After America

But in leaving Israel to its fate we have told our enemies something elemental and devastating about the will of a decaying West, and of the supposed global superpower. Around the world our foes will draw their own conclusions. Just as there are neglected and rubble-strewn Jewish cemeteries from Tangiers to Czernowitz to Baghdad, one day there will be abandoned American cemeteries, too. Across the globe there will be towns and countries where once were Americans and now are none—from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Germany and Japan. What’s left of the republic will hunker down and finally understand what’s it’s like to be Israel. Washington will be the new Jerusalem—a beleaguered citadel in a world that wants to kill it.

CHAPTER EIGHT AFTER A Letter from the Post-American World

Again upon the sea.

This time for Persia, bearing our wounded and the ashes of the dead…. The skull of the last Mehrikan I shall present to the museum at Teheran.

—J. A. Mitchell, The Last American (1889)

What follows purports to be a missive from the future. Author unknown. It was found tucked into the glovebox in the remnants of what appeared to be a Victorian-era contraption: This is a letter from the day after tomorrow, from the world after America. I would have entrusted it to the genial gentleman on a “time machine” who turned up last week with excited tales of the marvels of an American golden age circa 1950. Less than a hundred years ago! But the young ’uns told him he sounded like those Islamophile “scholars” boring on about the glories of Cordoba and el-Andalus in the tenth century. His machine looked promising, but it attracted the attention of rival gangs and they wound up with half of it apiece, neither of which functioned.

Much like what happened to America. But they left behind what I believe is the key time-traveling mechanism, and, while it is no longer sufficient to transport a person, I’m hopeful this letter will make it back to you in 1950—assuming, that is, that, like so much else of interest, the time-transporting device isn’t stymied by the Sino-Russo-Islamic cybershield that has reduced the Internet to little more than an archive of cautionary tales of all but forgotten minor American celebrities. (The Internet was a turn-of-the-century phenomenon, like your hula hoop, if that’s been invented by the time you get this.)

Before he got mugged, the time traveler wanted to know how we were getting by without the United States. Well, for want of any choice in the matter, we adjusted. As it beggared itself, cannibalized itself, and finally consumed itself, the hyperpower’s networks of globalization remained largely in place. We know their names still— Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Google….

Many of the famous multinationals survived the collapse of the United States. In economic terms, they were bigger than most nation-states, and so they had no trouble finding small countries to serve as company towns of convenience. Some aspects changed. McDonald’s and KFC and the rest are now halal. It’s just easier that way. Otherwise, you wind up like the Russians, with two of everything—the Muslim-compliant Burger King, and the branch across the street that still serves vodka: “Have it your way—da?”

And all that does is make it easier for Chechen gangs to blow up sad gaggles of Red Army alcoholics while minimalizing collateral damage of photogenic moppets and devout burqa-clad women. I no longer imbibe myself.

Like the late American entertainer Dean Martin, I drank to forget. But we forgot almost everything very quickly, so the excuse is less persuasive.

Much of the world would still seem familiar to you. Have you ever been in the executive lounge of an upmarket American chain hotel in the Middle East? The Grand Hyatt in Amman perhaps? Very congenial in the old days.

At breakfast you could get pancakes and hash browns, and the TV would be tuned to CNN International, while Saudi sheikhs and Russian “businessmen” and the representatives of Chinese state corporations conducted their after affairs. For a while, that’s what it felt like: an American-built international network but with fewer and fewer Americans. The Europeans had always enjoyed sneering at those polls about the ever dwindling percentage of Yanks who held valid passports. Who could blame you? You were the “ugly Americans,” the only foreigners who upon landing in Paris, Rome, Berlin, and many other capitals could reliably expect to have their country openly insulted by the cab driver en route to the hotel. Once the dollar ceased to be the global currency, and America became both yesterday’s man and the scapegoat for all the new woes afflicting the post-American world, fewer and fewer of your citizens ventured abroad. At power tables in the exclusive restaurants one sees Chinamen, Arabs, Venezuelans, even the occasional Jeremy or Derek from Eton or Upper Canada College hired as the retro-chic Wasp frontman for an international agglomeration of emirs and oligarchs.

But not a lot of Americans.

Even travel within North America became prohibitively expensive, and dangerous. Virtuous Americans forswore nuclear power and coal mining, and, when the crisis of the early Seventies exposed your vulnerability to Middle Eastern oil dictatorships, you spent the next thirty years letting your dependence on foreign petroleum double from one-third to two-thirds of your energy needs while you busied yourselves piously declining to drill in the Arctic lest it sully the pristine breeding grounds of the world’s largest mosquito herd. So today the Arabs still have the oil; Russia and Iran between them control half the world’s natural gas; and China and India need more and more of both. It never seemed to occur to America’s ruling class that an economy requires fuel to run it, and that one day the sellers might be in a position to pick and choose their customers. The decision by the Gulf emirates to lease bases to Beijing to enable the Chinese to secure the Asian oil routes was entirely predictable. Not a lot of Middle Eastern oil heads west these days.

The world after America is a sicker world. In 1999, the British Government set up NICE—the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, the country’s nicely named “death panel.” If one works for NICE these days, one no longer has to waste all that time inventing reasons as to why this or that innovative but costly American drug or procedure does not fit the overarching strategic goals of the National Health Service, because American medical innovation quickly dwindled away and nobody picked up the slack. The Chinese are said to have amazing new inventions to keep their leaders hale and hearty, but would prefer their aging peasantry keeled over sooner rather than later. A few other countries have carved out boutique markets: Japan for state-of-the-art post-human augmentation, the Swiss for luxury euthanasia. As I say, niche businesses. For the non-elites, for the multitudes of humanity crammed into the vast, diseased megalopolises of Africa or the favelas of Latin America, almost anything unexpected that happens anywhere kills huge numbers of people. Today the typical novelty virus develops in rural China, its existence is denied for weeks on end by the government, during which window of opportunity a carrier spreads it to the lobby of an international hotel in Hong Kong, and thence by jet it takes off for the world beyond—much as SARS did in 2003. But this time, instead of getting on a flight to Toronto, the returning tourist flies to Johannesburg, and the disease runs riot among a population whose immune systems are already weakened by HIV.

Tragic, but only for a moment, and then next month’s surprise disaster comes along like clockwork. Even without the cooperation of mendacious despots, life is nasty, brutish, and shortened in dramatic ways. Tsunamis and earthquakes kill on impressive scales. There is no superpower with the carrier groups or the C-130s or, indeed, the inclination to have “boots on the ground” (quaint expression, now unknown) within hours to start rescuing people, feeding them, housing them. So today we are all impeccably multilateral and work through the UN bureaucracy, which holds state-of-the art press conferences to announce it will soon be flying in (or nearby, or overhead, or in the general hemisphere) a top-level situation-assessment team to the approximate vicinity to conduct a situation assessment of the situation just as soon as an elite team of corporate mercenaries has flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel. Shouldn’t be more than a few weeks.