apathy and epidemics seemed as though it would take centuries. That the most populous nations have been able to take off before our eyes represents a sort of miracle which never ceases to amaze me.
That said, I must add on a less subjective note that the dizzying growth of the middle classes in China, India, Russia and Brazil — and all over the planet — is a reality which the world as it currently works does not seem able to accommodate. If in the near future three or four billion human beings were to begin consuming per capita as much as Europeans or Japanese by head of population — not to mention Americans — it goes without saying that we would see the world go even further off course, ecologically as well as economically. I scarcely need add that I’m not talking about some distant future but the immediate one, perhaps even the present. The pressure on natural resources — especially oil, water, raw materials, meat, fish, cereals, etc — and the struggles over the regions where they are produced; the determination of those who have them to hold on to them, and of those who do not to acquire them; all this provides enough fuel for innumerable deadly conflicts.
There is no doubt that these tensions will be lessened in a period of global economic recession in which we will consume less, produce less and worry less about resources running out. But that relative lull will be more than compensated for by the tensions produced by the crisis itself. How will nations respond if their hopes of economic development are subject to a sudden brutal interruption? What social upheavals, what ideological and political follies, what military campaigns would such frustrations lead to? The only similar event to which we can compare this is the Great Depression of 1929. That led to social cataclysm, to an unleashing of fanaticisms, to local conflicts, and to a worldwide conflagration.
We can reasonably hope that the most extreme scenarios will not be repeated. But there will inevitably be shocks and upheavals from which humanity will emerge transformed; no doubt battered, bruised and traumatised, but perhaps also more mature, more adult and more conscious than before of sharing a common adventure on its frail raft.
Chapter 5
The reduction of the West’s share of the world economy, which began towards the end of the Cold War, has been accompanied by serious consequences which even now are not yet fully measurable.
One of the most worrying is that Western powers, especially the United States, seemed tempted to preserve through military superiority what they could no longer preserve through economic superiority or moral authority.
This may be the most paradoxical and perverse consequence of the end of the Cold War: an event that was supposed to bring peace and reconciliation has in fact been followed by a whole sequence of conflicts, with America going from one war to another without pause as though that had become the method of governance for the world’s only superpower rather than a last resort.
The deadly attacks of 11 September 2001 do not fully explain this tendency. They may have reinforced it and partially legitimised it, but by and large it was already under way.
In December 1989, six weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US intervened militarily in Panama against General Noriega. This expedition resembled a police raid and served as a warning: no one should be under any illusion about who was in charge of the planet and who had simply to obey. In 1991 there followed the first Gulf War; in 1992–3 the ill-fated mission in Somalia; in 1994 the intervention in Haiti to install Jean-Bertrand Aristide in power; in 1995 the war in Bosnia; in December 1998 the massive bombing campaign in Iraq dubbed ‘Operation Desert Fox’; in 1999 the Kosovo conflict; from 2001 the war in Afghanistan and from 2003 the second Gulf War; in 2004 another intervention in Haiti, this time to remove President Aristide. And that doesn’t even include the punitive bombings or smaller-scale military actions in Colombia, Sudan, the Philippines, Pakistan and elsewhere.
In each of these cases, a clear-sighted observer might be able to detect some legitimate motives along with others which are mere pretexts. But the abundance of examples is in itself disconcerting, as if military intervention had become a method of planetary governance is how I referred to it. More than once since the beginning of this century, it has crossed my mind that the truth may be yet more sinister and that these operations were carried out to set an example, as when colonial powers in the past sought to instil fear in the hearts of their indigenous subjects to quash any desire to revolt.
Some of the most dubious military interventions will remain associated with George W. Bush, and it is in part because of the Iraq War that the US electorate voted Barack Obama and the Democrats into office. It remains to be seen how far the tendency towards interventionism is linked to one administration’s political choices, and to what extent it is determined by America’s position in the world: that of a country whose economic power is inexorably slipping, which is clearly living beyond its means and getting ever deeper into debt, and yet which possesses indisputable military superiority. How could it resist the temptation to play this trump card to compensate for its weakness in other areas?
Whatever its president’s feelings or its political convictions, the US can no longer allow its grip on the world to weaken, nor lose control of the resources such as oil which are essential to its economy; nor can it allow unimpeded freedom of movement to the forces which would harm it or look on passively as rival powers emerge which could one day challenge its supremacy. If America gave up its close and energetic management of world affairs, it would probably be sucked into a spiral of declining power and declining affluence.
That does not mean that systematic interventionism is the right answer to check decline; in fact, to judge by the first years of this century, it has speeded it up. But would an alternative policy have the opposite effect? It may be worth trying, but when a power loses its grip, the spontaneous reaction of its enemies is to overwhelm it and attack it rather than express gratitude. The West was much more respectful of Brezhnev’s USSR than Gorbachev’s, which it humiliated, plundered and dismantled, creating a deep feeling of resentment among the Russian people. And the leaders of the Iranian revolution were pitiless with President Carter, as he had had scruples about conducting an aggressive policy.
What this means is that the West’s dilemma over its relations with the rest of the world would not be miraculously resolved if Washington suddenly altered its behaviour on the international stage. But such a change of attitude on the part of the sole superpower might prove to be crucial if we still hope for an era of trust and solidarity among all nations.
Some analysts make a distinction between hard and soft power. By the latter they mean the various ways in which a state can exercise its authority without always having recourse to its armed forces. Stalin’s inability to understand this sort of power led him to ask how many divisions the Pope possessed. Moreover, the day the Soviet Union collapsed, from a strictly military perspective it still had the means to annihilate its enemies. But victory and defeat are not decided by armoured divisions, megatonnage of bombs or number of missile nose-cones. Those things are just one factor among many, and while great quantities of deadly weapons are undoubtedly necessary to maintain a great power, they are by no means sufficient. In any confrontation between individuals, groups or states, numerous factors come into play which may be a matter of physical power, economic capacity or moral influence. In the case of the Soviet Union, it is clear that it was morally discredited and economically crippled, which made its formidable military might useless.
Conversely, at the end of the Cold War, the West possessed overwhelming superiority in all three domains at once: military, thanks in particular to American power; economic, as a result of the financial, industrial and technological predominance of both Europe and the US; and moral, by virtue of its model of society, which had just defeated its most dangerous rival, Communism. This threefold superiority should have allowed the West to govern the world with subtlety, sometimes using the carrot and sometimes the stick, firmly discouraging rebellious enemies but offering everyone else substantial advantages to allow them to escape underdevelopment and tyranny.
That being so, it seemed reasonable to predict that recourse to arms would be very much the exception after the fall of Communism, and that it would be enough for the West to highlight the superiority of its own economic system and model of society in order to preserve its supremacy. More or less the opposite has happened. The West’s economic supremacy has been eroded by the rise of the Asian giants, not to mention Russia and Brazil, and recourse to arms has become commonplace.
