After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (46 page)

You would be surprised by how fast demographic destiny, economic reality, and technological escape-hatches intersect. Compare the turn-of-the-century’s suspicion and denigration of genetically modified foods with what was either enthusiasm for or indifference to genetically modified people. Mess with our vegetables and we would burn down your factory.

Mess with us, and we passed you our credit card. And by the time we wondered whether it was all such a smart idea it was the robots that had the Platinum Visa cards.

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the SomaLification of the worLd

The world after America is more dangerous, more violent, more genocidal. The fulfillment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions was more than simply the after 313

biggest abdication of responsibility by the great powers since the 1930s. It confirmed the Islamo-Sino-Russo-Everybody Else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer had the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.

What changed? At first, it seemed that nothing had. When a year or two went by without Israel getting nuked, people concluded that there had been no reason to worry in the first place. Washington’s “realists” said it demonstrated that “containment” (the fallback policy) worked. If the destruction of the Zionist Entity and, indeed, the West as a whole were Iran’s goals, they were theoretical—or, at any rate, not urgent. Pre-nuclear Iran had authorized successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, and blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, and acted extra-territorially to the full extent of its abilities for a third of a century, suggesting at the very minimum that it might be prudent to assume that when its abilities go nuclear Iran would be acting to an even fuller extent. But to acknowledge that simple truth would have asked too much of the “great powers,” preoccupied as they were with health care reform, and gays in the military, and universal nuclear disarmament.

Everything changed, instantly. But we pretended not to notice. At a stroke, Iran had transformed much of the map—and not just in the Middle East, where the Sunni dictatorships faced a choice between an unsought nuclear arms race or a future as Iranian client states. The “realists” argued that Iran was a “rational” actor and so, because blowing Tel Aviv off the map was totally “irrational,” it obviously couldn’t be part of the game plan.

Whether or not Iran was being “contained” from killing the Jews, there was no strategy for “containing” Iran’s use of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for “containing” the mullahs’ generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology. It should have been obvious that, even before obliterating Israel, Teheran intended to derive
some
benefit from its nuclear status. Entirely rational leverage would include: controlling the supply of Gulf oil, setting the price, and determining the customers; getting vulnerable emirates such as Kuwait and Qatar to close 314

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U.S. military bases; and turning American allies in Europe into de facto members of the non-aligned movement. Whatever deterrent effect it might have had on first use or proliferation, there was no reason to believe any U.S.

“containment” strategy would prevent Iran accomplishing its broader strategic goals. And sure enough all came to pass, very quickly. Why wouldn’t they? Soviet containment had been introduced a couple years after Washington had nuked Japan. Iranian “containment” followed years of inaction, in which America and its allies had passively acquiesced in the ayatollahs’

ambitions. Unlike the 1940s, there was a fundamental credibility issue.

Saudi Arabia began its own nuclear acquisition program, and continued with it even after it became clear that, on balance, Shia Persian nucleariza-tion worked, like so much else, to Wahhabi Arab advantage. It clarified the good cop/bad cop relationship. The Saudi annexation of the West was now backed by Iranian nuclear muscle.

For the most part, China stands aloof from these disputes. It has no pretensions to succeed America as the global order maker, and, while preferring likeminded authoritarian regimes, is happy to do business with whom-soever finds themselves in power in Africa, South America, or anywhere else. For their part, China’s trading partners have no desire to provoke Beijing, not with all those surplus young men it’s so eager to dispatch abroad. In a world in which American battleships no longer ply the Pacific, Australia understands that it lives on a Chinese lake. How silly was the assumption that “globalization” meant “westernization” or even “Americanization”—for little reason other than that, when a Danish businessman conversed with his Indonesian supplier, he did so in English. There have always been lingua francas—Latin, French—and their moments came and went. In 1958, just under 10 percent of the world’s people spoke English and 15.6 percent spoke Mandarin.62 By 1992, Mandarin was 15.2 percent, and English was down to 7.6. Today, business computers from Canada to New Zealand have keyboards in Roman and Chinese characters.

Even as it de-anglicizes, so the world after America is reprimitivizing, fast. In the early years of the century, in many columns filed from the VIP

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lounges of the world’s airports, Thomas L. Friedman, the in-house “thinker”

at the
New York Times
, had an analogy to which he was especially partial.

From December 2008:

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.63

And it wasn’t just space-age Hong Kong! From May 2008: In JFK’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout.

We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons.64

And it wasn’t just stone-age JFK! From 2007: Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.65

I gather that “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” were two popular TV

cartoon series of the mid-twentieth century. If you still have difficulty grasp-ing Mr. Friedman’s point, here he is in 2010, bemoaning the “faded, cramped domestic terminal” in Los Angeles, yet another example of America’s, er, terminal decline:

Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones.66

More fool them. Scholars of twentieth century popular culture say you’d have made a ton more money if you’d invested in “The Flintstones,” which was a classic, instead of “The Jetsons,” which was a stale knock-off with the 316

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veneer of modernity. But, if you were as invested in this theory of terminal decline as Friedman was, it would have helped to think it through a little.

Here’s one more from the
New York Times
’ cartoon thinker, from January 2002, when Americans were, for once, the Jetsons: For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones—and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.67

But they didn’t, did they? To reprise the old Taliban saying: “Americans have all the watches, but we’ve got all the time.” The American Jetsons had all the high-tech gizmos, but the Afghan Flintstones had the string and fertilizer.

