A History of the World (88 page)

Jihad

If American leaders had been told during the 1970s that they would win the Cold War only to find their next big problem overseas would be wars of religion, they would probably have laughed in nervous disbelief. Some might have guessed this was a reference to Israel. After the Nazi murder of the six million, US backing for a Jewish homeland state in Palestine had been decisive – but also provocative. The outrage of dispossessed Muslim Arabs after 1948, and their supporters in the Middle East, had failed to prevent a strong Israeli state develop, a kind of fortress-state with American backing. But this, plus the West’s reliance on Middle Eastern oil, and therefore on undemocratic but pro-Western regimes, made America hated by many Muslims. During the long fight with the Soviets, this barely seemed to matter. The Islamic world was militarily and economically weak – and still is. Whenever Israel was attacked, it easily repulsed its foes. Terrorist hijackings were pinpricks. Weren’t they?

Looking back, the first ominous sign had come as early as January 1979 in Iran, when a coup against the repressive, Western-backed Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi ushered in an Islamic revolution. The Americans were humiliated. It soon became clear that after so long concentrating on the Soviet threat, Western governments had proved spectacularly inept at dealing with resurgent Islamism. In the eight-year conflict between the two rivals that began in 1980 and resulted in around a million deaths, the US and her allies decided that, on balance,
they preferred the sordid dictatorship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. The doctrine of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ has rarely been so dramatically disproven. Two years after the end of his war with Iran, and heavily in debt, Saddam invaded the small oil-rich state of Kuwait. Americans, British troops and others were forced to go to war to turf him out again – but, foolishly respecting UN resolutions, did not carry on to his capital Baghdad and remove him from power.

Yet this embarrassment was topped by the Western mistakes in Afghanistan. As we have seen, the US responded to the Russian invasion of 1978–9 by backing extreme Islamist groups, including from Saudi Arabia, in their decade-long guerrilla campaign against the Russian army. By doing so America bolstered and fomented wider Islamist militancy, represented by the severely repressive Taliban in Afghanistan and by the worldwide jihadists of al Qaeda. This terror organization was formed in 1988 and led by Osama bin Laden, the son of a Saudi construction tycoon with a burning hatred of Westerners. Bin Laden had wanted the Saudi government to use his guerrillas against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and was furious that a Muslim country should have preferred the help of infidel Americans. Bin Laden moved to Sudan and then Afghanistan, making little secret of his hopes for a general anti-American campaign.

It was as if Washington could not take quite seriously a threat posed by religiously inspired enemies. This was particularly odd given that US support for Israel was itself a religious cause, passionately promoted not only by American Jews but very many evangelical American Christians. The contempt for American materialism shown by Muslim radicals was answered by Christian contempt for backward Islam. Meanwhile, Israel’s border wars made her enemies throughout Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt. One of bin Laden’s key rallying points for Muslim extremists was the liberation of Palestine and the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, an ambition also of Iran’s. In the Islamist mind, the US and Israel were inextricably linked, while the West was fundamentally hostile to Muslims. Part of the evidence for this had come from the breakup of Yugoslavia into smaller states, including predominantly Muslim Bosnia and Herzegovina, and insisting on their ancient differences. This led to horrible scenes that reminded many Americans, and Europeans too, of Nazi genocide.

The look on President George W. Bush’s face when he was told of the al Qaeda attacks on the ‘twin towers’ of the New York World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 was a defining image: the world’s last superpower hearing that history had not ended, after all. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, which killed nearly three thousand people there and in Virginia and Pennsylvania, had been meticulously planned and carried out. They provoked a surge of patriotic anger and defiance in the United States. A swift military campaign by the US and her allies in Afghanistan, where bin Laden and his organization were based, toppled the Taliban regime which had been harbouring them. This began a long war, still not over, in which the West and its local allies tried, and failed, to subdue Afghani resistance and create a democratic state. The corruption and unpopularity of the Kabul regime and the ability of Taliban fighters to withdraw across the border to Pakistan have made this an impossible war for the Americans and Europeans to win, even though bin Laden himself was finally hunted down inside Pakistan, and killed, in 2011.

Significant, too, was the decision by President Bush and allies led by Britain’s Tony Blair to invade Iraq for failing to abide by UN resolutions on disarmament. Blair had faced large anti-war protests, while allies such as France protested hotly against invasion. It later became clear that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and Blair had said he did; and that he may have miscalculated in deciding that he would be safer if they thought he did have them. At all events, a huge bombardment of Baghdad began in March 2003, leading to a swift military victory against Saddam’s army. Saddam, once Washington’s least-bad friend, was eventually tracked down and hanged. Rarely has success on the battlefield, however, led to such a difficult aftermath. Widespread disorder, followed by a vicious civil war, kept US, British and other troops in Iraq in large numbers until 2011. Appalling abuse of prisoners, the inability of the Coalition to damp down sectarian violence, and a chaotic refugee crisis, undermined much of the moral authority Western forces had claimed at the start of the conflict. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths have ranged widely, from more than 600,000 to around 150,000.

The Afghan and Iraq wars had been battlefield successes but strategic failures. They reminded the world that not even the most
apparently dominant superpower can do whatever it wants; and that invading somebody else’s culture (as well as their land) to impose democracy is a risky idea. It had worked with West Germany and Japan after the Second World War, but that was in countries that had had some prior democratic experience and had been militarily devastated after global conflict. They were also more worried about the threat of Soviet hegemony than American. More generally, the Afghan and Iraq experiences challenged the idea that the whole world was converging on a single political-economic system, or could do.

