The Russian government had promised to bring prosperity by relying on unique Russian capabilities in two areas: natural resources and the arms trade. The energy sector had been nominally privatized but in fact was part of a cooperative complex that included not only the large energy firms that had succeeded Gazprom, but also the principal banks and the armed forces. This system was highly popular with the public because it promised growth after years of economic stagnation. Arms deals flourished and Russian exports soared. Few realized, however, that Russian weapons development would include biological weapons or that it might be possible to create a “doomsday” machine that could spread biological agents electronically.
The classic view of sovereignty dominated this period and reinforced Russia in its assertions that its internal affairs—especially how to investigate and prosecute crimes—were finally a matter for its own determination. Nevertheless there were calls from many countries, including the United States, for an international investigation—even intervention—in order to head off the possibility that this virtual machine would be turned on other countries. For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, a superpower crisis occurred that had the potential to lead to a cataclysm. The United States, which had withdrawn from Eurasian affairs, now seemed prepared to reassert itself in an environment fraught with peril. Highly threatening messages were exchanged over a hotline (a satellite system that sends only written, coded text) that had not been used for decades. U.S. nuclear warheads targeted a laboratory beneath a mountain in the Caucasus where it was believed the conspirators were working; no other weapon was powerful enough to guarantee destruction of the lab.
In the event, Russian police work—using methods that were not for the squeamish—successfully ended the crisis. By resolving matters without resorting to intervention, the society of states had strengthened the shared confidence that its members would be allowed to develop in their ways. The doomsday virtual machine was “dismantled” and handed over to a consortium of states that agreed to provide long-term credits to Russia.
This period had enshrined, as never before, the absolute equality of states to determine their own security needs. In so doing, the society of market-states bore unavoidable responsibility for refusing to protect some (such as Taiwan or the many states of the Third World like Sri Lanka who became de facto provinces of their nuclear neighbors) or to shore up the positions of those states least likely to engage in aggression (like the United States). “Let many flowers bloom” was a popular political slogan during this era, but gardens take cultivation and selection, whereas the society of states resolutely refused to prefer one regime to another, leaving it to fate to determine which one would find itself outside the stability-conferring systems of terror and technology. The Garden also brought the world closer to a nuclear cataclysm between the United States and Russia than it had been since the end of the Cold War.
CULTURE
The enormous wealth made possible by the technological breakthroughs of this period, especially laser-fusion, fueled the recovery from the 2005 – 2009 recession, but it was simply not enough to paper over the cultural chasms that opened up among states. These chasms were in part the result of the dizzying growth in the knowledge about how other people live and how other societies' systems work. A deep alienation arose between the states of the developed North and the underdeveloped South and also even within states, leading to a fragmentation of the world trading system and the creation of the first new states since the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In some parts of the world, the terrifying appearance of the weather epidemics followed by the OOA-V plague raised suspicions that government agencies in the developed world—the CIA was often mentioned—were deliberately trying to depopulate the Third World.
In the 1990s, an analyst from the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State had concluded that the “unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it…. This process guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances.”16 He further concluded that these forces “have a powerful effect in undermining traditional social groups like tribes, clans, extended families, religious sects, and so on,”17 and predicted “something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy”18 which actually seemed about to come true in the wake of the commitments of the Peace of Paris. In retrospect we can see, however, that the disruption of traditional societies and values had exactly the opposite effect, rendering the South suspicious and insular, and ultimately fractionating the progressive states of the North. Moreover, one of the consequences of modern science, advancing automation, deprived the South of the capital benefits of cheap labor that would otherwise have resulted from globalization. With hostility and fear toward the messages that advanced telecommunications would bring, and without the capital to build the telecommunications infrastructure needed to exploit that technology for their own benefit, the states of the South gradually sank into a kind of silence, but not before they had received pictures, and been pictured, in ways that deeply alienated the two parts of the globe from each other.
