2011
The New York Times Magazine
December 2, 2001
By NIALL FERGUSON
Take the long view. What will New
York be like on Sept. 11, 2011? It's
not difficult to imagine a rather wretched
future. You need only visit one of those
cities -- Jerusalem or Belfast -- that have
been fractured by terrorism and religious
strife to get a glimpse. Imagine a segregated
city, with a kind of Muslim ghetto in an outer
borough that non-Muslims can enter only --
if they dare -- with a special endorsement on
their ID cards. Imagine security checkpoints
at every tunnel and bridge leading into
Manhattan, where armed antiterrorist troops
check every vehicle for traces of explosives
and prohibited toxins.
Does that mean you also have to count on
even worse gridlock on the Van Wyck
Expressway? No, because you also need to
imagine a decline in the number of cars on
the road. For by 2011, the third and final oil
shock will have heralded the end of the
internal-combustion era.
Still, there will be some comfort to be found
downtown. There, rising like a phoenix from
the rubble of the World Trade Center, will
be that gleaming monument to American
resilience: the twin towers of the Nafta
Center. Even if world trade couldn't be
rebuilt after the GREAT DEPRESSION
2002-03, at least the city's beloved
landmark could. And the new towers will be
even taller -- thanks to the antiaircraft turrets
on top.
In its immediate aftermath, the destruction of
the World Trade Center looked like one of
those events -- the assassination at
Sarajevo, the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- that set history on a new course.
Some excitable commentators began talking about ''World War III'' almost
the same day the twin towers fell. That's one possible future. Much more
likely, however, is the nightmare scene sketched above. That's because this
outcome could arise out of already discernible trends, all of which predated
Sept. 11, 2001. Tragic and spectacular though it was, that event was far less
of a turning point than is generally believed.
We should be wary, in fact, of ever attaching too much importance to any
single event. It was not Gavrilo Princip alone who started World War I. In
his great novel, ''The Man Without Qualities,'' Robert Musil dismissed the
idea that history moves in a straight line like a billiard ball, changing direction
only when struck. For Musil, history was more like ''the passage of clouds,''
constantly in flux, never predictable. That quality is what makes it impossible
to predict where exactly we will be 10 years from now.
Yet Musil's analogy of history and clouds illuminates something else. Though
the weather is hard to forecast, the range of possible weathers is not infinitely
large. It may not rain tomorrow, but we know that if it does, it will rain
water, not boiling oil. It may not be quite as warm as yesterday, but we
know that it will not be minus 50 degrees.
In other words, Sept. 11 was the historical equivalent of a violent and
unpredictable storm. But the storm did not alter the fact that summer was
slowly shading into fall. In just the same way, the attacks on New York and
Washington, however shocking, did not alter the direction of several
underlying historical trends. In many respects the world will not be so very
different in 2011 from the world as it would have evolved under the influence
of those trends, even had the attacks not happened.
The first deep trend is obvious enough: the spread of terrorism -- that is to
say the use of violence by nonstate organizations in the pursuit of extreme
political goals -- to the United States. This kind of terrorism has been around
for quite a while. Hijacking planes is certainly not new: since the late 1960's,
when the tactic first began to be used systematically by the Palestine
Liberation Organization and its sympathizers, there have been some 500
hijackings. As for the tactic of flying planes directly at populous targets, what
else were the 3,913 Japanese pilots doing who killed themselves and many
more American servicemen flying kamikaze missions in 1944 and 1945?
All that was really new on Sept. 11 was that these tried-and-tested tactics
were applied in combination and in the United States. Between 1995 and
2000, according to State Department figures, there were more than 2,100
international terrorist attacks. But just 15 of them occurred in North
America, causing just seven casualties. It was the successful extension of
international terrorism to the United States that was the novelty.
A novelty, yes, but hardly a surprise. Terrorism had been a fact of life in
major cities around the world -- including New York's elder sister London
-- for decades. The only surprising thing was that New York was spared for
so long. Put it this way: if economics could be globalized, why not political
violence? The two are in fact connected. Year after year it becomes easier
for small bands of fanatics to perpetrate mass destruction because the means
of destruction get cheaper and more readily available. The last time I
checked, a used AK-47 assault rifle could be purchased in the United States
for $700 and a new one for $1,395, almost exactly the price of the portable
computer on which this article was written.
In the same way, the real cost of a nuclear warhead -- and certainly the real
cost of a kiloton of nuclear yield -- is lower today than at any time since the
Manhattan Project achieved its goal. That cost two billion 1945 dollars.
