THE LAST SEASON, Erick Blehm, Harper Perennial, 2006

1

In the vast Sierra wilderness, far to the southward of the famous Yosemite Valley, there is yet a grander valley of the same kind.  It is situated on the South Fork of the Kings River, above the most extensive groves and forests of the giant sequoia, and be3neath the shadows of the highest mountains in the range, where canyons are the deepest and the snow-laden peaks are crowded most closely together.    –John Muir, 1891

3

A craggy, high-altitude desert of granite and metamorphic rock dominates the country.  But dotting the arid landscape of serrated ridgelines and glacial sculpted domes are remnants of the last Ice Age, or at least the last winter; striking sapphire blue lakes, ribboned inlets and outlets become creeks snaking across arctic-like tundra, giving drink to vibrant brushstrokes of meadows and forests, while swatches of green erupt like oases from the volcanic and glacially formed grayness.  The contrast softens the hard, rocky vistas and coaxes ecosystems to take up residence amid the harshness of it all.

4

With very little effort, one can escape almost everything and everyone associated with civilization.

But the reflection in a clear mountain lake of one highly trained ranger serves as a reminder:  What one cannot escape is one’s self.

9

In the backcountry, they were on call 24 hours a day as wilderness medics, law enforcement officers, search-and-rescue specialists, and wilderness hosts; interpreters who wore the hats of geologists, naturalists, botanists, wildlife observers, and historians.  On good days they were “heroes” called upon to find a lost backpacker, warm a hypothermic hiker, chase away a bear, or save a life.  On bad days they picked up trash, tore down illegal campfires, wrote citations, and were called “fucking assholes” simply for doing their job.  On the worst days they recovered bodies.

15

On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue.  Now even the colors are changing.  But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk, times neither day nor night, the old roads return to the sky some of its color.  Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.

22

. . . that remark was more maudlin than suicidal . . .

23

For the 5-foot-10, blond, fair-skinned Lyness, there was magic in these mountains.  After a couple of weeks in the high and lonely, all the backcountry rangers experienced a slowing down.  Randy called it “decompression,” a transition from the fast pace and crowds of civilization.  Once in wilderness, a Zen-like calm heightened their senses exponentially with each passing day.  Even skeptical rangers admit that an unmistakable zone comes with time and solitude.  Randy had likened the quieting sensation to religion, “a theology not found elsewhere,: he wrote in his logbook while stationed at Charlotte Lake in 1966.  He had struggled then to explain these “Sierra moments . . . only experienced when still . . . and surrounded by and conscious of the country.”

49

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”             -Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Only this simple everyday living and wilderness wandering seems natural and real, the other world, more like something read, not at all related to reality as I know it.

                                                            -Randy Morgenson, Charlotte Lake, 1966

51

. . . he was prepared to “protect the people from the park, and the park from the people.”  It was his mantra.

53

. . . where “the evening alpenglow on the peaks filled me with a feeling of bigness inside,” . . .

“ . . . I know exactly how Henry Thoreau felt when running home after the rain.  ‘Grow wild according to your nature, like these brakes and sedges which will never become English hay, let the thunder rumble.’ ”

Indeed, Middle Ray Lake was his Walden Pond; the surrounding peaks, basins, and meadows were his Sand County.

54

With some difficult scrambling and climbing, he reached the crux, where water flowed literally from solid rock.

57

Wilderness:  An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.           -Howard Zahniser

SUPERFUSION How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World’s Prosperity Depends on It, Zachary Karabell, Simon & Schuster, NY, 2009

4

. . . governments, especially governments of powerful and prosperous countries, continue to behave as if they have sovereignty over their domestic economies even as the measures they take are increasingly dependent on forces beyond their control.

7

. . . the future of China would be determined by economic openness, not political participation, and that dollars and not democracy would shape society.

8

These old ways of approaching the world, these us-versus-them dyads, are not just benign anachronisms.  Clinging to them can and will have serious consequences, most of them negative.

15-6

At the end of the 1970s, few societies were more distinct and distant.  China was a predominantly agricultural nation mired in poverty and cut off from the world after the excesses of the dictatorship of Chairman Mao.  By the 1970sm trade accounted for only 5% of China’s gross domestic product, an astonishing low figure for a country of China’s sez and scale.  In fact, China in the waning years of Mao had become significantly more isolated and detached from the international system that it had been either before the Communist victory in 1419 or during the initial years of the revolution in the 1950s.

The United States . . . was the dominant power in the world in the late 1970s, even though its self-perception was mired in malaise and doubt.  The experience of the Vietnam War, the stagflation of the domestic economy, the Watergate imbroglio, and a sense that it was no longer perceived as a champion of freedom all contributed to a crisis of confidence and self-image.  The 1970s also saw the beginning of a long and permanent decline in U.S. manufacturing employment, as other parts of world began to produce an ever-larger share of consumer goods for sale in U.S. and European markets.  But in both military and economic terms, the United States remained the central force on the globe, even factoring in the military challenge of the Soviet Union and the growing economic strength of Japan and West Germany.

16

The United States and China had a dramatic and surprising rekindling of relations in 1972, when Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing to meet with Mao in the Great Hall of the People off of Tiananmen Square.  It was an extraordinary meeting, made possible by the assiduous back-channel diplomacy of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, his Chinese interlocutors in general, and Premier Zhou Enlai above all.  Of course, there was also Ping-Pong.  China extended an invitation to the U.S. table tennis team as a gesture of goodwill in 1971, setting the stage for the political rapprochement a year later. 

17

In 1978 Deng Xiaoping consolidated his hold on the party and the country, and he pushed through an agenda of reform and modernization.  Too many of China’s people were mired in poverty, and Deng wisely understood that unless that changed, the tenuous compact between the party and the people would disintegrate.  Deng was an unlikely visionary.  He had survived purges, internecine battles within the Communist Party, bouts of internal exile and disfavor, the animosity of the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, and what could best be3 described as an up-and-down relationship with Mao.  Already seventy-two years old when Mao died, Deng was at an age when most people look back at their lives.  But he had no intention of going gently into the good night, wizened and gnome like that he was.  He had the grudging respect of many of the older party cadres and the utter loyalty of a younger generation that venerated his long service to the party and marveled at his ability to escape death, political and actual, for so long.

Deng intended to remake the way that the party governed the economy.  To that end, he first undertook agricultural reform and began to abolish the collective farming system.  Then he allowed for the creation of a few select special economic zones along the southern coast.  These zones were allowed to design their tax regimes to be more hospitable to private industry and foreign business ventures, and to give individuals more latitude to do business separate from the mandate of the state.  In spite of the Communist Party’s hostility to the West, the main criteria for the zones were that they were proximate to centers of Western commerce and trade, namely, Hong Kong, Macau, and in related fashion, Taiwan.

18

This limited opening was meant to be a laboratory, but the hunger of people for more autonomy and for raising their standard of living led to a rush of activity.  Trade spiked dramatically, as did industry in formerly sleepy regions such as the Pearl River Delta north of Hong Kong.  That did not please many in the party, who would not speak out directly against Deng but who could fall back on deep-seated and widely shared am bivalence about trade and too much entanglement with the West.  Many old-time party members held fast to the belief that fewer exports were better than more, and that no imports were better than some.  There was also resistance to welcoming foreign capital into the closed loop that was China’s economy in the 1970s and early 1980s  Many feared, rightly, as it turned out, that once foreign capital began to flow into China, the days of Maoism and even Chinese Communism would be numbered.

19

Some resisted the move toward more openness with the world and fought the very idea that market rules should have a place in China.  Others wanted the opening to go faster and extend more broadly throughout Chinese society.  Most of the discussions occurred behind a veneer of party unity, but soon the debate began to seep out in public.  Intellectuals and poets joined the discussions, while millions in the special economic zones set up small business enterprises and cast off the bland ideological straightjacket that had stifled change and growth for the past decades.  Of course, the fact that the government relaxed its restrictions and was less prone to the indiscriminate use of force was a tool of control allowed for the loosening.

Part of the debate was purely about the best path to modernization and economic growth.  But with that came the more radical debate about democracy and political openness.  Inside the party, there had long been discussions about democracy within the framework of Communist Party rule, but now there were rumblings about democracy as a separate reform that could jeopardize party rule.  By and end of the 1980s, some of the defenders of democracy were making their claims in public.  While they were assailed as “bourgeois liberals” bent on undermining the revolution, the fact that they were even able to publish and discuss their views in public without being arrested and jailed was more notable than the acrimony they generated.  Of course, they did face harassment, and when certain invisible lines were crossed, they could be stripped of their posts, confined, and in other ways silenced.  The rising volume of these debates was the direct precursor to the democracy movement that culminated in the Tiananmen Square protest during the spring of 1989.

20

. . . the internal dynamics of Chinese society were watched only by academics and to some extent intelligence agencies.  The former did a relatively good job tracking the changes and the debates but tended to see China’s evolution through a prism of “Communism and the party, bad; democracy and the market, good.”  Intelligence agencies were mostly focused on counting men in uniform and numbers of missiles, and on predicting whether China would take action against Taiwan.

21

[Deng] knew that something had not gone according to plan, and he was determined to set a future course that would not see a repeat of the protests on the one hand, or the chaos that he saw as endemic in China’s past on the other.  China over the previous 150 years had been buffeted by a never-ending series of civil wars, invasions, and self-imposed crises, and Deng was determined not to perpetuate a destructive cycle that had left the country on the sidelines of history.

21-2

Deng’s willingness to embrace a market economy and adopt an open door approach to the world at large was anything but ideological.  Years earlier, observing party members anguishing over some proposed policy, Deng had remarked, “Black cat, white cat, what does it matter as long it catches mice?”  The ends above all mattered for Deng, and both before and after Tiananmen, the goal was the continuation of the Chinese state led by the party for the betterment of all of China.  The material prosperity of the masses was an integral component to that end, and he had the foresight to understand that the rising affluence of neighboring Asian countries such as Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand was making it impossible for the party to maintain legitimacy unless it delivered on the promise of prosperity.

22

. . . China embarked on a path of economic modernization that managed to transform the country more quickly and more effectively than anyone could have imagined.  At each stage along the way, if course, other paths were available, many of which might have led to very different outcomes, including the collapse of the government, much as the ossified government of the Soviet Union fell apart in the early 1990s.

296-7

[There are] strong currents of nationalism and xenophobia in the Chinese military establishment, which views the Pacific Rim as destined to be a Chinese lake and sees the continued independence of Taiwan as well as a strong Japan as challenges to be confronted as China grows more economically powerful and confident in the years ahead.

What these voices don’t recognize is that it’s too late.  Whether or not Chimerica is a good thing or a bad thing, it has become so embedded that undoing it would be hugely destructive and disruptive.  That is more true after 2008 that it was before.  They need us; we need them.  The two economies have fused in the past 20 years, and not just in terms of China producing and the U.S. consuming.  In fact, now and in the years ahead, the dominant feature will be China consuming and providing finance to the U.S. government and growth to U.S. companies.  The only thing that can prevent that is concerted action on the part of either government to stand in the way, and the costs of that are so prohibitive that it is hard to see how that could happen.

Yes, if the economy of the United States were to deteriorate further in the years to come, there could be a wave of isolationism and protectionism.  If American self-conception doesn’t adapt to a changed world, if American cling to outdated notions of their own power and self-importance, that too could create serious obstacles to the forward progress of Chimerica in particular and to global commerce in general.  And if the benefits of these trends accrue only to the few, then it is inevitable that many will object and do what they can to arrest these developments.

298

The Washington mantra of open markets and less state activity was the orthodoxy until it proved to have some critical flaws, but no other system has proven better.  If there were a clear road map to prosperity, everyone would use it.  Add to the incomplete data and anachronistic models, and you are left with the recognition that anyone who claims certainty about the outcome of China’s unique path is at best fooling himself.

