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Geopolitical Predictions: Place Your Bets
The historian is a prophet looking backwards. ― Friedrich von Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments
So where is it all going, folks? Does anyone have an instinct?
When I wrote about why Margaret Thatcher mattered, I concluded “that the political figures who matter have two rare gifts.”
First, they are able to perceive the gathering of historical forces in a way their contemporaries were unable to do. What do I mean by “the gathering of historical forces?” I mean, they are able to sense the big picture. Lenin was able to discern a convergence of trends in Czarist Russia — the migration of the peasants, the rise of revolutionary consciousness, the weakness of the Czarist government, the debilitation inflicted upon Russia by the First World War — and to recognize what this convergence implied: The old order could now be toppled — not merely reformed, but destroyed. Czar Nicholas II could not perceive this. It is thus that Lenin now matters and Nicholas II does not.
Second, when promoted to power, those who matter are able to master those historical forces. Chiang understood perfectly that China was vulnerable to communism and understood as well what communism in China would mean. But he was unable, for all his energy and efforts, to master them. And so, tragically, he does not matter.
Churchill perceived the forces of history and then mastered them. In 1933, Hitler was widely regarded outside of Germany as no more than a buffoon. Churchill knew better. His assessment of Hitler was at the time astonishingly prescient and singular. He perceived the unique danger of Nazism when others could not see it or refused to believe it. He was steadfast in his warnings. When at last Churchill acquired power, he discharged his responsibilities in a fashion as to gain him immortality.
When politicians matter, they matter because of these gifts.
Thatcher had these gifts. She perceived — as did many of her contemporaries — that Britain was in decline. She perceived that the effects of Marxist doctrine upon Britain had been pernicious. But unlike her contemporaries, she perceived that Britain’s decline was not inevitable. And she perceived too that socialism was not — as widely believed — irreversible.
Simultaneously, she sensed a wider and related tide in history that no other leader, apart from Reagan, sensed at all. She understood that the Soviet Union was far from the invulnerable colossus it was imagined to be. She sensed, in fact, that it was unable to satisfy the basic needs of its population. It was corrupt, moribund, and doomed.
Having perceived the gathering of historical forces, she mastered them. She reversed the advance of socialism in Britain, proving both that a country can be ripped from a seemingly overdetermined trajectory and that it takes only a single figure with an exceptionally strong will to do so. She did not single-handedly cause the Soviet empire to crumble, but she landed some of the most devastating punches of the Cold War, and extraordinarily, emerged unblooded from the fight.
I wrote those words in 2007, and as you can see immediately, my own ability to perceive the gathering of historical forces will not leave me numbered among the immortals. Shortly after I wrote that conclusion, Lehman Brothers collapsed. The world’s confidence in capitalism was shaken by the subsequent events nearly as greatly as its confidence in communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
If you had told me then that in 2015, the better part of the Islamic world would be consumed in anarchy and savagery; that hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees would be streaming across Europe’s borders, threatening its unity and stability; that Russia would determine to re-prosecute the Cold War; that China would surpass America as the world’s largest economy and expand its military influence beyond its own shores; that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty would be in shreds, that the United States would begin a long, slow, melancholy retreat from the world stage — or even that Jeremy Corbyn would be the leader of a Labour Party whose own former director of media relations said, in 2002, “We are all Thatcherites now” — I suppose I wouldn’t have published that book.
So I don’t have the gift. I did grasp that Turkey was by no means a model democracy, and I said so before it was a truism. I saw exactly how serious the events in Syria were, and what their implications would be. But I have no strategy now for mastering these disasters, and I’m not sure at this point what one might even look like, or how I would recognize it.
So let’s hear from you. What will the world be like in six months, next year, in five years, in twenty? What are the most important gathering historical forces? What is the big picture? Which political figure, if any, has shown a sign that he — or she — has the ability to master them? If none of them do, and if the task by some accident fell to you, how would you approach it?
Published in Foreign Policy, History
I think you actually have four categories. Historical coherence and functional hard State and Army are two different things. Israel fits all four categories, although the modern state is more recent it is a reflection of one of the oldest national coherence’s there is. Egypt fits all but the first category. It has a hard state and army – maybe not totally successful – and an even greater historical coherence than Israel.
