THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  These institutional measures were of some benefit to the northern-tier blocs, but they did little to cushion the main effect of The Park, which was the rupture of North-South economic relations. Writing in 2020 and looking back on this period, one commentator observed:

  This age of fragmentation and regrouping within the society of market-states took place on account of the rupture of trade and interdependence between North and South. When the developed states looked to the South they saw refugees pounding on their golden doors, driven northward by the squalor, crime, disease, and environmental degradation that seemed immune to human ingenuity once a certain level of population growth and resource exhaustion had occurred. When the undeveloped states of the South looked to the North for investment and assistance, they believed they received instead cultural viruses of secularism, materialism, racism, and neocolonialism. In both cases, the result was an increase in regional capitalism enforced by protectionist barriers to the import of investment or goods.15

  Without growth in the underdeveloped states, the northern-tier economies stagnated for a lack of new markets. With their aging populations, savings rates in these countries plummeted and, along with them, the rate of new investment. In each of the principal states of the former First World, government deficits burgeoned as older populations demanded more and more services that had become more and more expensive (including costly anti-aging genomic treatments). The fragmentation of the polities of these states along cultural and ideological lines—the creation of interest groups willing and able to block legislation that did not buy off their constituents—paralyzed the adoption of the fiscal policies necessary to cope with these demands. This paralysis was worsened by the adoption, first in the United Kingdom, but later in the United States and elsewhere, of a system of proportional representation in parliament and Congress. The revenue base of governments eroded as capital moved abroad beyond the reach of tax collection. Many wealthy persons ceased to think of themselves in national terms and adopted tax residences in state havens abroad where their income could be sheltered.

  Concern about the environment led to costly regulations, which had the effect of imposing ever higher barriers on the products of the undeveloped world. States like China and India that refused to reduce emissions found their products barred from entry to lucrative First World markets. Agreement to reduce emissions, however, meant imposing lower standards of living on local populations and immense capital costs on producers. Either way, the effect was to close the markets of the developed world, just as concern about genetically engineered foods had closed the E. U. to American exports, or concern about child labor had closed the United States to Asian exports. Interest groups in the Park struck alliances that invariably proved costly to economic vitality.

  With export-driven growth cut off and without investment inflows from the developed states, the economic situation of the underdeveloped states grew worse. Overpopulation led to resource scarcity; resource scarcity led to deforestation and desertification, which led in turn to water shortages and migrations to cities that were plagued with disease, crime, and a breakdown in political authority. Except in search of lower wages multinational corporations were reluctant to be lured to these countries, even when enticed with large tax incentives. The other such incentive—relaxed regulations—had backfired in the face of so-called green tariffs imposed at the behest of an alliance between environmental groups and First World companies saddled with expensive environmental regulations. These provisions kept the products of poorer countries without environmental safeguards out of First World markets. Thus the opportunity to garner capital for infrastructure from exports wilted.

  The effects of these policies can be seen in India's experience in The Park at this period. Owing to resistance from various interest groups—civil servants, workers in long-protected domestic industries, political allies of the ruling government, even religious and ethnic groups that had been subsidized—it was difficult for reform regimes to modernize the Indian economy. The socialist policies of the Indian nation-state were largely dismantled and domestic competition thrived, but truly radical reforms that would make products export-worthy were harder to bring about. Secessionist movements not only in Kashmir and Punjab but in literally dozens of smaller areas were a constant threat to the central government.

  The consequences of falling water tables served as the flash point between the Muslim and Hindu populations relying on irrigation in the Indus River Basin. Pakistan had not participated in the growth experienced by India. With 65 percent of its land dependent on intensive irrigation, with widespread deforestation and a yearly population growth of 2.7 percent, Pakistan had no margin for failure when crop yields began to plummet in 2015. Neither the Indian nor the Pakistani government was strong enough to enforce restrictions on water use; neither had the legitimacy among its starving citizens to get them to refrain from attempting to drive away their neighbors in order to cultivate more land. The Water Wars of the Indus that began in 2017 lasted ten years. By the end of this period, 140 million people had starved or been driven from their homes by violence. (This dwarfed the 1960 famine in China, in which thirty million are supposed to have died.) International attempts at mediation—even the supply of emergency food relief—were rebuffed by officials on grounds of “Indian dignity.” The arrival of partial laser-fusion eventually would reverse the draining of the water supply by providing power to tap freshwater sources in the Himalayas, but this technology required capital investments on such a huge scale that only very large, wealthy states could afford it, and there were no such states remaining on the subcontinent. Pakistan had devolved into a patchwork of ethnic states of which Pakhtunistan was the largest and throughout which a strict Islamic code prevailed; India had fragmented into a loose congress of more than fifty states—largely organized along linguistic and religious lines. If these devolved states were too weak to enforce population growth control or environmental protection, and too contentious to ally in order to accumulate capital, they were also too feeble to wage war on a continental scale. One of the remarkable facts about the Water Wars is that neither side used nuclear weapons, though both possessed them, perhaps, one may speculate, because the small size of their respective arsenals encouraged them to husband such weapons. As a result, the soils of the subcontinent, though depleted, were not irradiated, and began slowly to recover as new genetically modified grains came into being, and population rates leveled off and then fell.