300

. . . even a United States and a developed world mired in slow growth or no growth are better off than they were a hundred years ago.  What has been lost in the United States is a sense that the future is what we make of it; that spirit is everywhere evident in China.  It is the single most important ingredient to a thriving society, and it has been the spark that made the fusion of China and America possible.  It is what led Deng to renounce the path his country was on and choose another, even though the means were at times brutal.  It is what led U.S. corporations to seek opportunities in China long before the odds of success outweighed the likelihood of failure.  And it is what allowed Americans for generations to reinvent themselves in the wake of their mistakes.  In the end, Chimerica is an idea, a vision of the future no more or less fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty, and complications that any other idea for how the world might look.  It is also an idea whose time has come, and as Victor Hugo wrote, such ideas are “greater than the tread of mighty armies.” We can try to turn back the tide.  Or we can embrace the world as it is, and work to fashion a future that satisfies our collective yearning for peace and prosperity.

304-5

If the past years have taught anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.  The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union came as a profound shock, as did the events of 9/11, to name just two of the black swans that took the world by surprise.  While the emergence of China seems relatively certain now, the future may hold some dramatic twists.  And while the fusion of the two economies is central to grasping the world today, it may of course wane or succumb to pressures in the years ahead.  Other factors, whether environmental or geopolitical, may also alter the trajectory in ways that are impossible to predict but should at least be considered.

To preserve this fusion, and ensure that it provides stability and enhances global prosperity in the future, both societies will need to consider radical innovations.  The United States currently deploys part of the 7^th Fleet in the Pacific Rim to keep the peace and shield Taiwan.  That raises the question of whether Taiwan needs shielding from China, especially given the degree to which both have been moving closer as economic ties deepen.  While close financial bonds in no way preclude armed conflict, the price of that for both Taiwan and China has become much higher.  As for formerly antagonistic neighbors such as Japan and China, Japan’s fortunes increasingly depend on Chinese demand for its high-end equipment, and while neither bears the other much affection, they too have been drawn into a tighter embrace.  In that light, the continued presence of the American fleet may be as anachronistic, and unnecessarily provocative, as the divisions once stationed in post-1945 Germany.

Both the Chinese and American governments continue to set economic policy within their borders, and while they consult one another, they treat things like interest rates, currency values, and budgets as sovereign rights that no one can or should infringe upon.  But in a world where much of China’s reserves are held in American assets, and where U.S. budgets are facilitated by Chinese credit, and in a world where capital flows between the two shape the domestic balances of each, it might make more sense if policy were decided in tandem.  Yes, there is now an ongoing dialogue, but that is different than officials of the Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China sitting down and deciding jointly on interest rates.  As unthinkable as that is now, the fusion of the two systems may soon demand it.

307

If the United States is to avoid the fate of Great Britain [loss of empire], if it even can, it must reorient itself away from the military and security challenges of the twentieth century and to the economic challenges of the twenty-first.  That will require not just a shift in how Americans think about the world but in how they interact with it, which will in turn demand a fundamental rethinking of the shape of the government and the national security state that emerged to meet the challenge of a Cold War and a Soviet Un ion that ceased to exist at precisely the same time that China began its steady rise.

Since 1989, the Chinese have had two decades to reshape their economy and their government.  In those 20 years, the U.S. government changed hardly at all, until the breakdown of the financial system led to intervention in the economy on a scale unknown since the 1930s.  But even the bailout of the financial system was managed with the tools of an earlier era, and by bureaucracies that were never designed to handle today’s issues.  And so there is a choice: try to regenerate our system with archaic tools, outmoded concepts, and government agencies from an earlier era, or channel our wellsprings of innovation and ingenuity to recasting our institutions and our thinking to fit the world we are now in.  It’s either that, or prepare for long evenings watching the sun set and wistfully yearning for a time that lives only in our memories.  Let’s hope we choose well.

403-5

If the past years have taught anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.  The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union came as a profound shock, as did the events of 9/11, to name just two of the black swans that took the world by surprise.  While the emergence of China seems relatively certain now, the future may hold some dramatic twists.  And while the fusion of the two economies is central to grasping the world today, it may of course wane or succumb to pressures in the years ahead.  Other factors, whether environmental or geopolitical, may also alter the trajectory in ways that are impossible to predict but should at least b e considered.

To preserve this fusion, and ensure that it provides stability and enhances global prosperity in the future, both societies will need to consider radical innovations.  The United States currently deploys part of the 7^th Fleet in the Pacific Rim to keep the peace and shield Taiwan.  That raises the question of whether Taiwan needs shielding from China, especially given the degree to which both have been moving closer as economic ties deepen.  While close financial bonds in no way preclude armed conflict, the price of that for both Taiwan and China has become much higher.  As for formerly antagonistic neighbors such as Japan and China, Japan’s fortunes increasingly depend on Chinese demand for its high-end equipment, and while neither bears the other much affection, they too have been drawn into a tighter embrace.  In that light, the continued presence of the American fleet may be as anachronistic, and unnecessarily provocative, as the divisions once stationed in post-1945 Germany.

Both the Chinese and American government continue to set economic policy within their borders, and while they consult one another, they treat things like interest rates, currency

values, and budgets as sovereign rights that no one can or should infringe upon.  But in a world where much of China’s reserves are held in American assets, and where U.S. budgets are facilitated by Chinese credit, and in a world where capital flows between the two, shape the domestic balances of each, it might make more sense if policy were decided in tandem.  Yes, there is now an ongoing dialogue, but that is different than officials of the Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China sitting down and deciding jointly on interest rates.  As unthinkable as that is now, the fusion of the two systems may soon demand it.

The SECOND WORLD

095  The SECOND WORLD  Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Parag  Khanna, Random House, NY, 2008

REFERENCE POINTS

Second World defined: a capital city has been cleaned up, the rest of the country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .x-xi

“The world is a book, and those who have not traveled have read only one page.”

                                                                                                -Saint Augustine  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi

Whenever governments champion leaders over institutions, the people lose.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Only in paranoid regimes do the riot police outnumber protestors.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Whether revolution transpires by coup, grassroots revolt, or military invasion, democratic consolidation only happens when locals have the means to pressure entrenched leadership into opening the system.       . . . .  59

Today the name of every Central Asian state ends in “-stan,” the Farsi suffix meaning “land.”  . . . . . . . . .  66

Rising empires see insecure spaces on maps the way bears emerging from hibernation sea food.  . . . . . . . 88

Merely catching drug czars in about as effective as catching terrorists: Unless root causes are addressed, the problem only multiplies.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146  

as Brazil goes, so goes South America.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

Natural resources and left-leaning democracy are never in themselves the causes of institutional decay in comparison to gamesmanship and corruption.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

The epic film The Battle of Algiers demonstrates, [that] even 150 years of European colonialism failed to transform Arab society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181

One million Egyptians make up nearly a fifth of Libra’s population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  185

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 marked the beginning of the modern subjugation of the Arab world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 

 

About 10% of the world’s sea trade still passes through the Suez Canal, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192

China is projected to replace the US as Egypt’s top trading partner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .194

Egypt is the central sieve through which Arabism and Islamism have for centuries flowed and blended, never more so than today. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197

The logic of Islamic democracy is that Islam is about liberation, not submission, and democracy is a means to exercise it.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199

But even as the Brotherhood debates whether Islam is “a” or “the” source of law, its platform actually has little to do with religion, focusing simply on countering corruption, creating jobs, and improving social services.200

American foreign policy “greatly facilitates the growth of extremist Islamist forces.”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200

The Western policy of prizing stability over democracy has become a pathetic cliché, for such stability never lasts more than a generation and culminates in instability.   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

Maybe an Arab peacekeeping force will put lives on the line for Muslims the way the US and Europe already do.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Modernization and conservatism are two simultaneous trends coevolving across the Arab world, each constantly feeding off the other.  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .213

Wars are a geopolitical resent button     . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .220

For the West it is an axiom of history that no country can sustain the paradox of a capitalist economy paired with an authoritarian government, yet this is precisely China’s sturdy reality.  Outside powers have never penetrated China’s inscrutable imperial politics and so must come to terms with “China as it is, not as we want it to be.”  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

[In China here are 40 million Christians; 30 million Muslims, called Hui.] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318

United States’ share of the world economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326

[In] the post-World War II boom America [was] the world’s largest oil producer and exporter . . . . . . . 329

“The idea of homeland security seems to have as much to do with illegal immigration coming through the southern border as it does with the threat of terrorism”  -Richard G. Wilkinson, The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .329

. . . as America’s global corruption rating falls, it must be questioned whether Americans’ loyalty is to people or institutions, to profits or to progress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332

America’s Patriot Act violates five of the ten cherished amendments of the Bill of Rights. . . . . . . . . . . . . 332

Great wealth and extravagance lead to the worst of all government, namely the mob rule of elites with little motivation other than preventing others from gaining the upper hand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332

America is decreasingly loved and increasingly feared, Europe is increasingly loved and decreasingly 

feared, and China is increasingly both loved and feared.    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

America, not China, is the world’s largest penal colony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  331 

It would be a step down for most Japanese and Germans to live like Americans. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331

America “can have democracy . . . or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, 

but we cannot have both.”  -Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis . . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   331

War . . . is not the continuation of politics by other means, but rather the cessation of negotiation.    . . . . 341

PREFACE

ix

[A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee, 1958 – 12 volumes]

Geopolitics is the relationship between power and space.  Globalization refers to the widening and deepening interconnections among the world’s peoples through all forms of exchange.

Like elements in the periodic table, nations can be grouped according to size, stability, wealth, and worldview.  Stable and prosperous first-world countries largely benefit from the international order as it stands today.  By contrast, poor and unstable third-world countries have failed to overcome their disadvantaged position within that order.  Second-world countries are caught in between.  Most of them embody both sets of characteristics:  They are divided internally into winners and losers, haves and have-nots.

x-xi

Schizophrenic second-world countries are also the tipping-point states that will determine the twenty-first-century balance of power among the world’s three main empires, the United States, the European Union, and China, as each uses the levers of globalization to exert its gravitational pull.  How do countries choose the superpower with which to ally?  Which model of globalization will prevail?  Will the East rival the West?  The answers to these questions can be found in the second world, and only in the second world.

To comprehend the morphing spheres and vectors of influence across the five regions of the second world, one must begin to think like a country, to slip into its skin.  World Bank officials joke that they would never purport to be experts about countries they had not at least flown over.  Experts of this kind point to statistical indicators and declare “things are getting much better” in this or that country.  Usually, this means that a capital city has been cleaned up, provided with sprouting hotels, banks with cash machines, and shopping malls, while crime has been isolated to outer neighborhoods.  What about the rest of the country: cities that don’t have airports, provinces that have poor roads and dilapidated infrastructure?  Are things getting much better out there?  Does it even feel like the same country?  It is no wonder people are surprised by a coup here, an economic collapse there, in countries that are constantly said to be thriving.

xi

Saint Augustine declared that “the world is a book, and those who have not traveled have read only one page.”  Only firsthand experience can validate or challenge our intuitions, giving us confidence about risky political decisions in a complex world of instant feedback loops and unintended consequences.

xi-xii

During travel, perception and though merge; a contradiction can emerge as a truth to be revealed, not some exception to be disproved.  Such ambiguity is the corollary of complexity, after all.  Reality is famously resistant to theories that measure the world according to what it should be rather than how it really is.  Instead, exploring the patterns of the second world aesthetically, honoring the value of purely sensory judgments, this exposes characteristics that are common to the entire second world; differences are revealed to be more relative than absolute.  For example, the civility of people’s behavior tends to reflect the decency of their governments, which in turn often correlates to the quality of their roads.  In the first world, roads are well paved, and the view is clear for miles, whereas clogged third-world roads are obscured by dust and exhaust; second-world roads are a mix of both.  First-world countries can accommodate millions of tourists, while visiting third-world states often involves choosing between exclusive hotels or low cost backpacking; many second-world countries simply lack the infrastructure for mass tourism.  Garbage is recycled in the first world and burned in the third; in the second world, it is occasionally collected but is also dumped off hillsides.  Corruption is widely invisible in the first world, rampant in the third, and subtle in the second.  Diplomatically, first-world states are sovereign decision-makers, and passive third-world nations are objects of superpower neomercantilism.  Second-world countries are the nervous swing states in between.