Converted into 2001 prices, that figure rises roughly tenfold, which is enough
to buy more than 400 Trident II missiles. (Let's face it: if nukes were
expensive, Pakistan wouldn't have them.) It seems reasonable to assume that
the same process has reduced the cost of biological weapons like refined
anthrax.
The bad news is that no amount of warfare against the states that harbor
terrorists will rule out further attacks. The Western European experience of
combating leftist and nationalist terrorism shows that the real war against
terrorism has to be fought on the home front by domestic intelligence
agencies, police forces and humdrum security guards around all potential
targets.
So, welcome to the world of the daily security check, the fortnightly bomb
scare and the annual explosion. Ten years from now, New York firefighters
and Washington postal workers will feel the same weary resignation that
Londoners developed during the I.R.A.'s bombing campaign.
The second trend that Sept. 11 did nothing to change is the economic
downturn. The asset bubble of the late 1990's peaked a year and a half
before the terrorists struck. And despite their proximity to Wall Street, the
real crashes of Sept. 11 did not cause a metaphorical crash on the stock
market -- just its temporary closure.
Admittedly, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, investors had to grit
their teeth as prices threatened to go into free fall. Yet so far, the deflation of
the late 1990's asset price bubble has been a gentle affair compared with the
cataclysmic meltdown that followed the bubble of the 1920's. To give some
orders of magnitude, a crash on the 1929-32 scale would take the Dow
down from over 11,723 -- where it stood at its peak in January last year --
to about 1,266 by November next year. On Nov. 15, it stood at 9,872, less
than 3 percent down from Sept. 10. When Alan Greenspan coined the
phrase ''irrational exuberance,'' the index was 6,473. In this light, the most
striking thing about the economic consequences of Sept. 11 would seem to
be their insignificance. A 3 percent drop in the Dow is nothing. Oil prices,
too, have continued their yearlong decline. And there has been virtually no
movement in long-term interest rates, which might have been expected at a
time of increased political risk.
Nevertheless, the world economy has two serious economic weaknesses --
also predating Sept. 11 -- that cannot be ignored.
The first is the nonglobal nature of globalization. Far from being perfectly
integrated, the world's markets for goods, capital and labor appear to have
become remarkably segmented. Thus, the overwhelming bulk of American,
Canadian and Mexican trade now takes place within the North American
Free Trade Area, just as most European trade takes place within Europe.
Back in 1913, international capital was truly international: about 63 percent
of foreign direct investment in 1913 went to developing countries. But in
1996, the proportion was just 28 percent. Labor mobility is also distorted,
with the United States able to cherry-pick the best-qualified and
most-talented workers from European and Asian economies under its
various visa programs while letting in many more unskilled (and untaxed)
Latino workers through the Mexican back door.
This is one key reason that the process we call globalization has tended to
result in widening inequality between nations. In the 1960's, the richest fifth of
the world's population had a total income 30 times as great as the poorest
fifth's; in 1998, the ratio was 74:1. In 1965, real gross domestic product per
capita in Chad was one-fifteenth of the U.S.'s ; in 1990, one-fiftieth. If there
was a substantial measure of convergence of incomes during the first age of
globalization, in this age there is a pronounced divergence. And such
inequality seems likely to increase the resentment felt in poorer countries
toward the super-rich United States. (That said, we should not make the
mistake of assuming that this poverty is the principal cause of support for
organizations like Al Qaeda, most of whose recruits come from relatively
prosperous backgrounds.)
Even more worrying is the medium-term outlook for global energy supplies.
The rise of the S.U.V. as a status symbol shows how complacent Americans
are about their supply of oil and petroleum. They should not be. True, oil
prices are low right now: a barrel of West Texas crude sells for about $20,
less than half the price (in real terms) as at the peak of the oil crisis in 1982.
But what made prices go through the roof in the 1970's and early 1980's
was political instability in the Middle East: the anti-Israel Arab oil embargo,
the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war. It's no great stretch to imagine
something similar happening again. (Even the demand-side shock of the
recent U.S. boom trebled the oil price between December 1998 and
October 2000's $33 peak.)
The realities are stark. The Middle East accounts for 31 percent of world oil
production but just 6 percent of consumption. North America accounts for
about 18 percent of world oil production but consumes 30 percent. Even
more sobering, however, are the figures for world oil reserves: North
America has just 6 percent of them; the Middle East 65 percent.
