The Second Eurasian Century Meets the Trojan Economy
Reading Hal Brands' sweeping history of great-power struggle over the "world island" against a domestic framework for hidden market entry, a ground-level account of the Belt and Road, and the newest Bloomberg Intelligence and Bloomberg Economics data on where the contest actually stands in 2026.
Framing: A Third Book at the Same Table
Two pieces already sit on this blog examining how power moves through channels that look, on their face, like ordinary commerce. "The Trojan Economy" tracked that mechanism inside the American market — subsidized auto parts rerouted through Mexico, mergers clearing review one at a time, portfolio capital sorting itself by geopolitical alignment. "The Emperor's New Road Meets the Trojan Economy" took the same diagnostic to the Belt and Road Initiative, reading Jonathan Hillman's fieldwork on ports and railways against the same three-condition test: a legitimate vehicle, a gap between entry rules and outcome rules, and quiet compounding.
Hal Brands' The Eurasian Century supplies the frame both pieces were implicitly borrowing from without naming it. Brands, a diplomatic historian at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, argues that the modern era is not the age of American power so much as a long, violent Eurasian century — a hundred-plus-year contest, running from 1914 through today, over who controls the "world island" that geographer Halford Mackinder identified in 1904 as the strategic center of the earth. Four hot-and-cold rounds of that contest have already been fought: World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and now — Brands argues — a second Eurasian century that opened not in some abstract sense but on a specific date, February 24, 2022, when Vladimir Putin sent his army into Ukraine three weeks after signing a "no limits" partnership with Xi Jinping.
This piece treats The Eurasian Century as the geopolitical scaffolding underneath the two economic pieces that preceded it. Where the Trojan Economy essay asked whether U.S. institutions can track structural change moving through legitimate market channels, and the Hillman piece asked the same question of sovereign lending and port leases, Brands asks it at the level of grand strategy itself: can an open, rules-based international order recognize a hybrid challenge — military, economic, and technological at once — before that challenge has already reshaped the board.
The Book's Core Thesis: One Century, Four Rounds
Brands' argument rests on a deceptively simple observation: Eurasia — the combined landmass of Europe, Asia, and North Africa — holds roughly a third of the earth's land, some 70 percent of its people, and the bulk of its industrial and military capacity. Every attempt by a single power or coalition to dominate that landmass has triggered a global war to stop it, and every time the attempt has been defeated, the peace that follows is mistaken for permanent rather than provisional. Brands structures the book around four such rounds: Wilhelmine Germany's bid for continental mastery that produced World War I; the Axis powers' attempt to weld a totalitarian pincer across Europe and the Pacific in World War II; the Soviet bid to sweep from Scandinavia to Korea that produced the Cold War; and — his real subject — the current bid by Xi Jinping's China and Vladimir Putin's Russia, with Iran as a junior partner, to build what he calls a "radically revised international order with an illiberal Asia at its core."
The interwar interlude each time is the trap. After 1991, Brands writes, Western policymakers concluded that geopolitics itself had gone out of fashion — that NATO expansion, WTO accession for China and Russia, and the spread of markets would dissolve the conditions that produce great-power war. James Baker's promise of a "democratic peace" is Brands' recurring foil: American strategy bet that economic integration would liberalize autocracies faster than it would strengthen them. The bet did not fully pay off. Russia's real GDP doubled between 1998 and 2014, quadrupling its military budget in the process; China's GDP rose twelve-fold and its military spending tenfold between 1990 and 2016 — growth financed substantially by the same open trading system the integration strategy was supposed to tame.
A country that was, only decades ago, desperately poor is now seeking a hybrid hegemony on land and at sea.Hal Brands, The Eurasian Century, Introduction
What makes Brands' account useful alongside the Trojan Economy framework is that he identifies the same underlying mechanism at the level of grand strategy that the Trojan Economy piece identifies in trade data: an open system built to reward legitimate participation was, by its own design, the easiest system for a determined revisionist power to grow inside of undetected. Brands does not use the word "Trojan," but the diagnosis is structurally the same — a gap between the rules of entry (WTO accession, capital-account openness, global supply-chain integration) and the outcome those rules were meant to protect (a liberalizing, cooperative Eurasia).