INTRODUCTION: Inter-Imperial Relations

xiv

. . . for thousands of years, empires have been the world’s most powerful political entities, their imperial yoke restraining subjugated nations from fighting one another and thereby fulfilling people’s eternal desire for order, the prerequisite for stability and meaningful democracy.  Rome, Istanbul, Venice, and London ruled over thousands of distinct political communities until the advent of the nation-state in the seventeenth century.  By World War II, global power had consolidated into just a half dozen empires, almost all of them European.  Decolonization ended these artificial empires, small nations

ruling by force over overseas colonies, but it di not end empire itself.  Empires may not be the most desirable form of governance, given the regular occurrence of hugely destructive wars between them, but mankind’s psychological limitations still prevent it from doing better.

xv

. . . today it is possible to measure with exactitude the micro-level processes and interactions that add up to large geopolitical shifts, just as scientists measure the symptoms and causes of climate change.  The world’s superpower map is being rebalanced, but without a single center.  By challenging America’s position in the global hierarchy and securing allies and loyalty around the world, the EU and China have engineered a palpable shift toward three relatively equal centers of influence: Washington, Brussels, and Beijing.

xvi

. . . Europe and china [have risen] from under the shadow of America’s regional security umbrellas, shifting gradually from internal consolidation to external power projection.  Their rise is now no more preventable than evolution.  Everywhere one can feel a planet that is simultaneously being Americanized, Europeanized, and Sinicized.

Power has migrated from monopoly to marketplace.  All three superpowers now use their military, economic, and political power to build spheres of influence around the world, competing to mediate conflicts, shape markets, and spread customs.  In the geopolitical marketplace, consumer countries choose which superpower will be their patron; some choose more than one.  When one superpower tries to isolate an enemy, another superpower can always swoop in with a lifeline and gain an ally.  The world has never before witnessed this sort of truly global competition, a condition that may be the most complicated, in all history, since the superpowers are neither all Western (China) nor even states as conventionally understood (the EU).

xvii

Many believe that the emerging world order is polycentric: China will remain primarily a regional power, Japan will assert itself more nationalistically, the EU will lack influence beyond its immediate region, India will rise to rival China, Russia will resurge, and an Islamic Caliphate will congeal as a geopolitical force.  All these views ignore a much deeper reality: The United States, the European Union, and China already possess most of the total power in the world, and will do their best to prevent all others from gaining ground on them.  Russia, Japan, and India cannot assert themselves globally, militarily or otherwise; they are not superpowers but rather balancers whose support (or lack thereof) can buttress or retard the dominance of the three superpowers without preventing it outright.  In fact, they are being gradually outmaneuvered by the United States, the EU, and China in their own regions.  Islam is in the same boat; lacking any diplomatic coherence of its own, it is spread across vast regions that are also bending toward the gravities of the main superpowers rather than coalescing into a meaningful whole.  So there are precisely three superpowers in the world, empires that will compete to set the

terms until history’s other principal vehicle for shaping global order, war, dictates otherwise.

xx

In the 1990s, a great debate took place between the contrasting visions of Francis Fukuyama (The End of History) and Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations), with the former generally caricatured as utopian and the latter as fatalistic.  The grand predecessor to this dichotomy was the tension between the worldviews of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.  Spengler opened The Decline of the West (1918) with the bold claim, “This book will for the first time attempt to predict history.”  He argued that the demise of the classical West was as inevitable as history itself; the symbols of high culture would naturally degenerate into material decadence in a process similar to human aging or the cycle of the seasons.  So persuasive was Spengler’s conclusion that Toynbee wondered before undertaking his Study of History whether the “whole inquiry had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, let along the answers, had fully taken shape in my own mind.”  But Spengler’s tragic revelation proved to be the spark for Toynbee’s own explorations, which sought to replace alarmism with foresight and determinism with agency.  Toynbee’s framework of “challenge and response” (to both natural and geopolitical stresses) set the stage for the West to choose either a compromising adaptation or an inflexible fundamentalism.  More than fifty years later, this remains the choice for the West.

xx-xxi

Almost a century ago, World War I was triggered by false assumptions and misunderstandings among European powers that had much in common: history, culture, geographic space, economic ties, and (for the most part) liberal political tradition.  Today, the United States, the EU, and China have very little of this going for them.  They do not have culture in common, nor do they share the same geographic space, nor are they all democratic.  What, if anything, can prevent World War III in a world of superpowers with such drastically different worldviews, motivations, and forms of power at their disposal?  If the twentieth century was what Isaiah Berlin called “the most terrible century in western history,” what will make the twenty-first century any different?

xxi

Whether globalization will continue is not the issue, only its extent.  Globalization has ebbed and flowed throughout history, but today it is wider and deeper than ever.

xxii

The economic interests favoring interdependence could also forestall simmering geopolitical tensions, forever transmuting them into nonviolent competition.  Indeed, the global economy will drive neither far nor fast on only one engine, and the three superpower economies are so deeply intertwined that the costs of conflict have risen considerable.  These trading empires are home to global corporations that master worldwide supply chains often located in the domains of the other empires, meaning that their continued prosperity depends on the strength, not the weakness, of the others.

. . . globalization alone will not prevent geopolitical history from repeating itself.  Globalization has always advanced and receded on the back of empires that have pushed their systems and rules as far as possible before retrenching.

PART I:  THE WEST’S EAST

BRUSSELS: The New Rome

6

Europe needs to expand, or Europe will die.  “We don’t admit it, but expansion stabilizes our population decline while increasing the labor pool,” one EU Commission official confided in his office full of wall-to-wall technocratic studies.

7

A successful empire cannot be racist.

THE RUSSION DEVOLUTION

13

 Two-thirds of Russians across the vast nation still live near the poverty line, dying off in waves during each successive intolerably cold winter.

14

. . . Western European techies clamoring to work for Estonian companies like Skype.

15

Russia’s superpower days are over.  Even as the world’s largest petrostate, its economy is still smaller than that of France.  And even as it becomes rich on paper, its politics all but confirm that the wealth will not be sustained.  Today it is the EU that prevents Russia from ever having a veto over the West, and it is also the EU that can make Russia join the West, and in doing so, same it from itself.

UCRAINE: From Border to Bridge

17

. . . Kiev, like Moscow, is a Potemkin village whose urban grandeur masks poverty that grows the farther one moves from the center.  Turning Ukraine into the next Poland means elevating it from its strikingly third-world attributes

20

Russians are so delusional that they don’t even learn from their mistakes.

22

. . . while American-led NATO used to be the tip of the West’s spear, paving the way for EU membership by absorbing not entirely qualified countries into the alliance, the EU’s gravitational pull has become far stronger and less controversial

THE BALKANS: Eastern Questions

28

. . . the total population of the remaining western and southern Balkan countries, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania; does not even add up to that of Romania, with no country larger in population than Manhattan.

29

. . . they [the Balkans] are also the most fiercely independent-minded, no country more so than Serbia.  After all, almost a century ago it was Serbian resistance to being incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire that led to World War I.

30

“We’re still a decade away from having a European-class economy.  To enter the Eurozone now would be like installing a world-class kitchen in a dilapidated house,” a Belgrade economist.

TURKEY: Marching East and West

36-7

Turkey occupies a space so vital that it destroys the idea of distinct continents.  Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine empire for eleven centuries, and then, as Istanbul, was the Ottoman seat of power over territories spanning the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Central Asia, reaching the gates of Vienna in 1687.  Straddling the narrow Dardanelles, it commands the east-west passage between Europe and Asia and the nor-south passage between the Black and Mediterranean seas.  During the Cold War, Turkey, once the Anatolian nucleus of the Ottoman empire, was NATO’s eastern island, a forward base and listening post.  Along with Ukraine, on the north shore of the Black Sea, Turkey is one of Europe’s two main prongs to the East, and the gateway to the world’s principal danger zone of Syria, Iraq, and Iran.  Turkey significantly amplifies Europe’s strategic weight: If Europe does not find ways to leverage Turkey’s strategic strengths, then its prospective eastern role effectively ends in the Balkans.

37

Turkey is important not only for where it is but also for what it is: the most powerful, democratic, and secular state in the Muslim world.  As Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan admonished in 2005, “Either [the EU] will show political maturity and become a global power, or it will end up a Christian club.”  That year, Turkey was granted approval to begin membership negotiations with the EU, signaling its readiness to become a true metissage of peoples and cultures.  It cannot be any other way, for the magnificent Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, first a Byzantine Christian church and then an Ottoman mosque, is still revered by Christians and Muslims alike.  Istanbul’s exotic boutiques, trendy galleries, and aromatic hammams (saunas) have made it the new Berlin, while the Kreuzberg district of Berlin is called “Little Istanbul.:  As a slick nightclub promoter in Istanbul boasted above blaring music, “A European DJ who hasn’t spun in Istanbul isn’t big-time.”  As Turkey becomes more European, Europe becomes more Turkish.

39

In Farsi, the word Turk can mean “barbarian” or vagabond,” . . .

THE CAUCASIAN CORRIDOR

BLACK SEA: EUROPE’S LAKE

45-6

For centuries Russian, Ottoman, and Persian imperial aspirations have flowed into the Black Sea, finding their confluence in its dark, serene waters.  Crimea’s most important archaeological site, the ancient Roman outpost of Chersonesos, now a suburb of Sebastopol, derives its name from the Greek word for “peninsula” and is the site of Prince Vladimir the Great’s baptism into Christianity in 988, after which the Byzantine empire fades, only to watch Orthodoxy spread to Kiev and Moscow.  Even the Genoese ruled cosmopolitan Crimea briefly in the fourteenth century.  In the Middle Ages, the Black Sea was the center of world commerce, linking Venice to the Mongol and Turkic tribes of Central Asia.  During its three hundred years under Ottoman control, European merchants referred to the Black Sea as a “Turkish lake.”  But in the nineteenth century, it was thrust into the geopolitical vortex:  European powers initially sought to dismember the Ottoman empire for control of the Bosphorus Strait, but After Russia under Nicholas I devastated the Ottoman fleets, Britain, France, and Austria rushed to prevent the sea from becoming the “Russian lake.”  The Crimean War thus became the western front of the Anglo-Russian “Great Game” in Central Asia.

The Black Sea today has been described as the Bermuda Triangle of strategic analysis, sitting on the edge of European, Eurasian, and Near Eastern security spaces without being central to any of them.  Yet an organic and multifaceted unity among Black Sea nations is being restored, this time within the European commonwealth.  Kiev’s Maiden Square, for example, where the Orange Revolution was staged, takes its name from the Farsi term for a multifunctional space for festivals and trade.  Crimea remains home to almost one million Tatars, descendants of the Mongol horde, the Volga Bulgars, and the Turkic tribes who spread through the Volga and Don river basins, but also related to the many Tatars of the Crimean Khanate who crossed the Black Sea to Turkey after Crimea was annexed by Russia.  Ukraine’s other Black Sea port, Odessa, built in the nineteenth century by international architects and aristocracy from France, Austria, and England, is once again a place where contraband flows in from Western Europe and out as far as the Far East, underscoring the restoration of its prime geography.

