From 1453 to 2026: As the West's 500-year world system comes to an end

As the post-colonial era draws to a close, the fundamental geopolitical question of the 21st century is no longer how the West will govern the world, but how it will live in a world it can no longer govern alone.

Certain turning points in world history create consequences that extend far beyond the era in which they occurred. The capture of Istanbul by our ancestors in 1453 is one of these. Historians mostly write of 1453 as the end of the Byzantine Empire, the close of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the modern era. Yet the rupture that took place was much greater than this. The conquest of Istanbul initiated a much larger process whose consequences have lasted for nearly 500 years. The conquest of Istanbul and the subsequent expansion of the Ottoman Empire's dominance over the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt, and the Red Sea formed a significant threshold in the changing of the old geoeconomic order between Europe and Asia.

For centuries, the riches of Asia, primarily China and India, were transported to the West via the Silk and Spice Roads. Istanbul and the Eastern Mediterranean were key nodes in this system. Maritime republics like Venice and Genoa had derived great wealth from the Mediterranean leg of this trade. New geopolitical conditions, however, led Europeans to seek alternative routes to Asia.

For Christian Europe, which had repeatedly clashed with the Turks during the Crusades that began after 1095 and lasted for nearly two centuries, the Turks' capture of Istanbul in 1453 created a major geopolitical and psychological shock. The fall of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire to Ottoman rule was not merely the end of an empire; for Europe, it meant a radical change in the balance of power along the traditional trade routes extending to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and Asia.

One of the responses the West gave to this change was geographical. The goal was to reach Asia via alternative maritime routes, bypassing Ottoman-controlled territories. Undoubtedly, the conquest of Istanbul was not the sole reason for Europe's opening to the oceans. Advances in maritime and ship technology, capital accumulation, the extraordinary profitability of the spice trade, and competition between European states had also prepared the ground for this transformation. However, the increasing weight of Ottoman power over the Eastern Mediterranean and traditional East-West trade routes became one of the significant geopolitical factors that accelerated the search for alternative paths.

The Portuguese advanced south along the African coast, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached India via the Indian Ocean. The Spanish, heading west, arrived in the Americas while trying to reach Asia. Thus, Europe's economic and military horizon expanded beyond the borders of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Subsequently, the foundations of colonial empires were laid, and the center of gravity of the world economy began to shift from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic over a period of several centuries.

THE ATLANTIC SYSTEM AND THE RISE OF THE WEST

This transformation did not just mean the discovery of new trade routes. While Portugal and Spain established the first great oceanic empires, the Netherlands in the 17th century combined trade, shipping, insurance, and finance into a much more advanced system. Amsterdam became one of the primary centers of world trade and finance. The accumulation of trade, credit, insurance, and maritime expertise that had developed in the maritime republics of the Mediterranean integrated with larger-scale state and capital structures in the Atlantic world. In the next stage, with the shift of the center to London, England became the dominant power of the world system. In the 20th century, the center of gravity of the system moved to the other side of the Atlantic, to New York and Washington.

During the era of mercantilism, the state, the merchant, and the navy complemented one another. The navy protected and, when necessary, opened trade routes; capital entered new regions; and the state supported this economic expansion with political and military power, primarily through the navy. The Industrial Revolution took this mechanism much further. As the European industry's need for raw materials, energy, and markets increased, capitalism integrated with imperialism. In the 19th century, England was at the center of this order. The Royal Navy was not just a fleet protecting British shores, but a global power ensuring the security and, when necessary, the control of global trade routes. London finance, the insurance system, ports, maritime transport routes, coal stations, and strategic straits became parts of the same global architecture. Thus, the foundations of a Western-centered world order that would last for nearly five centuries were laid. The state at the center of the system changed over time. First Portugal and Spain, then the Netherlands, England, France, and finally the United States came to the fore. However, the essence of the system remained largely the same. In this system, access to sea lanes, capital accumulation, technological superiority, and military power provided extraordinary advantages to the states controlling the center of the world economy. With both industrial revolutions being realized in the West, and especially with the transition from sail to coal and from coal to oil in ships, enabling the control of access to all continents by ocean and sea, the process extending from mercantilism to capitalism and from imperialism to globalization accelerated.

1945: COLONIALISM ENDED, HIERARCHY CONTINUED

While two world wars exhausted the power of the Pax Britannica, the US settled into the new center of the Western system. During the same period, classical colonial empires began to dissolve. Dozens of countries from India to Indonesia, from Algeria to a large part of Africa, gained their independence. However, political independence did not always mean economic and strategic independence.