China's Hybrid Bid, In Brands' Own Terms
The chapter that matters most for this comparison is Brands' fifth, "The Second Eurasian Century." His portrait of Xi's China combines three claims that map directly onto the material already covered in the Hillman piece. First, geography: China possesses both the continental reach the Soviet Union had and the oceanic frontage Moscow mostly lacked, which is precisely what worried Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman decades before either lived to see it tested. Second, motive: China is, in Brands' phrase, less a rising power than "a risen power that wants its say in reshaping a system it did not create" — a revanchist state seeking to undo what it calls a century of humiliation. Third, method: a fusion of old-fashioned military buildup with newer instruments of economic and digital leverage, of which the Belt and Road Initiative is the signature but not the only vehicle.
Brands is explicit that BRI's function, in his reading, is continental hedging: expansion into the Western Pacific runs into hard American positions, so Beijing has built westward and southward influence instead — pipelines through Pakistan, port leases in Sri Lanka and Djibouti, 5G and "smart city" surveillance infrastructure across the developing world — as a lower-resistance path to the same goal of Eurasian centrality. This is the identical geography Hillman's fieldwork covered chapter by chapter: Gwadar, Hambantota, the Belgrade–Budapest railway, the Djibouti base. Brands' contribution is to place that infrastructure inside a strategic logic Hillman deliberately avoided asserting too strongly — that the "uneven improvisation" the ground-level reporting found is nonetheless organized around a coherent goal, even if execution is messy and Beijing's own advisory panel admitted as much in 2019.
Taiwan as the fulcrum
Where Brands adds the most to the two prior pieces is Taiwan, which barely appears in either the Trojan Economy or Hillman essays but sits at the center of his account. Xi has reportedly instructed the People's Liberation Army to be ready to act on Taiwan by 2027. Brands frames the island through both Mahan and Mackinder simultaneously: geographically, it anchors the First Island Chain that blocks Chinese naval access to the open Pacific; economically, it produces the overwhelming majority of the world's most advanced semiconductors. A Chinese-controlled Taiwan, in this telling, is not a resting point but a springboard — the maritime equivalent of the continental springboard BRI provides in the other direction.
Conceptual Bridge: Three Frameworks, One Lag
Set next to each other, the three pieces on this blog now form a single argument told at three different scales, and Brands supplies the top layer that was implicit but unstated in the other two.
The Trojan Economy
Auto-parts trade rerouted through Mexico, merger review that has not kept pace with rising concentration, portfolio capital sorting by geopolitical alignment — all legal, all individually unremarkable, all compounding into structural change U.S. regulators were not built to track quickly.
The Emperor's New Road
Loan agreements, port leases, and railway contracts, each defensible on its own terms, redrawing who controls chokepoints from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa faster than sovereign-debt trackers and multilateral lenders were built to monitor.
The Eurasian Century
WTO accession, capital-account openness, and a liberal trading order, each a legitimate feature of the post–Cold War system, providing the growth that funded a twelve-fold Chinese GDP increase and a tenfold rise in military spending before Washington's "responsible stakeholder" bet had time to pay off.
Brands does not frame it this way — he is a historian of state power, not markets — but his own account of why the post–Cold War strategy stumbled reads as a grand-strategic version of the same three-condition test the Trojan Economy piece applies to U.S. trade data: a legitimate vehicle (economic integration), a gap between entry rules and outcome rules (WTO membership without political liberalization requirements), and quiet compounding (a generation of growth before the resulting military buildup became impossible to ignore). The book's real argument, stripped to its structure, is that the United States ran the Trojan Economy pattern on itself, once, at the scale of the entire international system, from roughly 1991 to 2022.
The Numbers, Updated for 2026
Brands closed his manuscript in 2024, before the current run of Bloomberg Intelligence and Bloomberg Economics reporting. Three data threads from 2026 update his account without overturning it: defense spending, BRI's capital trajectory, and the price tag of the scenario his Taiwan chapter treats as the contest's most dangerous flashpoint.
The defense-spending picture confirms Brands' central claim about pacing rather than direction. China's headline budget growth has actually decelerated — a nominal 7 percent rise in 2026 versus the 7.2 percent annual increases of the prior three years, and real-terms growth of about 6.4 percent, itself a step down from the near-8-percent rates of 2023–2025. But Bloomberg Opinion's own assessment, drawing on the gap between China's official figure and outside estimates from SIPRI and IISS, argues that focusing on the headline number misses how quickly the modernization program is actually progressing — the Pentagon's most recent assessment suggests true spending may run 32 to 63 percent above the declared figure. This is a defense-budget version of exactly the "concentration statistics can mislead" caution both prior blog pieces raised about their own data: the top-line number is real, but it understates the trend beneath it.
