November 9, 1989, was a day that changed the world. As jubilant crowds gathered before the Berlin Gate to celebrate the falling of the Iron Curtain, behind the scenes a much larger tectonic shift was taking place: the beginning of a new order in world affairs. On the surface the collapse of the Communist system in Eastern Europe should have rightfully been celebrated as a monumental advancement in the cause of human freedom, but along with that fall came the attendant demise of the international system that had maintained world order for half a century.
THE BEGINNING OF A NEW WORLD ORDER
The opening of the Berlin Gate was the beginning of a much larger revolution. Just over two years later General Colin Powell sat across a conference table in Moscow with the Secretary General of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. In Powell’s memoir he recalls in detail the fateful moment Gorbachev revealed his intentions, plans already in motion, to dissolve the Soviet Union. “Make no mistake General,” Gorbachev explained, “I just ended the Cold War.”
The most interesting aspect of the story was Powell’s reaction to this historic incident. He described feeling oddly unsettled and anxious after the meeting. Since the Second World War the United States had worked feverishly to outwit and undermine the Soviet “menace.” Now that effort was over, and what lay ahead was unknown. A new chapter in world affairs was beginning.
The bipolar nature of international affairs during the Cold War created a template of relative stability. There was a defined “us” and “them.” Strategic objectives were clarified through this prism. It was a system that influenced everything from trade treaties to military alliances, emigration quotas, foreign aid, arms deals, and technological research and investments. Now all of these things needed to be reviewed, with new priorities and diplomatic realities fashioned to suit a new international order. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a complete reshuffling of the deck in world affairs.
Throughout the 1990s scholars and strategists began to craft new theories of what system, or systems, would emerge to fill the void that the end of the Cold War created. Would the world be run as a unipolar monolith, with the remaining superpower, the United States, dictating the nature of world affairs? Some proclaimed the dawn of the “New World Order” in which an interconnected system of trade and commerce would assure peace and stability. Alliances would be crafted in such a fashion that capitalism and free markets would usher in a new golden age. Others had much more pessimistic assessments of what lay ahead.
THREE DOMINANT THEORIES
While the “New World Order” of globalization has gained wide acceptance as being the international principle dominating world affairs, three other theories have emerged to help explain the new paradigm we are living in. The first dominant theory was offered by the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. In 1994 he published a seminal essay in the journal Foreign Affairs titled “The Clash of Civilizations.” The underlying thesis of Huntington’s argument is that with the end of the ideological struggle between capitalist-democracy and communist-dictatorship now over, the world will revert back to more deeply felt bonds of identity. We will begin to identify ourselves not with our political or economic system, but through more ancient ties of religion, culture, and ethnicity—the world will be broken back up into the pre-colonial map of civilizations.
The second dominant theory views world affairs through a more pragmatic lens. The author and scholar Michael Klare has emerged as the most vocal spokesperson for the coming era of “resource wars.” This theory views international affairs as being dominated by a sort of economic ‘survival of the fittest’ competition. In a world that is fueled by petroleum, and dependant on access to supplies of other vital and scarce raw materials, we will witness a new age of conflict dominated by who gets what. Klare creates of map of the world with lines of conflict surrounding the earth’s remaining oil fields and fresh water systems. This worldview pits every nation-state against one another in a race for economic survival.
The final theory first appeared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly. The writer Robert Kaplan spent much of the 1990s traveling through some of the world’s most impoverished and unstable regions. His essay “The Coming Anarchy,” puts forth a dark vision of an emerging North-South conflict. In his view, the tensions of the Cold War caused the major powers to treat the less developed world as pawns in a larger strategic game. The problems and turmoil in Africa, Latin America or Central Asia were viewed as background noise in a greater struggle. With that struggle now concluded, these neglected problems will now pour across borders forming fault lines of anarchy separating the haves from the have-nots.
The events since that fateful meeting between Powell and Gorbachev have given credence to each of these strategic theories. Some viewed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as the opening salvo in a new civilizational struggle between the West and Islam. The “preemptive” invasion of Iraq could be perceived as a blatant resource grab, following in the lines of Klare’s predicted “oil wars.” All the while broad swaths of Africa have fallen into a form of political anarchy, with modern day pirates operating along coastlines outside the jurisdiction of any form of legitimate authority, and conflicts of genocidal proportions spilling across borders throughout the continent.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF CONFLICT
This project is an attempt to integrate and explore these different strategic paradigms, and to serve as a resource for students, teachers, or anyone else interested in gaining a better understanding of the underlying causes of conflict in the world today. You will find here a series of book recommendations, PowerPoint lectures, links to articles, and selection of short essays all meant to bring into sharper focus the underlying trends in international conflict studies at the dawn twenty-first century—welcome to the Geography of Conflict.
GLOBALIZATION
In an act of historical coincidence, it was on September 11, 1990, that the first President Bush stood before a joint session of congress to declare the dawn of a new age. The preceding year had brought about the effective collapse of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War II. A confident and optimistic American president saw before our nation and the world an era of historic transformation. It was time, declared the president, “to forge a new world order.” This new order would be based on democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. But to many within the administration and around the world what the president was really talking about was trade—the victory of capitalism and the transformation of the world into one giant free market.
The following decades have witness a fierce and at times violent debate about the nature of this new world order: who benefits, what are the rules of the game, what is the cost of entry, and is one giant world economy really a desirable or sustainable outcome? The phenomenon of “globalization” has come to define this era; it has become the prism through which almost every foreign policy decision is viewed. Access to oil and raw materials, markets and labor—these are the values that are driving the international system.
It has become fashionable in foreign policy circles to view an integrated world economy as a harbinger to a new age of peace and prosperity. This optimism is predicated on the belief that we will not fight with people we do business with; a system that is inter-dependant makes our old adversaries new allies in a drive to produce and consume. Some are not so sanguine. A world of unrestricted competitive capitalism is a zero-sum game, with clear winners and losers. As the gulf between the haves and the have-nots increases, and new technologies broadcast this disparity to people throughout the world, the potential for violent conflict may actually increase.
Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington does not share the optimist’s view of globalization. “Increasing trade in the international system is, by itself, unlikely to ease international tensions or promote greater international stability,” he writes. “Some international conflicts will actually be exacerbated by the corrosive side effects of globalization.” These corrosive effects can be most clearly demonstrated by the ways in which the integrated world economy distributes wealth.
We live in a world with an unprecedented disparity between the rich and poor. Today, twenty percent of the world’s population consumes eighty percent of its resources, while another twenty percent subsists on less than one dollar a day. Thomas Homer-Dixon, the Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, has calculated that the combined income of the world’s richest 225 people exceeds the income of the poorest forty-seven percent of the planet. For billions of people, the economic benefits created by the international system can be scarcely imagined. This vast population is also becoming increasingly aware of all they do not have. President Clinton warned on a trip through Africa that “global poverty is a powder keg that could be ignited by our indifference.”
The days when political leaders in the United States could stand up and say what is good for America’s major corporations is simply good for America, are over. William Greiter has written extensively on the global economy. In summarizing his central critique, he writes, “As the global system progresses along these lines, people will begin to grasp that enormous economic power is becoming concentrated in a very few hands and on a plane beyond national systems of accountability.” A statistic that flushes out Greiter’s observation is the fact that seventy percent of all global trade is controlled by just five hundred corporations, and these corporations are becoming less defined by any discernable national identity.
GLOBALIZATION AND THE NATION-STATE
“Sovereignty is not a physical fact. Sovereignty versus other considerations is one of the leading issues in world politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” -Zbigniew Brzezinski
The stark and deserted streets of Flint, Michigan, or other industrial cities in the American heartland, provide a telling visual for the costs of entry into the global economic system. One central advantage to the breaking down of trade barriers is it enables corporations to view the world as one giant labor pool. In setting up systems of production, these companies “arbitrage” their labor costs, scouring the globe for the cheapest workers, pitting one country’s workforce against another, with an eye for lowering the floor on wages and benefits.
In this sterile calculus, one American machinist is the equivalent of sixty Chinese machinists; one Frenchman, forty-seven Vietnamese. These stark wage disparities have naturally led to a flood of skilled employment draining out of the industrialized democracies, and into the Pacific Rim. Once viewed as a champion for the American economy, General Electric has shrunk its American workforce by over one hundred thousand jobs in the last decade, while tripling its revenues and profits, partly through outsourcing.
Another example of the blurring of corporate national identity is that of the Boeing 777 “Dreamliner.” For decades, the U.S. government has acted as almost a marketing agent on Boeing’s behalf. Yet, when the company announced is plans to build its new flagship airplane, the production was dispersed throughout twelve different countries. The corporation’s major capital investment over the last decade has been a state of the art production facility outside Ganghzou, China. Over the last decade, Boeing has been effectively exchanging thousands of Seattle machinists being paid $50,000 a year with health insurance and pensions, for Chinese workers making $600 a year with no benefits at all.
All told, between 1980 and 2005 American production jobs shrank by thirty-seven percent, while offshore production increased by almost an equal amount. In that same timeframe, Fortune 500 firms shed an additional four million jobs. These are jobs that are not coming back.
In addition to the arbitraging of labor costs, corporations also enjoy the benefit of skirting the environmental, health, and safety regulations that for decades have been a cost of doing business in the industrialized democracies. Under the rules of the World Trade Organization, an entity created in the 1990s to help regulate international trade, up to eighty percent of environmental regulations in the United States could be ruled illegal within the international trade system.
All this leads to the questions: what is a nation, after all, if commerce has eroded the meaning of national boundaries? What does it mean to our system of government, if corporations have the incentive to find ways of doing business that avoids the prerogatives and laws of countries?
