by Peter Zeihan
But desire will not equate to ability. Global immigration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has often had a reputation for being comprised of tired, poor, huddled masses. This is partly because tired, poor, huddled masses have been able to move relatively safely about the planet. Bretton Woods has had myriad impacts throughout the world, but it has made international transport cheap, easy, and safe compared to eras past. Everything from the EU’s system of unrestricted travel among most of its members to the global airline industry is the direct outcome of Bretton Woods. Conversely, American disengagement from the global free trade network will make international travel more expensive, cumbersome, and dangerous. Between reduced travel availability and reliability and higher volumes of those wanting to relocate, the price of safe passage will inflate impressively. So while many people may try to leave home, most will only be able to reach where they can walk or drive. Immigration may be about to go big and go global, but the paths trodden will shorten to the remarkably local.
With one exception. The relatively well-off will still be able to attempt to relocate farther afield by jet or ship. People with connections who can help them through. People with marketable skills that they can peddle at their destination. People with suitcases full of cash.
Don’t think it’s possible? Think again. Emigration in times of economic stress is a concept as old as the hills. In the Bretton Woods era, we’ve just come to think of “economic stress” as synonymous with “poor countries.” Roll back the clock to the 1840s and 1850s and look at America’s immigrant communities. Some 1 million Germans left Europe for the United States during the political and economic upheavals surrounding the revolutions of 1848. Almost all of them were skilled labor.
Here’s the global stability map from chapter 9 again, but this time with an overlay that highlights global concentrations of skilled labor. All of the countries that aren’t in the “improved” or “steady state” categories are likely to generate large volumes of immigrants, but only the countries with a large proportion of skilled labor are going to contribute to long-range migration streams. The migration trends of the future are not likely to be so many Greek construction workers or Egyptian secretaries, but instead Italian architects, German financial analysts, and Chinese physicists.
The lion’s share of these migrants are likely to seek entry into the same place: the United States. The reasoning is pretty straightforward. The United States is going to be somewhat above the global chaos, and its origin as a settler society makes it better able to absorb foreign populations than most countries. It will be an attractive destination from both a security and an economic point of view.
And it is more than mildly attractive to the Americans as well. Immigration is a huge societal cost saver. Raising children is one of the most expensive things that a person can do, and educating children is one of the most expensive things a government can do. Once everything from salaries to debt to busing to landscaping is factored in, the Department of Education estimates that total outlays for K-12 in the United States was $638 billion for the 2009–10 school year. That comes out to $12,750 per kid per year! In current dollars that means that the average high school diploma runs American society $165,000, and that’s without the affiliated expenses of things like carpooling or band uniforms. Skilled labor almost by definition is more thoroughly educated than high school: a four-year college degree adds another $70,000 for a state university1 or $160,000 for a private school. The numbers might seem a little lopsided in favor of K-12, but keep in mind that the cost of public education is embedded almost invisibly in your tax bill, while college comes directly out of your pocket. The result is the same. Each skilled immigrant who comes to the United States saves American society about a quarter million dollars in educational costs alone. But when they arrive, they don’t just arrive with a useful skill set, they arrive with the ability to help fuel America’s consumption-led economy and pay taxes as well.
Such labor shifts will help entrench the American position above the international disorder. Unskilled and semiskilled labor immigration from Mexico and Central America combined with skilled labor immigration from the rest of the world will help limit labor costs across the board in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, however, the brain drain will lead to increases in labor inflation in every technological sector. With its role as the predominant global capital source, and now with the world’s deepest and cheapest skilled labor pool, the United States should be able to maintain not just a pace of economic growth that will make it the envy of the rest of the globe, but also a pace of technological advancement that will keep it far ahead of the rest of the pack.
No one else can compete. The countries that will be sufficiently stable to theoretically still attract skilled labor fall into two categories. The first are those like Turkey or Uzbekistan that use ethnic-based nationalism as a means of mobilizing and managing their population. Outsiders are not necessarily welcome. The second are those like Australia and Canada that due to demographic factors are already deindustrializing. They may well prove able to attract some skilled labor, but the range of careers available—and the heights of income that are likely—simply cannot compete with the United States, which is reindustrializing, in large part because of shale.
Militancy Goes Big and Goes Global, but Terrorism Stays Home
As economies global, regional, national, and local degrade in the years ahead, there will be no end of conflicts. Some will come from government breakdown. Some will come as countries seek, whether out of opportunity or desperation, to control a resource or market or strategic spit of land held by another. In nearly all cases, there will be opposing military and political forces that will see the opposite side’s civilians as legitimate targets. Militancy isn’t just going to increase, it is going to become part of the landscape for upwards of one-third of the world’s population.