Emblematic of this mutual misunderstanding was the massacre at Times Square in 2005, only one year after the final collapse of the remnants of the Al Qaeda network that had savagely attacked the United States in 2001. The movie version of the novel Mahomet depicted the prophet as a young man in defiance of the Islamic injunction not to portray his face. Perhaps because the script had been the subject of worldwide protests, large crowds were gathered on the evening of the premiere at a theatre on 42nd Street in Manhattan. The movie's principal actors, as well as about two hundred persons, including many adolescents, were attacked with automatic weapons by a militant Islamicist group. More than fifty were killed. The pictures of the massacre—the entire scene was captured on video—were repeatedly played across the world and, to the growing consternation of many, produced diametrically opposed opinions in different countries. In the West there was outrage at the killing; in many Islamic states, the terrorists were regarded as heroes. When their release was achieved through a bombing campaign against movie theatres that threatened to shut down the film industry, the West embargoed oil sales from Iran (where the terrorists had turned up to a tumultuous welcome). This proved to be the first in a series of economic reprisals against various oil-producing states in the Middle East, which had the unfortunate effect of raising oil prices and slowing growth early in the century. There seemed to come from the Islamic world a surge of hatred that distressed, alarmed, and above all baffled19 persons in the West. In retrospect this should not have come as a surprise.20
In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, Muslims had suffered successive stages of humiliation at the hands of the West. The first was their loss of a leading role in the world economy as other energy sources—principally owing to laser-fusion technology, which brought the long-sought “hydrogen economy” into being—finally lessened reliance on the fossil fuels that were the source of wealth for many Muslim states. The second was the undermining of Muslim authority in Palestine through the economic renaissance of the Israeli state in the very midst of one of Islam's holiest lands, and the refusal of the United States and other powers to play a part in Mideast negotiations with Israel. The third was the challenge to Muslim cultural traditions, from emancipated women to rebellious children, as the presence of the new handheld television/computer/ telephones loaded with “edutainment” software that combined educational materials with entertainment formats—began to sweep the world. The main effect of the efforts of various Islamic governments that undertook spectrum jamming in an effort to disrupt the signals on which such technology depended, was to remove large sections of the globe from the international communications architecture. The Muslim world was the first to turn its back on the West and the ethos of consumerism, secularism, and libertarianism that was the e
ngine of economic growth of this era. Not all Muslims were reconciled to the ignominious defeat of the Taliban in 2001, nor to the death of their terrorist collaborator. One consequence of the World Trade Center attacks had been a mutual suspicion between Islamic and non-Islamic cultures.
At almost the same time, the meltdown of a nuclear reactor in Belarus (of the same design as the one that curdled at Chernobyl in 1988) caused a flood of refugees from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to storm barricades hastily erected at the German border. In the next two and a half months, more than 1.5 million persons tried to enter Germany, where eventually they were housed in camps. Unable to return to their poisoned homelands, these persons were not allowed to move further west into Germany and were strictly confined. A wall, unfortunately reminiscent in some ways of the Berlin Wall, was ultimately erected around the perimeter of the camps.
Then, as if to show that no area would go unscathed, an indigenous revolution in the southern states of Mexico ignited a popular uprising in the economically depressed north. This touched off another mass migration, with eventually more than five million Mexican nationals pouring into southern Texas and California. Scenes of vigilante violence against the illegal aliens shocked the country, and perhaps more ominously angered and repelled the Hispanic community in the United States. In both Texas and California there were reprisals; armed Mexican Americans volunteered to protect the refugees; for some months there was a lawless state of affairs along the border. Throughout the nation, there was a mood of mutual disgust: non-Mexican Americans felt betrayed by those who sheltered and hid illegal aliens. Hispanic Americans, in numbers well beyond those of Mexican heritage, felt contempt for their fellow Anglo citizens who had appeared indifferent to Mexican suffering.
In 2015, a teenage gang led by a former Army officer known to the world only as “Prince” seized power in the area around Monrovia, in Liberia. There were at that time about one million persons living in this city without potable water and without electricity. Using automatic weapons and often accompanied by handheld minicams, soldiers from this force engaged throughout the next months in a campaign of terror and depravity that was filmed and sold to distributors in the West. An outcry arose in the United States in particular urging intervention to restore order. There was no G-9 (P8) or U.N. force available to intervene. The advocates of a policy of intervention captured the imagination of the African American community—Liberia had been founded by former American slaves— who detected an unspoken racism behind the president's reluctance to intervene. Many Americans, however, saw the matter differently: the problems of poverty, political instability, and what were widely perceived as “tribal” conflicts were thought to be beyond solution. Indeed events in Africa tended to harden the worst racial stereotypes in the developed world. A divisive and intemperate debate in the Congress over whether to send humanitarian aid ended by failing to provide any funds for such a measure. Rioting broke out in Washington, D.C., where an Afrocentric curriculum had long been mandated in the public schools.
These developments seemed to exhaust the global community, which had struggled with the immediate but attenuated empathy that instant communications seemed to evoke. In reaction, states of The Garden turned inward, and groups within those states ceased striving for cultural homogeneity and celebrated differences instead.
Ironically, it was the multicultural aspects of the developed states that fostered this mutual distancing. By creating a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry had more influence than the national political class of any state, the market-states of the early twenty-first century had also created a powerful weapon that destabilized other societies and, even in their own societies, brought forth violent reactions that sought to restore the cultural values that were apparently being cast away. International communications at first made famines in faraway countries moving and tragic; eventually, these events seemed tiresome and inevitable. International communications initially made the prosperity and liberty of the developed states alluring; eventually these qualities came to seem vulgar and addictive. The national political class was powerless to either lead a state's people toward compassion or insulate a state from cultural invasion. The fragmentation that then occurred in these developed states was only an inner reflection of the alienation their peoples felt toward the outer, foreign world: the contact with other cultures had reinforced the intractability of cultural differences and the felt need to avoid the frustration and danger of such encounters.