DEMOCRACY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
“In America the confidence in the omnipotence of markets has been transformed into a foreign policy that assumes internationalizing markets is tantamount to democratizing them.” -The Case Against the Global Economy
This is not the first time in history to introduce the concept of unified world economy. The centuries of European adventuring around the world that has come to be know as the “Colonial Era” was largely driven by commercial interests. Columbus was not on a scientific expedition when he stumbled upon the Americas. He was looking for a more efficient route to supply the growing European appetite for spices. He was on a trade mission.
The collective memory of this era, and its accompanying violence and exploitation, may not be in to forefront of thinking in the industrialized world. But it is the prism through which much of the world continues to view Western motivations and behaviors when it comes to commerce and trade. Hernando de Soto is an economist who has spent his career studying development patterns in some of the world’s poorest regions. He writes, “Most people in developing nations view capitalism as a private club, a discriminatory system that benefits only the West and the elites who live inside the bell jars of poor countries.”
To many in the developing world, the project of globalization is simply another form of economic colonialism. This view seems to be validated in the form of direct investment that multi-national corporations are making in the less developed regions. The largest private investment ever made on the continent of Africa, a $3.5 billion pipeline, is designed to drain energy off of the continent, not foster development within it. And the paradigm of wage arbitrage, which pits one labor pool against another, serves to lower the incomes of the world’s manufacturing workers.
A case can be made—especially in China and Singapore—that the outsourcing of manufacturing from the industrialized world has led to higher standards of living. Indeed, many of the manufacturing jobs in China offer a significant step up the economic ladder, and can mean the end to a life of rural poverty. But the question remains as to whether this form of capitalist development brings an attendant increase in political freedoms and human rights. The record on this account is bleak. China and Singapore continue to rank among the world’s most repressive regimes in terms of political freedom and human rights, according to the organization Freedom House.
William Greiter in his book One World, Ready or Not tries to dispel the notion that capitalism and democracy are somehow wed, or that the historic trajectory of the West is bound to sweep across the globe, freeing billions in the process. He writes, “The great multi-nationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior. Indeed, one of the striking qualities about global enterprise is how easily free market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business.”
TOO MUCH STUFF
Perhaps the most striking feature of the globalization project is its wondrous ability to create stuff. By effectively utilizing the world’s cheapest labor pools, and skirting costly environmental and safety regulations, multi-national corporations have become more productive in manufacturing goods than would have been even imaginable to generations past. The stocked isles of inexpensive goods at Wal-mart and other box stores are a testimony to massive efficiencies of scale and low-cost production.
Yet, ironically, this success may also be one of the greatest liabilities to the world economy. The trend of outsourcing manufacturing away from the industrialized democracies to the Pacific Rim, has the net effect of removing middle class consumers from the market, one worker at a time. As an example, the Boeing machinist in Seattle could actually afford to fly on the planes he or she were helping build; their Chinese counterpart cannot.
The global system has been fixated on low cost production, and has developed remarkable technologies and strategies to deliver an abundance of goods to the market. But it is failing to generate new consumers with sufficient incomes to buy them. Since the 1950s the United States has served as the world’s “buyer of last resort.” America’s burgeoning middle class of the mid to late twentieth century could be counted on to consume the spare capacity within the global economy. This middle class has been the effective engine, the market, for the globalization project. As this middle class begins to shrink due to job losses, so too does stability of the system.
Between 1989 and 2005, eighty percent of male workers in the United States saw their wages stagnate or decline. Entire manufacturing enterprises have been shuttered, and communities of workers forced to find other means of employment, often at a fraction of their previous income. This is no doubt a stress on the workers and their families, but it also brings an element of fragility to the system as a whole.
The auto industry is a good example. As automobile production has shifted to lower cost regions around the world, productivity has shot up, while consumer demand has decreased. Each year the auto industry manufactures almost forty percent more inventory than there are consumers to buy. As an example, in 2000 the industry delivered 79 million vehicles, and was only able to sell 57 million. More than 20 million vehicles found no consumer with a sufficient income.
Peter Schavoir, a one-time director of strategy at IBM, frames the problem this way, “You can’t become so efficient that all this stuff is made without any middle class labor content. Because then you have nobody with the money to buy anything.”
PLAYING POKER ON THE TITANIC
“What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to reexamine the validity, under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology.” -James Goldsmith
One final element that deserves to be explored within the globalization project is the very ability of the earth’s environment to sustain it. This is no small point. The success of the capitalist model of the 20th century was predicated on an almost endless supply of cheap energy and raw materials. The wealth the system created was for the most part through a process of transferring “natural capital” into financial capital. We cut down trees and burned oil in an effort to grow the economy.
Between 1970 and 2000 the world lost approximately one-third of its natural resources wealth. This includes hardwoods from the Amazon, crude oil from Saudi Arabia, fish stocks off New England, top soil in India. The list goes on. It is a law of thermodynamics that can apply to economic development: you cannot get something out of nothing. Everything the capitalist economic system depends upon comes with a cost.
What is ominous is to watch as over two billion people in India and China begin to aspire to the energy and resource intensive lifestyle that we in the West have come to take for granted. While it is true that bringing this population into the system may solve the shortage of viable consumers, it could also collapse the world’s biosphere. Today, we in the United States consume on average more than ten times the energy per capita than China or India. Yet as these two developing nations look to grow their economies they are following the same resource and energy intensive strategies that have proven so effective in the West.
There are two serious problems with the prospect of bringing China and India along this path to development. First is the growing scarcity of energy and raw materials. The “easy” energy that fueled the post-war economic miracle in the West has been heavily depleted, and what remains of this easy energy continues to be a major flashpoint for international conflict. As India and China enter the geopolitical competition for Middle East or West African oil, for example, they bring with them a heightened potential for inter-state violence that could destabilize the international trading system.
But more ominous is the prospect of what success could look like if these two emerging economies continue to develop along this path. The overwhelming scientific consensus regarding global climate change, and the role of fossil fuels and industrialization in driving it, leaves the planet in a very tenuous position. Most climate scientists believe that we need to start immediately to reduce global carbon emissions if we are to stave off the worst effects of climate change. But instead of any real prospect for reducing emissions, we are actually on the verge of significantly increasing them as the world’s developing nations strive to build industrial economies dependant on the same energy and resource strategies that created this looming crisis.
It may well turn out that our planet simply cannot support an economic system that depends on such intensive consumption of energy and resources. The globalization project is built on the premise that it makes economic sense to produce goods halfway around the globe; that American consumers should be buying waste baskets made in China and apples from Chile. But there are serious questions as to how long such a system can sustain itself, and what it will mean to global stability once we run into the truly uncompromising ecological constraints the planet places before us.
Billionaire investor James Goldsmith thinks we may already have reached the end of this road, we just haven’t noticed. With our economic models so focused on quarterly output and profits, we may be blinded to a larger picture that surrounds us. He writes in the Financial Times of London, “A system that feeds on itself cannot keep eating forever.” To use a rather stark analogy to what we may be experiencing today, he observes, “In hindsight, some of capitalism victories may be a bit like winning at poker—on the Titanic.”
QUESTIONING OUR ASSUMPTIONS
“Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off. It is a force of nature—like wind or water.” -President Bill Clinton
On November 30, 1999, the globalization project was given a new face as tens of thousands of protesters clogged the streets of downtown Seattle. The occasion was the meeting of the World Trade Organization. Business and political leaders were met by unruly throngs representing divergent groups of environmentalist, labor unions, human rights advocates, or some who simply wished to protest any system of global authority whatsoever. It was an image that flashed back to the violent protests of 1960s, with heavily armed police firing teargas into crowds and young people being beaten with batons. The images seemed to capture a large and growing population who feel disaffected from the international system—and this in the richest nation on earth.
In the Cold War era, it was easier to define what we as individuals, and our nation collectively, represented. It was an ideological struggle between freedom and repression. But as the international trading system emerged as the dominant paradigm to world affairs, it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to understand where they stand, what values “we” represent, or where these trends are leadings us.
To be fair, there is lingering hope that the globalization project will eventually benefit the world’s poor. Some see the opening up of borders and the free flow of goods and services to offer a more level playing field in the world’s economic order. Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, stated that “the main losers in today’s very unequal world are not those who are too exposed to globalization, but those who have been left out.” Some of the most enterprising leaders in Africa today view global trade to be the long-awaited panacea to the continent’s suffering. And to millions of workers across the Pacific Rim, the explosion of international production and trade have brought jobs, modern infrastructure, educational opportunities—in essence, an entrée into the modern world.
But to critics, the fragility of the system is what is most troubling. Over the last decades, the world has invested trillions of dollars in the global trade infrastructure—an investment based on a series of assumptions. These assumptions include the basic economic viability of global production. Our system has been weaned on the ready availability of cheap energy that allows goods to be transported ever-greater distances around the world. But as energy becomes more scarce and costly in the coming decades, transportation costs may cause a sudden shock to the system. According to the economic forecast of the organization World Markets, that day of reckoning may already be upon us. Their annual report for 2008 states, “In fact, the explosion of global transport costs has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”
Beyond the economic costs, the globalization project depends on a world at relative peace, in which countries and regions can be depended upon to cooperate. The continuation of global trade requires not only peace and stability, but the absence of any pandemic disease that could stop the flow of goods overnight. Finally, the export of terrorism as a weapon of political dissent opens the world’s trading infrastructure to be likely and vulnerable targets for those disenfranchised by the system.