As colonial governors withdrew, new mechanisms of influence and dependency replaced direct rule. US-led military alliances, a global network of bases, NATO, the Bretton Woods order, the dollar-centered financial system, the IMF, and the World Bank became the fundamental institutions of the new order. While the United Nations represented the principle of sovereign equality, the veto system of the Security Council reflected the real hierarchy among the great powers.

1945 was also the beginning of the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. While the two superpowers avoided direct confrontation, the competition was carried out through wars, coups, and proxy struggles spreading from Korea to Vietnam, from Laos and Cambodia to Afghanistan, and to Africa and Latin America. To protect its interests, the US used methods of regime change, covert intelligence operations, and support for local forces in addition to military interventions. Millions of people lost their lives in the Korean and Indochina wars alone; when other conflicts affected by Cold War competition are added, the human toll became much heavier.

In short, classical colonialism ended, but great power politics did not disappear; it changed form. Spheres of influence, military bases, alliances, financial dependency, and proxy wars replaced direct rule. For nearly half a century, the Soviet Union formed a military and ideological counterweight to the Western system. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, this balance would disappear, and the world would enter a completely different era.

POST-COLD WAR: THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US reached a unique military, economic, and technological superiority with no global balancing power left against it. However, the end of the Cold War was not followed by a new era of peace. Neoconservative circles that rose in the 1990s and later became influential under the George W. Bush administration advocated for the use of American military power not for consent, but for coercion, aimed not only at preserving American superiority but also at advancing Israel's geopolitical goals. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), founded by prominent neocons in 1997, explicitly defined the preservation of American global leadership and the maintenance of US military superiority as a strategic goal.

The new era, which began with the 1991 Gulf War, continued with interventions in Yugoslavia and Kosovo, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, and subsequently with military operations in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the wider geography. 9/11, in particular, was the major rupture that expanded the scope of the use of American military power on a global scale.

Between 2001 and 2023, more than 940,000 people died due to direct war violence in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan, more than 432,000 of whom were civilians. When 3.6–3.8 million indirect deaths resulting from the collapse of health systems, economies, and infrastructure, as well as mass migration movements of refugees, are taken into account, it is estimated that the total human loss reached at least 4.5–4.7 million. Despite all these attacks, the US could not bring peace and tranquility to the places it intervened in. Except for the First Gulf War, it could not achieve a military victory. In most, it withdrew as it did in Vietnam. Its only success was expanding NATO within European countries. In this process, the US's superiority in destructive strategy did not stem solely from its military power. Its global military presence combined with the central position of the dollar, the financial system, technology, capital, and the alliance network. For this reason, unlike Vietnam, even strategic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan did not initially shake the foundation of the system. The US could lose wars, but it could maintain its central position in the world system. This was where the real power of the New American Century lay.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VIETNAM AND TODAY

When comparing today's transformation with the Vietnam defeat, it is necessary to analyze the fundamental difference. The US largely ended its direct military role in Vietnam in 1973; Saigon fell in 1975. Despite this, the US maintained its position at the center of the world economy, the dollar continued to dominate the international financial system, and the Western alliance remained intact. The Soviet Union was a military and ideological rival, but it could not create an alternative to the American-centered global economic system on the same scale. Vietnam was the loss of a war, not the loss of the American-centered world system.

The difference of today emerges here. At a time when the capacity of American military power to produce political results is being tested, the center of gravity of the world economy has shifted to Asia. In 1945, the picture was almost the opposite of today. At the end of the Second World War, US national income corresponded to 27% of the world total, and its manufacturing share was 50%. These values for China were 5% and 2%.

By 2026, the values have changed radically. China produces approximately 32% of world manufacturing value-added, while the US produces approximately 18%. China has moved far ahead of the US in the production of steel, electricity, automobiles, machine tools, industrial robots, and intermediate industrial goods. It also has a clear superiority in engineering, scientific publications, and the number of STEM graduates. China also has a significant demographic advantage in terms of the male population of military age. When all these indicators are evaluated together, it is seen that China's advantage over the US is not limited to economic size. China has a very strong material base in industrial production, energy, steel, machinery, engineering, and manpower capacity, which will form the basis of a long-term great power competition and a possible war of attrition.

