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But that era came a cropper when the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan became mired in failure and the Great Recession of 2008 dampened American growth.
Elsewhere, such as in eastern Europe and Asia, Obama actually reinforced America’s military presence to balance Russia and China, and his use of the American military to stem the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was decisive in preventing a global pandemic.
It’s important to remember that America is such an important player on the world stage that even small shifts in how we project power can have decisive impacts. And it’s this combination of shrinking American power in one part of the world plus the reshaping of the world more broadly by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law that defines the era we are in today, which I call the post–post–Cold War world.
That is, the traditional great-power competition, primarily among the United States, Russia, and China, is back again (if it ever really went away) as strong as ever, with the three major powers again jockeying over spheres of influence, along golden-oldie fault lines such as the NATO–Russia frontier or the South China Sea.
The age of accelerations in geopolitics is an equally plastic period, but it is not yet clear that we have the ability or imagination to build the alliances and global institutions to stabilize it the way the post–World War II statesmen did—yet that is our calling.
I see several new challenges emerging. The first come with the world’s rising interdependence;
It is not clear today what threatens America more, their strength or their weakness. If either were to collapse into the World of Disorder it would be a disaster.
China may be America’s rival, but, in today’s interdependent world, its collapse would be far more threatening to America than its rise.
In the Cold War, the biggest challenge for American foreign policy was almost always managing strength—our own strength, that of our allies, such as the European Union and Japan, and that of our main rivals, Russia and China.
Today, the American president spends much more time managing and navigating weakness: the weakness of our allies in the EU and Japan, the weakness of an angry, humiliated, and economically frail Russia, the weakness of states that have disintegrated, and the economic weakness of America after 9/11 and the 2008 crash.
You also get a big bill. (See: Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq.)
Then, in the wake of World War II, a wave of decolonization was unleashed, giving birth to an independent India, Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Morocco, Mali, Senegal, the Republic of the Congo, the Somali Republic, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria, Rwanda, Eritrea, Zambia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea—and more.
While very few of these new states had the economic, natural, or human resources to develop into strong industrial democracies, or even autocracies, their weaknesses were masked for many years—during the Cold War and immediately after—by a variety of factors that made being an “average” or “below average” state quite sustainable.
Because the stability of every square in the global chessboard mattered to Washington and Moscow, the Soviet Union was ready to rebuild the defeated army of Syria after it lost three wars to Israel in 1967, 1973, and 1982—and the United States was ready to support corrupt governments from Latin America to the Philippines, year in and year out. And
As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out in their book, the four key measures of an economy’s health (per capita GDP, labor productivity, the number of jobs, and median household income) all rose together for most of the Cold War years.
In hindsight, the period from World War II up to the fall of the Berlin Wall was “an incredible period of economic moderation,” argued James Manyika, one of the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute.
At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities.
China’s total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today—a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China’s wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries.
As Warren Buffett says, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
Turns out, a lot of countries were buck naked. And some, such as Venezuela, which spent as it went and saved nothing for a rainy day, are now falling apart.
“The last twenty-five years was all about who could make things cheapest, and the next twenty-five years will be about who can make things smartest,”
Maybe it is just a coincidence, but many, though not all, of the failing countries have borders that are almost entirely straight lines. Those lines and borders with ninety-degree angles were largely produced by imperial and colonial powers—corresponding to their particular interests at the colonial stage of history and not to real ethnic, religious, racial, tribal, or even geographic logic on the ground, let alone the voluntary association of people bound together in nationhood by social contracts.
Madagascar, the island nation off the eastern coast of Africa, is one of the ten poorest countries in the world.
The combination of dwindling foreign aid after the end of the Cold War and damage from increasingly severe cyclones has ravaged the country’s roads, power, and water infrastructure.
More than 90 percent of Madagascar’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, and, therefore, not surprisingly, some six hundred thousand children who should be in school are not.
Madagascar received foreign aid from everywhere during different stages of the Cold War.
Today, much of that aid is no longer being extended, and parts of the island are being washed away. The soil for agriculture in Madagascar is iron rich, nutrient poor, and often very soft.
This is a tragedy for everyone: “98 percent of Madagascar’s land mammals, 92 percent of its reptiles, 68 percent of its plants and 41 percent of its breeding bird species exist nowhere else on Earth,” according to the World Wildlife Fund. Madagascar is also home to “two-thirds of the world’s chameleons and 50 species of lemur, which are unique to the island.” Unfortunately, too many have been hunted. Thanks to the globalization of illicit flows, illegal wildlife trading has left Madagascar exposed to Chinese merchants, who work with corrupt officials to illegally export everything from
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And the more insecure people feel, the more kids they have as insurance.
Syria is the geopolitical superstorm of the age of accelerations. It’s what happens when every bad trend converges in one place—extreme weather, extreme globalization, extreme population growth, extreme Moore’s law, and a newly extreme unwillingness of the United States and many other smaller powers to decisively intervene because all they win is a bill.
“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” the Syrian economist Samir Aita explained to me, but the government’s failure to deal with it was a critical stressor fueling the uprising.
Because of the population explosion that really got cranking in the 1980s and 1990s due to shrinking mortality rates, those leaving the countryside came with huge families and settled in towns around cities such as Aleppo.
The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs, or services for this youth bulge.
Then Mother Nature showed up. Between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s landmass was ravaged by the worst recorded drought in its modern history. With the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, this drought wiped out the livelihoods of between eight hundred thousand and a million Syrian farmers and herders.
And with Assad doing nothing to help the drought refugees, a lot of very simple farmers and their kids got politicized.
The idea of state government “was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”
Did Assad’s government help? “They didn’t do anything,” she said. “We asked for help, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about this subject. Never, never. We had to solve our problems ourselves.”
“Since the first cry of ‘Allahu akbar,’ we all joined the revolution. Right away.” Was this about the drought? “Of course,” she said,
“the drought and unemployment were important in pushing people toward revolution.”
Free Syrian Army units are often family affairs. In a country where the government for decades wanted no one to trust anyone else, it’s no surprise.
“We could accept the drought because it was from Allah,” said Abu Khalil, “but we could not accept that the government would do nothing.”
It is impossible to disconnect the Arab Spring from the climate disruptions of the years just before, 2009–2010.
At the same time, wrote Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, in an essay on CBS.com on July 20, 2011, massive flooding occurred in Australia, another significant wheat exporter.
The result: the FAO Food Price Index hit its all-time high in February 2011—just when the Arab Awakenings hit—throwing some forty-four million people into poverty, according to the U.N.
Those climate-driven prices began dramatically boosting bread prices in Egypt, sparking that country’s upheaval. And the more upheaval there was in the Middle East, the more oil headed toward $125 a barrel, making everything worse as the costs of fertilizer and operating tractors increased.
It wasn’t for nothing that the main chant of the protesters who brought down President Mubarak in 2011 was “Bread, freedom, dignity”—and the bread came first. Such is politics in the age of accelerations.
“Desertification acts as the trigger,” explained Barbut, “and climate change acts as an amplifier of the political challenges we are witnessing today—economic migrants, interethnic conflicts, and extremism.”
only about one-third of those refugees are coming out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The other two-thirds are coming primarily from a cluster of very arid African states: Senegal,
Niger, Nigeria, Gambia, and Eritrea.
kids—44 percent of Senegal’s population is less than fourteen years old—there were just too many mouths to feed from the declining yields.