Eleven years to the day after President Bush stood so confidently before the country to declare the dawn of a new era, a group of nineteen men indoctrinated in an anti-Western ideology, and living lives largely removed from the benefits of globalization, chose for the targets of their terror and destruction two of the most visible signs of the global economic system—the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
The following decades have witness a fierce and at times violent debate about the nature of this new world order: who benefits, what are the rules of the game, what is the cost of entry, and is one giant world economy really a desirable or sustainable outcome? The phenomenon of “globalization” has come to define this era; it has become the prism through which almost every foreign policy decision is viewed. Access to oil and raw materials, markets and labor—these are the values that are driving the international system.
It has become fashionable in foreign policy circles to view an integrated world economy as a harbinger to a new age of peace and prosperity. This optimism is predicated on the belief that we will not fight with people we do business with; a system that is inter-dependant makes our old adversaries new allies in a drive to produce and consume. Some are not so sanguine. A world of unrestricted competitive capitalism is a zero-sum game, with clear winners and losers. As the gulf between the haves and the have-nots increases, and new technologies broadcast this disparity to people throughout the world, the potential for violent conflict may actually increase.
Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington does not share the optimist’s view of globalization. “Increasing trade in the international system is, by itself, unlikely to ease international tensions or promote greater international stability,” he writes. “Some international conflicts will actually be exacerbated by the corrosive side effects of globalization.” These corrosive effects can be most clearly demonstrated by the ways in which the integrated world economy distributes wealth.
We live in a world with an unprecedented disparity between the rich and poor. Today, twenty percent of the world’s population consumes eighty percent of its resources, while another twenty percent subsists on less than one dollar a day. Thomas Homer-Dixon, the Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, has calculated that the combined income of the world’s richest 225 people exceeds the income of the poorest forty-seven percent of the planet. For billions of people, the economic benefits created by the international system can be scarcely imagined. This vast population is also becoming increasingly aware of all they do not have. President Clinton warned on a trip through Africa that “global poverty is a powder keg that could be ignited by our indifference.”
The days when political leaders in the United States could stand up and say what is good for America’s major corporations is simply good for America, are over. William Greiter has written extensively on the global economy. In summarizing his central critique, he writes, “As the global system progresses along these lines, people will begin to grasp that enormous economic power is becoming concentrated in a very few hands and on a plane beyond national systems of accountability.” A statistic that flushes out Greiter’s observation is the fact that seventy percent of all global trade is controlled by just five hundred corporations, and these corporations are becoming less defined by any discernable national identity.
GLOBALIZATION AND THE NATION-STATE
“Sovereignty is not a physical fact. Sovereignty versus other considerations is one of the leading issues in world politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.” -Zbigniew Brzezinski
The stark and deserted streets of Flint, Michigan, or other industrial cities in the American heartland, provide a telling visual for the costs of entry into the global economic system. One central advantage to the breaking down of trade barriers is it enables corporations to view the world as one giant labor pool. In setting up systems of production, these companies “arbitrage” their labor costs, scouring the globe for the cheapest workers, pitting one country’s workforce against another, with an eye for lowering the floor on wages and benefits.
In this sterile calculus, one American machinist is the equivalent of sixty Chinese machinists; one Frenchman, forty-seven Vietnamese. These stark wage disparities have naturally led to a flood of skilled employment draining out of the industrialized democracies, and into the Pacific Rim. Once viewed as a champion for the American economy, General Electric has shrunk its American workforce by over one hundred thousand jobs in the last decade, while tripling its revenues and profits, partly through outsourcing.
Another example of the blurring of corporate national identity is that of the Boeing 777 “Dreamliner.” For decades, the U.S. government has acted as almost a marketing agent on Boeing’s behalf. Yet, when the company announced is plans to build its new flagship airplane, the production was dispersed throughout twelve different countries. The corporation’s major capital investment over the last decade has been a state of the art production facility outside Ganghzou, China. Over the last decade, Boeing has been effectively exchanging thousands of Seattle machinists being paid $50,000 a year with health insurance and pensions, for Chinese workers making $600 a year with no benefits at all.
All told, between 1980 and 2005 American production jobs shrank by thirty-seven percent, while offshore production increased by almost an equal amount. In that same timeframe, Fortune 500 firms shed an additional four million jobs. These are jobs that are not coming back.
In addition to the arbitraging of labor costs, corporations also enjoy the benefit of skirting the environmental, health, and safety regulations that for decades have been a cost of doing business in the industrialized democracies. Under the rules of the World Trade Organization, an entity created in the 1990s to help regulate international trade, up to eighty percent of environmental regulations in the United States could be ruled illegal within the international trade system.
All this leads to the questions: what is a nation, after all, if commerce has eroded the meaning of national boundaries? What does it mean to our system of government, if corporations have the incentive to find ways of doing business that avoids the prerogatives and laws of countries?
DEMOCRACY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
“In America the confidence in the omnipotence of markets has been transformed into a foreign policy that assumes internationalizing markets is tantamount to democratizing them.” -The Case Against the Global Economy
This is not the first time in history to introduce the concept of unified world economy. The centuries of European adventuring around the world that has come to be know as the “Colonial Era” was largely driven by commercial interests. Columbus was not on a scientific expedition when he stumbled upon the Americas. He was looking for a more efficient route to supply the growing European appetite for spices. He was on a trade mission.
The collective memory of this era, and its accompanying violence and exploitation, may not be in to forefront of thinking in the industrialized world. But it is the prism through which much of the world continues to view Western motivations and behaviors when it comes to commerce and trade. Hernando de Soto is an economist who has spent his career studying development patterns in some of the world’s poorest regions. He writes, “Most people in developing nations view capitalism as a private club, a discriminatory system that benefits only the West and the elites who live inside the bell jars of poor countries.”
To many in the developing world, the project of globalization is simply another form of economic colonialism. This view seems to be validated in the form of direct investment that multi-national corporations are making in the less developed regions. The largest private investment ever made on the continent of Africa, a $3.5 billion pipeline, is designed to drain energy off of the continent, not foster development within it. And the paradigm of wage arbitrage, which pits one labor pool against another, serves to lower the incomes of the world’s manufacturing workers.
A case can be made—especially in China and Singapore—that the outsourcing of manufacturing from the industrialized world has led to higher standards of living. Indeed, many of the manufacturing jobs in China offer a significant step up the economic ladder, and can mean the end to a life of rural poverty. But the question remains as to whether this form of capitalist development brings an attendant increase in political freedoms and human rights. The record on this account is bleak. China and Singapore continue to rank among the world’s most repressive regimes in terms of political freedom and human rights, according to the organization Freedom House.
William Greiter in his book One World, Ready or Not tries to dispel the notion that capitalism and democracy are somehow wed, or that the historic trajectory of the West is bound to sweep across the globe, freeing billions in the process. He writes, “The great multi-nationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior. Indeed, one of the striking qualities about global enterprise is how easily free market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business.”
TOO MUCH STUFF
Perhaps the most striking feature of the globalization project is its wondrous ability to create stuff. By effectively utilizing the world’s cheapest labor pools, and skirting costly environmental and safety regulations, multi-national corporations have become more productive in manufacturing goods than would have been even imaginable to generations past. The stocked isles of inexpensive goods at Wal-mart and other box stores are a testimony to massive efficiencies of scale and low-cost production.
Yet, ironically, this success may also be one of the greatest liabilities to the world economy. The trend of outsourcing manufacturing away from the industrialized democracies to the Pacific Rim, has the net effect of removing middle class consumers from the market, one worker at a time. As an example, the Boeing machinist in Seattle could actually afford to fly on the planes he or she were helping build; their Chinese counterpart cannot.
The global system has been fixated on low cost production, and has developed remarkable technologies and strategies to deliver an abundance of goods to the market. But it is failing to generate new consumers with sufficient incomes to buy them. Since the 1950s the United States has served as the world’s “buyer of last resort.” America’s burgeoning middle class of the mid to late twentieth century could be counted on to consume the spare capacity within the global economy. This middle class has been the effective engine, the market, for the globalization project. As this middle class begins to shrink due to job losses, so too does stability of the system.
Between 1989 and 2005, eighty percent of male workers in the United States saw their wages stagnate or decline. Entire manufacturing enterprises have been shuttered, and communities of workers forced to find other means of employment, often at a fraction of their previous income. This is no doubt a stress on the workers and their families, but it also brings an element of fragility to the system as a whole.
The auto industry is a good example. As automobile production has shifted to lower cost regions around the world, productivity has shot up, while consumer demand has decreased. Each year the auto industry manufactures almost forty percent more inventory than there are consumers to buy. As an example, in 2000 the industry delivered 79 million vehicles, and was only able to sell 57 million. More than 20 million vehicles found no consumer with a sufficient income.
Peter Schavoir, a one-time director of strategy at IBM, frames the problem this way, “You can’t become so efficient that all this stuff is made without any middle class labor content. Because then you have nobody with the money to buy anything.”
PLAYING POKER ON THE TITANIC
“What an astonishing thing it is to watch a civilization destroy itself because it is unable to reexamine the validity, under totally new circumstances, of an economic ideology.” -James Goldsmith
One final element that deserves to be explored within the globalization project is the very ability of the earth’s environment to sustain it. This is no small point. The success of the capitalist model of the 20th century was predicated on an almost endless supply of cheap energy and raw materials. The wealth the system created was for the most part through a process of transferring “natural capital” into financial capital. We cut down trees and burned oil in an effort to grow the economy.
