After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (41 page)

They got the post-American world they always dreamed of, and, as they adjust to a poorer and more violent planet, they will blame Washington for 280

after america

the horrors of the new age more furiously than ever. Think of Netanyahu alone at the podium trying to demonstrate objective facts to a roomful of madmen, liars, and appeasers. He’s the warm-up act, and that’s the reception Washington will get in a world after American power.

Western civilization is a synthesis—a multicultural synthesis, if you like: Athenian democracy, Roman law, the Hebrew Bible, dispersed by London to every corner of the globe. If Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem are the three temple mounts of the modern world and all its blessings, none has had a rougher ride than the last: attacked, besieged, captured, and recaptured dozens of times across the centuries—and twice destroyed. Today, Jerusalem is home to the Knesset and all Israeli government ministries, and the universally unrecognized capital of a universally delegitimized nation. Because the civilized world could not summon up the will to prevent Iran going nuclear, Israel will live on a thin line between the advanced civilized state they have built and oblivion, a permanent state of high alert in which the difference between first-world prosperity and extinction will come down to the hair-trigger reactions of bureaucratic monitoring of an implacable foe.

But in leaving Israel to its fate we have told our enemies something elemental and devastating about the will of a decaying West, and of the supposed global superpower. Around the world our foes will draw their own conclusions. Just as there are neglected and rubble-strewn Jewish cemeteries from Tangiers to Czernowitz to Baghdad, one day there will be abandoned American cemeteries, too. Across the globe there will be towns and countries where once were Americans and now are none—from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Germany and Japan. What’s left of the republic will hunker down and finally understand what’s it’s like to be Israel. Washington will be the new Jerusalem—a beleaguered citadel in a world that wants to kill it.

ChaPter

eight

after

a Letter from

the post-american world

Again upon the sea.

This time for Persia, bearing our wounded and the ashes of the
dead . . . . The skull of the last

Mehrikan I shall present to the museum at Teheran.

—J. A. Mitchell,
The Last American
(1889)
w
hat follows purports to be a missive from the future. Author
unknown. It was found tucked into the glovebox in the remnants
of what appeared to be a Victorian-era contraption:
This is a letter from the day after tomorrow, from the world after America. I would have entrusted it to the genial gentleman on a “time machine” who turned up last week with excited tales of the marvels of an American golden age circa 1950. Less than a hundred years ago! But the young ’uns told him he sounded like those Islamophile “scholars” boring on about the glories of Córdoba and el-Andalus in the tenth century. His machine looked promising, but it attracted the attention of rival gangs and they wound up with half of it apiece, neither of which functioned.

281

282

after america

Much like what happened to America. But they left behind what I believe is the key time-traveling mechanism, and, while it is no longer sufficient to transport a person, I’m hopeful this letter will make it back to you in 1950—assuming, that is, that, like so much else of interest, the time-transporting device isn’t stymied by the Sino-Russo-Islamic cybershield that has reduced the Internet to little more than an archive of cautionary tales of all but forgotten minor American celebrities. (The Internet was a turn-of-the-century phenomenon, like your hula hoop, if that’s been invented by the time you get this.)

Before he got mugged, the time traveler wanted to know how we were getting by without the United States. Well, for want of any choice in the matter, we adjusted. As it beggared itself, cannibalized itself, and finally consumed itself, the hyperpower’s networks of globalization remained largely in place. We know their names still—Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Google. . . .

Many of the famous multinationals survived the collapse of the United States. In economic terms, they were bigger than most nation-states, and so they had no trouble finding small countries to serve as company towns of convenience. Some aspects changed. McDonald’s and KFC and the rest are now halal. It’s just easier that way. Otherwise, you wind up like the Russians, with two of everything—the Muslim-compliant Burger King, and the branch across the street that still serves vodka: “Have it your way—
da
?”

And all that does is make it easier for Chechen gangs to blow up sad gaggles of Red Army alcoholics while minimalizing collateral damage of photoge-nic moppets and devout burqa-clad women. I no longer imbibe myself.

Like the late American entertainer Dean Martin, I drank to forget. But we forgot almost everything very quickly, so the excuse is less persuasive.

Much of the world would still seem familiar to you. Have you ever been in the executive lounge of an upmarket American chain hotel in the Middle East? The Grand Hyatt in Amman perhaps? Very congenial in the old days.

At breakfast you could get pancakes and hash browns, and the TV would be tuned to CNN International, while Saudi sheikhs and Russian “businessmen” and the representatives of Chinese state corporations conducted their after 283

affairs. For a while, that’s what it felt like: an American-built international network but with fewer and fewer Americans. The Europeans had always enjoyed sneering at those polls about the ever dwindling percentage of Yanks who held valid passports. Who could blame you? You were the “ugly Americans,” the only foreigners who upon landing in Paris, Rome, Berlin, and many other capitals could reliably expect to have their country openly insulted by the cab driver en route to the hotel. Once the dollar ceased to be the global currency, and America became both yesterday’s man and the scapegoat for all the new woes afflicting the post-American world, fewer and fewer of your citizens ventured abroad. At power tables in the exclusive restaurants one sees Chinamen, Arabs, Venezuelans, even the occasional Jeremy or Derek from Eton or Upper Canada College hired as the retro-chic Wasp frontman for an international agglomeration of emirs and oligarchs.

But not a lot of Americans.

