Power vacuum in West

Today’s unipolar world, in which the world’s only hyper-power lives beyond its means, with massive current account and budget deficits funded by Chinese and Japanese central banks, and no longer has the guts, patience, skill and commitment to root out global terrorism and failed states, is an unstable, transitional state of affairs. The beneficiary will not be the EU, which has neither the military nor economic muscle to replace the US and is anyway in even faster decline. In ways that are uncertain and hard to divine, the balance of power is clearly switching from the Atlantic to East Asia. It will be a messy process, made all the worse by the drift of the US and EU. It will be a shift in power ripe for exploitation by those with the interests of neither the West nor East Asia at heart. No wonder al Qaeda is licking its lips.