Thank You for Being Late

by Thomas L. Friedman

  Put it all together and you see why it was so much easier to be an average developing country in the Cold War and post–Cold War eras than it is today—and why some states are starting to fall into the World of Disorder. Today, this world includes parts of Somalia, Nigeria, South Sudan, Senegal, Iraq, Syria, Egyptian Sinai, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, western Pakistan, Chad, Mali, Niger, Eritrea, the Congo, and various swaths of Central America, including parts of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the pirate-infested waters of the Indian Ocean. It also includes the warlord-run zones that Russia carved out of neighboring states on its periphery—in the eastern Ukraine, Abkhazia, Chechnya, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. What all of these places have in common is that central authority either has collapsed or can barely extend its writ beyond the capital. In some cases these states were destabilized by the United States and its allies decapitating their governments—Iraq and Libya—and not effectively building successor authorities. Others have disintegrated on their own from the stresses of civil war, environmental degradation, and extreme poverty, and they are now hemorrhaging refugees in all directions.

  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.

  These states are least able to handle the age of accelerations. They are like caravan homes in a trailer park, built on slabs of cement, with no real foundations or basements. People often wonder, “Why do tornadoes always hit trailer parks?” They don’t. It’s just that trailer parks are enormously frail and vulnerable when they do get hit. That is what’s happening today to so many of these average countries. The three accelerations are plowing through many of these flimsy, contrived, artificial states like a tornado through a trailer park.

  But this problem is not only afflicting the states with straight-line borders. It is impacting weak states of all shapes and sizes. I have spent time reporting from the World of Disorder in the past few years, looking at the states hardest hit by the age of accelerations. Here is a quick sample survey from Madagascar to Syria to Senegal to Niger that highlights how the end of the Cold War world and the rise of a world shaped by accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law have stressed these already frail states to the limit—and beyond.

  Madagascar

  Madagascar, the island nation off the eastern coast of Africa, is one of the ten poorest countries in the world. I visited in the summer of 2014. It is the poster child for how “average is over” thanks to the three accelerations. Where do I start? The population of Madagascar has exploded in the last two decades, with a growth rate of 2.9 percent, among the highest in Africa. The island’s population increased by more than three million people just from 2008 to 2013—to twenty-three million, almost double what it was in 1990. This is an island. It is not getting any bigger. 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. I took a two-hour jeep ride into the interior on a major artery that was so badly eroded it involved driving from pothole to pothole. I can say it was easily the worst road I have ever traveled on in my life on Planet Earth. 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. The United States paid to have a NASA satellite tracking station there for a while; the French gave foreign aid to its former colony and sent arms for the Malagasy Armed Forces, including MiG-21 fighter jets; the Cubans sent teachers, and the Chinese sent road builders and even built a sugar factory. And, finally, and you cannot make this up, the country’s gleaming white Presidential Palace—Madagascar’s version of the U.S. White House—was designed and built in the 1970s by the North Koreans, who also trained the Madagascar president’s security detail and provided assistance with agriculture and irrigation.

  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. Ninety percent of Madagascar’s forests have been chopped down for slash-and-burn agriculture, timber, firewood, and charcoal over the last century. Indeed, most hillsides have no trees anymore to hold the soil when it rains. Flying along the northwestern coast, you can’t miss the scale of the problem. You see a giant red plume of red soil bleeding into the Betsiboka River, bleeding into Bombetoka Bay, bleeding into the Indian Ocean. The mess is so big that astronauts have taken pictures of it from space. It is as if the whole country were bleeding.

  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 valuable rosewood timber to rare tortoises.

  For a while, globalization did bring some textile manufacturers to Madagascar to create jobs. They set up factories and provided low-skilled employment, but then pulled up stakes and moved to Vietnam and elsewhere when the local politics became too unstable. These manufacturers had options, and as soon as they were spooked they left. The empty factories tell the tale. And in the post–post–Cold War world what Madagascar once thought was average is now way below average. Mandatory education in Madagascar is only through age fifteen, and it’s in the local Malagasy language, making it rather hard to compete for higher-wage work with, say, Estonia, which is now teaching computer coding in first grade.

  It is hard to see how Madagascar reverses these trends. Said Russ Mittermeier, the renowned primatologist from Conservation International, who has worked in Madagascar to help preserve its environment since 1984: “The more you erode, the more people you have with less soil under their feet to grow things.” And the more insecure people feel, the more kids they have as insurance.

  Syria

  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.

  To fully understand it, though, you have to start with Mother Nature. In 2014, I traveled to northern Syria to write columns and do a documentary on the impact of the drought—called the jafaf in Arabic—on the civil war there for the TV series Years of Living Dangerously, which was then on Showtime. “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.

  This is the story, he explained: After Bashar al-Assad took power from his late father in 2000, he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria to large-scale farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work. 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 a
nd settled in towns around cities such as Aleppo. Some of those small towns swelled from two thousand people to four hundred thousand in a decade or so. 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 this happened at a time when the population of Syria had doubled twice in sixty years. As a result, half the population in Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers left the land for urban areas, beginning in the early 2000s, said Aita. 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.” Young people and farmers starved for jobs—and land starved for water—were a prescription for revolution.

  That was the specific message of the drought refugees, like Faten, whom I met in May 2013, in her simple flat in Sanliurfa, a Turkish city near the Syrian border. Faten, then thirty-eight, a Sunni Muslim, had fled there with her son Mohammed, nineteen, a member of the Free Syrian Army, who’d been badly wounded in a firefight a few months earlier. Raised in the northeastern Syrian farming village of Mohasen, Faten, who asked me not to use her last name, told me her story: She and her husband “used to own farmland … We tended annual crops. We had wheat, barley, and everyday food—vegetables, cucumbers, anything we could plant instead of buying in the market. Thank God there were rains, and the harvests were very good before. And then suddenly, the drought happened.”