Even travel within North America became prohibitively expensive, and dangerous. Virtuous Americans forswore nuclear power and coal mining, and, when the crisis of the early Seventies exposed your vulnerability to Middle Eastern oil dictatorships, you spent the next thirty years letting your dependence on foreign petroleum double from one-third to two-thirds of your energy needs while you busied yourselves piously declining to drill in the Arctic lest it sully the pristine breeding grounds of the world’s largest mosquito herd. So today the Arabs still have the oil; Russia and Iran between them control half the world’s natural gas; and China and India need more and more of both. It never seemed to occur to America’s ruling class that an economy requires fuel to run it, and that one day the sellers might be in a position to pick and choose their customers. The decision by the Gulf emirates to lease bases to Beijing to enable the Chinese to secure the Asian oil routes was entirely predictable. Not a lot of Middle Eastern oil heads west these days.

The world after America is a sicker world. In 1999, the British Government set up NICE—the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the country’s nicely named “death panel.” If one works for NICE these days, 284

after america

one no longer has to waste all that time inventing reasons as to why this or that innovative but costly American drug or procedure does not fit the overarching strategic goals of the National Health Service, because American medical innovation quickly dwindled away and nobody picked up the slack. The Chinese are said to have amazing new inventions to keep their leaders hale and hearty, but would prefer their aging peasantry keeled over sooner rather than later. A few other countries have carved out boutique markets: Japan for state-of-the-art post-human augmentation, the Swiss for luxury euthanasia. As I say, niche businesses. For the non-elites, for the multitudes of humanity crammed into the vast, diseased megalopolises of Africa or the
favelas
of Latin America, almost anything unexpected that happens anywhere kills huge numbers of people. Today the typical novelty virus develops in rural China, its existence is denied for weeks on end by the government, during which window of opportunity a carrier spreads it to the lobby of an international hotel in Hong Kong, and thence by jet it takes off for the world beyond—much as SARS did in 2003. But this time, instead of getting on a flight to Toronto, the returning tourist flies to Johan-nesburg, and the disease runs riot among a population whose immune systems are already weakened by HIV.

Tragic, but only for a moment, and then next month’s surprise disaster comes along like clockwork. Even without the cooperation of mendacious despots, life is nasty, brutish, and shortened in dramatic ways. Tsunamis and earthquakes kill on impressive scales. There is no superpower with the carrier groups or the C-130s or, indeed, the inclination to have “boots on the ground” (quaint expression, now unknown) within hours to start rescuing people, feeding them, housing them. So today we are all impeccably multilateral and work through the UN bureaucracy, which holds state-of-the art press conferences to announce it will soon be flying in (or nearby, or overhead, or in the general hemisphere) a top-level situation-assessment team to the approximate vicinity to conduct a situation assessment of the situation just as soon as an elite team of corporate mercenaries has flown after 285

in and restored room service to the five-star hotel. Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks.

If the tsunami doesn’t get you, the relief operation usually does the trick.

In 2010, an earthquake hit Haiti, and the UN dispatched peacekeepers, including cholera-infected Bangladeshi troops. So Haiti had a cholera epidemic introduced to the island by the transnational body supposedly rescuing it from the previous catastrophe. That was the test run for a world of hemisphere-hopping disasters. The Russians are pressuring the Chinese to develop a form of airborne quarantine: unmanned drones would spray the infected megalopolis from the skies, the way early morning aerial maintenance crews used to zap your DisneyWorld with bug spray from the heavens each dawn.

The world after America is a poorer place. The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of “a new world middle class,” as Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin called them in his study
The World Distribution of
Income
. This class was made up of some 2.5 billion citizens of the developing world whose standards of living were rapidly approaching those of the West.1 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, as Virginia Postrel reported in the
New York Times
, “the largest number of people earned about $8,000—a standard of living equivalent to Portugal’s.” 2 Not everybody was part of this success story: In your time—the 1950s—Egypt and South Korea had had more or less identical per capita incomes. By the first decade of the new century, Egypt’s was less than a sixth of South Korea’s.3

Which of these models would prevail in the years ahead? Access to western markets had given South Korea a western lifestyle, complete with western-sized families: soon, like many of the so-called “Asian tigers,” they had one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. They were tigers without cubs. Whereas Egypt, like most of the Muslim world, was in a demographic boom and its poverty helped export its surplus population, either in the express lane (a gentleman called Mohammed Atta flying through the office window on a Tuesday morning) or through less dramatic but relentless 286

after america

mass immigration. (I believe they have a new “community center” named after Mr. Atta in Tower Hamlets, East London.) The collapsed birth rates of Europe and the Asian tigers left an insufficient domestic market for economic growth. They were ever more dependent on access to the U.S. market, even as the American consumer became too broke to go to the mall. As for the rest of the planet, sub-Saharan Africa doubled its population between 2010 and 2030. Unlike enviro-feminists in London fretting about “overpopulation,” the Africans were in no hurry to tie their tubes, and the West’s ecochondriacs declined to hector them. Why, sub-Saharan babies “consumed” fewer resources. Which was true. They still do, man for man. Excepting South Africa, the Dark Continent’s per capita income averaged $355 in 2004, but had fallen below $275 by 2030.4 Good for the planet? Well, it depends how you think about it. A few years earlier, a Unicef report had found that more than one billion children in the developing world were suffering from the most basic “deprivations”—lack of food, lack of education, lack of rights.5 Yet by 2020 each of them—or at any rate the half who were girls—had had an average of three children each.