But a distinction needs to be made between militancy and terrorism. Militancy is when groups take up arms either in opposition to or in the absence of a local government. As a rule, the weaker regional governments are, the greater the propensity for militancy to expand, both in terms of geographic reach and the number of groups involved. Militants particularly thrive when the writ of governments ends, either due to lack of resources or actual state collapse as the militants become the de facto rulers of specific territories. In war zones such militants turn to guerrilla tactics to achieve their aims.
Think of places like Afghanistan, Somalia, or Mexico’s border regions where groups like the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, and the Gulf Cartel have managed to impose their own systems (or, based on your politics, challenge an occupying force) at the end of a gun. These are all classic militant groups.
Such groups thrive on disorder, and no system in world history has injected more order into the world than Bretton Woods. Because of the trade and alliance network the vast majority of the world is at peace and prosperous. In the absence of war and poverty, and the presence of strong, well-funded local state apparatuses, there just are not nearly as many lawless or war-torn areas as there have been by historical standards. But as the Bretton Woods system gives way this happy holiday from history will come to an end. Take a fresh look at the global stability map in chapter 9 with this in mind. Militancy will be a way of life in the failed states, a common occurrence in the decentralized states, and an irregular occurrence in many of the countries that face stability challenges.
Militants are typically not friendly folks, and they do tend to target civilians from time to time, up to and including with terror attacks.
A few likely examples of future guerrilla-sourced terrorism:
• Uzbek military forces will directly conquer the Tajik and Kyrgyz portions of the Fergana Valley. The region’s mixed populations are obvious targets for guerrilla actions of all types.
• Angola’s Ninjas are slowly but steadily eradicating the non-Mbundu populations. The effectiveness of the Mbundu’s state security apparatus leav
es terrorism as one of the few tools remaining for the groups slated for elimination.
• Europeans—probably French and Italians—will take command of collapsed Libya in order to secure access to oil and natural gas supplies, and will bring civilians in to operate the Libyan energy industry. The Libyans who resist will have ample targets.
• Without capital to maintain high levels of agricultural productivity, the highland Bolivians will lack enough food to survive. Their only choice will be to raid the more fertile areas of the Bolivian lowlands. Farmers of the lowlands will be seen as prime targets.
• The failure of the European system will have a damning impact on the central governments of many states, allowing organized crime groups to exercise ever greater control over local affairs. In some places, such as Italy, expect local reigns of terror as such groups overwhelm police forces and intimidate citizens into compliance.
• Russian, Persian, and Turkish power will sweep into the Caucasus, and Persian and Turkish power into Mesopotamia. Militants—locally spawned, Saudi-planted, Iranian-funded, and/or Russian-instigated—will resist by targeting everything from imposed governments to infrastructure.
• The Chinese central government has not just smothered the cultural expressions of its minorities, it has shipped Han Chinese into their homelands in order to work a genocide by assimilation and dilution. As Chinese economic growth falters and central control cracks apart, there are a wealth of Han targets for the restless and oppressed minorities. Some of these groups, most notably the Uighurs of far western China, have little compunction about bringing the fight to the Han across the length and breadth of China.
• The current emir of Oman—Qaboos bin Said Al Said—is a brilliant man, having cobbled together a modern state out of a mutually hostile collage of communists, militants, Islamists, and various tribal groups. He is also in his mid-seventies, gay, and heirless. Upon his death, the various factions he has held together by force of personality will not just tear down everything he has built, but also open up on each other.
But terrorism is only one tool in the militant’s playbook, and a rarely used one at that. When at war, militants attempt to strike when and where least expected and melt away. The whole idea is to avoid a direct slugging match with a conventional force, which will probably have aircraft and artillery. Attacking a military force, regardless of the tactics used, is by its very definition not a terror attack.
When dominating their own chunk of land, militants seek to actually be the government, so it matters what tools are used against the population. In both cases terrorism—the use of violence by a nonstate actor against civilians to achieve a political end—may be used, but it will not be the norm.
And most important, such tactics would “only” be used locally. Militants’ concerns, motivations, resources, forces, goals, and actions are all focused on their specific geographies. They are either resisting a superior force or attempting to carve out a piece of territory for themselves. They don’t have the inclination or capacity to strike out cross-border except in the narrowest sense, much less across an ocean.
This sort of “over there” terrorism is not the type that generates fear in the West. Instead it is the transnational sort that results in attacks like those of September 11, 2001. The express goal of transnational groups such as al Qaeda is to instill fear in the general population in order to shape the policies of entire governments. For transnational terrorists, the use of terror tactics is not a tool selected for a situation, but instead both the means and the end.
Such groups will still exist in the future, but they will face two obstacles to their operation that they currently do not. The first is a problem that transnational terror groups will find that they have in common with international migrants and multinational corporations: It will become harder to get around. Crossing international borders, much less oceans, will be a much grander undertaking than it is now. Just as economies and trade will regionalize and even localize, so too will militant activity. That leaves would-be transnational terror groups with a much-constrained definition of “transnational.”
