The Global Power Shift from West to East | The National Interest

The Global Power Shift from West to East | The National Interest: THE IMPENDING end of the Old Order—both Pax Americana and the period of Western ascendancy—heralds a fraught transition to a new and uncertain constellation of power in international politics. Within the ascendant West, the era of American dominance emerged out of the ashes of the previous international order, Pax Britannica. It signified Europe’s displacement by the United States as the locus of global power. But it took the twentieth century’s two world wars and the global depression to forge the transition between these international orders.