On the other hand, the new network of relationships formed by China, Russia, India, and other rising powers; the expansion of the SCO and BRICS, initiatives for trade in national currencies, and the development of alternative financial institutions are narrowing the room for maneuver of the single-centered order that emerged after the Cold War.

Therefore, the issue is not just whether the US can achieve its military goals in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, or another front. The real historical rupture is that the erosion in the capacity of American military power to produce political results coincides with the same period when economic, industrial, and technological weight has shifted outside the West. During the Vietnam era, a war was lost, but the system was strong; what is being discussed today is the transformation of the system itself.

EPIC FURY AND THE CHANGING BALANCE OF POWER

The Iran war and the US's Operation Epic Fury are of special importance in this respect. The military capability the US can use against Iran is still great. However, the use of military power on this scale no longer guarantees that the opposing side's political will will be broken or that the war will end on terms desired by Washington. Data on war costs and ammunition consumption in the analysis released by the US Department of Defense Office of Inspector General in September 2026 reveal the cost of Epic Fury, which exceeded 42 billion dollars, the gaps that emerged in strategic ammunition stocks, and especially the high consumption levels in air and missile defense interceptor ammunition. Furthermore, the report concludes that the United States entered this war without sufficient planning or foresight. The report officially acknowledges a strategic error and indirectly shows how difficult it has become for the US to sustain modern high-intensity warfare.

Here, the difference between Vietnam and today emerges once again. During the Vietnam War, the US was one of the world's largest industrial, financial, and military centers, and despite losing the war, it maintained this position. Today, however, the cost and ammunition consumption created by military operations are experienced alongside debates about the sustainability of American industrial capacity and whether global obligations can be met simultaneously. What has changed is not just the weakening of the American military, but the old determinant of this power over the global system, namely the ability to generate consent. Today, the American military presence still maintains its place with its massive defense budget and warfighting assets, but it cannot produce results against those who generate resistance in the fields of economic, technological, and diplomatic struggle.

THE MESSAGE FROM HORMUZ AND BAB EL-MANDEB

One of the most striking indicators of this transformation is taking place at sea. The West's five-hundred-year rise occurred largely thanks to its opening to the oceans, its control of maritime trade routes, and its ability to impose its political will on these routes with naval power when necessary. Today, however, developments in the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea, and the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic Ocean show the limits of the same system. The military pressure created by Iran in Hormuz and by the Houthis (Ansarallah) in Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea should not be evaluated merely as regional conflicts. The fact that the US cannot intervene in the new maritime transport route opened by Russia in the north of Eurasia should be evaluated separately. These carry the signs of a much larger change. Although the West still possesses extremely large naval and air power, it is seen that this power cannot provide unlimited freedom of movement in critical maritime passages. Missile technologies, unmanned systems, coastal-based weapons, and relatively low-cost asymmetric capabilities are narrowing the room for maneuver of large and expensive naval forces.

What is decisive here is not how many aircraft carriers or submarines one possesses. What is essential is at what cost, for how long, and with the aim of achieving what political result these forces can be used. The presence of an aircraft carrier strike group in the region and its ability to control a sea lane politically and militarily are no longer the same thing.

What is happening in Hormuz is symbolic in this respect. Despite deploying a large military force, the US cannot completely eliminate Iran's pressure on maritime transport in the region, especially in the Strait of Hormuz. More importantly, although Washington seeks support from its NATO allies and traditional partners such as Canada, Japan, Australia, and South Korea in the Hormuz equation where it is stuck, these countries are not directly entering the war alongside the US to open Hormuz with military force.

In Bab el-Mandeb, a similar but this time striking picture emerges for Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is not receiving the military support it expects from the US and Europe against Yemen; the support it expects from the UK is also not coming. Despite the close security and alliance relations it has developed with Pakistan and Turkey, it has to carry the strategic burden on the ground largely by itself. The Saudis, who are almost left alone, are becoming dependent on Israel's support and are being blackmailed to become a party to the Abraham Accords. Therefore, Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are becoming two separate laboratories of the same historical transformation. In Hormuz, the world's most powerful military state, the US, and in Bab el-Mandeb, one of the world's largest energy exporters, Saudi Arabia, are struggling to reflect their political will on the field to the extent they desire, despite the immense material power they possess. The old link between military superiority and the capacity to impose political will is weakening.