Between 1970 and 2000 the world lost approximately one-third of its natural resources wealth. This includes hardwoods from the Amazon, crude oil from Saudi Arabia, fish stocks off New England, top soil in India. The list goes on. It is a law of thermodynamics that can apply to economic development: you cannot get something out of nothing. Everything the capitalist economic system depends upon comes with a cost.
What is ominous is to watch as over two billion people in India and China begin to aspire to the energy and resource intensive lifestyle that we in the West have come to take for granted. While it is true that bringing this population into the system may solve the shortage of viable consumers, it could also collapse the world’s biosphere. Today, we in the United States consume on average more than ten times the energy per capita than China or India. Yet as these two developing nations look to grow their economies they are following the same resource and energy intensive strategies that have proven so effective in the West.
There are two serious problems with the prospect of bringing China and India along this path to development. First is the growing scarcity of energy and raw materials. The “easy” energy that fueled the post-war economic miracle in the West has been heavily depleted, and what remains of this easy energy continues to be a major flashpoint for international conflict. As India and China enter the geopolitical competition for Middle East or West African oil, for example, they bring with them a heightened potential for inter-state violence that could destabilize the international trading system.
But more ominous is the prospect of what success could look like if these two emerging economies continue to develop along this path. The overwhelming scientific consensus regarding global climate change, and the role of fossil fuels and industrialization in driving it, leaves the planet in a very tenuous position. Most climate scientists believe that we need to start immediately to reduce global carbon emissions if we are to stave off the worst effects of climate change. But instead of any real prospect for reducing emissions, we are actually on the verge of significantly increasing them as the world’s developing nations strive to build industrial economies dependant on the same energy and resource strategies that created this looming crisis.
It may well turn out that our planet simply cannot support an economic system that depends on such intensive consumption of energy and resources. The globalization project is built on the premise that it makes economic sense to produce goods halfway around the globe; that American consumers should be buying waste baskets made in China and apples from Chile. But there are serious questions as to how long such a system can sustain itself, and what it will mean to global stability once we run into the truly uncompromising ecological constraints the planet places before us.
Billionaire investor James Goldsmith thinks we may already have reached the end of this road, we just haven’t noticed. With our economic models so focused on quarterly output and profits, we may be blinded to a larger picture that surrounds us. He writes in the Financial Times of London, “A system that feeds on itself cannot keep eating forever.” To use a rather stark analogy to what we may be experiencing today, he observes, “In hindsight, some of capitalism victories may be a bit like winning at poker—on the Titanic.”
QUESTIONING OUR ASSUMPTIONS
“Globalization is not something we can hold off or turn off. It is a force of nature—like wind or water.” -President Bill Clinton
On November 30, 1999, the globalization project was given a new face as tens of thousands of protesters clogged the streets of downtown Seattle. The occasion was the meeting of the World Trade Organization. Business and political leaders were met by unruly throngs representing divergent groups of environmentalist, labor unions, human rights advocates, or some who simply wished to protest any system of global authority whatsoever. It was an image that flashed back to the violent protests of 1960s, with heavily armed police firing teargas into crowds and young people being beaten with batons. The images seemed to capture a large and growing population who feel disaffected from the international system—and this in the richest nation on earth.
In the Cold War era, it was easier to define what we as individuals, and our nation collectively, represented. It was an ideological struggle between freedom and repression. But as the international trading system emerged as the dominant paradigm to world affairs, it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to understand where they stand, what values “we” represent, or where these trends are leadings us.
To be fair, there is lingering hope that the globalization project will eventually benefit the world’s poor. Some see the opening up of borders and the free flow of goods and services to offer a more level playing field in the world’s economic order. Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, stated that “the main losers in today’s very unequal world are not those who are too exposed to globalization, but those who have been left out.” Some of the most enterprising leaders in Africa today view global trade to be the long-awaited panacea to the continent’s suffering. And to millions of workers across the Pacific Rim, the explosion of international production and trade have brought jobs, modern infrastructure, educational opportunities—in essence, an entrée into the modern world.
But to critics, the fragility of the system is what is most troubling. Over the last decades, the world has invested trillions of dollars in the global trade infrastructure—an investment based on a series of assumptions. These assumptions include the basic economic viability of global production. Our system has been weaned on the ready availability of cheap energy that allows goods to be transported ever-greater distances around the world. But as energy becomes more scarce and costly in the coming decades, transportation costs may cause a sudden shock to the system. According to the economic forecast of the organization World Markets, that day of reckoning may already be upon us. Their annual report for 2008 states, “In fact, the explosion of global transport costs has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”
Beyond the economic costs, the globalization project depends on a world at relative peace, in which countries and regions can be depended upon to cooperate. The continuation of global trade requires not only peace and stability, but the absence of any pandemic disease that could stop the flow of goods overnight. Finally, the export of terrorism as a weapon of political dissent opens the world’s trading infrastructure to be likely and vulnerable targets for those disenfranchised by the system.
Eleven years to the day after President Bush stood so confidently before the country to declare the dawn of a new era, a group of nineteen men indoctrinated in an anti-Western ideology, and living lives largely removed from the benefits of globalization, chose for the targets of their terror and destruction two of the most visible signs of the global economic system—the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
CULTURE
In a sense, the modern era was brought to the Middle East in 1798 in the form of a small expeditionary force commanded by a young French general. The ease in which Napoleon and his army were able to not only conquer the ancient lands of Egypt, but to establish a colonial regime and hold power over a large part of Islamic civilization was a humiliation the region is still yet to fully recover from. The overpowering military dominance of the West, driven by new technologies and schemes of economic development, were a dramatic expression for the end of an era in Islam. The civilizational struggle that had been going on for centuries had, for the time being, been won. The two centuries to follow would bring about even more blatant examples of this victory. The Golden Age of Islam was over.
What makes this historical turnabout all the more remarkable is the fact that in the centuries prior to Napoleon’s expedition, Islam had been more dynamic, inquisitive, and prosperous than the Christian Civilization of the West. It was Islamic scholars who had preserved the storehouse of the Greek and Roman scientific and philosophical knowledge during the Medieval Era in the West, when Christian Civilization had devolved into the barbarity of the Inquisition, and was going about burning its women for the crime of “witchcraft.” Yet something happened around the time of the Renaissance. As new discoveries were bringing a greater grasp of the universe, and the wondrous powers of science were opening up inventions and innovations, Islam began to stagnate. A once vibrant society became increasingly backward-looking, tending to perceive all the problems of society as being caused by a turning away from the Islamic purity of a bygone era.
The great Western scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, writes, “The reluctance of the Islamic Middle East to accept European science is all the more remarkable if one considers the immense contribution of the Islamic civilization of the Middle Ages to the rise of modern science.” He goes on to observe, “In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil, and in a sense a dependant of the Islamic world.” This age of superiority led to a form of cultural arrogance in Islam, according the Lewis. Islamic society came to view the Christian West as a backwater; a land of barbarians and heretics who could quite simply offer no improvements to the purity and perfection embodied in the Koran and Islamic society. What was true in the teachings and culture of Christianity had already been incorporated and improved by Islamic civilization. This assumption led to an almost complete rejection of, or isolation from, the tectonic shifts that the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution were making in West.
The Napoleonic conquests in the Middle East were a tangible expression of the power of Western science to innovate superior technologies. The ability to project violence and subdue armies and populations is understandable in any culture or language. Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington explains, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas of values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
The superiority of the organized violence that Huntington speaks of led to over a century of colonization and humiliation in the Middle East. The empires of the West divided up the land and resources of the region, creating artificially-imposed borders cutting across tribal and religious affiliations. The result was an assortment of “nation-states,” that lacked anything like the coherence and historical meaning of nations in the West. The journal Foreign Affairs has noted, “When the European oversea empire dissolved, they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns and settlements.” The legacy of this colonial era is widely viewed in the region to be the root cause for the lack of economic and political progress in the modern Middle East.
The decades following the end of the European colonial era has, according to Lewis, led to “a string of shabby tyrannies” throughout the region, “ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.” The Middle East, and Islamic civilization as a whole, rank among the world’s most repressive in political and religious freedoms. The modern Middle East has also starkly failed in its efforts towards economic development in the age of the global economy. According to the World Bank, “The region still lags behind the world in investment, job creation, productivity, exports and income.” One study concluded the total non-oil exports from the Arab world “amount to less than those of Finland, a country of just six million people.”
This political and economic performance has led to a sense of disillusionment and alienation from the modern world. As a result, we have witnessed throughout Islam a rising tide of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism; this trend has been one of the most significant sources of instability to the international order since the end of the Cold War. Huntington writes, “To ignore the impact of the Islamic Resurgence on Eastern Hemisphere politics in the late twentieth century is equivalent to ignoring the impact of the Protestant Reformation on European politics in the late sixteenth century.”
The impact Huntington is talking about forms the core of his theory on “the clash of civilizations.” In 1994, in an essay under that title in the journal Foreign Affairs, Huntington proposed one of the most talked-about and controversial theories as to the dominating trend driving international conflict in the Post-Cold War era. His theory suggests that the end of the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the West has led to a resurgence in ethnic and civilizational identity. Individuals and nations no longer attach the same significance to their political or economic system, according to Huntington’s theory. They are finding meaning and identity in older cultural and religious ties.
It is as if the map of the world is being redrawn along the lines prior to European colonization. “People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions,” according to Huntington. This realignment will naturally cause a revival of more ancient rivalries and animosities, such as the age-old struggle between the Christian West and the Islamic East. “The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”
But the lingering sense of isolation and desperation that has led to the rise in Islamic extremism is not purely a clash between the East and the West. One of the most troubling observations in the theory of the “clash of civilizations” is that virtually everywhere Islam comes into contact with a different civilization, there is violence going on today. Whether that be in Chechnya, where Islam meets Russian-Orthodox civilization; or Kashmir, where it meets Hindu civilization; or in Western China, Israel, or the Sudan… the trend indicated on the map leads to some of Huntington’s most controversial observations: there is some religious, historical, political, or economic force that has led to a civilizational animus between Islam and the rest of the world.