The United States had accounted for almost half the world’s military expenditures. But somehow it didn’t feel like that. In Afghanistan, a few illiterate goatherds with IEDs had tied down the hyperpower for over twice as long as it took America to win victory in the Second World War. To be sure, counterinsurgency campaigns are difficult. But D-Day difficult? Liberating-a-continent difficult? Liberating a continent from a serious enemy with well-trained troops and state-of-the-art technology?

If the jihadists’ problem was an inability to forget the Crusades, perhaps the West suffered from an inability to remember. After Muslim provocations against Christians, Pope Urban II spoke to the Council of Clermont in 1095 and called for what we now know as the First Crusade.

Within four years, an army had been raised, got to the Middle East (on foot for most of the journey), liberated the Holy Land, and established a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem that lasted for two centuries. Four years, eight years, twelve years after George W. Bush spoke in the rubble of Ground Zero, Ground Zero was still rubble, and all the smart thinkers insisted that it was a waste of time to discuss whatever it was America was doing in Afghanistan in terms of outmoded concepts such as “victory.”

Nobody had any desire to be in Kabul for another two centuries, or even another two years.

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Well, the First Crusade was too long ago, and so was D-Day, and the wars were different now: America had more ships and more planes than anybody else on the planet. So, entirely reasonably, nobody wanted to get into a dogfight or a naval battle with them. Instead, the geopolitical Gulliver was up against legions of Liliputians—fiercely motivated youths generated by an ideology with all but unlimited manpower. It had been that way since Somalia in the early Nineties. The Americans made a film on the subject (
Black Hawk Down
) and then never gave it another thought. And so, two decades on, the world’s most luxuriously funded military showed no sign of having adapted to the world it was living in. Its enemies had: an IED was an “improvised” explosive device. Why couldn’t America improvise? In the early stages of its wars, IEDs were detonated by cell phones and even garage-door openers. So the Pentagon jammed them. The enemy downgraded to more primitive detonators: you can’t jam string. In 2010 it was reported that the Taliban had developed metal-free IEDs, which made them all but undetectable: instead of two hacksaw blades and artillery shells, they began using graphite blades and ammonium nitrate.68 If you had tanks and battleships and jet fighters, you were too weak to take on the hyperpower. But, if you had string and hacksaws and fertilizer, you could tie him down for a decade. America had fallen for the Friedman thesis: in Afghanistan, the Taliban had invested in “The Flintstones,” while the West had invested in

“The Jetsons,” and we were the ones desperate to negotiate our way out.

So, in the fall of 2001, the Jetsons toppled the Flintstones. And the Flintstones bided their time, and quickly figured out that the Jetsons didn’t have the stomach to do what it takes, and their space-age occupation of Bedrock would rapidly dwindle down into a thankless semi-colonial polic-ing operation for which the citizenry back on the home front in Orbit City would have no appetite. Jetson-wise, the West was all jets and no sons. The sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn pointed out that 1,000 German men had 480

sons, while 1,000 Afghan men had 4,000 sons.69 To lose your only son in a distant war is devastating. For your third, fourth, and fifth sons, what else is there for them to do?

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The Pentagon was post-human before post-human was cool. Having pioneered unmanned drones to zap the natives from the skies, it developed more sophisticated models—drones that flew in the exosphere, and were even more invisible to the goatherds far below. When you’re dependent on technology in an age of globalized computerization, it’s hard to make everything “secure,” and certainly not as secure as a group of inbred jihadists sitting around a camp fire. The unceasing Chinese cyber-probing grew more and more probing, and daring. Drones would suddenly drop from the skies for no apparent reason. Nobody minded: if it was a casualty of war, it was not one to be memorialized or exploited for political gain. Eventually the cost of replacing them became prohibitive. The land of the unmanned drone gradually abandoned the drone, while remaining unmanned.

Recall H. G. Wells’ Time-Traveler. When he makes his first foray into the Morlocks’ subterranean lair, he is impressed to find that, unlike the effete Eloi, they are not vegetarian. On the other hand, he is not clear exactly what large animal it is that they’re roasting on the spit.

And then the penny drops.

“Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was—far less than any monkey,” he reflects. “His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men—!”

He calms himself and tries to look at it in a scientific spirit. “After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago.”

I gather that, for TV comics and newspaper cartoonists of your time—

the mid-twentieth century—there were few more reliable laughs than putting a white man wearing a pith helmet in a big pot surrounded by dancing natives. Yet, oddly enough, there was virtually no empirical basis for such a persistent stereotype. “The rest of the world had always believed that there was cannibalism in Africa,” wrote Charles Onyango-Obbo in
The East African
in 2003, “but there wasn’t much hard evidence for it.”70

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Yet by the early days of the twenty-first century, when the PC enforcers would clobber you for even the mildest evocation of the old cooking-pot gag, cannibalism was flourishing. Mr Onyango-Obbo had been reporting that the Congolese Liberation Movement was slaughtering huge numbers of people and feeding the body parts to their relatives. In North Kivu, a group called les Effaceurs (the Erasers) had wanted to open up the province’s mineral resources to commercial exploitation and to that end had engaged in ethnic cleansing by cannibalism. The Congo Civil War raged for most of the first decade of this century uncovered by CNN and the
New
York Times
for want of any way to blame it on George W. Bush. Among the estimated six million dead, many were eaten. The two parties to the conflict agreed on very little except that pygmies make an excellent entrée. Both sides hunted them down as if they were the drive-thru fast-food of big game.

While regarding them as sub-human, they believed that if you roasted their flesh and ate it you would gain magical powers. In return, the pygmies asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity, for all the good that did.71