Indeed, a rising share of Europe’s energy imports come from east of the Black Sea.  In a thinly veiled effort to undermine Russian influence in the region and resurrect a sense of camaraderie, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova formed a regional diplomatic group in the mid-1990s, one that, with the loss of Uzbekistan, now carries the unfortunate acronym GUAM.  A more strategically relevant effort has emerged in the form of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) group, which includes Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.  Trade is growing rapidly across the Black Sea’s waters, with Turkey investing over $2 billion annually in the Ukrainian economy, helping to revive its faltering shipbuilding industry.  With the incremental Europeanization of its littoral nations, the Black Sea is now becoming a “European lake” whose eastern shores lead the West into the Caucasus.

GEORGIA: ON EUROPE’S MIND

48

Imagine a country of abandoned villages, collapsed buildings, battered trucks belching clouds of foul exhaust, women selling corn on the roadside, children bathing in drying riverbeds, and haggard beggars in the capital city.

50

Whenever governments champion leaders over institutions, the people lose.

51-52

When Georgia called on Russia to vacate its military bases, Russia responded by doubling natural-gas prices, in the middle of winter, the same Gazprom blackmail Ukrainians have also suffered.  “For a small country it is exceptionally dangerous to be the neighbor of a large, powerful country,” explains Georgian scholar Alexander Rondeli.  “If a small country commits a strategic error, that is not a mere luxury but can be suicidal; diplomacy is virtually the only instrument of foreign policy available.”

But Russia’s dominance of the region could still collapse under its own weight.  Despite finally quelling the insurgency in Chechnya, Russia has yet to legitimize its rule in the broader Muslim-populated northern Caucasus region and the republic of Tatarstan, which with Europe’s largest mosque in Kazan remains a permissive environment for anti-Russian sentiment.  The fierce Chechen character captured in Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat has sabotaged Russia Throughout history, and may yet return.  “They have tried to co-opt Chechnya,” observed a Georgian diplomat, citing the grand mosque Russia recently built in Grozny, just slightly smaller than that of Kazan.  “But Russia never retreats the easy way, always choosing instead to make things more difficult for itself.”

52

They [Western energy companies] brokered the “deal of the century,” as it was then [in the 1990s] called: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, the second longest in the world, built mostly underground to avoid sensitive areas (including circumventing Armenia altogether) and making Turkey, on whose Mediterranean shore the pipeline ends, a conduit for close to 10 percent of the world’s oil.

AZERBAIJAN: UNCORKING THE CASPIAN

54

The Caucasus is the meeting point of Europe’s East and Asia’s West.  Latin inscriptions carved by Roman centurions show that Azerbaijan has been Europe’s frontier since the first century A.D., but the Romans also turned back, declaring that no one could live in the hell of the Gobustan Desert.

55

Europe will fulfill its geographic imperative only if it can accommodate people with Asiatic souls.

57-58

. . . how the Axeri government manages energy income will determine whether the country follows the Norwegian model of oil-sponsored development or is struck, like Nigeria, by  the “resource curse” and remains a Russian-style petrocratic state in which the oil and banking sectors overlap and the government-oligarchy nexus manipulates markets to cash in on high oil prices and currency revaluations.

58

Only in paranoid regimes do the riot police outnumber protestors.

59

Whether revolution transpires by coup, grassroots revolt, or military invasion, democratic consolidation only happens when locals have the means to pressure entrenched leadership into opening the system.

CONCLUSION: Stretching Europe

60

The “common European house” is growing far larger than historian A.J.P. Taylor ever could have expected, turning into a multi-tiered commonwealth of members, partners, and associates with varying degrees of privileges, commitments, and subsidies.  Its history of strife is a poor guide for the future, for Europe today is as prosperous and powerful as any single superstate.  The EU is also gradually demonstrating its growing willingness to transform every country within its reach, as it does better than any other superpower.  Within Europe today, Kurds are protected from Turks, Bosnians and Kosovars from Serbs, and Ukrainians and Georgians from Russians, with the EU at the same time using its institutional alphabet soup to make them work together as well.

PART II:  AFFAIRS OF THE HEARTLAND

THE SILK ROAD AND THE GREAT GAME

66

It is said that 10 percent of Asian makes are decendants of Genghis Khan, history’s most prolific conqueror and rapist.

Today the name of every Central Asian state ends in “-stan,” the Farsi suffix meaning “land.” 

69

Its [China’s Shanghi Cooperation Organization (SCO)] “new security concept” then sought to bind countries close to China by initiating confidence-building measures among the original “Shanghai Five” (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) to confront their common “three evils”: separatism, terrorism, and extremism.

THE RUSSIA THAT WAS

74

On the Sin-Kyrgyz border in 1969, a Chinese soldier mooned Russian troops, who in turn defiled a portrait of Mao, petty events that sparked Sino-Soviet split became official, and both the USSR and China flirted with the idea of declaring the other “the Main Adversary,” superseding even the United States.

TIBET AND XINJIANG: The New Bamboo Curtain

80

Tibet and Xinjiang today set the stage for the rebirth of a multiethnic empire in ways that resemble nothing so much as America’s frontier expansion nearly two centuries ago.  Chinese think about their mission civilatrice today very much the way American settlers did: They are bringing development and modernity.  Asiatic, Buddhist Tibetans and Turkic, Muslim Uyghurs are being lifted out of the third world, whether they like it or not.  They are getting roads, telephone lines, hospitals, and jobs.  School fees are being reduced or abolished to promote basic education and Chineseness.  Unlike those Europeans who seek to define the European Union as a Christian club, there are no Chinese inhibitions about incorporating Muslim territories.  The new mythology of Chinese nationalism is not based on expunging minorities but rather granting them a common status in the paternalistic Chinese state: Uyghurs and Tibetans are told they are Chinese, even though they are not Han.  Mandarin is the only common denominator among China’s tapestry of unrelated languages and dialects, including Mongol, (Arabic scripted) Uyghur, Tibetan, and Zhuang.  Indeed, although Tibet and Xinjiang border each other, their cultures are mutually unintelligible, and neither Tibetans nor Uyghurs seem to have even heard of the Zhuang, even though they are China’s largest minority.

Large empires are maintained through a combination of force and law, and China has not wavered in its strategy across Tibet and Xinjiang; it is merely a difference of degree.  In even the remotest corners of Tibet, small army bases house platoons of the People’s Liberation Army, with soldiers menacingly practicing martial arts twice daily in public squares, often right next to ancient and fragile Buddhist stupas.

83-84

The world-island is ever more a sing body.  Soon it will be possible to travel from Aberdeen to Singapore or Seoul on the Trans-Asian Railway Network, whose various sections have been under construction since the 1960s.  Barbarians retreating across the steppe once watched their larger enemies weaken with distance from their core, but today China’s growing reach along its infrastructural axes is steadily and confidently compressing the Central Asian space.

KAZAKHSTAN: “Happiness is Multiple Pipelines”

85

The combined oil reserves of the Caspian Sea are estimated at over two hundred billion barrels (as compared with the Persian Gulf’s proven reserves of over six hundred billion barrels), making the region indispensable as an alternative source of oil for both the West and the East.  Kazakhstan has thus become like Saudi Arabia, an energy powerhouse that all superpowers must try to win.  Occupying the vast expanse of barren steppe that Genghis Khan so easily conquered, Kazakhstan is the world’s largest landlocked country.  Through dust storms and blizzards, all of the players of the new Great Game are here building the new oil-slicked Silk Road.

86

The word Kazakh is Turkic for “free,” and Kazakhstan today wants neither a return to subservience under Russia, nor subjugation under Chinese hegemony, nor extensive American meddling or bases.  But if the country’s oil outflow becomes tight, will these competing empires pull it apart?

88

Rising empires see insecure spaces on maps the way bears emerging from hibernation see food.

89

In Almaty, many street names now end with the Turkic koshesi rather than the Russian prospekt.  The share of the population that is ethnically Russian has declined considerably to under 20 percent over the past decade, as many returned to Russia, but many Russians have also come back to Kazakhstan.  “The actually discriminate against me just because I have a Kazakh passport,” a young Russian journalist in Almaty complained after what was intended to be a permanent trip to Moscow.  “And so I actually have a better job here.”  On the cool summer evenings, Kazakh and Russian youth mingle in outdoor cafes and restaurants speaking an easy mix of Russian and Kazakh.  Kazakhstan has even refurbished the one warmly remembered relic of the Soviet Union: the circus.

91

At the time of the Soviet collapse, Kazakhstan had more nuclear weapons than France, Britain, and China combined, but having been the victim of Soviet nuclear testing for decades, radiation caused many grotesque deformities among stillborn children, Kazakhstan worked with the United States to return all nuclear material to Russia and is now pursuing for nuclear-free zone status for Central Asia.  Russia watches Kazakhstan closely, and even respects it.  Perhaps the country could serve as a model for Russia itself.

KYRSYZSTAN AND TAJIKISTAN:

Sovereign of Everything, Master of Nothing

95

China is bringing about the resurrection of their old Silk Road passages, which thrived until the arrival of Islam, when Arabs forced the Tang Dynasty back across the Tien Shan Mountains at the Battle of Talas in 751.  The fabled Torugart Pass on the Sino-Kyrgyz boarder has now been turned into a sturdy highway suitable for heavy truck traffic stretching across the country into Uzbekistan.  Central Asian trade is actually insignificant for China, but for Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, China’s presence is enormous and grows more so with every passing day.  The largest share of Kyrgyz exports now go to China, while the Dordoi bazaar in Bishkek is flooded with Chinese-made clothing and tools.  Far more than in Kazakhstan, the cross-border shuttle trade has meant the settlement of more Chinese communities in Kyrgyzstan, with organized Chinatown now a feature of all but a few cities.  In Bishkek itself, Lenin Avenue has been renamed after Deng Xiaoping.

95-96

When the United States requested basing rights for AWACS reconnaissance planes in Kyrgyzstan, China forced the government to turn it down, revealing that American bases in Kyrgyzstan are less like the nimble “lily pads” to which the Pentagon aspires than islands being flooded in a rising tide of Chinese commercial and infrastructural activity, the real levers of influence in underdeveloped states.  The Pentagon’s planes can get America there, but then what?  America cannot displace China economically, and China can easily lavish with bribes whichever Kyrgyz regime comes next, confirming America to its base.  If democracy assistance continues to be nothing more than aid to autocrats or salaries for consultants, the very regimes the West hopes to eliminate, those that sell themselves to the highest bidder with little regard for strategic stability, will continue to flourish.

97

This new Silk Road passage [the tunnel through the Fan Mountains connecting Dushanbe to Khujand] is less romantic, more industrial, and far faster than its previous incarnations.  But once built, highways become pathways not only for trade and oil but also for drugs, infectious diseases, and extremist ideologies.

UZBEKISTAN AND TURKMENISTAN:

Men Behaving Badly

AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN:

Taming South-Central Asia

112

Though Pakistan’s conflict with India over Kashmir flares intermittently, its interminable Afghan dilemma and location within both CENTCOM”s and China’s strategic orbits indicates a Central Asian future.  During the Cold War, the United States “tilted” alternately between India and Pakistan, but when it suspended arms shipments to both countries after their 1965 war, Pakistan found a willing supplier in China, which had gone to war with India in 1962.  Ever since, Pakistan has been at the center of China’s diplomatic maneuvers, infrastructure routing, and military ambitions.  By recognizing Kashmir’s northern territories as belonging to Pakistan then proudly touted the Karaboram Highway network’s extension from Xinjiang over the 15,000-foot Khunjerab Pass (the name means “Valley of Blood”), a “four tank wide” corridor easing the passage of Chinese weapons across the Himalayas.

