After America

that the Congolese Liberation Movement was slaughtering huge numbers of people and feeding the body parts to their relatives. In North Kivu, a group called les Effaceurs (the Erasers) had wanted to open up the province’s mineral resources to commercial exploitation and to that end had engaged in ethnic cleansing by cannibalism. The Congo Civil War raged for most of the first decade of this century uncovered by CNN and the New York Times for want of any way to blame it on George W. Bush. Among the estimated six million dead, many were eaten. The two parties to the conflict agreed on very little except that pygmies make an excellent entree. Both sides hunted them down as if they were the drive-thru fast-food of big game.

While regarding them as sub-human, they believed that if you roasted their flesh and ate it you would gain magical powers. In return, the pygmies asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity, for all the good that did.⁷¹

After all, a society that will resume cannibalism is unlikely to observe any UN resolutions. As Mr. Onyango- Obbo saw it, the resurgence of the two-legged menu option was a function of Africa’s reprimitivization. “Cannibalism,” he wrote, “happens commonly where there is little science, and people don’t see themselves as creatures of a much higher order than other animals around them. When you have gone to the moon, you consider yourself and other humans to be very different from the chimp at the zoo.”

But in the twilight of the West, Americans no longer went to the moon, and environmental activists loudly proclaimed that man was no different from the chimps (who by the way shouldn’t be in the zoo).

The state of nature made huge advances in the early years of the century.

Why did we never wonder what might happen when such forces went nuclear? Ah, well. The transnational jet set had other filet o’ fish to fry. They had convinced themselves that economic and technological factors shape the world all but exclusively, and that the sexy buzz words—“globalization,” “networking”—could cure all ills. The famous Golden Arches Thesis of Thomas Friedman posited that countries with McDonald’s franchises don’t go to war with each other. Shortly thereafter, Bill Clinton bombed Belgrade, a city richly endowed with western fast-food outlets. A few years earlier, when the Iron Curtain had fallen, Yugoslavia had been, economically, the best- positioned of the recovering Communist states. But, given the choice between expanding the already booming vacation resorts of the Dalmatian coast for their eager Anglo-German tourist clientele or reducing Croatia and Bosnia and Kosovo to rubble over ethno-linguistic differences no outsider can even discern (“Serbo-Croat”?), Yugoslavia opted for the latter.

They didn’t eat their enemies’ private parts, but they certainly sliced off plenty of breasts and genitals.

Another thinker, Thomas P. M. Barnett, the widely admired author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century and Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating, liked to divide the world into a functioning “Core” and a “Non-Integrating Gap.”⁷² He favored using a “SysAdmin” force—a “pistol-packin’ Peace Corps”—to transform the “Gap” countries and bring them within the “Core.” Like many chaps who swan about dispensing high-end advice to international A-listers, he viewed the world’s problems as something to be sorted out by more effective elites— better armed forces, international agencies, that sort of thing. The common herd was noticeable by its absence from his pages. If he had given them any thought, he might have realized that his vision of a “SysAdmin” force— European allies that would go into countries after American hard power has liberated them—was simply deluded. Whatever the defects of the Continent’s elites, the real problem was not the lack of leaders but the lack of followers.

It soon became clear that Professor Barnett was holding his thesis upside down. Rather than Europe’s leadership class helping move countries from the Non-Integrating Gap to the Core, it would have its work cut out preventing large parts of the Core doing a Bosnia and moving to the Non-Integrating Gap. For all the economic growth since World War II, much of the world had gone backwards—almost the whole of West Africa, and Central Africa, and Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Bosnia. Yet none of the elite asked themselves a simple question: What’s to stop that spreading? In a world after America, the reprimitivization of the map would accelerate: the new Jew- hating Sweden… the French banlieues where the state’s writ ceased to run… Clapton, East London, where Shayna Bharuchi cut out her four-year-old daughter’s heart while listening to an MP3 of the Koran…

