After America полностью

Tragic, but only for a moment, and then next month’s surprise disaster comes along like clockwork. Even without the cooperation of mendacious despots, life is nasty, brutish, and shortened in dramatic ways. Tsunamis and earthquakes kill on impressive scales. There is no superpower with the carrier groups or the C-130s or, indeed, the inclination to have “boots on the ground” (quaint expression, now unknown) within hours to start rescuing people, feeding them, housing them. So today we are all impeccably multilateral and work through the UN bureaucracy, which holds state-of-the art press conferences to announce it will soon be flying in (or nearby, or overhead, or in the general hemisphere) a top-level situation-assessment team to the approximate vicinity to conduct a situation assessment of the situation just as soon as an elite team of corporate mercenaries has flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel. Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks.

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

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

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

Which of these models would prevail in the years ahead? Access to western markets had given South Korea a western lifestyle, complete with western-sized families: soon, like many of the so-called “Asian tigers,” they had one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. They were tigers without cubs. Whereas Egypt, like most of the Muslim world, was in a demographic boom and its poverty helped export its surplus population, either in the express lane (a gentleman called Mohammed Atta flying through the office window on a Tuesday morning) or through less dramatic but relentless mass immigration. (I believe they have a new “community center” named after Mr. Atta in Tower Hamlets, East London.) The collapsed birth rates of Europe and the Asian tigers left an insufficient domestic market for economic growth. They were ever more dependent on access to the U.S. market, even as the American consumer became too broke to go to the mall. As for the rest of the planet, sub-Saharan Africa doubled its population between 2010 and 2030. Unlike enviro-feminists in London fretting about “overpopulation,” the Africans were in no hurry to tie their tubes, and the West’s ecochondriacs declined to hector them. Why, sub-Saharan babies “consumed” fewer resources. Which was true. They still do, man for man. Excepting South Africa, the Dark Continent’s per capita income averaged $355 in 2004, but had fallen below $275 by 2030.⁴ Good for the planet? Well, it depends how you think about it. A few years earlier, a Unicef report had found that more than one billion children in the developing world were suffering from the most basic “deprivations”—lack of food, lack of education, lack of rights.⁵ Yet by 2020 each of them—or at any rate the half who were girls—had had an average of three children each.

Who in turn lacked food and education and much else, and had a much higher incidence of genetic disorders. It would have been asking an awful lot for them to remain in the teeming, pathogenic shanty megalopolises into which the Third World’s population was consolidating—rather than simply to sail over to Spain or Italy or the Côte d’Azur.

But never mind African-Asian or Cairo-Seoul comparisons, and consider the available models within Korea itself: in the south, a prosperous, educated, advanced nation; to the north, a dark, starving, one-man psycho-state tyranny that exported nothing but knock-off Viagra and No Dong.