114

Pakistan is becoming more like faltering, splintering Indonesia than the Islamist democratic powerhouse Turkey.

Whether under democracy or dictatorship, however, Pakistan’s citizens have become accustomed to corruption and underdevelopment.  The cycle is likely to continue once Musharraf’s turn is up.  Ultimately, despite their celebrity status in the West, Karzai and Musharraf are incapable of stabilizing their countries, both of which have been steadily disintegrating since the British empire withdrew.  Western efforts have not been nearly enough.  Will China do better?

CONCLUSION: A CHANGE OF HEART

PART III: THE END OF THE MONROE DOCTRINE

THE NEW RULES OF THE GAME

123

After the Protestant Reformation, the New World reentered calculations of the global balance of power, with Franc and the Netherlands undermining Catholic Spain by seizing territories from Canada to the northern coast of South America.  No matter which power prevailed, however, hegemony meant mercantilism, client regimes, and cultural domination.

125

Most [Latin American] leaders of the era campaigned on the left and governed on the right, and modernization was a paradoxical code word for dependency on America.

BETWEEN AFRICA AND EAST ASIA

129

Latin America and Africa have the highest income inequality in the world, but Latin America’s is, but worse because it has more wealthy people.  The region’s indigenous peasants are a high-altitude version of Africa’s destitute farmers tilling tiny plots, while super-wealthy African and Latin elites live in mansion villas with abundant first-world amenities.

MEXICO:  The Umbilical Cord

VENEZUELA:  Bolivar’s Revenge

138

The elected autocrats of the 1960s left a legacy of “superhighways in shambles and devastated ecosystems, ruinous debt and workers no more punctual than they ever were.

The same cycle could be repeating itself in Venezuela today.  In the personality politics of Latin America, strong leaders always come at the expense of strong institutions.  The region suffers not only from bad latitude, but also bad attitude, none worse than that of Hugo Chavez, whose numerous self-reinventions have culminated in a character best described as “narcissist-Leninist.”  After a failed coup attempt and imprisonment in 1992, the left-wing nationalist Chavez swept to presidential power in 1998 on a platform aimed at the disenfranchised, his escalating savage discourse of resentment and suspicion exploiting the elite’s indifference to the underclass.

138-39

“The government could be across town or on the moon,” a poor man in the Petare barrio district of Caracas groused.  “All we want is a paycheck.”  Charming and irresponsible, Chavez manipulated these poor masses who don’t demand accountability in either governance or oil-revenue spending because they don’t realize that the state and its resources ultimately belong to them.  “The people are loyal to Chavez no matter what he does, for he has given them hope,” a Caracas political analyst explained.  “Chavistas will throw down their bodies for him.”

.. . whereas in Kazakhstan property rights have been spread widely and oil wealth has been used to spur private enterprise, Chavez’s notion of “Bolivarian socialism” retains an ironclad emphasis on state control.

His surrogate, military-managed apparatus now produces over one million barrels less that peak capacity.  PDVSA also operated independently of the government, while Chavez has created his own treasury ministry (Banco de Tesoros) from which he fattens his European bank accounts.

142

China could not actually replace the United States as a principal destination for Venezuelan oil (given that it is about sixty day away versus a week for the United States), but its share of Venezuelan oil purchases has boomed.

143

. . . even if Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution fails, he has awakened a sense among all South American leaders, even those who think him a clown, that they must work much more closely together to become a prosperous and sovereign second-world continent rather than a third-world Atlantis.  The Bolivarian dream will live on well beyond Chavez, and he will stick around as long as possible to make sure it does.

COLOMBIA: The Andean Balkans?

144

If South America is going to connect to the world, it will happen in Colombia.

146

Merely catching drug czars in about as effective as catching terrorists: Unless root causes are addressed, the problem only multiplies.  No wonder being a guerilla is said to be a way of life in Colombia, the only country where rebels seem to die of old age.

149

The United States could do a lot more to look after its sole ally in South America, and prevent it from falling into Venezuela’s sphere of influence.

151

Colombia may remain America’s “aircraft carrier,” China may make the Andes its continental foothold, European-style regionalism may develop, the outcome remains unclear.  But it can safely be said that no Andean leader will ever slavishly privatize his (or her) country’s economy in the excessive fashion touted under the Washington Consensus, and tier countries will be the better for it.

Brazil: The Southern Pole

153

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a left-leaning sociologist who had fled the dictatorship to Chile and France, rose to the presidency on the argument that even as globalization erodes state power, it nonetheless demands an expansion of the state’s mandate beyond law enforcement and foreign policy to include human rights, social equity, and environmental protection.  And since globalization weakens bourgeois dominance, stronger democracy is necessary to mediate among increasingly powerful interest groups representing capitalists, unions, and the poor.

158

Relief operations during the 2005 Amazon drought were the largest ever undertaken by the Brazilian army and civil defense forces, underscoring that it is ecological and social, not military, security that most threatens the continent.  Brazil’s experiments in all these spheres are both the most revealing and the most consequential; for as Brazil goes, so goes South America. 

ARGENTINA AND CHILE: Very Fraternal Twins

162-63

Proof that Chile is the region’s most vibrant economy is everywhere: a four-lane freeway linking the northern Andes to the southern lowlands, profitable vineyards in the fields around the major port of Valparaiso, research centers on engineering innovation, and glass skyscrapers in the capital, Santiago, the continent’s second business hub behind Sao Paulo. Chile has as many Internet users as Mexico, with one-sixth the population.  Chile increasingly acts like the England of South America, keeping its distance from unruly continental affairs while seeking pragmatic alliances far and wide.  In all of Latin America, Chile is the only country that stands a reasonable chance of joining the first world in the coming decade.

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The stability of Chile’s politics since Pinochet has meant that it no longer matters who governs, for pragmatism is the order of the day for both left and right.  The lesson for the rest of the region, and America, is that natural resources and left-leaning democracy are never in themselves the causes of institutional decay in comparison to gamesmanship and corruption.  Chile should be the continent’s best teacher, if for no other reason that that in Latin America, jealousy is the greatest cultural motivator.

CONCLUSION: BEYOND MONROE

PART IV: IN SEARCH OF THE “MIDDLE EAST”

THE SHATTERED BELT

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From the seventh through the thirteenth centuries, Damascus under the Umayyad dynasties and Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate ruled from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.  But for centuries afterward, Arabs were fractured and dominated by Turks, Persians, and Europeans.

“Language and religion are reawakening our deepest connections to each other,” gushed a journalist in Dubai, the Arab world’s unofficial capital.  Each symbolizes one of the only two forces that have ever captured Arab hearts and minds: Arabism and Islamism, the two faces of globalization in the region today.

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. . . Islamist parties are predominantly domestic because even as they rally anti-Western sentiment, they are keenly aware that Muslims are nowhere more subjugated than in their own countries.  Islam, which gives all believers equality in faith, is accorded little liberty in its own domain.

Arab Muslims, like most people, ultimately ascribe greater importance to economic than spiritual ends, making it more likely that Arabism will return as a regional political-cultural movement than that Islam will congeal as a superpower.

THE MAGHREB: Europe’s Southern Shore

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Until the Punic Wars, Phoenician Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) controlled the North African coast and southern Iberia, as well as Corsica, Sardinia, and part of Sicily, islands that for centuries have been both fortresses and land bridges for mutual conquest across the Mediterranean.  Subsequent Roman and then Byzantine domination of North Africa was eventually overcome by Arab invaders from the east at the end of the seventh century.  A millennium later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain, France, and Italy returned to establish massive colonies across North Africa, firmly linking it to Europe.

“Traditional, Bedouin societies care less for mimicking European politics than maintaining personal, tribal, and religious honor.”

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. . . the epic film The Battle of Algiers demonstrates, [that] even 150 years of European colonialism failed to transform Arab society.

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Greater European investment in the Maghreb means economic transition before political transformation, but in the Arab context, the former must come before the latter.

LIBYA: SEEING GREEN

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Beginning in the sixth century B.C., Phoenicians from Tyre (in present-day Lebanon) and Greeks colonized North Africa, creating trading outposts that began as rest stops en route to Spain, where they would purchase precious metals.  Libya’s two costal provinces, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, were gradually subsumed into the Roman empire.  The massive granite columns and marble baths of Leptis Magna were largely imported from Aswan in ancient Egypt, from which roads terminated in its majestic port.  All settlements clustered along the Mediterranean coast then passed under a procession of imperial bands: Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman.

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The influx of migrants into Libya from Algeria, Tunisia, Chad, Niger, and Egypt is a testament to Libya’s stability.  One million Egyptians make up nearly a fifth of Libra’s population, their accents noticeable as they congregate on Tripoli’s rustic cornice.  But many African migrants, having been tortured in government detention centers, choose to lie low, clinging to their preferred cafes and black neighborhoods.

EGYPT: Between Bureaucrats and Theocrats

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In the third century B.C., Egyptian king Ptolemy II presided over the Great Library of Alexandria, the largest in the world with over seven hundred thousand scrolls.  Its destruction nearly seven hundred years later in a fire caused by Roman barbarism marked the end of Egypt’s place as the center of global learning.

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Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 marked the beginning of the modern subjugation of the Arab world.  But no matter who its rulers are, Egypt has always seen itself as central to the Mediterranean, African, and Arab worlds.

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About 10% of the world’s sea trade still passes through the Suez Canal, . . .

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China is projected to replace the US as Egypt’s top trading partner through its investments in the Suez Canal, cement factories, electronics companies, and convention centers.  Chinese cultural traits such as an emphasis on honor play well in the Arab world, where its diplomats show deference to local culture by learning Arabic and even taking Arabic names.

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Egypt is the central sieve through which Arabism and Islamism have for centuries flowed and blended, never more so than today. Hassan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, sought to revive Arab civilization after the collapse of the Ottoman empire through a nonviolent pan-Sunni movement.  After his assassination in 1949 by Egyptian authorities, his disciple Sayyed Qutb carried forward his teachings with the added urgency of seeing the world at an intolerable crisis point of Western-backed oppression of the Arabs’ pious Islamic bedrock.  Though the Brotherhood spread its reach to Jordan and Syria, its biggest comeback has been at home.  Egypt, not Iraq, is the Arab tipping point for both Islamism and democracy. 

For over a thousand years Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque and university, so old they intricately blend the entire history of Islamic architecture, have been cornerstones of conservative Islamic thinking,  Arab rulers have often touted their Muslim credentials to gain the support of this Islamic establishment, but Islamists would never voluntarily endorse the current Arab political stasis.  For the millions of frustrated Egyptians left out of the country’s new economic possibilities, or who are stuck in traffic trying to get too them, the call to prayer is an emotional stabilizer that inspires not radicalization but its opposite: a reminder of core values in a materialist environment that appears to be losing them.  After a day of loitering, young boys suddenly skip to a mosque on Cairo’s Zamalek Island at sunset because prayer and discussion focus the mind and give meaning.  Just across the pathway is the resplendent Opera House, but who can afford to go there?

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For decades autocracy was the bulwark against communism and Islamism; now democracy is Islamism’s weapon against autocracy.  The logic of Islamic democracy is that Islam is about liberation, not submission, and democracy is a means to exercise it. Through social activism and slick televangelism, the Brotherhood appeals to Egypt’s struggling middle and lower classes, compelling voters through slogans such as “Islam is the solution” or “If Islam were applied, no one would be hungry!”  But even as the Brotherhood debates whether Islam is “a” or “the” source of law, its platform actually has little to do with religion, focusing simply on countering corruption, creating jobs, and improving social services. The Brotherhood’s presence has awoken the parliament for decades of dormancy through its persistent calls for Mubarak to repeal his arbitrary emergency laws.  Islam and democracy are certainly more compatible than authoritarianism and democracy.

