It looks like a Trump-Putin-Xi world, but it’s really Orwell's

VLADIMIR PUTIN’s encounter with Donald Trump in Anchorage summons bad memories of past summits in Munich or Yalta, in which the destiny of smaller Eastern European nations was decided by greater powers without their participation. But a fictional model from the postwar era seems more prophetic.

- By John Authers

George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1948, tells of a world divided into three great powers. They are:

Oceania (The US, plus South America, the UK, Australia, and southern Africa),

Eurasia (All of the old Soviet Union, including Russia, and continental Europe in its entirety).

East Asia (Essentially China, Japan, and the Korean peninsula).

They fight interminably over the contested, poorer parts of the world: the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, the Arabian, Peninsula, and the rest of Africa. Though alliances shift, they remain in permanent balance:

“None of the three superstates could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defenses are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants.”

That is from a fictional book that Orwell cites, written by Emmanuel Goldstein (a stand-in for Trotsky). Each bloc is self-sufficient. There is no trade between them, but they all benefit from the status quo.

Orwell’s terrifying template is a caricature of the world order he foresaw taking shape. Many of 1984's horrors have not come to pass. But it’s a good place to start. When the actual year arrived, the world was divided into the US and Soviet empires and a large “Third World.” That had some similarities to the novel. A few years later, after the Berlin Wall had fallen, it appeared that a liberal globalized order had triumphed.