The second constraint regards the sort of home territory that transnational terror groups require to operate. If the home government is too strong, the transnational groups are hunted down and exterminated. If the home government is too weak, the transnational groups have to expend their scarce resources and personnel to carve out and maintain their own piece of territory, just as more traditional militant groups would. That would leave them with few resources with which to hurl an operation into another hemisphere. Terror groups’ Goldilocks zone is a government that is on the edge—just strong enough to hold a territory together, but weak enough that it cannot actually control all of it. That’s a very specific mix, and is represented by the “decentralized” layer of the global stability map.
I’m not going to say anything as blanket as “the United States doesn’t need to worry about terrorism anymore,” but the mechanics of the future are going to add an extremely thick layer of insulation to America’s already impressive distance from the world at large. Take a look at the map below. It is the same global stability map I’ve shown you before, but this time with an overlay for Muslim population concentrations.
There are a few takeaways from this map. First, not very many places in the Islamic world will have decentralized governments. Many of the locations that the West fears will become breeding grounds for terrorism—Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria—will become such security no-man’s-lands that transnational groups simply will not be able to function. There will certainly be a few decentralized areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, but not only are those Muslim populations in the continental interior, they are also thoroughly engrossed in local issues rather than hell-bent on launching operations in distant continents.
When I look at this map, I see two areas of concern.
The Pakistani Vise
Pakistan looms large as the most critical area.
In many ways, this was doomed to happen. As a consequence of the September 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. forces began heavy operations, first to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, and then to stabilize Afghanistan into some sort of form that could prevent al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s resurgence. Considering that Afghanistan is both rugged and landlocked, it should come as no surprise that both tasks were difficult, with the latter proving all but impossible. At the time of this writing, the United States is attempting to negotiate the handover of authority to the local government that the Americans installed. It is highly likely that the Americans will have no more than a token presence in the country beyond 2016.
But there will certainly be debris. As part of the Afghan war effort the Americans discovered that the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region is as rugged and porous as it is densely populated. Many militant groups, most notably the Afghan and Pakistani strains of the Taliban movement, call it home. That unsavory fact introduced the Americans good and hard to Pakistan’s core statehood problem.
Pakistan—in good times—is a state under siege, and it all comes down to geography. The Indus valley is the Pakistani core, and the waters of the Indus are the merger of five smaller upland rivers that all originate in the Himalayas. However, unlike the similarly sourced Ganges, the middle reaches of the Indus system receive no rainfall. All the rivers flood during the monsoons and must have their flows carefully managed to ensure regular water for the region’s omnipresent irrigation works. If not for this management, the entire area, like the Nile valley, would be desert. The Indus may have been navigable at some point deep in the past, but millennia of such tight management and such seasonal input extremes mean that in the contemporary period it is only navigable to Hyderabad, just a handful of miles from the Indian Ocean. From a capital-generation and a social point of view, this puts Pakistan in a very similar basket as Egypt. A very thin crust of society manages the extremely capital-poor system and everyone else is a de facto slave.
That,
however and unfortunately, is where the similarity with Egypt ends.
The middle regions of the Indus system are not only not highland, but they directly abut the Ganges region. All that separates the heavily irrigated Indus basin from the perennially fertile Ganges basin is a low saddle of land just one hundred miles deep. While this saddle is bracketed by a pair of impressive natural boundaries—the Himalayas and the Thar Desert—it is some three hundred miles wide and leads directly into the most densely populated region of the world. It is broadly indefensible. Under any circumstances, the people of the Indus valley will be heavily outnumbered by and exposed to the people of the far more populous Ganges valley, and that’s before including the other Indian territories.
And that’s before considering Pakistan’s other borders. The entire western fringe of the Indus basin is mountainous, but most of it actually gets more natural rainfall than the core Pakistani lands (which have to be irrigated with waters from the Indus and its tributaries). This allows permanent populations—if far smaller than the dense footprint of the Indus itself—to exist. The Sindhi and Punjabi peoples of the Indus lowlands are somewhat traditional riverine people who have struck a political deal to run the Pakistani state. The nonriverine peoples of the highlands—a mix of Pashtuns, Kashmiris, Baluchis, and (many) more—in contrast, live more traditionally and resent any effort by the lowlanders to assert control over them, often rebelling. The lowlanders would prefer to leave the highlanders be, but the highlanders sit upon a series of major passes—of which Kyber is the most infamous—that allow access from Central Asia and Persia into the Indus core. In times past, the Mongols used such routes. In more recent times, the Soviets threatened Pakistan via the same passes. As much as the Sindhi/Punjabi core might not want to have much to deal with the highlands, they dare not go without a military presence there.