From Morocco to Iraq, sporadic, anonymous bombings during elections are the growing pains of democracy.  But the only way to diminish the credibility of Islamist radicals who act like nineteenth-century Russian anarchists is to give greater opportunity to those who act like twenty-first democrats.  Democracy has moderated Islamist parties across the Muslim world, and in Egypt they now condemn terrorism perpetrated in their name because Egyptians are themselves appalled by the rising extremism.  Tourism workers decry bombings at the Valley of the Kings or Red Sea resort villages such as Dahab that damage the industry on which their livelihoods depend.  “We expect our leaders, whether secular or Islamist, to stop such violence, not accelerate it,” insisted a democracy activist in Cairo, adding, “Islamists have more credibility to dissuade fanatics than anyone in the Mubarak regime.”

“Imposed democracy is an oxymoron,” complained an Egyptian Islamist outside the Al-Azhar mosque.  “Islamism does not define itself with repect to Western ideals.”  Since America’s personal alliance is with the greatly resented Mubarak, not with the Egyptian people, its reform efforts are truly slow, shallow, and narrow, highlighting the hypocrisy of sheltering the all-powerful executive.  The United States has been reluctant to offer pacts to entrenched leaders, protecting them in secondary roles in exchange for allowing their countries to move on, rather than be dragged down with them.  As a result, argues Tunisian human rights activist Moncef Marzouki, American foreign policy “greatly facilitates the growth of extremist Islamist forces.” Indeed, America is most disliked in countries with U.S.-allied regimes; after all, almost all of the September 11, 2001, hijackers came from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.  If the West wants democracy in Egypt, it must accept Islamists as part of that democracy.  As one analyst wrote, “The US can force a shuffling of the deck, but cannot determine where the cards fall.”

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The Western policy of prizing stability over democracy has become a pathetic cliché, for such stability never lasts more than a generation and culminates in instability.

THE RETURN OF ARABISM

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The Arab League, not long ago considered defunct, is in a process of self-reinvention, not as a threat to individual state sovereignty but as an Arab United Nations, fostering technical cooperation through specialized trade, education, and agriculture agencies.  In the buzzing corridors of its Cairo headquarters, Arab League officials speak of the European Coal and Steel Union as an appropriate parallel to their effort to transcend the mutual condescension between Egypt and Saudi Arabia (Egyptians view Saudis as uncultured Bedouins; Saudis see Egyptians as scheming beggars) to unite the most populous and wealthy Arab states as the natural locomotive of revived Arabism. 

Maybe an Arab peacekeeping force will put lives on the line for Muslims the way the US and Europe already do.

THE MASHREQ: Road Maps

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. . . Israel is blending and bleeding with its Arab neighbors more and more.

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From tourism to trade to terrorism, Israel and Palestine can separate in theory but never in practice.

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Until Palestinians are granted statehood, pressure on Hamas to recognize Israel is premature and ironic precisely because Palestine is an entity, not a state, and thus is in no position of offer such legal recognition.  Henry Kissinger stated in 1975 that “no solution is possible” without the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state.  Three decades later, this remains the precondition to peaceful regional integration.

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Outside of Amman, many young women say they choose to wear a veil as a symbol of responsibility to Islam and as a reaction against the perceived over-Westernization of the elite.  Modernization and conservatism are two simultaneous trends coevolving across the Arab world, each constantly feeding off the other.

THE FORMER IRAQ:

Buffer, Black Hole, and Broken Boundary

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Wars are a geopolitical resent button:  They recalibrate the hierarchy of power as countries either triumph, battle to stalemate, or disappear altogether.  Both are happening in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003 failed to create a unified and democratic state.

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Europe’s colonial experience in the region effectively ended with the Suez Crisis in 1956, and America’s neocolonial experience will also wind down in the same country in which it began, leaving the Mashreq a zone of shifting alliances and competing regional postures. 

Centuries before China illegally sold air defense systems to Saddam Hussein, Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulagu Khan made it all the way to Baghdad, which he sacked in 1258, this ending the Abbasid caliphate.  Iraq has been terminated before, and history will do so again.  In the long term, the region could be the better for it.

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The famed Hamilton Road along the magnificent Zagros Mountains, built by New Zealand engineer A.M. Hamilton from 1928 to 1932, can once again become the primary artery for his branch of the Silk Road. 

[Could other parts of the Silk Rd. as wide as the Oregon Trail?]

IRAN: Virtues and Vices

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Though revolutions are the watched pot that never boils, they are more likely once  the intelligentsia and masses can afford to think beyond basic welfare.

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. . . [Iran’s] bureaucracy is an inefficient and inept cesspool of corruption, and it has so ritualized religion that it has alienated much of the post revolution generation, which constitutes most of the seventy million population and most of the unemployed.  The already severe brain drain of Iran’s technical class is common to second- and third-world countries, where entering the diaspora is the only possible route to success; lobbying for work permits at the Canadian embassy in Damascus has been described as a generational pilgrimage.  And despite its agricultural potential, manufacturing capacity, and heritage of ancient ruins to rival Greece or Turkey, Iran’s main exports remain the same as before the revolution: carpets, pistachios, and, of course, petroleum.

GULF STREAMS

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Even with all of the world’s corrent and projected oil and gas taps flowing, the Persian Gult will still provide 40 percent of the total energy supply well into the future, ensuring that its geopolitical centrality will continue to match its geopraphic centrality at the crossroads of Europe and Asia.

THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES: WHERE LAS VEGAS MEETS SINGAPORE

250

The situation of third-world workers in Dubai is the best evidence that the city is run like a modern corporation: It responds not to political pressure, only to threats to its profits.  As international media scrutiny focused on workers’ deplorable conditions and spasmodic unrest, the Dubai sheikhs promised to act for the sake of shoring up their image, realizing that their dream could be undone at the hands of the very people who built it (a scenario depicted in the Hollywood film Syriana).

CONCLUSION: ARABIAN SAND DUNES

252-3

While the West frets over Arab disorder, an emerging Arab order is defining the region’s future.  The combination of massive oil wealth, mass media, shared grievances, and the painful awareness of the arbitrary Western-imposed borders are transforming the Arab political landscape into one of remarkably consistent public opinion that is suspicious of American foreign policy and contests the legitimacy of unelected rulers.  The younger generation of Arabs is spreading these sentiments through student exchanges, activist conferences, and Internet blogs.  This broad, concerted, and bottom-up push for political change is a trend not seen with any such consistency anywhere else.  A new cohort of leaders that embodies liberal rather than military education may even bring policy change without violent regime change.  As the editor of Beirut’s Daily Star, Rami Khoury, pithily remarked, “We can’t be the world’s last undemocratic region forever!”

FROM OUTSIDE IN TO INSIDE OUT

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Rather than inspiring great awe, many Asians see America’s offshore naval presence as a historical accident, now antiquated, superfluous, and even dangerous.

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. . . “guns have fallen silent” in the region due to a “tidal wave of common sense” by which Asians are rejecting the Western historical pattern of militarism in favor of shared prosperity.        -Kishore Mahbubani, Singaporean diplomat

261      [1997 – British hand off Hong Kong to China]

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The West’s democratization efforts have hit a wall even higher in East Asia than they have in the Arab world.  Western scholars predict that economic openness will lead to democratization, but not only do Asian governments collude with elites to prevent any challenge to their control over public goods and the law, but democracy is even less in demand because many Asian countries actually have good leaders (junzi) who do not want to become the prince of a Confucian maxim who is wrong but not contradicted, thus bringing ruin to his country.

It is ironic that the West’s great rival should come from a Confucian-based meritocracy of elites, since this idea is firmly rooted in Plato’s Republic, which calls for rule by wise philosopher kings.

267

The early Confucian scholar Mencius argued that violating the right to food and material well-being is a greater crime than denying political rights.  Humility and compassion (ren), not flamboyance and egoism, are the cherished virtues.  In Confucian cultures, the family name comes first, then the given name.  Filial piety is a cherished and legally enforced principle in numerous East Asian countries, and many believe that the ideal society is structured like a family rather than based on individuals.

CHINA’S FIRST-WORLD SEDUCTION

271

The United States must now turn to its only true ally: geography.  From Palau to Guam to Hawaii, America’s navy is devising an entirely sea-based network of logistics and access channels to allow it to operate militarily in a region where few want it to.

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Built on an unpopulated backwater by the British East India Company, mostly Chinese-populated Singapore is the first country in the world to defy the notion of equatorial malaise that has become the third-world norm.  When the Malaysian Federation expelled Singapore in 1965, it left Lee Kuan Yew and his band of migrants with no army, a “Chinese island in a Malay sea.”

274

Toynbee’s impression [of Singapore] seems more valid now than it did a half century ago:  “Singapore may have been founded by British enterprise, but today it is a Chinese city: The future capital of a Chinese ‘Co-prosperity Sphere’ which is likely to last, because it will have been established by business ability and not by military force.”

INDIA LOOKS EAST

275

The United States explicitly seeks to sponsor India’s rise as “the first large, economically powerful, culturally vibrant, multiethnic, multireligious democracy outside of the geographic West,” not to mention as a hedge against China.

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China has order and may one day have democracy.  India has democracy but achieves less because it is chaotic.  The link between trade and development that China exemplifies is almost absent in India.  Relative to its geographical and population size, India’s government is almost invisibly weak, with a federal budget the size of Norway’s.  Unlike China, unified India is a British creation, and its unity often appears more geographical than psychological; it is a cramped peninsula where Tamils and Assamese have nowhere else to go, yet still they try.  It could also be argued that China is a freer country than democratic India:  Literacy is far higher, the poverty rate far lower.  Also, it take longer to start a business in India, one-third as many Indians have Internet access, and only one-fifth as many have cell phones.  India’s democracy may never have experienced a famine, but over half of India’s children are malnourished.  Because most Indians lack economic freedom, other freedoms are that much more difficult to enjoy.  The difference between India and China is thus not just the time lag between the advents of their current economic reform eras but also a fundamental matter of national organizational ability.  Even if India rises, it will be according to Chinese rules.

MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA:

The Greater Chinese Co-prosperity Sphere

279

“ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries kowtow to China not only to avoid being on China’s bad side,” a Thai diplomat and former ASEAN official explained, “but on the promise that China will not abandon them in times of need, as the U.S. did during the Asian financial crisis.”  ASEAN is now synonymous with China’s multitiered periphery: Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei as the wealthiest partners; Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam as economic and strategic assets; and Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines as third-world clients.  With all of them, China is granting greater market access and sustaining trade deficits (which have brought record profits to ASEAN businesses) in exchange for raw materials, defense agreements, and diplomatic pledges to lean it way.  Like Europeans in the Maghreb, Chinese baby-boomers are buying retirement properties from Penang to Bali, enlarging a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere for the twenty-first century.

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For 350 years, Dutch colonizers were unable to penetrate Indonesia’s milieu of cultures in which Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam coexisted across disparate geography.  Ancient kingdoms in Java, Thailand, Malaya, and Cambodia derived their religions from India, a heritage that produced intricate monuments of Hindu-Buddhist spirituality such as the giant temple and stupas of Borobudur.

288

If Islamist fundamentalism is a virus, then the antibiotic must contain a small amount of it in order to help the body build up resistance.  Indonesia is home to the world’s two largest Muslim organizations: Nadhlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, today the country’s most credible voices again shariatization.  They argue for the preservation of the secular state because if unqualified state courts were to impose Sharia, Islam would lose its divine character.  “Our peasantry has been seduced by ideologies from communism to radical Islamism, so different from our traditions that they are entirely new religions,” fretted an Islamist working within the government.

