-asset bubble, creating space for South Korea’s family-run industrial conglomerates (chaebol) to leverage their government’s tax incentives and cheap credit to challenge Japan’s dominance in heavy industries and electronics.
East Asia’s geopolitical tensions heightened as China’s confidence grew. In 1995, fearing Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui’s independence aspirations, China mobilized forces in Fujian province and conducted missile tests and amphibious exercises in the Taiwan Strait, with the United States responding by sending two aircraft carrier battle groups to compel it to back down. China did, however, regain sovereignty over Hong Kong from Great Britain in 1997 and Macao from Portugal in 1999, marking the formal disappearance of colonialism in Asia. During the mid-1990s, China also became more assertive in the South China Sea, prompting ASEAN to establish the ASEAN Regional Forum to bring China, the United States, Russia, Australia, and other powers under one diplomatic umbrella. ASEAN also expanded to include Vietnam in 1995 and Laos and Myanmar in 1997. Despite the tense regional atmosphere, China and South Korea began a dialogue with isolated North Korea, which had lost its Soviet patron. However, despite pledges to maintain nuclear-free status on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea announced its withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Outside China, democratization was a major phenomenon in East Asia. In South Korea, former army general Roh Tae-woo won the country’s first direct presidential election in nearly two decades in 1988, remaining in office until 1993. In Taiwan as well, the incremental Kuomintang political reforms of the 1980s gave way to full-fledged electoral democracy in the 1990s. Political change came unevenly to Southeast Asia. The kleptocratic Marcos regime in the Philippines was toppled, replaced through democratic elections in 1986 by Corazon Aquino, who was hailed as the “mother of Asian democracy,” followed by Fidel Ramos in 1992. Southeast Asia’s export-led growth surge suffered a significant setback with the financial contagion of 1997, in which insufficient foreign currency reserves forced major devaluations and skyrocketing debt in Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and even mature economies such as South Korea. The collapse of local currencies laid bare the crony capitalism governing countries such as Indonesia. After three decades of rule, Suharto lost the backing of the army and resigned in 1998 amid waves of demonstrations.
The Soviet collapse was also a major precipitating factor in India’s 1990s shift toward an open economy. As the once significant trade volumes with the Soviet Union plummented and the Persian Gulf War caused a doubling of oil prices, India’s prime minister, P V. Narasimha Rao, and his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, set about reversing Nehru-era central planning, dismantling the notorious “license Raj” of regulations, and welcoming foreign investment, all of which contr
ibuted to lifting India above what had come to be known as the “Hindu rate of growth.” At the same time, an insurgency in Kashmir and intermittent conflict with Pakistan soured relations, with both countries covertly accelerating their nuclear weapons programs and conducting nuclear tests in 1998. Pakistan also faced instability on its western border as the chaos of Afghanistan’s civil war resulted in the radical Taliban movement’s rise from the refugee camps of Peshawar to the takeover of Afghanistan in 1994, after which it began to set its sights on spreading Islamist revolution by harboring terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.
In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, the region’s economic conditions recovered in the late 1990s and 2000s thanks to increased outsourcing of manufacturing by Western companies and accelerated trade integration. By 2004, Asia’s intraregional trade surpassed its trade with developed countries, insulating the region’s economies from the demand shock of the 2007 Western financial crisis. India, too, continued to grow despite lackluster economic reforms and began a “Look East” policy to capitalize on the rising opportunities for trade and strategic collaboration with East Asia. Meanwhile, Indians, Pakistanis, and other South Asians streamed in ever larger numbers to work in construction or government bureaucracies in the thriving petromonarchies of the Gulf region, whose economies surged on the back of a rapid growth in oil and gas exports to the fast-growing markets of East Asia. In the reverse direction, China expanded its infrastructure projects across Central Asia toward Iran, Pakistan, and the Gulf states.
This growth wave linking West and East Asia deepened despite the sudden turbulence emanating from the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 in response to the 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC. The United States toppled both the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in Iraq, but insurgencies led by local militias and Al Qaeda against the US-led occupation forces in Iraq and NATO forces in Afghanistan took a heavy toll, with Iraqi refugees crowding into neighboring Jordan and Syria. Meanwhile, a second Palestinian intifada against Israel broke out in 2000 and carried on through the death of PLO leader Yassir Arafat in 2004. In Iran, the strident Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president and pursued a confrontational path with the United States, including ramping up the country’s covert nuclear program. As tensions with Iran mounted, violence flared around the Arab region. In early 2011, food insecurity and public agitation against corruption fueled antigovernment riots across many Arab states. Civil war shattered Syria, with radical groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) spreading westward from Iraq and millions of refugees fleeing the country for Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Europe.
Most South and East Asian societies spent the 2010s focused on political stability and economic growth. China became the world’s largest economy (in PPP terms) in 2014, Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, launched a major stimulus and reform program, and South Korea became the first country to transition to national high-speed Internet. In 2014, India elected Narendra Modi prime minister for his agenda of infrastructure investment, streamlining of regulation, and national pride. In Southeast Asia, Myanmar’s military junta relaxed its grip on power and allowed Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the nation’s independence-era hero, to come out of house arrest and become a national political figure; a coup in Thailand against the kleptocratic Shinawatra family led again to military government, albeit focused on infrastructure and economic reform; and Vietnam took off as an industrial production center. The ASEAN nations of Southeast Asia overtook India in GDP and China as a recipient of foreign investment.
