A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (25 page)

Around 2035 or 2040, the Alliance will realize that it lacks the means to maintain its domination of the mercantile order. Financially and morally exhausted by these
conflicts, faced with the same dilemmas as the Roman Empire at the beginning of our era, member countries will then form the polycentric order and change strategy. The Alliance will no longer concern itself with the rest of the world. It will reduce its energy and financial dependence, inaugurate a policy of protectionism, circle its wagons, and limit its defense to the protection of its interests in the narrowest sense. It will try to put in place a shield over its territory to monitor and destroy any weapon or hijacked aircraft attempting to touch its soil. Higher and higher walls will be built against pirates, just like the wall now protecting and isolating Israel from terrorist attacks. For example, the Alliance will deem it essential to master the situation in the western and eastern Mediterranean, usually at the request of the countries concerned. To fly to the countries of the Alliance, people will have to supply detailed information on their lives — and perhaps leave possessions or loved ones behind as security, or as hostages.

Here again, and once again, cutting-edge technologies of market democracy — those of hypersurveil-lance — will participate in setting up the sinews of war and the police.

Even so, there will be no guarantee of success. Neither markets nor democracies nor pirates can be kept down forever.

Some, in Europe or elsewhere, will then propose ceasing to defend themselves, reducing military budgets,
disarming unilaterally, and collaborating with whoever is the enemy. We shall witness the birth of these denuclearized, pacifist, and passive postnational states, already the dream of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, among many others.

Others, anxious to keep the peace without submitting, will try to give proof of diplomatic imagination. The United Nations will attempt to implement the procedures enshrined in its charter for negotiation, conflict prevention, and dissuasion. So that questions in litigation may be treated in a more confidential way, discreet conflict-prevention bodies will multiply, on the lines of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) or the Community of Sant’Egidio, a discreet and efficient Catholic organization. The latter is connected to the Carter Center, where the former U.S. president has run it remarkably well for over twenty years. A more recent initiative still is that of another former president, Bill Clinton. The role of these ad hoc institutions and specialist relational enterprises will be to detect in advance the sources of conflict and areas of tension, to try to broker agreements between the potential belligerents and ensure they are respected. To do this, they will have to benefit from considerable observation, surveillance, analysis, and prevention capabilities. They must also have enough influence for the agreements reached under their guidance to be respected. We shall encounter them again, in the following wave of the future, as an essential factor for peace.

To avoid war, the market democracies will also try to extend the blessings of freedom to those who might become their enemies. They will help still uncertain
countries to join their ranks, in other words to set up the separation of religious and secular powers, to rid themselves of terrorist militias, and lay the foundations for a market economy. Such goals are generally illusory, as is borne out by what is happening in Afghanistan today (a narco-state where the drug trade represents nine-tenths of wealth produced) or in Iraq (where chaos still reigns), unless accompanied by an effective civil society — which can only come from the society itself.

Those who reject such an evolution toward democracy will remain aggressive and will be treated as such by the market democracies.

Faced with permanently aggressive states, dissuasion will always be necessary and its absence always disastrous. In October 1936, confronted by the remilitarization of the Ruhr by Nazi troops, Lord Halifax and Léon Blum failed to react — and war followed. In October 1962, following the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba and their rejection by the Kennedy brothers, peace remained unbroken. At the beginning of the eighties, then French president François Mitterrand supported the installation of American rockets in Europe, thus helping to dispel the Soviet threat.

Similarly, both today and tomorrow, those who wish to live free in market democracies will be unable to accept the presence, directly confronting them, of offensive weapons controlled by groups openly calling for their destruction.

No one will be safe from weapons at first aimed at other targets. Now pointed at Japan, North Korea’s missiles will one day target the United States and China. The missiles of a Pakistan fallen into the hands of fundamentalists will threaten first India, then Europe. Those of Hezbollah — in other words Iran — that now target Israel will one day be pointed (from Beirut or Tehran) at Cairo, Riyadh, Algiers, Tunis, Casablanca, Istanbul, then at Rome, Madrid, London, and Paris. Should the battle lines harden and the country be threatened with annihilation, China’s missiles could one day target Japan and the United States.

Democracies must not let themselves be impressed by such threats. If, out of fear of reprisals, they accept the permanent targeting of their countries by Iranian, Pakistani, or Korean missiles, they will be entering a fool’s game, like that played by France and Great Britain in 1936, then in 1938 at Munich. And the stakes will be even higher, for these weapons could be launched from fifteen different sites by fifteen different dictatorial regimes and at different targets. To eliminate them, the Alliance must first threaten the regimes concerned with preventive action, make clear its own strike capabilities, and intimidate its enemies into backing down. If this is not enough to make the threats disappear, it must strike.

No dissuasion will be possible against pirates, because they will have no territory to defend. Yielding to them
in one place will not suffice to calm them. Mafias would not be satisfied with control of Colombia or Afghanistan; Islamic extremists would not stop at the destruction of Israel, nor with American withdrawal from Iraq or Saudi Arabia.

Against pirates, only preventive attack will suffice. The Alliance and every one of its members must therefore prepare to launch preventive war on those of the pirates (or on those of the nations where they have sought refuge) who threaten to use their weapons in the service of a faith, of a secular ambition, or in the search for criminal profit. To justify such a preventive war, the Alliance must not dream up bellicose intentions on the part of its adversary, nor take as an excuse imaginary weapons of mass destruction, as was the case with the war against Iraq in 2003. The Alliance cannot found its foreign policy on human rights yet violate them daily. But at some point in this century it may have to do so.

Optimists will say that this saber-rattling should not be taken too seriously. A country, or a nonstate entity, that achieves nuclear-power status or possesses extremely murderous weapons will of necessity turn reasonable. The best proof of this is that all those that have disclosed (officially or unofficially) their possession of such arsenals have so far indeed turned “reasonable.”

