Current Events: July 2007
Most baby boomers in the US lack any significant experience of extended misery. However, we are only two generations away from the depression and WWII, and just one from the Vietnam War, so we believe in the possibility of misery. The generations after us can’t imagine such misery and don’t believe it can happen to them. For affluent young Americans, misery is a car accident or an illness in the family, and real extended misery is something that happens in Africa or southern Asia, or on Indian reservations, or in inner-city ghettos.
One problem is that Americans have no idea why they are so rich and others are so poor. A well-known African activist named Ernest Wamba said, “Africa isn’t poor. Africa is rich. We don’t need aid. All we need is for you [Western imperialists] to take your feet off our necks.” But here in the US, we presume Africans are poor because they are dumb or hopelessly fractious and unable to cooperate. We fail to see how our government and corporations enforce poverty around the world, and that failure allows us to continue our own efforts to “eke out a living in a competitive world” without thinking too much about the people who are starving and dying of easily preventable diseases as a direct result of the power we wield.
Right now, about 50% of the whole human family lives on two dollars a day or less. About 24,000 people starve to death every day. We Americans tend to think that it’s just a matter of time before all these poor people get their act together and learn how to live like Americans, but on the current trajectory, it seems that the number of poor is actually increasing. Even in the US, the percentage of the population that is either in jail or grinding poverty is growing considerably faster than the percentage that is becoming millionaires. At what percentage do the poor realize that, having nothing to lose, they have nothing to fear? How many people have to be how angry before they get out the old battle ax?
In this column we have focused regularly and rather intently on symptoms like Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda and the US Department of Defense. We have pointed out that the world community is now deciding whether to eliminate nuclear weapons or let them spread uncontrollably. We have asserted that if either side in the “war on terror” uses a nuclear weapon, it will be unlikely to stop at one. And we have painted gloomy scenarios in which a nuclear bunker-buster in Iran leads to the loss of a city in the US, then to a massive nuclear attack somewhere in the Middle East, plunging the world into dog-eat-dog chaos. But we have yet to identify the core issue.
Over the next few years, perhaps decades, the human family will experience tremendous stress. Just as our diverse communitiesdivided by language, culture, and religionare encountering each other with new intensity, our competition for declining resources is intensifying, and we are becoming acutely aware of our collective adverse and potentially disastrous effects on our planetary ecosystem. The question is: Will we seek to solve these problems and reduce our stress through cooperation, as represented by the United Nations? Or will we do so through competition, as represented by US efforts to reinforce and solidify its global dominance? In other words, will we learn to govern ourselves through dialogue, negotiation, treaties and international law? Or will the US seek to remain king of the world, ruling the world for its own good, rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies.
Unfortunately, the US ruling elites in both political parties have adopted the competitivist approach. This obsolete approach is already inspiring widespread rebellion and, unless it is abandoned soon, will very likely lead to worldwide catastrophe. This catastrophe will result from two errors in judgment. The first is the worship of competition, the idea that free competition can solve our problems. Competition and the free market are simply incapable of controlling nuclear weapons and preventing global warming. Collective problems of this global nature require cooperation, as demonstrated by the lack of anything approximating adequate progress on either of these and many other critical fronts.
The second error of judgment is a vast overestimation of US power. The tragic results of this delusion of omnipotence can already be seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the US were now to take on Iran through military violence, the resulting political and economic disaster could bring the US to its knees, plunging the entire world economy into a depression so deep as to inspire widespread acts of collective, suicidal rebellion.
In case you are among those harboring the delusion that the US could win a war against the rest of the world, consider this July article by Fraser Nelson in The Spectator. As you read this, please keep in mind that numerous US policy documents clearly state that the US intends to allow the emergence of no potential rival. The article below describes a collision course.
The Cold War is back
The new arms race is deadly because Russia is so fragile
Fraser NelsonA little over a week ago, Vladimir Putin tested a weapon deadlier than anything previously developed by the Soviet Union. A missile launched from a submarine in the White Sea entered the stratosphere and returned precisely on target 3,800 miles away in the Russian Far East —the other side of the world. Such tests are meant to send messages. The target could just have easily been Tehran, Los Angeles or London. It signaled that Russia means business. After a hiatus of two decades, the arms race is back.
While Britain has been fixated on the Middle East and Iraq, it has paid insufficient attention to the increasingly aggressive noises emanating from the Kremlin. Mr. Putin was never very enthusiastic about Russia becoming a part of the West, but now, flush with gas and oil revenues, he has left its orbit altogether. The Russian military is once again treating NATO as the glavny protivnik, the primary enemy, and drawing up plans for a nuclear war. And Putin’s explicit aim is to challenge, and then counter, America’s world dominance.
As recently as six years ago, such an ambition would have been laughable. Then, Russia was an economic basket-case which had been admitted into the G7 group of industrialized nations only as an act of charity. The main security issue in Russia was how to stop its nuclear fuel being sold for scrap to rogue states. But, in those days, oil was $17 a barrel. Now it is $75 and rising. For a country which pumps out more oil than any on earth, save for Saudi Arabia, the consequences could scarcely have been more dramatic. Russia now has a huge surplus, has banked $25 billion in a ‘stabilization fund’ and has the third-largest currency reserves in the world.