  What did it look like? “To see the land made us very sad,” she said. “The land became like a desert, like salt.” Everything turned yellow.

  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.”

  So what did you do? “When the drought happened, we could handle it for two years, and then we said, ‘It’s enough.’ So we decided to move to the city. I got a government job as a nurse, and my husband opened a shop. It was hard. The majority of people left the village and went to the city to find jobs, anything to make a living to eat.”

  The drought was particularly hard on young men who wanted to study or marry but could no longer afford either, Faten added. Families married off daughters at earlier ages because they couldn’t support them. Faten, her head conservatively covered in a black scarf, said the drought and the government’s total lack of response radicalized her, her neighbors, and her sons, who joined the opposition fighters. So when the first spark of revolutionary protest was ignited in the small southern Syrian town of Dara’a, in March 2011, Faten and other drought refugees couldn’t wait to sign on. “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.” (Indeed, she was in Turkey to get medical care for her son Mohammed, who sat quietly during our interview, alternately looking at battle pictures on his cell phone and watching a satellite TV broadcast from a rebel station inside Syria.)

  Abu Khalil, forty-eight, was one of those who didn’t just protest. A former cotton farmer who had to become a smuggler to make ends meet for his sixteen children after the drought wiped out their farm, he became the Free Syrian Army commander in the Tel Abyad area. We met at a crushed Syrian Army checkpoint in Tel Abyad when I crossed into Syria’s Rakah province—ground zero for the drought. After being introduced by our Syrian go-between, Abu Khalil, who was built like a tough little boxer, introduced me to his fighting unit. He did not introduce them by rank but by blood, pointing to each of the armed men around him and saying: “My nephew, my cousin, my brother, my cousin, my nephew, my son, my cousin…” 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.” The bottom line, said Abu Khalil, was that this “was a revolution of the hungry.” Before we parted, he pulled me aside to say that all that his men needed were antitank and antiaircraft weapons and they could finish Assad off. “Couldn’t Obama just let the Mafia send them to us?” he asked. “Don’t worry, we won’t use them against Israel.”

  Some diplomats saw all of this coming. On January 21, 2014, I wrote a column in The New York Times quoting a November 8, 2008, cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus to the State Department that had been unearthed by WikiLeaks. This was in the middle of the Syrian drought. The embassy was telling the State Department that Syria’s U.N. food and agriculture representative, Abdullah bin Yehia, was seeking drought assistance from the U.N. and wanted the United States to contribute.

  Here are a few key passages:

  The U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs launched an appeal on September 29 requesting roughly $20.23 million to assist an estimated one million people impacted by what the U.N. describes as the country’s worst drought in four decades …

  Yehia proposes to use money from the appeal to provide seed and technical assistance to 15,000 small-holding farmers in northeast Syria in an effort to preserve the social and economic fabric of this rural, agricultural community. If UNFAO efforts fail, Yehia predicts mass migration from the northeast, which could act as a multiplier on social and economic pressures already at play and undermine stability …

  Yehia does not believe that the [government of Bashar al-Assad] will allow any Syrian citizen to starve … However, Yehia told us that the Syrian minister of agriculture … stated publicly that economic and social fallout from the drought was “beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.” What the U.N. is trying to combat through this appeal, Yehia says, is the potential for “social destruction” that would accompany erosion of the agricultural industry in rural Syria. This social destruction would lead to political instability.

  It is impossible to disconnect the Arab Spring from the climate disruptions of the years just before, 2009–2010. For instance, Russia, the world’s fourth-largest wheat exporter, suffered its worst drought in a hundred years in that period. Dubbed the “Black Sea Drought,” it included a heat wave that set fires that burned down huge acreage of Russian forests. The drought parched farm fields and shrank the country’s breadbasket so much that the Russian government banned wheat exports for a year.

  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. This coincided with excessive rains in the American Midwest and Canada, damaging more corn and wheat production, while “freakishly massive flooding in Pakistan, which put some 20% of that country under water, also spooked markets and spurred on the speculators.”

  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.

  In June 2013, I was in Cairo; I got up one morning at five to watch the operations of a bakery selling government-subsidized bread in the dirt-poor Imbaba neighborhood. In the background, through an open window, I heard children in
a Koranic school cheerfully repeating verses for their teacher. As soon as the baker opened his shutters, a scrum of men, women, and children jostled to get their bags of pita, the staple of their diet. They had to get there early, they knew, because the baker sold only so many subsidized pita loaves; he sold the rest of his government-subsidized flour on the black market to private bakers who charged five times the official price. He had no choice, he told me, because his fuel costs were spiking. I actually watched the subsidized-flour bags, marked with government stamps, being carried on shoulders by young men right out the side door. “This is the hardest job in Egypt,” the bakery owner told me. Everyone is always mad at him, especially those who lined up early and still left with no bread.

  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.

  Senegal and Niger

  I first met Monique Barbut, who heads the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, at the U.N. Paris climate meeting in late 2015. Her calling card was a presentation with three maps of Africa, each with an oblong outline around a bunch of dots clustered in the middle of the continent. Map number one: the most vulnerable regions of desertification in Africa in 2008. Map number two: conflicts and food riots in Africa, 2007–2008. Map number three: terrorist attacks in Africa in 2012. All three overlapped in the same sub-Saharan heart of Africa. “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.”