East Asia’s economic stability and integration helped mitigate significant geopolitical tensions over historically disputed territories such as the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands between China and Japan and the Spratly and Paracel islands between China and littoral Southeast Asian nations. Tensions escalated on the Korean Peninsula, however, as North Korea sank a South Korean warship in 2010 and conducted successive nuclear and ICBM missile tests in 2017. Pan-Asian integration nonetheless moved forward in large strides: almost all Asian countries joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), founded by China in 2014, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) summit in 2017, committing trillions of dollars of capital to greater commercial and cultural exchange across the full breadth of Asia—and beyond.
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Lessons of Asian History—for Asia and the World
The preceding account of Asian history will not be familiar to most readers, both because of the Eurocentric nature of Western historical narratives but also because Asia itself has been fragmented for so long that many societies have lost touch with the bonds that once tied them together. The purpose of such an abridged history, therefore, is both to establish a common understanding of Asia’s past and to reestablish Asia’s central role in global history: European empires became wealthy global powers because they subjugated Asia, and the United States’ global influence today hinges on its relevance in Asia. Perhaps most important, Asians can be reminded of what their collective historical achievements have been and consider what is possible in the future.
Seeing the world from the Asian point of view involves a range of both smaller and larger modifications. Nomenclature is one area that is easy to redress. The Turkic tribes and Sogdian peoples east of the Amu Darya River had richer identities than the Western term “Transoxiana” (“Land beyond the Oxus”) suggests. Western history also refers to Southeast Asia as “Indochina,” the French colonial term for the region, but Burmese and Khmer people would never refer to themselves merely as the intersection of two larger states. The term “Middle East,” too, is a useless colonial holdover referring to where British ships stopped for refueling. And Asians don’t have a collective “Dark Ages” as if there had been no meaningful activity across the lands stretching from the Mediterranean to Japan from AD 435 to 1000. For numerous Asian civilizations, this era was one of several Golden Ages.
There are also matters of substantive emphasis. Western history tends to be absorbed with the lore of Alexander the Great’s conquests in Central Asia, but the diplomatic strategies of the Mauryan emperor Chandragupta and his adviser Chanakya are far more important for the region’s history. For most of history prior to the Industrial Revolution, Asia far outstripped Europe on indicators of development, while Europe was a peripheral upstart. Trade across vast distances between the Mediterranean and China along the Silk Roads long predated Europe’s fifteenth-century voyages. Far from being an undiscovered continent prior to European colonialism, Africa was for centuries an integral part of the Afroeurasian trading system. And well before Europe held any colonies at all, the Mongols presided over the largest territorial empire ever known.
At a minimum, this brief historical sweep gives basic context to understand certain current events. When you see the Taliban destroying the Buddha statues of Bamiyan, you know how Buddhism got to a country thought of today as home to Muslim fundamentalists. When you witness the Canton Fair with 200,000 visitors from two hundred countries signing $30 billion in trade deals, you know that Guangzhou has been a cosmopolitan trading hub for more than a millennium.1 Or if you are at a garden party in New Delhi’s diplomatic quarter of Chanakyapuri, you now know how the neighborhood got its name. But beyond the facts, there are lessons from Asian history for Asia’s future—and the world’s.
Culture Matters
A panoramic arc of West, Central, South, East, and Southeast Asian history going back thousands of years shows that Asia’s linkages have been continuously propelled through commerce, conflict, and culture. Turkic, Arab, and Persian civilizations, as well as those of China, Japan, and Korea, have been uninterruptedly accumulating and sharing knowledge for nearly three thousand years. The most basic example is language. Ancient Indian Sanskrit served as a model for written Thai, Tibetan, and other regional languages, while in East Asia, the Chinese writing system came to Japan via Korea. The Arabic script became the basis of numerous oral trad
itions such as Farsi, Kurdish, Pashto, and Urdu as they crystallized into written languages. The linkages across the Turkic, Persian, and Indic worlds have resulted in thousands of modern cognates between Turkish, Farsi, and Hindi. Linguistic influence also flowed from west to east: Persian, not Chinese, was the lingua franca of the Silk Roads. The Tang Dynasty set up Persian schools to train its traders and agents to communicate with their counterparts in the western regions. East Asian societies were also willing recipients of cultural ideas that arrived with commerce along the Silk Roads, especially Buddhism.
Commerce and conflict also enabled the intermingling of ethnicities and bloodlines through migratory settlement and marriage. China, Japan, and Korea have all had ethnically mixed dynasties. Chinese-ness is often perceived of as hewing to the Han ethnicity, but there is no one pure “Chinese” genetic stock, given the historical importance of the Mongol-Turkic Sui rulers, Mongol overlords, and Manchu dynasties. The Chinese imperial administration, especially under the cosmopolitan Tang, employed countless bureaucrats and generals from other Asian cultures, with communities of Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Mongols settled throughout the empire. During the Ming Dynasty, the admiral Zheng He, a distant descendant of a Song-era Muslim Persian migrant, led the Ming’s famous maritime voyages as far as Africa. The later Qing military was dominated not by Han but by Mongols and Manchus. Similarly, Arab, Persian, and Turkic fusion made the Abbasid Caliphate an impressive intellectual, cultural, and military power, one capable of penetrating India and establishing the Delhi Sultanate. Mongol DNA is significant in the lineage of numerous Asian peoples. Asian identity has long been more syncretic than ethnic.