Huntington’s theory has not been embraced in all quarters, to be sure. Johns Hopkins political scientist Fouad Adjami states quite clearly, “Huntington is wrong. He has underestimated the tenacity of modernity and secularism in places that acquired these ways at great odds, always perilously close to the abyss, the darkness never far.” Adjami sees in Huntington’s map of civilizations a gross over-simplification of the nature of international conflict. “It is easy to understand Huntington’s frustration with this kind of complexity, with the strange mixture of attraction and repulsion that the West breeds, and his need to simplify matters, to mark out the borders of civilizations.”
Yet Huntington’s map speaks for itself, and the trend towards inter-civilizational violence only seemed to be magnified on September 11th, and the eight years of war that have followed. Where this struggle will ultimately lead is an open question. The Islamic nations of the Middle East could find a more productive relationship working within the global economy. Political reforms could be introduced giving voice to the grievances of the disenfranchised. Or we could be entering another era of civilizational “crusades” modeled after the historic and bloody wars that have defined the centuries-old relation between the Christian West and the Islamic East.
What makes this historical turnabout all the more remarkable is the fact that in the centuries prior to Napoleon’s expedition, Islam had been more dynamic, inquisitive, and prosperous than the Christian Civilization of the West. It was Islamic scholars who had preserved the storehouse of the Greek and Roman scientific and philosophical knowledge during the Medieval Era in the West, when Christian Civilization had devolved into the barbarity of the Inquisition, and was going about burning its women for the crime of “witchcraft.” Yet something happened around the time of the Renaissance. As new discoveries were bringing a greater grasp of the universe, and the wondrous powers of science were opening up inventions and innovations, Islam began to stagnate. A once vibrant society became increasingly backward-looking, tending to perceive all the problems of society as being caused by a turning away from the Islamic purity of a bygone era.
The great Western scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, writes, “The reluctance of the Islamic Middle East to accept European science is all the more remarkable if one considers the immense contribution of the Islamic civilization of the Middle Ages to the rise of modern science.” He goes on to observe, “In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe was a pupil, and in a sense a dependant of the Islamic world.” This age of superiority led to a form of cultural arrogance in Islam, according the Lewis. Islamic society came to view the Christian West as a backwater; a land of barbarians and heretics who could quite simply offer no improvements to the purity and perfection embodied in the Koran and Islamic society. What was true in the teachings and culture of Christianity had already been incorporated and improved by Islamic civilization. This assumption led to an almost complete rejection of, or isolation from, the tectonic shifts that the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution were making in West.
The Napoleonic conquests in the Middle East were a tangible expression of the power of Western science to innovate superior technologies. The ability to project violence and subdue armies and populations is understandable in any culture or language. Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington explains, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas of values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
The superiority of the organized violence that Huntington speaks of led to over a century of colonization and humiliation in the Middle East. The empires of the West divided up the land and resources of the region, creating artificially-imposed borders cutting across tribal and religious affiliations. The result was an assortment of “nation-states,” that lacked anything like the coherence and historical meaning of nations in the West. The journal Foreign Affairs has noted, “When the European oversea empire dissolved, they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns and settlements.” The legacy of this colonial era is widely viewed in the region to be the root cause for the lack of economic and political progress in the modern Middle East.
The decades following the end of the European colonial era has, according to Lewis, led to “a string of shabby tyrannies” throughout the region, “ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships, modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.” The Middle East, and Islamic civilization as a whole, rank among the world’s most repressive in political and religious freedoms. The modern Middle East has also starkly failed in its efforts towards economic development in the age of the global economy. According to the World Bank, “The region still lags behind the world in investment, job creation, productivity, exports and income.” One study concluded the total non-oil exports from the Arab world “amount to less than those of Finland, a country of just six million people.”
This political and economic performance has led to a sense of disillusionment and alienation from the modern world. As a result, we have witnessed throughout Islam a rising tide of religious fundamentalism and fanaticism; this trend has been one of the most significant sources of instability to the international order since the end of the Cold War. Huntington writes, “To ignore the impact of the Islamic Resurgence on Eastern Hemisphere politics in the late twentieth century is equivalent to ignoring the impact of the Protestant Reformation on European politics in the late sixteenth century.”
The impact Huntington is talking about forms the core of his theory on “the clash of civilizations.” In 1994, in an essay under that title in the journal Foreign Affairs, Huntington proposed one of the most talked-about and controversial theories as to the dominating trend driving international conflict in the Post-Cold War era. His theory suggests that the end of the ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the West has led to a resurgence in ethnic and civilizational identity. Individuals and nations no longer attach the same significance to their political or economic system, according to Huntington’s theory. They are finding meaning and identity in older cultural and religious ties.
It is as if the map of the world is being redrawn along the lines prior to European colonization. “People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions,” according to Huntington. This realignment will naturally cause a revival of more ancient rivalries and animosities, such as the age-old struggle between the Christian West and the Islamic East. “The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”
But the lingering sense of isolation and desperation that has led to the rise in Islamic extremism is not purely a clash between the East and the West. One of the most troubling observations in the theory of the “clash of civilizations” is that virtually everywhere Islam comes into contact with a different civilization, there is violence going on today. Whether that be in Chechnya, where Islam meets Russian-Orthodox civilization; or Kashmir, where it meets Hindu civilization; or in Western China, Israel, or the Sudan… the trend indicated on the map leads to some of Huntington’s most controversial observations: there is some religious, historical, political, or economic force that has led to a civilizational animus between Islam and the rest of the world.
Huntington’s theory has not been embraced in all quarters, to be sure. Johns Hopkins political scientist Fouad Adjami states quite clearly, “Huntington is wrong. He has underestimated the tenacity of modernity and secularism in places that acquired these ways at great odds, always perilously close to the abyss, the darkness never far.” Adjami sees in Huntington’s map of civilizations a gross over-simplification of the nature of international conflict. “It is easy to understand Huntington’s frustration with this kind of complexity, with the strange mixture of attraction and repulsion that the West breeds, and his need to simplify matters, to mark out the borders of civilizations.”
Yet Huntington’s map speaks for itself, and the trend towards inter-civilizational violence only seemed to be magnified on September 11th, and the eight years of war that have followed. Where this struggle will ultimately lead is an open question. The Islamic nations of the Middle East could find a more productive relationship working within the global economy. Political reforms could be introduced giving voice to the grievances of the disenfranchised. Or we could be entering another era of civilizational “crusades” modeled after the historic and bloody wars that have defined the centuries-old relation between the Christian West and the Islamic East.
RESOURCE WARS
Over the night of August 7, 2008, the fragile peace that had been maintained since the collapse of the Soviet Union was broken, as shots and artillery fire erupted along the contested border between the Central Asian nation of Georgia and the Russian-backed break-away province South Ossentia. What was most surprising about the conflict was the immediate and overwhelming response by leaders across the Western world. A region that had once been at the heart of the Soviet Union, now seemed to be factoring into the deep strategic thinking of the United States and Europe. The stakes of this conflict obviously had greater implications than regional borders or ethnicity.
THE OIL RUSH IN THE CASPIAN
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from the newly independent republics of Central Asia, Western oil companies were finally given access to this promising region. The Caspian Basin, which includes areas within Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Iran, and Kazakhstan, has long been known to hold great reserves of oil and natural gas. One of the world’s oldest refineries was built in Baku, on the banks of the Caspian Sea. The oilfields of Baku factored heavily into Hitler’s ill-advised invasion of Russia during World War II. But the news flooding out of the Caspian throughout the 1990s was breathtaking—here may be the largest undeveloped hydrocarbon resources left on earth. Initial reports indicate the region could hold up to one-fifth of the world’s proven reserves of petroleum: 280 billion barrels of oil, and as much as 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Whoever controls the production of these reserves could help shape the contours of the energy economy of the twenty-first century.
As the geopolitical significance of this region became increasingly clear, American diplomacy and military strategy naturally followed. Michael Klare elaborates in his book Resource Wars on the seamless efforts to enhance American interests in the region. In July 1997 Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott declared in a speech that the resources of the Caspian “matter profoundly to the United States.” One month later, President Clinton hosted the president of Azerbaijan at the White House, and explains that the relations between the two countries “not only help Azerbaijan to prosper, but also help diversify our energy supply and strengthen our nation’s security.”
Klare makes the point that American presidents don’t use the term “national security” lightly. Invoking that level of importance implies to our friends and adversaries a willingness to use military force if necessary to promote these interests. Six weeks after Clinton’s remarks, American forces conducted their first ever joint military training operation in the Caspian, entailing the longest airborne operation in history. The sight of American paratroopers landing in the hillsides of the former Soviet republics provided a highly conspicuous demonstration of our new interests in the region.
A NEW DEFINITION OF NATIONAL SECURITY
The evolution of American interests in the Caspian Basin are indicative of a much larger trend in international relations and the ways in which nations now define their “security.” During the Cold War, our national security was broadly framed as an ideological struggle between a repressive communist system and the capitalist democracies of the West. Natural resources certainly played an important strategic role, but competition for energy and other materials was sorted out through competing “spheres of influence.” When those spheres of influence lost their historic currency with the collapse of communism, competition for natural resources took on a much greater urgency. Klare calls this transformation the “economization of national security affairs.” He goes on to explain how “nothing has influenced U.S. military policy more than the need to guarantee access to vital natural resources.”