Rather than invest this bounty in Russia’s crumbling infrastructure or its imploding health service, Mr Putin has gone on an arms spending spree. In 2001, the defense budget was 140 billion rubles; today it stands at 870 billion ($16.7 billion) —a sixfold increase, and the fastest in Russia’s peacetime history. Last year, he added six new intercontinental missiles to his arsenal, 12 launch vehicles, 31 battle tanks and seven Mi-28N night attack helicopters. And this is but a taste of what is yet to come.
The missile tested last week takes off so fast that no missile defense system could detect it in time. The new variant of the Topol-M missile will have multiple warheads, which splinter so they cannot be shot out of the sky. America’s floundering missile defense system cannot hope to offer protection. Washington struggles to keep up: two months ago, another interceptor missile fired off Alaska fell into the Pacific having failed to recognize, far less hit, its target. America is now losing the ballistic missile game.
Meanwhile, Mr. Putin has learned to use energy as a weapon. Russia is sitting on the largest stretch of gas reserves in the world, and Europe already depends on Russia for a quarter of its gas. The Kremlin knows that energy security is intimately intertwined with national security, and tested its strength the winter before last when it temporarily suspended gas supply to Ukraine in an argument about prices. Germany is expected to rely on Russia for 80 per cent of its gas within a decade.
Precisely what Mr. Putin intends to do with this missile-muscle was made astonishingly clear in February when he delivered a speech at the Munich security conference. It was a J’accuse to America, serving notice that Russia had moved from ally to adversary. “The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres—economic, political and humanitarian, and has imposed itself on other states,” he declared. “This is the world of one master, one sovereign.” And his objective is to challenge such hegemony.
To Britain, all this sounds almost quaintly absurd. The recent debate about renewing Trident reckoned without a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia. Yet this is precisely what Mr. Putin’s troops are being trained to expect. The view in London is fundamentally different from the view in Warsaw, which is watching the Kremlin’s assertiveness with alarm. In Moscow much of the Cold War mindset is returning (minus the communist ideology) —whereby NATO is the enemy, and perceived as a growing threat…. When Mr. Putin is called upon to explain his extraordinary arms build-up, he points to the expansion of NATO.
The architect of the new Russian military is Sergei Ivanov, for six years defense secretary, now promoted to Deputy Prime Minister and the favorite to succeed Mr. Putin next March. “In the mid-1990s, we counted on the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to the end of the Cold War —that NATO would not move to the east,” he said in a recent interview. “But now we see everyone deceived us.”…These are not the clandestine methods of the Cold War. All this missile testing, ostentatious war-gaming and tub-thumping is clearly designed to draw attention to Russia. It is consistent with a bid to lead a new power axis —perhaps based upon the gas cartel which Russia is discussing with Iran, Qatar and Venezuela. Mr. Putin visited the Middle East soon after making his anti-American outburst as if preparing the ground for a new coalition of aggrieved states hostile to America….
The military is not waiting around. In January, Russia’s military chiefs met to discuss security and deliver keynote speeches. One after the other, they asked for the governing military doctrine of their nation to be redrafted, explicitly naming America and NATO as the primary enemies. In March, the Russian Security Council duly announced that it no longer considered terrorism to be the greatest threat, and instead unveiled a new strategy based upon “geopolitical realities”— namely, that rival military alliances were becoming stronger, “especially NATO.”
Six years ago, when George W. Bush first hosted Mr. Putin at his ranch in Texas, he famously claimed to have seen into his soul. At the time he phrased it slightly differently to an adviser, unaware that his microphone was still live and his remarks were being broadcast over the speaker system in the next room. “I’ve got him eating out of my hand,” the President whispered. “You give these Russkies some cake and they’ll give you their souls.”
How things have changed. In Mr. Putin’s trip to Maine last week, it was Mr. Bush who was doing the back-pedalling, agreeing to ditch the Pentagon’s plans for the missile interceptors in Poland. They joked, shared a speedboat, ate lobster. and played fetch with their dogs. But it is now time for realpolitik. The free market has perished in Russia, and a petro-economy has taken its place. Russia is no longer a junior partner for the West, but a growing adversary. Mr. Putin will smile —but rearm Russia as he smiles. And the new arms race continues apace.
To me, the most terrifying sentence in this article is Bush’s comment when he thought his mike was off. Obviously, his attitude is deeply competitive and demeaning. It is the comment of a man seeking to manipulate a rival, not seeking to cooperate with an ally. Putin is a warrior who has responded as a warrior to the warriors running the US government, and, according to the above article, Putin is likely to be replaced by another warrior. Unless the US comes up soon with leadership that understands the principles of peace and cooperation, we are all doomed to come to a full and practical understanding of the term “extended misery”—and that includes affluent Americans.