The West’s global weight depends overwhelmingly on the United States’ population and position.

Evidence

If the United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. Without the United States the West becomes a minuscule and declining part of the world’s population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the extremity of the Eurasian land mass. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 850

Categorization

• SEED: A geopolitics piece: ‘Europe is a small peninsula’ — how the U.S. subsidizes the West’s demographic and geographic relevance, and what de-Westernization would cost it.