Feeling comfortable? Total U.S. energy consumption -- of which petroleum
accounts for about two-fifths -- has risen about 27 percent since 1972, while
oil reserves have fallen by about 30 percent. Right now, the United States
depends on the Persian Gulf -- mainly Saudi Arabia -- for about 12 percent
of its oil imports, but that figure is bound to rise as OPEC countries account
for an ever-increasing share of the world's available oil.
The time frame may be much tighter than S.U.V. manufacturers realize.
Kenneth S. Deffeyes of Princeton University predicts that global oil
production will start to decline from 2004. At a conference at the Royal
United Services Institute in London in October, experts warned that from
2008 supplies of non-OPEC oil will fall steeply -- reaching close to zero in
2040 -- and that, barring some major technological breakthroughs, there will
be an effective world shortage from 2010.
Yet even that estimate could prove to be overoptimistic if there is a regime
change in Saudi Arabia. Like ''the coming oil crisis,'' the fall of the Saudi
monarchy has been prophesied so often that many people have stopped
believing it could ever happen. Don't be so sure. The position of the ruling
dynasty increasingly resembles that of the shah of Iran in the late 1970's.
Low oil prices may have been good for the West, but they have produced a
significant fall in per capita income in Saudi Arabia, creating a reserve army
of disenchanted young men who are the natural recruits of Al Qaeda.
Make no mistake: radical Islam -- especially the Wahhabist strain found in
Saudi Arabia -- is a revolutionary movement that has set the Middle East
ablaze before now (in the 1880's for example, when a Sudanese holy man
calling himself the ''Mahdi,'' or ''expected guide,'' emerged as the Victorian
Osama bin Laden). A revolution in Saudi Arabia would be as traumatic a
blow to the world economy as the Iranian revolution of 1979.
The days of the S.U.V. -- perhaps even the days of the internal-combustion
engine -- are therefore numbered. American car manufacturers have less
than a decade to come up with an alternative and affordable energy source
to gasoline. If they fail, the world economy could well find itself reliving the
stagflation of the 1970's.
There is a third trend that has been at work for more than a decade: the
transition of American global power from informal to formal imperialism.
Since 1945, the United States has largely been content to exercise influence
around the world indirectly: exercising economic leverage through
multinational corporations and international agencies like the International
Monetary Fund and political power through ''friendly'' indigenous regimes.
As Britain discovered in the 19th century, however, there are limits to what
can be achieved by informal imperialism. Revolutions can overthrow the
puppet rulers. New regimes can default on their debts, disrupt trade, go to
war with their neighbors -- even sponsor terrorism.
Slowly and rather unreflectively, the United States has been responding to
crises of this sort by intervening directly in the internal affairs of faraway
countries. True, it has tended to do so behind a veil of multilateralism, acting
in the name of the United Nations or NATO. But the precedents set in
Bosnia and Kosovo are crucial. What happened in the 1990's was that those
territories became a new kind of colony: international protectorates
underwritten by U.S. military and monetary might.
Since the United States and Britain went to war against Afghanistan -- with
the avowed intention of replacing the Taliban regime -- I have found myself
quoting Rudyard Kipling on ''the White Man's Burden,'' particularly those
lines (written just over a century ago) that enjoined Americans to fight what
he called ''the savage wars of peace'' while at the same time filling ''full the
mouth of Famine.'' (Kipling would certainly have grasped the rationale of
simultaneously dropping cluster bombs and food parcels.) Of course, no one
today would be so politically incorrect as to call governing Afghanistan ''the
White Man's Burden.'' Even in his messianic speech at the Labor Party
conference in October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked innocuously
about ''partnership,'' ''the politics of globalization'' and ''reordering this
world.'' Yet the underlying message of that speech was pure Kipling.
There are good reasons to wonder how readily Americans will assume the
Victorian burden, of course. The strengths of the U.S. economy may not be
the strengths of a natural imperial hegemon. The British Empire relied on an
enormous export of capital and people, but since 1972 the American
economy has been a net importer of capital (to the tune of 15 percent of
G.D.P. last year), and the United States remains the favored destination of
immigrants from around the world, not a producer of would-be colonial
emigrants. Moreover, Britain in its heyday was able to draw on a culture of
unabashed imperialism dating back to the Elizabethan period. The United
States -- born in a war against the British Empire -- will always be a
reluctant ruler of other peoples.