AN AMERICAN LAKE
The historic meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud provides one of the most colorful and revealing stories of the role of energy and natural resources in national security policy. Less than twenty-four hours after the Conference at Yalta, in which the victors of World War II began the process of dividing up the spoils of war, FDR met the King of Saudi Arabia on a navy frigate moored in the middle of the Suez Canal. There is little historical documentation of what they said during their meetings. But the result has been clear, and confirmed by every American administration since: the energy resources of Arabian Peninsula are critical to the national security of the United States, and our military is prepared to do whatever is necessary to preserve access to those supplies.
At the time of the Roosevelt/Ibn Saud meeting, the United States was not the dominant military power in the Middle East. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the U.S. relied on the British navy to safeguard our interests in the region. It was the strategic analysis of a young Winston Churchill, who, while serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty prior to the outbreak of World War I, changed the geopolitical significance of the region. He promoted the initiative to convert the British navy from coal power, which Britain had in abundance, to oil—a fuel that the United Kingdom had almost none of. This decision would make the world’s most powerful navy newly dependant on the client states of the Middle East. The relationship between Persia and the U.K. became the template for what was to follow.
The first cooperative oil agreement between the West and the Middle East was the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. This partnership was the beginning of a growing Western reliance on the energy of the Middle East, not only to fuel economic growth and industrialization, but also as a critical element in the ability to project military power and defend national security. For the majority of the twentieth century it was the British who served as the international policemen of the Middle East. The British navy patrolled the sea lanes and assured the steady and free flow of Middle East energy into the markets of the West.
Despite conventional wisdom, the United States has actually had a very limited dependence on Middle Eastern oil for most of its history. The significance of Roosevelt’s quid pro quo with the Saudi King was to assure the ready supply of Arabian oil as the catalyst for the post-war reconstruction of a devastated Europe and Japan. This relationship was part of a strategy to conserve American oil for domestic consumption. The United States provided four-fifths of the oil used by the allies during the World War II, and that war effort caused a heavy strain on America’s oil production. Following the war, it was widely touted that the allies had “floated to victory on a tide of American oil.” American military planners concluded that the next World War would have to be fought with someone else’s oil. The days of America’s role as the world’s dominant oil producer were over.
Roosevelt’s strategy proved to be wildly effective. The rapid rise in energy consumption in Western Europe and Japan following the war led to one of the great “economic miracles” in human history. Countries that lay in ruins following the war would rise up to become major industrial powers. Economic historian Alfred Chandler observes how “the German and Japanese economic miracles were based on improved institutional arrangements and cheap oil.” The post-war economies of Western Europe witnessed a fifteen-fold increase in their oil consumption; Japan’s consumption increase 137 times, from 32,000 to over 4.4 million barrels a day!
This unprecedented increase in demand for Middle Eastern oil was the beginning of the “oil addiction” of the modern era. The “addiction” and Western dependence on the resources of the region became more troubling when the British announced they were pulling out their forces after 1971. With the departure of the British, a massive power vacuum enveloped the region. Through the prism of the Cold War, leaders in Washington became increasingly focused on maintaining order and stability in the Middle East. The greatest strategic fear was that with the departure of the British, the Soviet Union would make good on its stated objective of dominating the energy resources of the region.
The Nixon administration was placed in a great geopolitical quandary: the world’s most important energy reserves were vulnerable to being usurped by the Soviets, yet the military debacle of Vietnam in the early 1970s severely limited our strategic options. The most viable option on the table became known as the “Nixon Doctrine.” This was a policy of indoctrinating and bolstering regional allies who would look after American interests. The plan was to strengthen local “sheriffs” who would project power in the region, and serve as proxies for the United States. Ironically, in hindsight, the choice for our regional “sheriff” in the Middle East was Iran.
America opened a floodgate of arms shipments and military support to Iran beginning in 1972. Over $12 billion of sophisticated weaponry, from F16 fighter jets to anti-aircraft missiles, were sold to the country throughout the 1970s. The regime of the Shah became the proxy power for the West, until the Iranian Revolution of 1979. When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power, he and his fundamentalist followers brought an effective end to the Nixon Doctrine. America needed a revised policy for securing our interests, and the development of this new policy fell to President Jimmy Carter.
In January 1980, in the midst of an on-going hostage crisis that was gripping the nation, President Carter stood before a joint session of congress and declared: “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States, and such as assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” And thus, the implicit policy of the United States became explicit: our military would now be the dominant force in the Middle East.
The following decades witnessed a dramatic ramping up of American military power in the region. The Department of Defense created a new command, CentCom, with the stated objective of securing the supply of energy coming out of the Persian Gulf. The Seventh Fleet was deployed to patrol the sea lanes and safeguard the oil tankers departing from the ports of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Marines were sent into Lebanon, and military aid was increased to our allies Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
The most dramatic expression of the Carter Doctrine came in the spring of 1991. The “power” that was threatening American interests turned out to be the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq. As Iraqi tanks rolled across the desert and captured the lucrative oil fields of the tiny nation of Kuwait, alarm bells rang out across the industrialized world. With almost no international dissent, American forces were mobilized in one of the greatest projections of military power in the latter half of the twentieth century. Viewed through the prism of energy security, leaders across the globe deemed it unacceptable to have an unstable dictator such as Saddam Hussein controlling production of up to one forth of the world’s oil. There was also the fear that his military adventuring would not stop with Kuwait. If the world did not act, Hussein may well have continued his campaign into the greatest energy prize—the petroleum reserves of Saudi Arabia.
To argue that the first Gulf War was not about oil is untenable. But to claim that the war was about oil, and that it was a rational response to the vital interests of the United States and other energy importing nations around the world is strategically understandable. Energy is central to the economic and national security of every nation on earth. Without access to energy, the wheels and motion of development and everyday life come to a halt. In the calculus of a nation’s interests, energy is worth fighting for. The dilemma facing the planet is that the abundant and cheap energy reserves that fueled the dramatic growth and industrialization of the twentieth century are becoming scarce. As newly developing economies such as China and India enter into the matrix of energy geopolitics the picture becomes even more complicated. The wars over control of Iraq’s oil reserves may be just a prelude for even greater international struggles to come.
THE OIL RUSH IN THE CASPIAN
In the early 1990s, as the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from the newly independent republics of Central Asia, Western oil companies were finally given access to this promising region. The Caspian Basin, which includes areas within Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Iran, and Kazakhstan, has long been known to hold great reserves of oil and natural gas. One of the world’s oldest refineries was built in Baku, on the banks of the Caspian Sea. The oilfields of Baku factored heavily into Hitler’s ill-advised invasion of Russia during World War II. But the news flooding out of the Caspian throughout the 1990s was breathtaking—here may be the largest undeveloped hydrocarbon resources left on earth. Initial reports indicate the region could hold up to one-fifth of the world’s proven reserves of petroleum: 280 billion barrels of oil, and as much as 665 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Whoever controls the production of these reserves could help shape the contours of the energy economy of the twenty-first century.
As the geopolitical significance of this region became increasingly clear, American diplomacy and military strategy naturally followed. Michael Klare elaborates in his book Resource Wars on the seamless efforts to enhance American interests in the region. In July 1997 Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott declared in a speech that the resources of the Caspian “matter profoundly to the United States.” One month later, President Clinton hosted the president of Azerbaijan at the White House, and explains that the relations between the two countries “not only help Azerbaijan to prosper, but also help diversify our energy supply and strengthen our nation’s security.”
Klare makes the point that American presidents don’t use the term “national security” lightly. Invoking that level of importance implies to our friends and adversaries a willingness to use military force if necessary to promote these interests. Six weeks after Clinton’s remarks, American forces conducted their first ever joint military training operation in the Caspian, entailing the longest airborne operation in history. The sight of American paratroopers landing in the hillsides of the former Soviet republics provided a highly conspicuous demonstration of our new interests in the region.
A NEW DEFINITION OF NATIONAL SECURITY
The evolution of American interests in the Caspian Basin are indicative of a much larger trend in international relations and the ways in which nations now define their “security.” During the Cold War, our national security was broadly framed as an ideological struggle between a repressive communist system and the capitalist democracies of the West. Natural resources certainly played an important strategic role, but competition for energy and other materials was sorted out through competing “spheres of influence.” When those spheres of influence lost their historic currency with the collapse of communism, competition for natural resources took on a much greater urgency. Klare calls this transformation the “economization of national security affairs.” He goes on to explain how “nothing has influenced U.S. military policy more than the need to guarantee access to vital natural resources.”
AN AMERICAN LAKE
The historic meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud provides one of the most colorful and revealing stories of the role of energy and natural resources in national security policy. Less than twenty-four hours after the Conference at Yalta, in which the victors of World War II began the process of dividing up the spoils of war, FDR met the King of Saudi Arabia on a navy frigate moored in the middle of the Suez Canal. There is little historical documentation of what they said during their meetings. But the result has been clear, and confirmed by every American administration since: the energy resources of Arabian Peninsula are critical to the national security of the United States, and our military is prepared to do whatever is necessary to preserve access to those supplies.
At the time of the Roosevelt/Ibn Saud meeting, the United States was not the dominant military power in the Middle East. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the U.S. relied on the British navy to safeguard our interests in the region. It was the strategic analysis of a young Winston Churchill, who, while serving as the First Lord of the Admiralty prior to the outbreak of World War I, changed the geopolitical significance of the region. He promoted the initiative to convert the British navy from coal power, which Britain had in abundance, to oil—a fuel that the United Kingdom had almost none of. This decision would make the world’s most powerful navy newly dependant on the client states of the Middle East. The relationship between Persia and the U.K. became the template for what was to follow.
