Much of the world would still seem familiar to you. Have you ever been in the executive lounge of an upmarket American chain hotel in the Middle East? The Grand Hyatt in Amman perhaps? Very congenial in the old days.
At breakfast you could get pancakes and hash browns, and the TV would be tuned to CNN International, while Saudi sheikhs and Russian “businessmen” and the representatives of Chinese state corporations conducted their after affairs. For a while, that’s what it felt like: an American-built international network but with fewer and fewer Americans. The Europeans had always enjoyed sneering at those polls about the ever dwindling percentage of Yanks who held valid passports. Who could blame you? You were the “ugly Americans,” the only foreigners who upon landing in Paris, Rome, Berlin, and many other capitals could reliably expect to have their country openly insulted by the cab driver en route to the hotel. Once the dollar ceased to be the global currency, and America became both yesterday’s man and the scapegoat for all the new woes afflicting the post-American world, fewer and fewer of your citizens ventured abroad. At power tables in the exclusive restaurants one sees Chinamen, Arabs, Venezuelans, even the occasional Jeremy or Derek from Eton or Upper Canada College hired as the retro-chic Wasp frontman for an international agglomeration of emirs and oligarchs.
But not a lot of Americans.
Even travel within North America became prohibitively expensive, and dangerous. Virtuous Americans forswore nuclear power and coal mining, and, when the crisis of the early Seventies exposed your vulnerability to Middle Eastern oil dictatorships, you spent the next thirty years letting your dependence on foreign petroleum double from one-third to two-thirds of your energy needs while you busied yourselves piously declining to drill in the Arctic lest it sully the pristine breeding grounds of the world’s largest mosquito herd. So today the Arabs still have the oil; Russia and Iran between them control half the world’s natural gas; and China and India need more and more of both. It never seemed to occur to America’s ruling class that an economy requires fuel to run it, and that one day the sellers might be in a position to pick and choose their customers. The decision by the Gulf emirates to lease bases to Beijing to enable the Chinese to secure the Asian oil routes was entirely predictable. Not a lot of Middle Eastern oil heads west these days.
The world after America is a sicker world. In 1999, the British Government set up NICE—the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the country’s nicely named “death panel.” If one works for NICE these days, one no longer has to waste all that time inventing reasons as to why this or that innovative but costly American drug or procedure does not fit the overarching strategic goals of the National Health Service, because American medical innovation quickly dwindled away and nobody picked up the slack. The Chinese are said to have amazing new inventions to keep their leaders hale and hearty, but would prefer their aging peasantry keeled over sooner rather than later. A few other countries have carved out boutique markets: Japan for state-of-the-art post-human augmentation, the Swiss for luxury euthanasia. As I say, niche businesses. For the non-elites, for the multitudes of humanity crammed into the vast, diseased megalopolises of Africa or the