But reluctance isn't the same as renunciation. And the obvious lesson the
United States can draw from the British experience of formal empire is that
the world's most successful economy can do a very great deal to impose its
preferred values on less technologically advanced societies. It is nothing short
of astonishing that Great Britain was able to govern about a quarter of the
world's population and land surface -- and to control nearly all of its sea
lanes -- without running up an especially large defense bill (an average of just
3 percent of net national product between 1870 and 1913, lower for the rest
of the 19th century). And today the United States is vastly wealthier relative
to the rest of the world than Britain ever was. In 1913, Britain's share of total
world output was a shade over 8 percent; the equivalent figure for the United
States in 1998 was just under 22 percent. Nor should anybody pretend that,
at least in fiscal terms, the cost of expanding the American empire -- even if it
meant a great many little wars like the one in Afghanistan -- would be
prohibitive. Last year, American defense spending stood at just 2.9 percent
of G.D.P., compared with an average for the years 1948-98 of 6.8 percent.
I have not yet raised one trend, much commented on -- the supposedly
inescapable ''clash'' between a democratic West and an intolerant Islam.
From this viewpoint, Sept. 11 was a moment of revelation rather than
redirection, as America belatedly woke up to a struggle the Muslim world
has been fighting for years. I don't buy this.
Primarily that's because the most striking features of modern Islam are its
amazing heterogeneity and geographical dispersion. Violence between ethnic
or religious groups is not dividing the world into great blocs. As we have
already seen in the Balkans (where we were inclined to side with the
Muslims, don't forget), the tendency is for existing political units to fragment.
So any clash of civilizations will occur not on conventional battlefields but in
the streets of multicultural states like Bosnia -- or even cities like Bradford in
England, where gangs of Muslim youths rioted last summer.
Think of it as deglobalization: for one of the great paradoxes of our time is
that the economic integration of the world has coincided with its political
disintegration. Excluding sub-Saharan Africa, there were 64 independent
countries in the world in 1871. Forty-three years later, on the eve of World
War I, imperialism had reduced the number to 59. But since World War II,
there have been sustained increases. In 1946, there were 74 independent
countries; in 1950, 89. By 1995, the number was 192.
In this context, the main significance of movements like Islamic
fundamentalism may lie in their centrifugal as opposed to centripetal effects.
Rather than anticipating a clash between monolithic civilizations, we should
expect a continued process of political disintegration as religious and ethnic
conflicts challenge the integrity of existing multicultural nation-states. Civil war
has, after all, been the most frequent kind of war since 1945: something like
two-thirds of all postwar conflicts have been within rather than between
states. From Yugoslavia to Iraq to Afghanistan, what the United States
keeps having to confront is not a united Islam but a succession of fractured
polities, racked by internecine war. (The same could be said about Somalia,
Sierra Leone and Rwanda.)
Why has economic globalization coincided with political fragmentation in this
contradictory fashion? One possible answer is that globalized market forces
increase regional inequalities within traditional nation-states. Another is that
the superficial homogenization of popular culture -- through Hollywood, the
pop-music industry and the Anglicization of technical communication --
promotes an accentuation of parochial identities as a kind of a reaction. But
the best answer may be that as more and more ethnically heterogeneous
countries adopt (with American encouragement) the combination of
economic openness and political democracy, their rationale simply falls
away. Central government loses its legitimacy as the planner of the economy,
and ethnic minorities vote for separatist parties.
These, then, are the four deep trends shaping the early 21st century. First,
the globalization of terrorism. Second, the approach of a second energy
crisis. Third, the formalization of American imperialism. And finally, the
fragmentation of the multicultural polity.
What are the implications for the world of Sept. 11, 2011? With the caveat
that this is only one of a number of possible futures, let me repeat my earlier
predictions. Terrorism will be a part of everyday life. Meanwhile, American
troops will be patrolling both Kabul and Kosovo. And the divisions between
ethnic and religious groups in the United States -- indeed throughout the
world -- will be even more pronounced. So much for the bad news. The
good news? There will be fewer S.U.V.'s clogging up the streets.
Let me conclude with a fifth prediction. Most people will regard all of these
things as direct consequences of the terrorist attacks 10 years before.
Indeed, The New York Times Magazine will carry an article saying that
Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the great turning points of modern history.
Wrong. The unpalatable truth is that it would all have happened anyway.
nytimes.com
Niall Ferguson is a professor of political and financial history at the
University of Oxford. He is the author of ''The Cash Nexus'' and a
contributor to ''The Age of Terror,'' to be published this month by Basic
Books. |