The first cooperative oil agreement between the West and the Middle East was the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. This partnership was the beginning of a growing Western reliance on the energy of the Middle East, not only to fuel economic growth and industrialization, but also as a critical element in the ability to project military power and defend national security. For the majority of the twentieth century it was the British who served as the international policemen of the Middle East. The British navy patrolled the sea lanes and assured the steady and free flow of Middle East energy into the markets of the West.
Despite conventional wisdom, the United States has actually had a very limited dependence on Middle Eastern oil for most of its history. The significance of Roosevelt’s quid pro quo with the Saudi King was to assure the ready supply of Arabian oil as the catalyst for the post-war reconstruction of a devastated Europe and Japan. This relationship was part of a strategy to conserve American oil for domestic consumption. The United States provided four-fifths of the oil used by the allies during the World War II, and that war effort caused a heavy strain on America’s oil production. Following the war, it was widely touted that the allies had “floated to victory on a tide of American oil.” American military planners concluded that the next World War would have to be fought with someone else’s oil. The days of America’s role as the world’s dominant oil producer were over.
Roosevelt’s strategy proved to be wildly effective. The rapid rise in energy consumption in Western Europe and Japan following the war led to one of the great “economic miracles” in human history. Countries that lay in ruins following the war would rise up to become major industrial powers. Economic historian Alfred Chandler observes how “the German and Japanese economic miracles were based on improved institutional arrangements and cheap oil.” The post-war economies of Western Europe witnessed a fifteen-fold increase in their oil consumption; Japan’s consumption increase 137 times, from 32,000 to over 4.4 million barrels a day!
This unprecedented increase in demand for Middle Eastern oil was the beginning of the “oil addiction” of the modern era. The “addiction” and Western dependence on the resources of the region became more troubling when the British announced they were pulling out their forces after 1971. With the departure of the British, a massive power vacuum enveloped the region. Through the prism of the Cold War, leaders in Washington became increasingly focused on maintaining order and stability in the Middle East. The greatest strategic fear was that with the departure of the British, the Soviet Union would make good on its stated objective of dominating the energy resources of the region.
The Nixon administration was placed in a great geopolitical quandary: the world’s most important energy reserves were vulnerable to being usurped by the Soviets, yet the military debacle of Vietnam in the early 1970s severely limited our strategic options. The most viable option on the table became known as the “Nixon Doctrine.” This was a policy of indoctrinating and bolstering regional allies who would look after American interests. The plan was to strengthen local “sheriffs” who would project power in the region, and serve as proxies for the United States. Ironically, in hindsight, the choice for our regional “sheriff” in the Middle East was Iran.
America opened a floodgate of arms shipments and military support to Iran beginning in 1972. Over $12 billion of sophisticated weaponry, from F16 fighter jets to anti-aircraft missiles, were sold to the country throughout the 1970s. The regime of the Shah became the proxy power for the West, until the Iranian Revolution of 1979. When the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power, he and his fundamentalist followers brought an effective end to the Nixon Doctrine. America needed a revised policy for securing our interests, and the development of this new policy fell to President Jimmy Carter.
In January 1980, in the midst of an on-going hostage crisis that was gripping the nation, President Carter stood before a joint session of congress and declared: “Let our position be absolutely clear. An attempt by any outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States, and such as assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” And thus, the implicit policy of the United States became explicit: our military would now be the dominant force in the Middle East.
The following decades witnessed a dramatic ramping up of American military power in the region. The Department of Defense created a new command, CentCom, with the stated objective of securing the supply of energy coming out of the Persian Gulf. The Seventh Fleet was deployed to patrol the sea lanes and safeguard the oil tankers departing from the ports of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Marines were sent into Lebanon, and military aid was increased to our allies Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
The most dramatic expression of the Carter Doctrine came in the spring of 1991. The “power” that was threatening American interests turned out to be the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq. As Iraqi tanks rolled across the desert and captured the lucrative oil fields of the tiny nation of Kuwait, alarm bells rang out across the industrialized world. With almost no international dissent, American forces were mobilized in one of the greatest projections of military power in the latter half of the twentieth century. Viewed through the prism of energy security, leaders across the globe deemed it unacceptable to have an unstable dictator such as Saddam Hussein controlling production of up to one forth of the world’s oil. There was also the fear that his military adventuring would not stop with Kuwait. If the world did not act, Hussein may well have continued his campaign into the greatest energy prize—the petroleum reserves of Saudi Arabia.
To argue that the first Gulf War was not about oil is untenable. But to claim that the war was about oil, and that it was a rational response to the vital interests of the United States and other energy importing nations around the world is strategically understandable. Energy is central to the economic and national security of every nation on earth. Without access to energy, the wheels and motion of development and everyday life come to a halt. In the calculus of a nation’s interests, energy is worth fighting for. The dilemma facing the planet is that the abundant and cheap energy reserves that fueled the dramatic growth and industrialization of the twentieth century are becoming scarce. As newly developing economies such as China and India enter into the matrix of energy geopolitics the picture becomes even more complicated. The wars over control of Iraq’s oil reserves may be just a prelude for even greater international struggles to come.
LESSONS IN ANARCHY
The news coming off the continent of Africa has not been good in recent years. Reports of genocidal violence, unchecked disease, political corruption, and the use of rape as a weapon of war have dulled the senses of many in the Western world. But on September 26, 2008, a story hit the wires that touched the imagination of people around the world. A small band of Somali “pirates” using nothing more than AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades had managed to hijack a cargo ship transporting thirty-three Russian made T-72 tanks and other heavy armaments bound for Kenya. The assailants, comprised of a rag-tag gang of uneducated youth, barefoot and dressed in dirty t-shirts, successfully overtook a major ship on high waters transporting sophisticated weaponry worth tens of million of dollars. The incident has become somewhat of a symbol for a new era of criminal anarchy on the continent, and is perhaps a gloomy talisman of things to come.
In 1994, the intrepid writer Robert Kaplan published an essay titled “The Coming Anarchy” in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly in which he predicted that the new international order of the 21st century would not be about trade, oil, or clashing cultures. What he experienced while traveling through parts of Africa and other impoverished regions around the world was a growing tension between the haves and the have-nots. He foresaw a new age where criminal violence and political anarchy would create the new fault lines dividing the world. “Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress,” Kaplan observed, “in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger.” The sight of criminal pirates operating off the coast of a country already living in political anarchy was a conspicuous image for the future Kaplan foretold.
The trends leading to the “coming anarchy” can be traced to three distinct causes: the lingering effects of colonialism and the weak and ineffective nation-states that emerged from it; environmental degradation and the scarcity of the resources that societies depend upon; and the demographic trends that are causing overpopulation in the world’s poorest regions.
KIND LEOPOLD’S GHOST
Straight lines on a map of political geography are unnatural constructs. Where political domains follow the contours of rivers or mountains, or natural barriers that would have delineated different ethnic or cultural groupings in a pre-Colonial Era, there tends to a greater rationale for a nation’s sovereignty. But any glance at a map of Africa finds an abundance of straight lines. No region on earth continues to linger in the pernicious effects of colonial domination more than Africa. It was only a century ago that the continent remained divided up between the competing commercial interests of the European powers. It was an era when the Congo, today one of the most violent and underdeveloped nations on earth, remained the personal playground and resource stock for a ruthless European monarch. To understand the political problems facing the continent, we need to begin by confronting King Leopold’s ghost.
The West often blames political corruption for the turmoil in Africa. But corrupt leaders may be just a visible symptom of a much deeper root cause. How can any leader, no matter how noble in intention, rule over a political entity that lacks a reason for being? Many of Africa’s nation-states, in Kaplan’s anarchy theory, are illusions. Kaplan takes Sierra Leone in West Africa as an example: “According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined borders, with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the interior. In the government’s territory the national army is an unruly rabble threatening drivers and passengers at most checkpoints.” In much of the surrounding region the situation is the same. “Even in quite zones none of the governments maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty.”
Here we come once again to the lines on the map—what do they mean, and to whom? In Kaplan’s analysis, borders have become largely meaningless in many places around the globe. He observes that in the world’s poorest regions, “political maps are the product of tired conventional wisdom,” and for governments whose borders lack intrinsic recognition, there is a trend to make an even more aggressive show out of their supposed legitimacy. “The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise.” These artificial borders are a lingering apparition of King Leopold’s ghost. As Kaplan observes, “The borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross purposes with demography and topography.” They are the straight lines on political maps.
The very notion of the nation-state with defined political borders drawn on maps is a Western invention. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europe was broken up into a set of kingdoms without defined borders. The nations that emerged from the Peace tended to have a sense of collective identity in the form a shared language, culture, religion, and ancestry. To be French held a deeper meaning beyond a political structure. The same cannot be said for many nations in the developing world, and Africa in particular. The lack of a common, binding national identity makes governing a country through a centralized government—I in which most people feel no real connection—all the more challenging.
In Kaplan’s anarchy, the future may see a steady dissolution of this system of organizing political power in the developing world. There is nothing to say that the world of nations is the final chapter in the history of humankind’s political evolution.
THE LAST TREE STANDING
Until recently, discussions on the role that the environment and natural resources play in international relations was viewed as a peripheral concern, but no longer. In regions around the world, resource scarcity will become the flashpoint of conflict and one of the major sources of political instability. Kaplan makes the point quite clearly, “It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the defining national-security issue of the early twenty-first century.” In regions such as Africa, competition for water, timber, and arable farmland will become a driving source of violence.