The BRI figure extends the argument from the Hillman piece rather than repeating it. The initiative's 2025 rebound to a record $213.5 billion in construction and investment complicates the "BRI in retreat" narrative that took hold in Western commentary after 2020's contraction — while, per Bloomberg's February 2026 assessment, confirming that the shape of Chinese overseas capital has changed from megaproject financing toward smaller, more selective deals in energy, mining, and what Chinese planners call the "New Three" industries: electric vehicles, batteries, and renewables.
Bipolarity, Autocracy-vs-Democracy, and Bloomberg's "Camp" Model
Both prior blog pieces leaned on Bloomberg's 2026 outlook describing markets sorting into a "camp" model — a narrower set of preferential supply chains and trusted investment corridors, with the United States and aligned democracies inside and strategic competitors outside. Brands gives that market-side observation its geopolitical name: he argues the defining feature of the current period is not multipolarity, as some scholars have claimed, but a return to bipolarity organized along an autocracy-democracy fault line, with China as the pole around which Russia, and to a lesser degree Iran, now orbit.
| Framework | Organizing Axis | Primary Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Brands, The Eurasian Century | Autocracy vs. democracy; U.S.-led coalition vs. Sino-Russian axis | Defense budgets, alliance structures (NATO, AUKUS), the February 2022 Xi–Putin "no limits" statement |
| Bloomberg 2026 "Camp" Model | Inside vs. outside the preferred capital system | Equity-index performance (Bloomberg Market Democracies TR vs. broader EM benchmarks), FDI and portfolio flow sorting |
| Trojan Economy Framework | Legitimate channel vs. structural effect, inside a single economy | Auto-parts trade, merger review gaps, tariff pass-through |
These three are not the same claim, and collapsing them would overstate the fit. Brands is describing state alignment and military posture; Bloomberg's camp model is describing where capital is choosing to flow given that alignment; the Trojan Economy framework is describing how power moves through a single market's internal rules regardless of which camp that market belongs to. But they are compatible descriptions of the same period, observed from three altitudes — and China and India are, in Bloomberg's own framing, the two most consequential countries that increasingly sit outside the preferred capital system even as their economic weight makes full exclusion impossible.
Who is inside the preferred camp system, who is outside, and what equity markets are levered to that redesign.Bloomberg Professional Services, Global Index 2026 Outlook
Taiwan: Where the Chokepoint Argument Gets Tested
The Hillman piece treated Hambantota and Gwadar as the signature chokepoints of the BRI era — places where an ostensibly commercial transaction (a port lease, a loan) produced a structural shift in who controls a maritime access point. Brands' account of Taiwan describes the same mechanism running in the opposite direction: not China acquiring a chokepoint through legitimate commercial channels abroad, but China attempting to seize one through force at home, precisely because the island's economic centrality — nearly all of the world's most advanced logic chips — makes the legitimate, commercial route to influence unavailable to Beijing there in a way it wasn't in Sri Lanka or Djibouti.
Bloomberg Economics has since put a number on what Brands treats mostly in strategic terms. Modeling five scenarios from outright war to rapprochement, Bloomberg Economics estimates that a full US-China conflict over Taiwan would cut global output by roughly $10.6 trillion in the first year — about 9.6 percent of world GDP, exceeding the shock of both the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The mechanism is almost entirely the semiconductor supply chain: losing access to Taiwan's fabrication capacity would cut global supply of cutting-edge logic chips by an estimated 62 percent.
The scale of the estimate is itself a data point for the Trojan Economy thesis: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.'s top twenty customers alone carry a combined market capitalization near $7.4 trillion, meaning the vulnerability sits not in any single transaction but in the cumulative, decades-long concentration of an entire technology stack in one facility set on one contested island — a chokepoint that accumulated in plain sight, the same way Hillman's Gwadar cable and Hambantota's debt did, and the same way the Trojan Economy piece describes U.S. equity-market concentration accumulating in a small number of AI-linked firms.
The most current wrinkle Brands could not have covered is Taiwan's own 2026 pivot toward tighter export controls on AI chips bound for China, reportedly moving to align its rules more closely with Washington's — a decision that, if finalized, would tighten one more link in the chokepoint chain Brands' Mackinder-and-Mahan framing already treats as decisive.
What All Three Frameworks Risk Overstating
A rigorous synthesis has to hold Brands to the same standard the two prior pieces applied to themselves.
- The "myth of multipolarity" critique. Brands' own endnotes cite scholars such as Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, who argue that American structural advantages remain so large that talk of a return to true bipolarity, let alone multipolarity, overstates how close China has actually come to peer status — a caution Brands engages but does not fully resolve.