MYANMAR, THAILAND AND VIETNAM:

The Inner Triangle

298

Since Suharto’s 1998 ouster, corruption, income disparity, ethno-religious divides, and secessionist violence have all increased.  His handpicked successor, B. J. Habibie, was a clueless cleric whose referendum on East Timor resulted in its independence and his own impeachment.  Political drift continued under Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri:  The more powerful Islamist parties become, the more scared the rest get.

The price of Indonesian democracy is unity, as near-total autonomy bordering on self-rule has become the model of choice for many provinces.

SIZE MATTERS: The Four Chinas

302

Progress is a mechanical necessity for China’s leaders, who are keenly aware of previous eras of superlative glory.  China has always been “a civilization pretending to be a nation,” wrote eminent scholar Lucian Pye.  Communism was merely a fleeting ambition, but it erased ethnic nationalisms and paved the way for a far grander and more intrinsic goal: recapturing a glorious past destroyed during the shameful humiliations of the nineteenth century.  Having otherwise been the region’s dominant empire, there is no trepidation about embarking on that path again; for China, it is simply back to the future.  The latest planned date for China’s superpower coming-out party is 2049, the centennial of its national unification.  Empires begin with the self-belief in the right to rule, and restoring China’s status as the Middle Kingdom has meant shifting from contentment with isolation to rebranding itself as a boundless civilization.

307

Europe believes it can change China through soft power in ways American hard power cannot, or least achieve more with its strategy than America does.  European trade with China exceeds Sino-US trade, and China’s exports to Europe now exceed America’s.  Europe has made clear that China will have to accept its interference if China is ever to attain the coveted “market economy” status.

China’s greatest ally in the emerging balance of power is not Europe, it is globalization.

314

Shanghai already has more skyscrapers than New York, with some, like the Jin Mao Tower for instance, blending the best of the old and the new in its design, which resemble a bamboo shoot in spring.  The Bund, its well-known riverfront, was built at the turn of the century to resemble European art deco, but rather than let colonial contributions crumble, the Chinese have integrated modern glass facades to modernize its grandeur.

315

Once the city of bicycles, Beijing now seems to have more cars, while bicycles are being recycled.  Dozens of five-star hotels and gated communities of full-service condominiums now augment what has always been a city of ancient palaces and sprawling parks whose grandeur was awe-inspiring as far back as Marco Polo.  Elderly couples learn to tango at night by the illuminated Ming-era city walls.  Although, as in Shanghai, many old neighborhoods are being cleared for modern developments, numerous old hutong are refurbished and capitalize on the constant tourist influx.

315-17

If there were any lingering doubt that no inherent faith in Marxist-Leninist dogma exists in the Chinese soul, one need only visit Taiwan and Hong Kong to have it quickly dispelled.

Sun Yat-sen explicitly elevated China toward Enlightenment ideals, and Chiang Kai-shek, his successor as head of the Huomintang, presided over a flowering of economic and cultural liberty until 1949.  Mao Zedong then leveraged mass agrarian impulses during the civil war’s Long March to force the Nationalists’ retreat to Taiwan and denounced the Chang Kai-shek era as “bureaucratic capitalism.”  But if Mao were alive today, he surely would be able to come up with a better description of what mainland China has become.

The Communist victory in the civil war sparked great capital flight from China, money that spread and multiplied across the region in the hands of scrupulous overseas Chinese investors.  Ironically, it was particularly the Yueh, the people of Chin’s southern coastal region, whom northern Chinese leaders most disparaged and expelled to Taiwan and elsewhere.  Yet in the past decades, the Yueh have done the most to propel China’s economy, investing billions through their Shanghai financial links.

From an island of undesirables, Taiwan has become, in the words of former Chinese foreign minister Li Zhouxing, “A matter of life or death for China.”  Any Chinese leader who lost Taiwan would be considered eternally guilty.  Taiwan is actually a stateless economic node, so central to the global economy that almost no electronic instrument is lacking a Taiwanese component.  A disruption in its economy, whether due to war or natural calamity, would be disastrous for everyone equally, taking a large chunk of the global economy off-line.  Washington protects Taiwan as much for its microchips as for its military dignity, but it privately opposes Taiwanese independence, hoping that a grand bargain can be reached whereby Taiwan promises not to secede and China de-escalates.  After years of Chinese lobbying around the world, Taiwan has become so isolated diplomatically that its independence would be recognized by no country, perhaps not even by the United States.  Despite the massive armaments on both sides and America’s looming presence, what is really at stake is political face and economic control.  China knows that the eventual incorporation of Taiwan will give it a world-class center of high-tech industries in addition to a manufacturing juggernaut.  To this day, Taiwan is the largest foreign investor in the mainland’s factories and enterprises, far larger than the United States, the EU, or Japan.  Pragmatists in Taiwan want an ever-deeper common market with China to facilitate such investments, and China has responded by cleverly offering $4 billion in loans to small and medium-size Taiwanese enterprises (SMEs) operating in China.  China is already Taiwan’s largest export market, so it has no desire to attack the very island that serves its economic growth so dutifully.

Despite the occasional cross-strait saber rattling, the reality of China and Taiwan’s mutual colonization proceeds apace.  Yet today it is clear that Taiwan will not politically absorb China any more than the earth will swallow the heavens.  Mainland Chinese show little respect for Taiwan’s democracy, which has been prone to nationalist hijacking and the marginalization of mainland immigrants.  “We are only copying Taiwan’s economic and social model,” explained a Chinese businessman in Beijing.  “After a wild early phase of capitalism, they too focused on development and became first-world.”

Even more than Taiwan, Hong Kong has perennially been rated the world’s freest economy, and it has been seen as a model of how the Chinese might just be malleable into Western civility or democracy.  In 1997, when the “last British colony surrendered to the last Communist tyranny,” in the words of the island’s final British governor, Chris Patten, China was gifted this global financial capital where now less than one in ten people work in manufacturing despite an annual export value greater than India’s or Russia’s.

Land reclamation on both Hong Kong island and mainland Kowloon have narrowed the grand Victoria Harbor between them, a symbol for the closing gap between Hong Kong and the upper Pearl River delta cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou (Canton), which together form the wealthiest Chinese region.  The delta was Britain entrepot on the maritime Silk Road, and now it is the channel on which ancient Yueh cities have reclaimed modern glory as export processing zones.  In nearby Macao (China’s own Las Vegas) and Hainan Island, Chinese mega-infrastructure projects are paving the way for Taiwanese, Korean, and Hong Kong investors to build hugely profitable hotels, and resorts; buy up real estate; and launch low-cost airlines to ferry Chinese there from all over the mainland, while Beihai offers an ideal location for the coastal trade with Vietnam.  But the shrinking harbor metaphor travels in the opposite direction as well:  The upper delta’s pollution has traveled downstream, clouding Hong Kong’s air and water, and since the handover, Hong Kong’s politics have suffered from greater corruption and violations of property rights.  Like Taiwan, Hong Kong becomes more Chinese and less an independent system with each passing year.

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For the West it is an axiom of history that no country can sustain the paradox of a capitalist economy paired with an authoritarian government, yet this is precisely China’s sturdy reality.  Outside powers have never penetrated China’s inscrutable imperial politics and so must come to terms with “China as it is, not as we want it to be.”

When China’s last emperor, Pu Yi, was demoted from head of the Celestial Empire and integrated into the Communist ranks, he allegedly said of his reeducation: “The Communist Party is so great that it does not annihilate the person physically in the flesh, but rather annihilates mistaken ideas.”

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. . . [China] faces little competition, for in five thousand years, never once have “the people” been a candidate to assume the “mandate of heaven.”  Maoism may be discredited, but Mao’s dictum remains beyond dispute: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, therefore the Party must control the gun.”

318

[In China here are 40 million Christians; 30 million Muslims, called Hui]

319

Of course, the only regimes more corrupt than ones where multiple parties contend for power are those where one party has all the power.  China’s systemic corruption has been likened to a rotten tree that still stands but bears no fruit.  The selling of government positions, the meddling in enterprises large and small, the siphoning of funds for grand public squares, the nonexistent product-safety standards, the confiscation and sale of peasant property to developers, the mismanagement of banks, and the operation of low-quality hotels and hospitals by provincial ministries and the army to raise funds are just a few examples of the nexus of Chinese politics and capitalism gone awry.

320

China will heed no calls for democratization or any other systemic change until it reaches its goal of a medium-income population by 2050.  In fact it may take a century or more for full democracy to appear in China, if ever, but the race is purely internal, giving no ground to foreign demands.  Chinese take growing pride in their social and civic order, something that liberalization of the information environment could actually increase further, again, contrary to Western logic.  The Chinese state is strong enough that it can afford to allow the media to be critical without becoming an independent power base, but as in Singapore, the Party is not confident enough yet.  For the growing millions of Chinese Internet users, many Web sites remain restricted and Orwellian rewards are given for self-censorship; media reporting on natural disasters without prior approval is banned.  Yet a free media environment is a vehicle for healthy debate, transparency, and public education.  China can hardly command unmitigated international respect when many of its prize-winning filmmakers and writers live in exile from a country where telling the truth and telling lies are equally dangerous.  In this area, at least, China would far more commendable lead the East if it adapted more lessons from the West.

CONCLUSION

The Search For Equilibrium in a Non-American World

            A RACE TO THE TOP

321

It is hard to overestimate the fluidity of the early twenty-first century landscape.  As America vacillates between shunning and embracing the international community, the Chinese Politburo remains a black box, and the EU cautiously exercises strategic leverage, alternative scenarios to a world dominated by these three powers must be entertained.  America may not be able to afford its excessive consumption, nor Europe its expansion, nor China its environmental and social burdens.  All three superpowers might retrench if they are unable to maintain present commitments, or if blending with their peripheries proves too cumbersome.  Yet it remains a safe bet that history’s fatalistic cycles of rise, fall, and conflict will continue.

Much of America’s global esteem and self-promotion has been based on its status as the military defender of freedom, the wealthiest society and the most vibrant democracy in a Hobbesian and Darwinian world.

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“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”                      -Charles Darwin

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A superpower doesn’t last a minute longer that it has to.  America has long had the military capacity to pulverize its competitors into dust, but dispite President Bush’s repeated claims that America must “go on the offensive and stay on the offensive,” between th “war on terror” and the “Axis of Evil,” America has failed on every single count to resolve the major threats it has identified, revealing the impotence of military power.

“Force might conquer the world but it cannot legitimize itself.”        -Henry Kissinger

Ironically, even if America is merely a benign “accidental empire,” it increasingly feels that it must act imperially to defend its vision against those of the EU and China.  While it admonishes others for playing power politics, those others nonetheless continue to counter America’s own attempted power monopoly.  America’s false assumptions of dominance are laid bare in every second-world region: The EU can stabilize its East, the Chinese-led SCO can organize Central Asia, South America can reject the United States, Arab states can refuse American hegemony, and China cannot be contained in East Asia by military means alone.

323

The question for Americans has changed from “What’s in it for us?” to “Why aren’t we there?”  International congresses and summits are being held elsewhere with none of the hassles of America’s arbitrary visa restrictions.

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As the organs of the world body reject America’s surgical insertions, Americans have become unable to decide whether the costs and consequences of global engagement are worthwhile.  This domestic discontent and the inability to uphold global commitments alone are the key indicators of imperial overstretch.  As Toynbee warned,  “There is no armor against fate.”

American foreign policy is often described as distracted or overwhelmed by its many agendas: counterterrorism, trade expansion, energy security, and conflict resolution; and a preoccupation with crisis management is a sure sign that it is failing in these grand strategic priorities. 