THE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL RISE OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Reading the transformation of the post-colonial order solely through the military limitations faced by the West is not sufficient. The real major change is taking place in the economic and financial field. While emerging and developing economies, according to purchasing power parity, now carry out the majority of world production, the quota, voting, and management structures of institutions like the IMF and the World Bank still largely bear the traces of the power distribution after the Second World War. BRICS's demand for greater representation and the emergence of alternative institutions like the New Development Bank are the results of this changing economic weight.

The fundamental feature of the new era is not that the Global South necessarily becomes anti-Western, but that its dependence on the West is decreasing. While China offers alternatives in trade, industry, and finance, and Russia in energy and military technology, India is expanding its strategic autonomy. Gulf countries, while maintaining their relations with the West, are deepening their economic ties with Asia. Thus, the space for states to move between different power centers without remaining dependent on a single geopolitical and financial center is expanding. This transformation is also seen in the financial system. Trade in local currencies, alternative payment systems, and the increasing gold purchases of central banks have not created a new system that will replace the dollar in the short term, but they provide new options to states. Especially the ability to use reserve assets in sanctions has turned gold back into a tool of financial security and sovereignty.

China is one of the most striking examples of this. Its reduction of its holdings in American Treasury bonds while increasing its gold reserves is part of a broader trend toward the diversification of reserves. In the same period, the US's growing public debt, high budget deficits, and the rise in long-term bond yields are also increasing the pressure on the dollar-centered system. Therefore, the issue is not the collapse of the dollar or the imminent disappearance of the American financial system. The real historical change is that states increasingly have alternatives that can reduce their dependence on a single financial center. Gold purchases, BRICS's local currency initiatives, alternative payment systems, and reserve diversification are different parts of the same trend. The order established after 1945 is still strong; but it is no longer unrivaled and without alternatives.

FROM POST-COLONIAL ORDER TO MULTIPOLARITY

The traces of global transformation are also seen in Washington's own strategic priorities. The US's giving more weight to mainland security and the Western Hemisphere, and withdrawing troops from Europe and West Asia, shows that it is re-evaluating the cost of its global engagements. While China remains at the center of long-term strategic competition, Washington is faced with the costs of simultaneously containing Russia in Europe, maintaining military superiority in West Asia, limiting China in the Indo-Pacific, and carrying the security burden of global sea lanes. The hegemonic power now has to take into account not only the capacity of its rivals but also the limits of its own resources.

For this reason, seeing what is happening only as the decline of American hegemony is incomplete. The Western-centered system, which developed from the end of the 15th century, largely maintained its military, financial, and technological superiority in the post-colonial order that replaced classical colonialism after 1945. Today, however, the shift of industrial production to Asia, the multi-centering of technology, the proliferation of financial alternatives, and the increase in the military deterrence of states outside the West are changing this structure.

This process does not mean a new unipolarity where China replaces the West. While the US and Europe continue to be powerful actors, China, India, Russia, Turkey, and other centers of the Global South are gaining a wider room for maneuver. This is the true meaning of multipolarity. The emergence of a new balance order where a single center cannot direct the world system alone, and power is distributed among more actors.

THE ISRAEL FACTOR: THE LEGITIMACY CRISIS OF AMERICAN HEGEMONY

Explaining the global decline of the US, which plays a major role in the collapse of post-colonialism, solely through China's rise, Russia's strengthening, the erosion in the dollar system, or the limits of American military power remains incomplete. One of the factors accelerating this decline, especially in the Global South, is the almost unconditional strategic relationship Washington has established with Israel. This relationship, which deepened after 1973 and gained a new dimension within the "war on terror" paradigm after September 11, 2001, increasingly integrated American military, economic, and diplomatic power with Israel's security priorities. The US's bases, air power, navy, sanctions, and financial system forced regional states to act cautiously and often obediently toward Washington for a long time. However, the consent felt for American leadership over time left its place to the fear felt for American power. Yet hegemony can be sustained not only by fear, but by legitimacy and consent.

The great humanitarian destruction experienced in Gaza after October 7, 2023, and the developments in the West Bank and Lebanon accelerated this legitimacy crisis on a global scale. The political bill for Israel's actions was increasingly written to Washington as well, because Israel's ability to fight on this scale and continuity is directly linked to American weapons, ammunition, financial support, and diplomatic protection. Thus, Israel began to turn from being merely a force multiplier of American power in the region into a growing burden on the US's soft power and global legitimacy. The pro-Israel lobbies in US domestic politics, the ideological support of Evangelical movements, and the pro-Israel approach institutionalized within the media, think tanks, and foreign policy elites also make it difficult for Washington to move away from this policy. On the other hand, a very serious public opinion against Israel has formed in the US public and the world due to the genocide in Gaza. For now, the biggest problem of the Israeli administration, apart from military operations, is to change this image of Israel.