A famous American First Lady wrote a bestseller called It Takes a Village (to raise a child)—an African proverb, supposedly. Why our leaders should have been commending tribal life as a model for advanced societies is a mystery. But even Africans didn’t want to raise their children in an African village. They abandoned them for shanties in what (if you flew over West Africa by night) looked like one giant coastal megalopolis. And, with respect to child-rearing, they left behind most of their traditions, too. We are a planet without a past—or, at any rate, memory. Like the European trans-nationalists wedded to their Ponzi welfare state, like the American spendaholics burning through trillions as if it was still 1950 and they were the only economic power on earth, like the Singularity post-humans revolving on themselves without repose, reprimitivized man lives in an eternal present tense, in the dystopia of the moment. In The Atlantic Monthly a few years back, casting around for a phrase to describe the “citizens” of such “states,” Robert D. Kaplan called them “re-primitivized man.”⁷³ Demographic growth, environmental devastation, accelerated urbanization, and civic decay have reduced them to a far more primitive state than their parents and grandparents. As Andrew McCarthy wrote: “Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil.

It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.”⁷⁴

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Liberia, the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea were all less “civilized” than they had been a couple of generations ago. And yet in one sense many of them had made undeniable progress: they had globalized their pathologies.

Somali pirates seized container ships flying the ensigns of the great powers. Iranian proxies ran Gaza and much of Lebanon. North Korea’s impoverished prison state had provided nuclear technology to Damascus and Teheran, and Teheran had agreed to station missiles in Venezuela. Even the nude warlords of west Africa had managed to destabilize on a scale no second-tier western power could contemplate. Celebrating diversity unto the end, wealthy nations that could no longer project meaningful force to their own borders watched the two-bit basket-cases nuclearize, and assumed this geopolitical diversity would have no consequences. By 2005, Iran was offering to share its nuclear technology with Sudan.⁷⁵

Sudan? Oh, surely you remember: the other day I found a program for a “Save Darfur” interpretative-dance fundraiser in the attic. Massachusetts, I think. Perhaps you attended. Someone read out a press release from the activist actor George Clooney, and everyone had a simply marvelous time.

Meanwhile, back in Sudan, the killing went on: hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. With machetes. That’s pretty labor-intensive.

But a nuclear Sudan would supposedly be a model of self-restraint?

The mound of corpses piled up around the world at the turn of the century was not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states. Yet the Pansy Left (in George Orwell’s phrase) continued to insist that the problem was technological, a question of nuclear “proliferation.” Even from a post-American world, it seems sad to have to point out that the problem was not that America had nukes and that poor old Sudan had to make do with machetes. It’s that the machete crowd were willing to kill on an industrial scale and the high-tech guys could not muster the will to stop them. To horrified western liberals, nuclear technology was bad in and of itself. But nukes are means. What you do with them depends on your ends.

And if, as in the Congo and Sudan, killing is your end, then you will find the means. Perhaps it was only sensitivity to cultural diversity that prevented President Obama taking up a machete non-proliferation initiative.

There is a fine line between civilization and the abyss. North Korea had friends on the Security Council. Powerful states protected one-man psycho states. And one-man psycho states provided delivery systems to apocalyptic ideological states. And apocalyptic ideological states funded non-state actors around the world. And in Somalia and elsewhere non-state actors were constrained only by their ever increasing capabilities.

As America should have learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan, stupid, ill-trained illiterates with primitive explosives who don’t care who they kill can inflict a lot of damage on the technologically advanced highly trained warriors of civilized states. As one of Nick Berg’s kidnappers explained both to his victim and to the world in the souvenir Islamic snuff video, “You know, when we behead someone, we enjoy it.”⁷⁶ Thus, “asymmetric warfare” on a planet divided into civilized states with unusable nuclear arsenals and barbarous regimes happy to kill with whatever’s to hand. We had moved into a world beyond American order, but in which, as