  The lesson learned by the states of The Park was that regional protectionism tended to lock in high unemployment rates and slow growth in part because it locked out global capital flows and the rapid diffusion of new technology. Coping with these problems gave a new lease on life to government agencies that might otherwise have died with the nation-state but that remained and further hampered economic efficiency.

  THE GARDEN

  SECURITY

  The U.S elections of 2008, it can be seen in retrospect, were a watershed in American politics, not so much for the new leaders in both Congress and the White House who were brought to the world stage as for the consensus reflected in the election results that the governance of the preceding years—both Democratic and Republican—had been misguided. The slow recovery from the recession encouraged protectionist barriers to trade; these further constrained the global recovery and invited foreign criticism that Americans found irksome. American pre-eminence in many arenas was perceived abroad as hegemony and contributed to a U.S./European estrangement. Traditional ethnocentrism in Asia coupled with mercantile trade policies intensified the sense of mutual alienation that arose between Americans and Asians.

  In a stunning repudiation of previous policy, a public consensus in the United States emerged that the multilateral interventions of the previous twelve years had been a mistake. The steady, unpredictable terrorist attacks (and, it must be said the harrowing but fruitless “alerts”) left the United States demoralized. Many believed that, but for American involvem
ent abroad, the terror campaigns would never have happened. The collapse of Haitian democracy; the televised melees in the refugee camps of Burundi and Rwanda, in which Western aid workers were set on fire; and the much-publicized case of a French commander at NATO headquarters in Brussels, apparently part of a vast network of agents, who had been stealing high-tech American industrial secrets in order to aid French companies—all these had the effect of extinguishing the enthusiasm of the U.S. public for foreign cooperation. Undoubtedly the decisive event, however, was the discovery that, through a complicated system of loans guaranteed by foreign government bonds, both U.S. political parties had unwittingly accepted huge sums of money from foreign governments whose role was hidden by the use of intermediaries. Disillusionment and disgust swept across the entire landscape of foreign policy engagement: U.S. support for the U.N., which then stood at 25 percent of the U.N. annual budget, was reduced to 10 percent by a joint resolution of Congress on the technical ground that the U.N. was not permitted to acquire debt without the express permission of the Security Council (debt that had in fact accumulated as a result of a U.S. refusal to pay its dues). U.S. foreign aid, which had stabilized at a meager $10 billion, was slashed by 30 percent with a proviso that it was to be phased out altogether over a ten-year period; funds originally earmarked for Russia to assist with denuclearization were cut completely when comptroller reports disclosed widespread skimming by Russian officials. For roughly similar reasons, U.S. support for drug eradication in other countries, largely Latin American and Asian, was simply stopped. After a fruitless effort to get NATO to intervene in the renewed Balkan conflict, the United States had allowed the North Atlantic Council to fall into desuetude, and at this time the top three NATO commanders were all non-American. But the most dramatic breaks in policy occurred with those states who had been caught in the campaign finance scheme: Israel, China, and the Gulf States.

  The United States had played a pivotal role in the Middle East since 1948. The disclosure of covert campaign assistance by Middle Eastern governments to both American political parties coincided with widely televised, violent Israeli repression of Palestinian marches for suffrage in the occupied areas still under Israeli control, and the savage suppression of a “pro-democracy” movement in Kuwait (including allegations of beheadings). Many Americans suspected, although probably without foundation, that the campaign finance loans by foreign governments had effectively bought U.S. military assistance to both states. The result was the withdrawal of U.S. naval forces in the region and a sharp scaling back in security assistance. The continuous fall in world energy prices had reduced the importance of the region to American interests, but it was at least as significant that, after sixty years, the regional conflict in that area seemed no closer to resolution. The United States virtually withdrew from any high-profile leadership in the area, taking with it $3 billion in direct aid to Israel and about $2 billion in aid to Egypt.

  In Asia, once the Chinese regime had been listed as a “human rights abuser” by the United States in 2004, U.S. statutory restrictions kicked in that had the effect of virtually ceding Chinese markets to European, Korean, and Japanese exports. When Chinese covert campaign assistance came to light, it appeared that the Chinese were trying to reverse this “decertification” process by corrupt means. There was some evidence that members of Congress and the administration had made promises to Chinese intermediaries that were embarrassing, and that they had made public statements that were plainly at variance with the known facts about Chinese human rights policies. It appeared that in many places Panama and Haiti, Israel and the Gulf, China and Russia—American meddling had been expensive and counterproductive; now this appearance was acutely enhanced by the fact of foreign meddling in American affairs, suggesting to some that hidden forces were manipulating U.S. policy.

