We have been living in the supposed Pacific Age for several decades now.
The memory of the last time the Atlantic was considered the centre of the world has become distant. Very distant.
Most people alive today cannot remember it.
That is precisely why the occasional suggestion that the Atlantic Age might be returning can sound almost revolutionary. It is not. It is merely unfamiliar to people who have grown up assuming that the Pacific was where the future had moved.
And on the surface, the Pacific seems to have everything.
North America on one side.
Some of the world’s most populous and economically dynamic countries on the other.
The coastline of China. Japan. Korea. Southeast Asia.
Countries that went from extraordinary poverty to extraordinary industrial growth within a few decades.
For a shallow reading of geopolitics, it is irresistible.
The Pacific must therefore be the centre of the world.
Barack Obama famously embraced the idea of a Pacific century, and there was an obvious reason why the United States could plausibly make that claim.
America has access to both oceans.
It can look towards Europe and the Atlantic, or towards Asia and the Pacific.
That is a genuine strategic advantage.
But there is a problem with calling the Pacific a basin in the same sense as the Atlantic.
The Pacific is not really a basin.
It is an enormous part of the planet.
It covers roughly half the Earth’s surface.
That changes everything.
The Atlantic is a relatively compact body of water. North America and Europe are separated by an ocean that can be crossed in hours by modern aviation and within a reasonable period by ship.
The Pacific is different.
Very different.
The distances are enormous.
Very, very enormous.
California and East Asia are not neighbours simply because they happen to face the same ocean.
Geography does not become irrelevant because trade became cheaper.
And then there is another uncomfortable issue.
A number of the great Asian growth stories were built on extraordinary export success without creating domestic markets remotely comparable in depth to those of the United States or Europe.
They became extraordinarily good at producing things.
That is not the same as becoming equally good partners.
A country can be an exceptional supplier without being an equally exceptional economic counterpart.
The distinction matters.
The United States can buy enormous quantities of goods from Asia. It can build supply chains across the Pacific. It can invest, trade and cooperate.
But that does not automatically create a balanced economic relationship.
A source of things is not necessarily a partner.
Partners operate at roughly comparable levels of economic depth, purchasing power, technological sophistication and institutional capacity.
Much of Asia does not.
And the countries that increasingly do are often precisely those that are geographically furthest away.
This is the part of the Pacific Age narrative that tends to disappear beneath the glossy statistics.
Population is not economic integration.
GDP growth is not necessarily domestic-market depth.
Export manufacturing is not the same thing as becoming a peer.
And sharing an ocean does not make countries neighbours.
The Pacific will remain enormously important. Asia will remain enormously important. The economic transformation of the region is one of the defining developments of the modern era.
But none of this makes the Pacific automatically the natural centre of the world economy.
The Atlantic has something the Pacific lacks.
Compactness.
Europe and North America sit within a relatively manageable economic and geographic space, with deep markets, mature institutions, enormous accumulated capital and dense networks of trade, finance, technology and investment.
Perhaps the Atlantic Age never really ended.
Perhaps we simply stopped looking at it because the Pacific story was more exciting.
And excitement, as ever, is not the same thing as substance.