I fear that the struggle in Syria is going to mimic the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, which, without achieving a genuine resolution of the power struggle between East and West and the various sects within Islam, will, within the next 5 to 10 years, turn into a declared but skirmish-like world war pitting the U.S., Canada (the Trudeau era will be short and sour), India, Japan and the small Asian countries that now are at odds with China over its island building in the South China Sea, Turkey, Israel, and much of the Sunni Muslim world against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and the Shia Muslim world. The EU will have already collapsed into small, nationalist states characterized by their own demographic and cultural struggles and as a unit will be unable to provide much help one way or the other except, perhaps, to successfully assimilate more Muslim/North African immigrants into a more Western mindset. I have no idea how it will turn out but predict that, whatever happens, over the next quarter century the East will rise while the West will fall (politically, not catastrophically: see post-Renaissance Rome). … I will be delighted to be proved wrong.
In the short-to-medium term, I’m cautiously optimistic. I expect Europe’s flirtations with national self-abdication and the resulting reactionary Nazism will both prove short-lived but salutary reminders to Europeans that culture matters. The US will not go to open war with China or Russia (though there may be some confrontations, maybe even limited exchanges). In the West, our political class will remain terrible, and we’ll be much less rich than we could be as a result, but we’ll muddle through. In the rest of the world, technology, communication, and trade will continue to make life better for more people faster than the autocrats can squelch it or the kleptocrats can steal it.
In the medium-to-long term, the crystal ball gets blurry, but I think Kevin’s on to something. Guttenberg’s invention led eventually to the Thirty Years’ War and the Westphalian system. All our discussion assumes nation-states remain the primary mode of organizing large groups of humanity. It’s not clear to me why I should expect that to remain true.
[continued…]
We’re familiar with trans-national movements: The Catholic Church, International Socialism, Rotary International, al-Qaeda. A group like Anonymous seems to be something else, something new. And of course, ISIS, attempting to carve out a Westphalian state while inspiring a global virtual Caliphate.
The ISIS that holds territory in Syria and Iraq will not last once a serious country decides to squash it. ISIS online may be more formidable in the long run, or maybe its appeal will fade with its meatspace counterpart. Regardless, online networks of like-minded people — hopefully more benign than ISIS — will become increasingly significant organizing identities.
You probably don’t rank “Richochetti” all that high in your personal identity, but I bet it ranks higher than you would have imagined it would when you joined. If you move around a lot, it could easily mean more to you than your current suburb of residence. If our national governments continue to disappoint for another decade or three, I can imagine a world where Ricochet or networks like it could matter more than our nominal citizenship.
I don’t really know what that world looks like, and I can imagine ways it could be either worse or better than the world we live in. But I know Kevin’s right: Guttenberg changed the world in ways that took decades and centuries to process. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and I think we just started a new line of the couplet.
Where does Pakistan fall?
How about the PA?
In case you’re still around ctlaw, good questions! Since the PA is pretty much Sunni, I think it will align with Israel but not openly. The PA’s primary but unacknowledged enemy will be Hamas, funded by Iran and even now aligned with Russia and China. Pakistan, I really have no clue. … FWIW, I don’t envision the war’s skirmishes as end-times battles but, rather, as openly asserted uprisings that will finally settle some of the innumerable geographical, cultural, and ideological issues that have terrorized East and West Asia since the end of World War I. (I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the United States splintered into several regions). I’m reminded of the Mapparium in the Mary Baker Eddy Library at the Christian Science complex in Boston, which was built in 1935 and has left the world’s national borders and names as they were then: no Israel (but also no sovereign Palestinian state), no East/West Germany (or East/West Berlin); Persia was in the process of renaming itself Iran; numerous countries and border lines in Africa and South America have since been renamed. In other words, geographical change is historically much more common than we tend to think. Not sure if we’re going backward or forward (all things considered, I think forward), but festering tensions eventually do more than fester, leading to challenging upheavals and eventualities both good and bad. … Again, I’d be happy to have my hunches proved wrong.
Extra prediction at no additional charge:
Over the life of the Oslo process the PA has moved from being Israel’s opponent to its de facto ally today.
Twenty years from now I predict a similar outcome for Israel and Hamas.
Good news? No. Because the reason Hamas has risen is that the PA has been subverted. And when Hamas is in turn subverted, it will in turn be replaced by something even more extreme, like Islamic Jihad.
The primary purpose of these organisations, for Palestinians, is to resist occupation. And when they stop resisting occupation and start cooperating with it, even implementing its policing, there is a vacuum created which more extreme groups rush in to fill.
It’s an illustration of the limited benefits of subversion. Or, rather, how it is counterproductive unless complemented by other strategies.