The Iran war, which began on February 28, 2026, made the military limits of this relationship more visible. Israel's superiority based on high technology, intelligence, and especially air power was not enough to produce a decisive political result alone against a state with a large geography, population, missile capacity, and strategic depth like Iran. Yemen also formed a similar example. While the Houthis' pressure on the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb severely affected Eilat's maritime trade, US and Israeli air power could not eliminate this threat. When both countries' excessive dependence on air power, long-range precision strikes, and technological superiority is combined with their avoidance of land wars that could create large losses, the capacity of military superiority to produce political results is limited.

The real importance of the Israel factor in American decline emerges here. Israel, which for many years was the US's forward outpost and force multiplier in West Asia, is today turning into one of the important sources of Washington's loss of legitimacy in the Global South. Part of the support given to Iran stems not from the adoption of the Iranian regime's ideology, but from Tehran being seen as a power capable of resisting the pressure of the Israel-US axis. Thus, American hegemony is coming to a dangerous threshold. First, consent eroded and was replaced by fear; now, with the examples of Iran and Yemen, fear is also beginning to erode.

AS THE 500-YEAR PERIOD CLOSES

The remarkable irony of history is that the rise of the West and today's transformation intersect again on sea lanes. Five hundred years ago, Europeans went outside the Mediterranean and opened to the oceans to reach the riches of Asia. After Portugal and Spain, the Netherlands and England globalized maritime trade, while the US carried the same system to its peak in the 20th century with the dollar, aircraft carriers, and a worldwide network of bases.

Today, as economic weight turns back to Asia, Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Western Pacific are turning into the main geopolitical competition areas of world politics. The Iran war, the Ukraine-Russia War, the Black Sea, the Red Sea crisis, and the tension around Taiwan are not completely independent developments from each other. These are the contact lines of the old order and the power distribution that is emerging. Five hundred years ago, Europe's fundamental question was how it would reach Asia. Today, the fundamental question is whether the West can govern the world system as it did before in the face of a rising Asia and an increasingly autonomous Global South.

Colonialism ended in the 20th century. Now, the post-colonial hierarchy established after it is also beginning to dissolve. This does not mean the collapse of the West or the US. The West is not disappearing, but it is losing its privileged center position that sits above the rest of the world. The world that will emerge will be in a more complex structure. The transition period to multipolarity may produce more crises, wars, and uncertainty. As the old order dissolves, the rules of the new order have not yet been written. When Istanbul fell in 1453, no one knew that this would be one of the historical starting points of an Atlantic-centered Western superiority that would last for nearly five centuries. In 2026, we also do not know the final form of the new system. However, the direction is becoming increasingly clear.

CONCLUSION

As the post-colonial era draws to a close, the fundamental geopolitical question of the 21st century is no longer how the West will govern the world, but how it will live in a world it can no longer govern alone. As the five-hundred-year Western-centered order transforms, Turkey is once again at a critical junction on the geography that changed the direction of world history in 1453.

Turkey's power does not stem from a single element; it stems from the combination of its geostrategic position, the Straits, its strong and usable military capacity, its developing defense industry, its wide diplomatic network, its industrial base, its ties with the Turkic world, and its central position in energy-transport corridors. For this reason, Turkey is not just a bridge between East and West, but a center capable of influencing the balances between the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Eastern Mediterranean, West Asia, and Africa.

However, geopolitical effectiveness does not mean permanent power alone. For today, economic instability, polarization, weaknesses in the parliamentary system (separation of powers, checks and balances), lack of financing and capital, the politicization of law, income inequality, foreign dependency in critical technologies, and problems in qualified human capital, energy, logistics, and institutional accumulation are the fundamental limitations before Turkey. The decisive question for Turkey in the coming period is whether it can overcome these problems and whether the geopolitical weight it possesses will turn into a permanent state capacity. Turkey, which can create military, diplomatic, and political results in a wide geography today, can only carry this effectiveness to the long term with a strong production structure, science and technology infrastructure, capital accumulation, qualified human resources, and solid institutions.