As a result, the market-states of this era were thrown back on custom. Customary approaches to allocations are not concerned with optimizing output or increasing the productivity of the individual. Many of the steps taken by the states in this era were irrational, if by that is meant the adoption of policies that cannot in the long run strengthen the economic opportunities of the society on whose behalf such policies are undertaken. Openness and candor are often sacrificed by relying on customary approaches, but openness and candor are not absolutes and there are other values—the preservation of a way of life, religious values that range from the sanctity of life to the protection of a certain structure of the family—that were protected. By mid-century languages that were almost dead in 2000 were flourishing. Art and architecture ceased to be dominated by the West and experienced a new renaissance. Educated persons played more musical instruments, performed more plays, and made more art now that echnology brought down the skill levels required for these tasks. The Garden, by subordinating the value of the race for wealth, evoked the value of artistic expression in many cultures that had almost nothing else in common.
ECONOMICS
During this period of increasing surpluses in finished products, little attention was paid to stable or slightly falling levels of food production. Grain stockpiles had been reduced during the middle teens of the century, but as population seemed to be leveling off, there seemed to be no cause for alarm. When in the summer of 2020, a drought struck the United States there were ample world reserves of foodstuffs.
But the following year the drought expanded, and by 2022 it was clear that the world might be entering a period of food shortages. As world stocks of grain became depleted, China and Japan began buying rice in large quantities; Russia attempted to purchase virtually the entire U.S. wheat export crop, which had been cut by a third by the drought. Prices started to rise aggressively: wheat went to $ 10 a bushel; soybeans hit $15, while corn topped $9 for the first time in history.21
Weather patterns around the world intensified the drought that gripped the United States and Canada: records for the severity and duration of winter were set in Russia, Poland, and Germany; dramatically uneven precipitation caused flash floods in China and Southeast Asia, bursting dike systems and polluting rice fields. The price of wheat doubled to more than $20 per bushel; a loaf of bread in an American supermarket cost $4; the price of a quart of cooking oil went to $8. Hoarding began to spread across the developed world, as images of starvation in India, Bangladesh, and Central Africa filled television screens.
There was, in fact, plenty of food for the world's population, although its availability—particularly that of proteins—was sharply constricted by hoarding in the wealthier states. The real difficulty was distribution, and here the collapse of international cooperation proved highly destructive. Nation-state institutions like the IMF and the World Bank had been discredited (the IMF by its doctrinaire adherence to the Washington Consensus, the bank by its perceived reluctance to follow that Consensus) and had fallen into disuse. The OECD had become a forum for high-profile quarreling and finger-pointing. There were literally no international institutions that might have stepped in to organize a worldwide, rational distribution system for food, and in any case there was no legal authority to do so. When in 2024 Viet Nam announced that it was joining a food cartel organized by Japan, China mobilized its armed forces and with some difficulty occupied Hanoi. The following year Russia massed troops on the Ukraine border and virtually co
erced an economic union between the two countries to get access to Ukrainian crops. So things stood in 2025 when weather patterns began to ease.
The mercantile model had been adopted by many market-states—and sometimes by states that had tried, and abandoned, the entrepreneurial model, such as the United States. States as varied as Canada, France, Japan, Tanzania, Korea, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Ecuador, Iran, and even Norway all pursued this method of achieving market success. The mercantile market-state stressed the need for harmony among different market actors. On average, in market-states that adopted the mercantile model the incomes received by the highest 20 percent of the population amounted to no more than four times the incomes of the lowest 20 percent; in entrepreneurial market-states the ratio had often been more than 15 to 1. By sharing the benefits of growth widely among its citizens, a state following this model was able to justify subsidies to certain sectors and to maintain political stability. To be sure, some states without an almost exclusive ethnic and cultural homogeneity that attempted this model—Brazil did so in the early teens of the twenty-first century, for example—faced widespread consumer-led revolts. Still, states following this model seemed to be able to avoid the problems of organized crime and of street crime that plagued other market-states, though whether this was a result of their more homogeneous societies or (as in the United States) other factors cannot easily be determined.
Initially, The Garden was an inhospitable environment for the society of states, because it stressed the mercantile, competitive relations of nonho-mogeneous groups like a society of states. What was required was an international system that could generalize to the society of states itself the self-consciously stable and equitable obligations of the mercantile market-state. Because such an approach depends on complex systems of mutual obligation and trust, it may be that this could never have come into being without the famines and food crises of the early twenty-first century, which ultimately discredited mercantilist attitudes.
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Page 109
