After America полностью

Another thinker, Thomas P. M. Barnett, the widely admired author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century and Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating, liked to divide the world into a functioning “Core” and a “Non-Integrating Gap.”⁷² He favored using a “SysAdmin” force—a “pistol-packin’ Peace Corps”—to transform the “Gap” countries and bring them within the “Core.” Like many chaps who swan about dispensing high-end advice to international A-listers, he viewed the world’s problems as something to be sorted out by more effective elites—

better armed forces, international agencies, that sort of thing. The common herd was noticeable by its absence from his pages. If he had given them any thought, he might have realized that his vision of a “SysAdmin” force—European allies that would go into countries after American hard power has liberated them—was simply deluded. Whatever the defects of the Continent’s elites, the real problem was not the lack of leaders but the lack of followers.

It soon became clear that Professor Barnett was holding his thesis upside down. Rather than Europe’s leadership class helping move countries from the Non-Integrating Gap to the Core, it would have its work cut out preventing large parts of the Core doing a Bosnia and moving to the Non-Integrating Gap. For all the economic growth since World War II, much of the world had gone backwards—almost the whole of West Africa, and Central Africa, and Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Bosnia. Yet none of the elite asked themselves a simple question: What’s to stop that spreading? In a world after America, the reprimitivization of the map would accelerate: the new Jew-hating Sweden… the French banlieues where the state’s writ ceased to run… Clapton, East London, where Shayna Bharuchi cut out her four-year-old daughter’s heart while listening to an MP3 of the Koran…

A famous American First Lady wrote a bestseller called It Takes a Village (to raise a child)—an African proverb, supposedly. Why our leaders should have been commending tribal life as a model for advanced societies is a mystery. But even Africans didn’t want to raise their children in an African village. They abandoned them for shanties in what (if you flew over West Africa by night) looked like one giant coastal megalopolis. And, with respect to child-rearing, they left behind most of their traditions, too. We are a planet without a past—or, at any rate, memory. Like the European trans-nationalists wedded to their Ponzi welfare state, like the American spendaholics burning through trillions as if it was still 1950 and they were the only economic power on earth, like the Singularity post-humans revolving on themselves without repose, reprimitivized man lives in an eternal present tense, in the dystopia of the moment. In The Atlantic Monthly a few years back, casting around for a phrase to describe the “citizens” of such “states,” Robert D. Kaplan called them “re-primitivized man.”⁷³ Demographic growth, environmental devastation, accelerated urbanization, and civic decay have reduced them to a far more primitive state than their parents and grandparents. As Andrew McCarthy wrote: “Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil.

It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.”⁷⁴

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Liberia, the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea were all less “civilized” than they had been a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense many of them had made undeniable progress: they had globalized their pathologies.

Somali pirates seized container ships flying the ensigns of the great powers. Iranian proxies ran Gaza and much of Lebanon. North Korea’s impoverished prison state had provided nuclear technology to Damascus and Teheran, and Teheran had agreed to station missiles in Venezuela. Even the nude warlords of west Africa had managed to destabilize on a scale no second-tier western power could contemplate. Celebrating diversity unto the end, wealthy nations that could no longer project meaningful force to their own borders watched the two-bit basket-cases nuclearize, and assumed this geopolitical diversity would have no consequences. By 2005, Iran was offering to share its nuclear technology with Sudan.⁷⁵

Sudan? Oh, surely you remember: the other day I found a program for a “Save Darfur” interpretative-dance fundraiser in the attic. Massachusetts, I think. Perhaps you attended. Someone read out a press release from the activist actor George Clooney, and everyone had a simply marvelous time.

Meanwhile, back in Sudan, the killing went on: hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. With machetes. That’s pretty labor-intensive.