- Small-state agency. Just as Hillman's fieldwork found Central Asian and Southeast Asian states bargaining actively rather than submitting passively to Chinese influence, Brands' own account concedes that autocratic cooperation between Beijing and Moscow has real limits — China notably withheld lethal military aid to Russia early in the Ukraine war specifically to avoid triggering Western sanctions.
- Structural determinism. Mackinder's geography is a powerful organizing device, but critics have long noted it can flatten contingent political choices into an inevitability narrative — the same caution the Trojan Economy piece applies to its own metaphor, which "explicitly disclaims conspiracy" in favor of describing a monitoring lag rather than a predetermined outcome.
- Bipolarity cuts against BRI's own numbers. A China supposedly consolidating into a tight Sino-Russian axis is, per the BRI data, simultaneously the largest bilateral creditor to more than fifty developing nations across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia — a sprawling, transactional web of relationships that does not obviously behave like a disciplined bipolar bloc.
Synthesis: One Lag, Three Scales
Read together, the trilogy this piece completes converges on a single underlying claim, tested now at the scale of firms, of infrastructure financing, and of grand strategy itself: structural power moves faster through legitimate channels than the institutions built to monitor it can track. Inside the United States, that lag runs through auto-parts trade rerouted via Mexico and merger review that has not kept pace with concentration. Across the BRI's geography, it runs through sovereign loans and port leases that each looked commercially defensible in isolation. At the level of the international system Brands describes, it ran through three decades of WTO membership, market access, and technology transfer that financed a twelve-fold expansion of Chinese GDP and a tenfold expansion of its military budget before the strategy premised on liberalizing Beijing had time to either succeed or be abandoned.
The 2026 data updates each layer without overturning any of them. Defense spending confirms the trend Brands identifies even as headline growth rates decelerate. BRI's record 2025 rebound confirms the initiative survived its own overextension by changing shape rather than retreating. And Bloomberg Economics' $10.6 trillion Taiwan estimate gives numerical weight to what Brands treats as the contest's most dangerous single flashpoint — a chokepoint that, like Hambantota and Gwadar before it, accumulated its strategic weight through decades of ordinary commercial concentration before anyone was pricing in the risk of losing it by force.
Whether the "camp" model Bloomberg describes for 2026–2027 capital markets ultimately hardens into the kind of durable bipolar structure Brands argues already exists at the level of state power, or whether it remains a looser, more transactional sorting that leaves room for the small-state bargaining Hillman documented on the ground, is the open question all three pieces on this blog leave for the reader rather than resolve. What the sources agree on is narrower and more defensible: the institutions built to monitor market concentration, sovereign debt, and great-power military balance are each, in their own domain, still catching up to how quickly legitimate channels can compound into structural change.
Sources
- Brands, Hal. The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2025.
- Avant-Garde (Ryan F.). "The Trojan Economy: Rethinking Hidden Market Entry in the Modern American Economy." July 9, 2026. avantgardebyryanf.blogspot.com
- Avant-Garde (Ryan F.). "The Emperor's New Road Meets the Trojan Economy." July 21, 2026. avantgardebyryanf.blogspot.com
- Bloomberg Professional Services. "Global Index 2026 Outlook." January 2026. bloomberg.com/professional
- Bloomberg News. "The $10 Trillion Fight: Modeling a US-China War Over Taiwan." Bloomberg Economics, February 10, 2026.
- Bloomberg Opinion. "China's Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think." March 4, 2026. bloomberg.com/opinion
- Bloomberg News. "China Plans Slowest Boost to Defense Spending Since 2022 at 7%." March 5, 2026.
- Bloomberg News. "Taiwan Weighs Tighter AI Chip Export Controls Targeting China to Align with US." June 9, 2026.
- Bloomberg Opinion. "Stop Fighting Yesterday's Battle on China's Belt and Road." February 16, 2026.
- International Institute for Strategic Studies. "China's National Party Congress 2026: Defence Remains a Priority Amid Fiscal Challenges." The Military Balance 2026, March 2026.
- Nedopil, Christoph. "China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2025." Green Finance & Development Center, Griffith University, January 2026.
- Hillman, Jonathan E. The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century. New Haven: Yale University Press / CSIS, 2020.
- Brooks, Stephen G., and William Wohlforth. "The Myth of Multipolarity: American Power's Staying Power." Foreign Affairs, May–June 2023.
- World Economic Forum. "Global Risks Report 2026: Geopolitical and Economic Risks Rise in New Age of Competition." January 14, 2026.
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