  Perhaps no line received as much applause at the Inauguration as when on January 20, 2009, the new American president said,

  No one can see the future. But the recent past has taught us that we must let every nation develop in its own way, making its own mistakes perhaps but living and growing according to its own lights. To do otherwise encourages dependency in the weak and the constant drain of resources from the strong, and above all, interference in other people's business. No one—and no organization—is anointed to decide which nations shall survive and which shall be left to fail. We shall tend our own garden.

  When the Sri Lankan massacres occurred, when the South African coup took place—even when the situation in Guyana potentially threatened a renewal of the boat people crises of the 1990s (only worse, because these refugees were laden with disease), even then the United States studiously did not intervene. Other states were in much the same mood. In Japan, the Liberal Democratic government had fallen over its insistence on observing the U.S./Japan Status of Forces Agreement's provision that American servicemen indicted for crimes in Japan be tried in the United States. A brutal rape by a group of American sailors based in Yokohama had become a cause célèbre; in the elections that followed, a coalition came to power pledged to terminate the treaty and to demand the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Japan. “The Occupation Is Over”—Senryou Teppai!—was the campaign slogan of the victorious candidates. The new government's pledge to increase self-reliance struck a welcome chord with the Japanese public. Few voices of dissent were raised when the Japanese defense budget—since 1989 the third largest in the world—was raised by 15 percent to develop and procure a new generation of cyber weapons, leapfrogging the delivery systems of the late twentieth century. These weapons primarily targeted information centers and networks rather than conventional military bases, harbors, and railway centers. With respect to these latter targets, the Japanese nuclear-powered submarines that had flourished in the late twentieth century took over as platforms for a new generation of smaller but equally lethal postnuclear warheads. The accuracy of these systems, directed by Japanese “black”—undetectable—satellites, permitted the Japanese to continue their adherence to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while advancing to a newer generation of weapons of mass destruction that the United States had yet to deploy. Japanese rearmament was sufficient to check North Korean ambitions on the peninsula, but this had the unintended and undesired consequence—from the Japanese point of view—of bringing about a closer relationship between the two Koreas.

  These events led to what became commonly known as the Iron Triangles, a series of interlocking deterrence relationships around the world in which, it was believed, a mutual stability was achieved through nuclear proliferation among regional adversaries. China-Korea-Japan; Germany-Russia-Ukraine; India-Pakistan-China; Iran-Israel-Iraq; Australia-Indonesia-Malaysia; Chile-Argentina-Brazil: these were the main Iron Triangles, with subsidiary triangles such as Singapore-China-Viet Nam, Germany-Poland-Russia, France–Germany-Great Britain.

  The intense trade in weapons and delivery systems was responsible, as much as any other single factor, for the surge in capital growth in Russia and the liberalization of the Chinese regime once it effectively merged with the now-compliant island of Taiwan. Unable to either acquire nuclear weapons (for fear of Chinese pre-emption) or hold on to a U.S. defense commitment, Taiwan had been forced to negotiate a union with the mainland. With the Hong Kong Chinese and the Shenzhen, the Taiwanese had effectively bought their way into influence with the army with the promise of larger defense budgets and had managed to significantly liberalize the Chinese political environment. In 2018 the Chinese capital was moved to Shanghai, and Tibet was allowed limited autonomy as a theocratic state.

  Only two states stood aloof from this rapidly replicating system of mutual deterrence relationships: South Africa and the United States. South Africa renounced all weapons of mass destruction and became a haven for persons everywhere seeking refuge from the terror of nuclear war. The United States, having no obvious proximate adversaries, devoted its attention to developing ballistic missile and anti-aircraft defenses that, by the year 202
0, were confidently thought to be effective against the sort of proliferated delivery systems that most states were now acquiring. The preceding period of arms control and reduction was now seen by most commentators as one of intense danger in which the United States and other powerful states had unsuccessfully attempted, through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the Missile Technology Control Regime, to determine what states would be allowed to have the weapons of survival. This had been replaced by a more stable international environment, it was usually said. Terrorism had steadily abated during this period.

  At least this was the common opinion when, on May 1, 2021, the Russian government announced that it was the subject of an extortion demand and asked for financial support from the international community. This demand came from a shadowy group that claimed to have control over a biological/computer virus that could spread a debilitating influenza through the Internet. This threat struck directly at the weakness of international institutions during this period—for who was there to broker such financial support? Or to determine whether elements of the Russian government itself were behind the scheme?