In a world of alignments, not alliances, the diplomatic playing field pits America’s coalition, Europe’s consensus, and China’s consultative imperial modes; each hardening in divergent ideological cement.  The United States offers military and regime protection and aid, China offers full-service, conditionality-free relationships, and Europe offers deep reform and economic association with its union.  Their imperial networks or spheres of influence increasingly overlap, with second-world countries multi-aligning: balancing and bandwagoning simultaneously to gain economic assistance from one power, military aid from another, and trade ties with the third.  The United States, the EU, and China increasingly act like “frenemies”: friends and enemies at the same time.

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. . . The second-world anti-imperial belt of Venezuela, Iran, Kazakhstan, Libya, Malaysia and others will continue to focus as much on building ties among themselves as with Washington, Brussels, or Beijing.  . . . these countries will syncretize the best of what each superpower offers to achieve their own vision of success, they will also partner directly with one another to extract oil reserves, share intelligence, combat terrorism, reduce poverty, implement capital controls, and build modern infrastructure.  They will use their sovereign wealth to buy Western banks, ports, and other strategic assets.  Their regional groups will continue to construct their own economic zones, development banks, peacekeeping forces, and criminal courts.

AMERICA: From the First World to the Second?

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China already is second-world, but is climbing up from the third.  Europe is absorbing its second-world periphery, seeking to elevate it to the first world.  Could America, long the first-world icon, slip into the second world?  As with all empires, there is a certain cognitive dissonance when contemplating its demise.  But civilization, Toynbee explained, “is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.”  To understand how civilizations break down, we must “extend our mental range of vision beyond its bounds.”  Strong arms and strongmen cannot mask America’s relative decline, since they are the chief symbols of it.

The United States’ share of the world economy has fallen from 50 percent to 25 percent since World War II, with Europe and Asia building the other two world-regions. 

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America may claim to embody certain ideals for the world: liberty, happiness, opportunity;  but it now actually has to prove this in comparison with others.  The term quality of life sounds abstract, but in concretely measurable ways it is deteriorating, and America’s continental size compounds the challenge.  America ranks near the bottom of the OECD in average worker income and income inequality, similar to its ranking in individual happiness (to which inequality negatively correlates).  America’s median income is far less impressive than the mean income its individual wealth deceptively inflates.  The super-rich live in economic bubbles, contributing as much to other countries’ economies as their own, with the top 130,000 individuals earning as much as the bottom 40 percent of the entire population of three hundred million.  Citibank analysts refer to the United States as a “plutonomy,” in which the wealthy few fuel the economy more than the masses. 

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America is ceasing to be a middle-class nation, becoming instead a classic second-world combination of extremes.  For three decades now, America’s working class has seen no increase in its wages in real terms, its share of the economy dwindling even as its numbers swell.  The very notion of “two Americas” raised in its 2004 presidential election campaign shows that it is lacking a middle.  One-fifth of America’s children grow up in poverty, with the total poor population close to forty million.  In New York City, many low-income families have downsized into dormitories, unable to afford regular housing.

America is not a healthy country compared to its first-world peers.  One is hard pressed to find people who would not want to have a guarantee of free or affordable medical care in times of need.  America may live by a free market ideology, but that does not mean that the forty-five million Americans who lack health insurance like it that way.  While scolding other nations for their overly bureaucratic ways, the astronomical administrative costs in America’s health-care system are like its foreign aid programs, with more money going into overhead than to the intended recipients. 

In a nation of privatized privilege, services that work well: fancy apartment building, hotel, restaurants, health clubs, private taxis; all cater to the elite and their private economy.  For everyone else, things fall apart: Public transportation systems: roads, tunnels, trains and buses; are in various states of disrepair; broadband Internet penetration has fallen behind Europe’s; mobile telephone networks are substandard; and archaic taxi cabs don’t accept electronic payment.  Even worse, America may prove to be afflicted by the same oil curse as many second-world states.  Much of its infrastructure was built during the post-World War II boom when America was the world’s largest oil producer and exporter; but today its water pipes and power stations are run-down, causing lead and mercury poisoning and sporadic but massive blackouts.

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The idea of homeland security seems to have as much to do with illegal immigration coming through the southern border as it does with the threat of terrorism.

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“Societies that tolerate the injustices of great inequality will almost inescapably suffer their social consequences: they will be unfriendly and violent, recognized more for their hostility than their hospitality.”  If every society gets the barbarians it deserves, as Toynbee argued, are Americans their own worst enemies?  It remains a mystery why Americans, threatened physically by no one but themselves, require so many weapons, as they are mostly used to kill one another off.  Not only do many communities live in fear of arbitrary shootings, but the state’s purpose is widely redirected toward suppression of violence rather than rehabilitation of underdeveloped areas.  At the same time, America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with a rising number of life sentences.  America, not China, is the world’s largest penal colony.  And together with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, America’s death penalty, odious to most of the developed world, contributes to 80 percent of the world’s executions.  It would be a step down for most Japanese and Germans to live like Americans, since their countries are the two wealthiest and most advanced, and least unequal, large countries in the world. 

America “can have democracy . . . or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.” 

                                                            -Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

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. . . as America’s global corruption rating falls, it must be questioned whether Americans’ loyalty is to people or institutions, to profits or to progress.

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In Common Sense, Thomas Paine argued that the checks balancing the British monarchy, the aristocracy, and the Commons were a farce.  Today, the separation of powers articulated in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws is becoming equally scarce in America.  Because “enlightened statesmen may not always be at the helm,” wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 10, checks and balances are necessary.  Yet precisely when America needed to assuage the world’s anxieties about its power, the executive branch neglected both its obligation of truth and its limitations under the law, undermining both the office and respect for it.  Whether or not America recovers from the unitary executive model of President Bush, the state of America’s politicians and population remain equally significant causes for concern.  America’s Patriot Act violates five of the ten cherished amendments of the Bill of Rights: freedom of speech and assembly, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, due process, prompt public trial, and protection from cruel and unusual punishment.   Though this act was passed by Congress, the executive branch’s classification of secrets demonstrates an evaporating desire to share information with the legislative branch.  Even if subsequent administrations reverse these policies, the damage has already been done.

From the glorification of military power to the gladiator culture in sport, what Polybius wrote of Rome applies well to America: Great wealth and extravagance lead to the worst of all government, namely the mob rule of elites with little motivation other than preventing others from gaining the upper hand.  As Christianity brought down Rome, might it not do the same to America?  What Reinhold Niebuhr called the “messianic consciousness of America” has inevitably seeped into its foreign policy and eroded the strategic competence prescribed by realism.  The religious sanctification of foreign policy has led to a greater rhetorical focus on human rights, religious freedom, and suffering from mass diseases, but the policies corresponding to such ambitions has had anything but their desired effect.  Religious revival has led to a national polarization and even “disenlightenment.”  While Christian evangelists gained ground in American politics through grassroots social activism and federal tax breaks, Islam has spread rapidly in its prisons, with both groups promising an eternal community consisting only of themselves.

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America’s defining trait has been above all else a capacity for self-renewal: a political, economic, and cultural regeneration, even self-correction.  But the combination of messianic leaders and corporate puppet masters, culture wars, fear of the outside world, and self-doubt about its leadership make a new domestic consensus unlikely.  America’s foreign policy elite is utterly divorced from citizens’ concerns as well: Leaders are keen

for the United States to fight more wars, push for free trade, and allow mass immigration, while the majority of Americans want fewer military interventions, less foreign aid, immigration restrictions, and some form of protectionism for American jobs and industries.  The era of the “Great Society” seemed to end definitively with President Reagan, never to return again.  America has lost its momentum, and it cannot turn things around simply because it wants to, renewal is equal parts physical and ideological, America is a first-world country in need of a Marshall Plan to stay where it is.  Because Americans are so unfamiliar with the world beyond their shores, however, they may wake up to realize that the standard they set is more appropriate for the second world than for the first.

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First-world countries slow to adjust to the pace of global redistribution of labor and investment are vulnerable to competition from, and potentially displacement by, members of the second world.

THE IMPERIAL ALANCING ACT

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Imperialism, like leadership, is about finding a balance between fear and love.  Machiavelli believed that bonds of gratitude expire quickly, abandoned when self-interest calls; thus the “dread of punishment” makes fear a stronger instrument of control than love.  Taking the long view. America is decreasingly loved and increasingly feared,  Europe is increasingly loved and decreasingly feared, and China is increasingly both loved and feared.   

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Double standards and legalistic isolationism have undone America’s exemplary record of promoting human rights, and unsanctioned preemptive war has undermined the authority of the UN Security Council.  When superpower interests collide, the UN has proven to be as catastrophically irrelevant as the League of Nations.

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War brings profit to the military-industrial complex and is always supported by the large patriotic camps on all sides.  Yet the notion of a Sino-US rivalry to lead the world is also premature and simplistic, for in the event of their conflict, Europe would be the winner, as capital would flee to its sanctuaries. 

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Empires and superpowers usually promise peace but bring wars.

How could the next world war be averted?  There does exist a tripartite coalition to triumph globalization over geopolitics:  The American working class supports Chinese workers by shopping at Wal-Mart, while its upper class spends on European cars and luxury items; both Europe and China buy American technology; and America’s General Motors and Boeing and Europe’s Airbus can attribute much of their profits to reduced costs derived from production in, and sales to, China.  Capital markets allow for all rather than a zero-sum competition.  Furthermore, the “cult of the offensive” does not dominate military strategy today:  In an age of nuclear weaponry, few believe that initiating conflict entails quick victory with minimal loss.  Never has A. J. P. Taylor’s adage been more true: If the goal of being a great power is to be able to fight a great war, the only way to remain a great power is not to fight one.  The damage done to oneself through conflict has never been higher than in today’s integrated world.

The tripolar world should be thought of as a stool:  With two legs it cannot stand long; with three it can be stable.  The three-legged U.S.-EU-China stool is currently wobbling, and the new global strategy for the current turn of the geopolitical wheel is “equilibrium.”  Equilibrium is dynamic, hence more difficult to keep in balance than the unchallenged hegemony of a single hegemon, but it nonetheless represents the next evolutionary stage beyond the laws of anarchy and balance of power. 

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Equilibrium requires that the United States, the EU, and China together determine the rules of the geopolitical game.  Much as in a family, equilibrium entails a complex set of codes to domesticate international relations, with compromise a similarly crucial value.  The incentives in favor of creating institutions that intentionally diminish one’s own power and elevate others are admittedly elusive; egotistical states need to be convinced that they would save costs through collaboration that serve their interests.  But America could actually increase its influence if it tempers its power.  The path between dominance and retrenchment is the active creation of an “international constitution” with broad allegiance, inspiring a collective maturation.

Power is tamed by addressing core interests, not leapfrogging into utopia.  Rather than the U.S.-Soviet-Chinese “strategic triangle” of the 1960s and 1970s, a G-3 institution of the US, the EU, and China would be the most appropriate forum to establish deeper working relations among the superpowers.

Chinese participation could go a long way toward softening Chinese suspicion of the United States and commit China to pooling resources with its peers.  The further down the road one looks, the more global problems revolve around energy resources and fresh water rather than calculations of military power imbalances and territorial rivalry.

Yet, China’s present exclusion from the deliberations of the International Energy Agency fuels its suspicion that there is an “invisible Western hand” keeping global oil prices high. 

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“Scientism has left man enriched in his technical mastery of inanimate nature, but it has left him impoverished in his quest for an answer to the riddle of the universe and of his existence in it.”    -Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics

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. . . history proves that mankind is often anything but rational, and often precisely when it needs rationality most.  Instead, altering our future course demands a deep knowledge of second-world political dynamics, a precise mutual understanding among the superpowers, and proactive and flexible statecraft to create and maintain stability among them.

War . . . is not the continuation of politics by other means, but rather the cessation of negotiation.