The optimists are partly right. Democracies, where power is controlled by public opinion, or totalitarian regimes that have suffered painfully from war, will never make offensive use of these weapons. But the higher the number of players in the strategic game, the higher the number of those urged on by madmen or by those for
whom death (of others, including their own troops) will not count. Then the chances of seeing these arms used will rise.

So the world will live increasingly haunted by fear of nuclear annihilation, of miniaturized war, of suicidal war. It is true that four kinds of conflict will erupt before hyperconflict: wars triggered by scarcity, frontier wars, wars for influence, wars between pirates and sedentaries.

Just as wars have been fought over coal and iron, so they will be fought for petroleum and rare materials. First (and as it has been for a century), the need for a steady petroleum supply will provoke a number of conflicts as its extraction becomes costlier and more difficult. The United States, which consumes a quarter of the world’s oil (with nearly two-thirds of it coming from abroad), will be determined to retain control of its sources of supply. It will want to go on controlling Saudi Arabia and Iraq; it will also want to recover control of Iran to prevent a blocking of the Strait of Ormuz, which would deprive the planet of a fifth of world production and drive the cost of a barrel of oil skyward. The American presence in the Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will be substantially reinforced, at once to monitor what is happening in Iran and to prevent China from laying hands on the region. The United States will exercise more and more control over the Gulf of Mexico and ensure that Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela at least have compliant leaders. Conflicts could also flare,
based on the petroleum pretext, in Central Asia between China and Russia, between the United States and China, between Turkey and Iran. Kazakhstan will step forward as an arbiter and as a regional power. The other major consumer countries (the European Union, Japan, China, and India) will also want to retain access to the oilfields of the Middle East, Russia, Africa, and Central Asia, as well as control of the zones through which this oil reaches the sea.

On Russia’s borders (a zone crisscrossed by pipelines), pitiless civil wars (often financed by rival oil companies) will ravage these transit regions.

For the same reasons, Venezuela, Nigeria, Congo, and Indonesia, whose oilfields will one day be exhausted without their even having time to build modern economies around them, could also become (or become again) conflict zones.

Finally, the maritime areas (where future major fields will be found and where fleets of tankers will transit) will be so many sites of possible clashes.

Drinking water — rarer and rarer, as we have seen — will also provoke increasingly significant wars. In the last fifty years, thirty-seven conflicts have been waged over it, always on a local scale. This can only repeat itself: 145 nations have a part of their territory situated over a transborder water basin; around a third of the 263 transborder basins are shared by more than two countries; nineteen basins involve at least five countries. Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay are competing for the world’s third-largest underground freshwater reserve, the Guarani basin. The Danube basin is shared by eighteen nations: the periodic Balkan crises
are partly rooted in this region. Tomorrow, when drinking water starts to run short, these battles will become much more violent. India, short of water, might contemplate diverting the three biggest rivers born there, which now enter the sea in Bangladesh. If Lebanon installs pumps on the El Ouazzane watercourse, a tributary of the Jordan feeding the Sea of Galilee and currently supplying Israel with a third of its drinking water, conflict will surely ensue. Turkey’s plans to control the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers will worry Syria and Iraq. Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan will quarrel increasingly over the Amu Darya and Sir Darya rivers, essential to the intensive cultivation of cotton. Hydro-electric dams in China — where the Mekong River is born — will threaten Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Mexico and the United States will quarrel over the Colorado and Rio Grande. Senegal and Mauritania may fight one another over control of the Senegal River. Algeria, Libya, and Chad might also come to blows over exploitation of their rare transborder water layers. Albania, Greece, and Macedonia risk entering into conflict for the same reasons. Finally — and above all — ten states share the waters of the Nile: Ethiopia, upstream, which supplies 86 percent of the flow and uses only 0.3 percent of it, intends to build thirty-six dams. This would partly desiccate Egypt, in all likelihood provoking an immediate conflict.

Finally, climatic disturbances will ignite wars over occupation of lands that have remained or become breathable and cultivatable. Siberia, Morocco, Algeria,
and southern Spain could become battlefields between natives and immigrants.

Several countries could well fight their neighbors in order to reunite populations, such as India and Pakistan over control of Kashmir, and between very many countries of sub-Saharan Africa in order to bring ethnic groups together.

Others will also try to destroy a neighbor. Several Arab countries still want to liquidate the Jewish state — which must therefore win every war against them on pain of annihilation. Diehards in the region will in any case unleash hostilities as soon as a peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors is announced.

The victory of democracy will also give birth to new conflicts within nations — either to challenge domination by one ethnic group, to provoke secession, or to avoid it. Today, more than forty conflicts of this kind are going on in twenty-seven countries. Some of them have dragged on for decades, most of them in Africa and Asia. The struggles ravaging Côte d’Ivoire, Darfur, Kashmir, Congo, and Sri Lanka are the most murderous of them. Congo long since surpassed a death toll of three million.

If these nations cannot organize their acts of partition in a spirit of calm, as the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia did in 1992, the world will be headed toward civil wars that will end with the creation of new states,
as in India and Yugoslavia, or in widespread ruin, as in Rwanda, Transnistria, Somaliland, Côte d’Ivoire, or Ethiopia. Conflicts of this kind could erupt in Congo, Russia, and Central Asia (between Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, and Iran), in Senegal, India, China, Indonesia. and the Philippines. Probably the worst of these clashes will be that opposing Ibos and Hausas in Nigeria.

Other conflicts of this same kind could take place between various groups within the bosom of developed countries. Even cities will proclaim secession; ethnic or linguistic minorities will demand independence. The partitioning of territories will go badly.