The situation in Darfur, where thousands have been killed and millions others displaced, is instructive to this point. While on the surface the conflict appears to be yet another struggle based on tribal antagonism, but international observers now believe the real issue driving the violence is a contest for the underground aquifers of the region, and the last remnants of productive farmland.
Competition for the resources of survival will increasingly become a defining feature in regions that lack effective political and civic institutions to supply basic services to their growing populations. Kaplan explains, “The environment, I will argue, is a part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security.” Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, believes, “Future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish.”
Indeed, the scarcity of natural resources will be a key harbinger to the criminal anarchy that Kaplan predicts. When society breaks down to a point where the very survival of a community is placed in question, a form of violent desperation is sure to ensue. In Kaplan’s’ analysis, “Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity.”
THE MALTHUSIAN DILEMMA
A non-scientific method of gauging the stability of a region is to observe the number of men and boys lining the streets with nothing to do. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times calls this population of loiterers “the standing around guys.” A combination of population growth coupled with a corresponding lack of economic development has created in the poorest regions of the world pockets of desperate young men with no real hope for material advancement in the world. This is true across Africa, the Middle East, and in Pakistan: the regions with the greatest potential for political anarchy.
There is a cruel trajectory to the demographics of the early twenty-first century. While much of the developing world is seeing a stabilizing in population growth, and parts of Europe and Russia are actually witnessing a population decline, Africa and the Middle East are growing at an exponential pace. According to the National Academy of Sciences, ninety-five percent of the population growth in the coming decades will be in the world’s poorest regions; areas that also have the least functional political and civic institutions to support this growth.
Young men’s willingness to resort to terrorism and serve as suicidal bombers is an example of the sort of desperation that can arise in circumstances that combine population growth and a lack of economic opportunity. Kaplan explains how “a large number of people on this planet to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down… in places where the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence.” Violence as an expression of dissent, driven by poverty and desperation, is the final component in the coming of Kaplan’s anarchy.
Burgeoning demographic “youth bulges” will be one of the lingering threats to peace and stability in many under-developed regions around the world. Kaplan sees these disenfranchised people as one of the key catalysts to the violent anarchy he predicts, “I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.”
THE COMING ANARCHY
Thomas Homer-Dixon likes to make an analogy for the situation facing the industrialized world. He asks us to think of a stretch limo driving down a side alley in one of the world’s poorest slums. Inside the limo, with its air conditioning and high fidelity sound, is North America, Western Europe, and the emerging Pacific Rim. Outside the limo is the rest of humankind looking in. This disparity between the haves and the have-nots will create the new fault lines of conflict in the decades ahead.
If the world continues along this trajectory, the problems of Africa or other impoverished regions will not be isolated. They will most likely become grim exports. “Disease, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders…” these could become the leading sources of instability in large parts of the planet. The final message embedded in Kaplan’s theory of the coming anarchy is, “Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.”
In 1994, the intrepid writer Robert Kaplan published an essay titled “The Coming Anarchy” in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly in which he predicted that the new international order of the 21st century would not be about trade, oil, or clashing cultures. What he experienced while traveling through parts of Africa and other impoverished regions around the world was a growing tension between the haves and the have-nots. He foresaw a new age where criminal violence and political anarchy would create the new fault lines dividing the world. “Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress,” Kaplan observed, “in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger.” The sight of criminal pirates operating off the coast of a country already living in political anarchy was a conspicuous image for the future Kaplan foretold.
The trends leading to the “coming anarchy” can be traced to three distinct causes: the lingering effects of colonialism and the weak and ineffective nation-states that emerged from it; environmental degradation and the scarcity of the resources that societies depend upon; and the demographic trends that are causing overpopulation in the world’s poorest regions.
KIND LEOPOLD’S GHOST
Straight lines on a map of political geography are unnatural constructs. Where political domains follow the contours of rivers or mountains, or natural barriers that would have delineated different ethnic or cultural groupings in a pre-Colonial Era, there tends to a greater rationale for a nation’s sovereignty. But any glance at a map of Africa finds an abundance of straight lines. No region on earth continues to linger in the pernicious effects of colonial domination more than Africa. It was only a century ago that the continent remained divided up between the competing commercial interests of the European powers. It was an era when the Congo, today one of the most violent and underdeveloped nations on earth, remained the personal playground and resource stock for a ruthless European monarch. To understand the political problems facing the continent, we need to begin by confronting King Leopold’s ghost.
The West often blames political corruption for the turmoil in Africa. But corrupt leaders may be just a visible symptom of a much deeper root cause. How can any leader, no matter how noble in intention, rule over a political entity that lacks a reason for being? Many of Africa’s nation-states, in Kaplan’s anarchy theory, are illusions. Kaplan takes Sierra Leone in West Africa as an example: “According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined borders, with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian government controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the interior. In the government’s territory the national army is an unruly rabble threatening drivers and passengers at most checkpoints.” In much of the surrounding region the situation is the same. “Even in quite zones none of the governments maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty.”
Here we come once again to the lines on the map—what do they mean, and to whom? In Kaplan’s analysis, borders have become largely meaningless in many places around the globe. He observes that in the world’s poorest regions, “political maps are the product of tired conventional wisdom,” and for governments whose borders lack intrinsic recognition, there is a trend to make an even more aggressive show out of their supposed legitimacy. “The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise.” These artificial borders are a lingering apparition of King Leopold’s ghost. As Kaplan observes, “The borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at cross purposes with demography and topography.” They are the straight lines on political maps.
The very notion of the nation-state with defined political borders drawn on maps is a Western invention. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europe was broken up into a set of kingdoms without defined borders. The nations that emerged from the Peace tended to have a sense of collective identity in the form a shared language, culture, religion, and ancestry. To be French held a deeper meaning beyond a political structure. The same cannot be said for many nations in the developing world, and Africa in particular. The lack of a common, binding national identity makes governing a country through a centralized government—I in which most people feel no real connection—all the more challenging.
In Kaplan’s anarchy, the future may see a steady dissolution of this system of organizing political power in the developing world. There is nothing to say that the world of nations is the final chapter in the history of humankind’s political evolution.
THE LAST TREE STANDING
Until recently, discussions on the role that the environment and natural resources play in international relations was viewed as a peripheral concern, but no longer. In regions around the world, resource scarcity will become the flashpoint of conflict and one of the major sources of political instability. Kaplan makes the point quite clearly, “It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the defining national-security issue of the early twenty-first century.” In regions such as Africa, competition for water, timber, and arable farmland will become a driving source of violence.
The situation in Darfur, where thousands have been killed and millions others displaced, is instructive to this point. While on the surface the conflict appears to be yet another struggle based on tribal antagonism, but international observers now believe the real issue driving the violence is a contest for the underground aquifers of the region, and the last remnants of productive farmland.
Competition for the resources of survival will increasingly become a defining feature in regions that lack effective political and civic institutions to supply basic services to their growing populations. Kaplan explains, “The environment, I will argue, is a part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat to our security.” Thomas Homer-Dixon, Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto, believes, “Future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish.”
Indeed, the scarcity of natural resources will be a key harbinger to the criminal anarchy that Kaplan predicts. When society breaks down to a point where the very survival of a community is placed in question, a form of violent desperation is sure to ensue. In Kaplan’s’ analysis, “Future wars will be those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity.”
THE MALTHUSIAN DILEMMA
A non-scientific method of gauging the stability of a region is to observe the number of men and boys lining the streets with nothing to do. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times calls this population of loiterers “the standing around guys.” A combination of population growth coupled with a corresponding lack of economic development has created in the poorest regions of the world pockets of desperate young men with no real hope for material advancement in the world. This is true across Africa, the Middle East, and in Pakistan: the regions with the greatest potential for political anarchy.
There is a cruel trajectory to the demographics of the early twenty-first century. While much of the developing world is seeing a stabilizing in population growth, and parts of Europe and Russia are actually witnessing a population decline, Africa and the Middle East are growing at an exponential pace. According to the National Academy of Sciences, ninety-five percent of the population growth in the coming decades will be in the world’s poorest regions; areas that also have the least functional political and civic institutions to support this growth.
Young men’s willingness to resort to terrorism and serve as suicidal bombers is an example of the sort of desperation that can arise in circumstances that combine population growth and a lack of economic opportunity. Kaplan explains how “a large number of people on this planet to whom the comfort and stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks existence a step up rather than a step down… in places where the Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence.” Violence as an expression of dissent, driven by poverty and desperation, is the final component in the coming of Kaplan’s anarchy.
Burgeoning demographic “youth bulges” will be one of the lingering threats to peace and stability in many under-developed regions around the world. Kaplan sees these disenfranchised people as one of the key catalysts to the violent anarchy he predicts, “I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.”
THE COMING ANARCHY
Thomas Homer-Dixon likes to make an analogy for the situation facing the industrialized world. He asks us to think of a stretch limo driving down a side alley in one of the world’s poorest slums. Inside the limo, with its air conditioning and high fidelity sound, is North America, Western Europe, and the emerging Pacific Rim. Outside the limo is the rest of humankind looking in. This disparity between the haves and the have-nots will create the new fault lines of conflict in the decades ahead.
If the world continues along this trajectory, the problems of Africa or other impoverished regions will not be isolated. They will most likely become grim exports. “Disease, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders…” these could become the leading sources of instability in large parts of the planet. The final message embedded in Kaplan’s theory of the coming anarchy is, “Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world.”
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