Instead of the end of history, more was heard about culture wars, or clashes of ‘civilization’, including religion. In parts of the West with large Muslim populations, such as England, Holland and France, a new edge of suspicion was detectable. In parts of the Muslim world such as Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt (even after the overthrow of its dictator Mubarak) that had Christian populations, these minorities felt more threatened. With the US opening a large and secretive detention centre for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, deploying torture and introducing fiercer security legislation, it became clear how badly the ‘war on terror’ had damaged open societies – and their highest ideals, too. Dilemmas about how to deal with dangerous Islamist critics returned the West to problems raised, but never solved, by the trial of Socrates in ancient Athens.

Splurge

Had the West at least continued to dominate economically, that would have been something. But by 2009, the People’s Republic of China was contributing more than half of the world’s economic growth. China today is doing nothing new. It is going through the shift from country to city, into basic manufacturing and thence to more sophisticated manufacturing, that happened to Britain and the eastern US in the first industrial revolution, and to Japan, Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War. The grim working conditions in the factories, the raucous enjoyment of material plenty by the winners in the cities, and a certain recklessness about pollution as the country goes for growth at all costs, have all been seen before. This is a familiar trading-up. Only three things are different. First, China is run by men who call
themselves Communists. Second, China is very big. Third, all this is happening at warp speed.

By the year 2025, China is expected to have 219 cities of more than a million, compared with thirty-five in Europe.
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Its growth has affected almost every part of the globe. China is gorging on minerals and land in Africa, Mongolia, Latin America and Australia. Its low-cost manufacturing has given the West a glut of cheap goods, helping destroy manufacturing businesses here. As a consequence, it has a vast chest of foreign exchange which, the writer Jonathan Fenby points out, ‘could buy the whole of Italy, or all the sovereign debt of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain as of 2011, plus Google, Apple, IBM and Microsoft plus all the real estate in Manhattan and Washington DC, plus the world’s fifty most valuable sports franchises’.
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In 2010 China ran a $273 billion trade surplus with the US. There has never been a significant instance in history of an underlying economic power not mutating into political, and generally military, power. Countries can maintain a previous dominance with a swollen and technically advanced military for quite some time after their economic advantage has slipped. Britain did it in the early twentieth century. America is doing so now. But it comes at a high cost: energy and treasure that could have been used to recharge an economy are being spent on overseas commitments. The American economy is still four times larger than China’s, but Chinese growth rates are shrinking the gap at an impressive pace. Recent studies suggest China may overtake the US by 2020, and thirty years later might have an economy twice the size of America’s.
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So China’s power will change the world hugely. Chinese leaders still claim sovereignty over Taiwan, as well as small islands in the South China Sea, and refuse to acknowledge protests about human rights abuses at home, or in Tibet. The growing size of the Chinese navy has produced a ripple of unease around the region, from Australia and the Philippines to Vietnam and India. China’s Communist rulers, no longer presenting quite such a united front as they once did, face their biggest problems at home, dealing with the need for constant high growth to keep a more assertive and consumer-minded population content, with challenges to official censorship, with pollution threats, and with the difficulties of diversifying their economy. They proclaim their peaceful intentions. But economic power brings
political power. It always has; and as the Chinese sovereign wealth funds probe deeper into Western corporate life, Americans and Europeans are uneasily aware of how little they know about where the Chinese government ends and Chinese business begins.

China is also a key part of the great capitalist imbalance that followed the Cold War. The West relaxed. It makes too little and spends too much, a process greatly aided by China’s deliberate undervaluing of its currency. The fragility of Western capitalism today was first shown up by a banking crisis in 2008, in essence not much different from that of 1929. Then, as before, bankers had been using novel and little-understood ways of lending more money, including to house-buyers who were gambling on prices rising so they could pay off their debts. Complex algorithms used to measure risk meant that only a very small number of people, even in the relevant banks, understood what they were doing. This might have carried on for a long time in periods of ever-upward growth, but despite important new revenue-producing electronic products, the boom did not reflect underlying economic strength. America was buying cheap goods from China and living, in effect, on Chinese credit.

When in 2007 the US housing bubble burst, many banks found they were sitting on assets such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) worth nothing like their assumed value. Some big companies went bust, and a wave of failure swept the US and Europe, leading to costly bail-outs of banks by Britain, Ireland and the US. Only fast action by leading governments staved off a sharp and general recession, though the West was plunged into a period of low, or no, growth, and political leaders lost much authority.

So they should have done; for behind the crisis was a failure of political gumption. In the United States and in European countries, notably Britain, the tycoons of a deregulated financial world had intimidated everyone else. Old safeguards separating traditional banking from riskier forms of investment banking had gone. Regulation was ‘light-touch’. Bankers were paid astronomical salaries and bonuses, without much comment. Politicians seemed content to take the taxes a rampant financial sector offered, spend them on things electorates wanted, and not ask too many questions. Meanwhile, Western economies were looking unbalanced. There was much less manufacturing.

Both governments and private individuals had learned to ramp up debt, to spend now and pay later. Economic policy had virtually vanished from political debate. So once the good times ended, there came a period of reckoning and anguish. In the US, among Republicans, this led to a revival of aggressively anti-state free-market rhetoric. In Europe, entire countries tottered on the edge of bankruptcy, and of falling out of the euro. There were riots in Athens, London and Madrid; there were protests on Wall Street. None of it felt like the victory of the West.

Thus Cold War triumph, which had had Washington cavorting with delight at the new ‘unipolar’ world (a concept not known to geometry, never mind politics), was followed by a stinging political hangover. The West’s economic dominance was slipping away to China. The fashionable form of Wall Street capitalism was having a nervous breakdown. And far from there being no new enemies, the US and her allies were confronted around the world by adherents of an ancient religion who seemed to reject the entire project of modernity as it had developed in the twentieth century, but who could not be destroyed on the battlefield.