The Yikes Years

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54962-2004Nov16?language=printer>

The Washington Post

washingtonpost.com
The Yikes Years
Life as the world's lone superpower is beginning to make the Cold War look easy

 By David Von Drehle

 Sunday, November 21, 2004; Page W16

 The Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak observed that "history
cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing." Which was an
interesting assertion from a man who saw, among other clearly historic
events, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Bolsheviks, the Stalinist
terror and World War II.

But let's work with Boris a little. No doubt he was correct in the sense
that history sort of sneaks up on us. Day after day, stuff happens, and
some of it is strange, some is unsettling, some is stirring, some is
portentous. But we don't often know, in real time, whether these various
happenings are adding up to anything meaningful enough to be called
"history."

Yet there comes a day when you look out the window and notice that the lawn
is extremely shaggy. You may not have seen the grass growing, but suddenly
it's so high you can no longer find the dog's chew toys or the baseball
glove you asked your kid 400 times to put away. And then it rains for three
straight days and you realize there is no way your lawn mower can get
through the sopping wet, jungle-thick morass without making a terrible mess
of the mower, the lawn, your shoes . . .

 Based on interviews with esteemed experts, the perusal of a stack of dense
tomes, a plodding trip through thousands of pages of knotty articles in
learned journals, plus the findings of assorted blue-ribbon federal
commissions and weeks of squint-eyed reflection, I can report that this is
precisely where America finds itself today.

We are up to our shins in the sloppy grass of history.

Maybe you have noticed. The past half-dozen years or so, strange things,
unsettling things, stirring things, portentous things have been happening
right and left. The decade of the 1990s danced in with such promise. No
more Cold War. No more Evil Empire. The Persian Gulf War required a mere
four days of land operations and seemed to spell the end of that gloomy,
doubt-America malaise widely known as the "Vietnam syndrome." For a moment,
it genuinely seemed that the most interesting question a president could
face was, "Boxers or briefs?"

Then:

February 1998. A bloodthirsty zealot with a billionaire father declared war
on America. Weird. From some cave or compound in Afghanistan, Osama bin
Laden dispatched a fatwa to a London newspaper announcing the sacred duty
of Muslims to kill Americans anywhere they could find us. Only a handful of
us even noticed. But this strange event turned out to be truly historic.
After all, how many rich fanatics have declared war on an entire country?

And how many, within six months, have managed to blow up two U.S. embassies?

Our elected leaders began making their own sort of history. On December 19,
1998, the designated speaker of the House, Louisiana congressman Bob
Livingston, marched onto the floor of Congress, announced he was quitting
on account of a sex scandal, and called on President Clinton to do
likewise. That certainly felt new. The rich guy in Afghanistan was trying
to have a war with us, but our government had painfully snagged on what we
were calling "zipper problems." Yet this wasn't even the biggest story of
the day, because Livingston's speech was a footnote to the fact that the
House impeached a president for only the second time in U.S. history.

Then bin Laden's troops bombed, and nearly sank, a U.S. Navy destroyer.

Then came a deadlocked presidential election, the first in more than a century.

All this played out against a backdrop of dazzling new technologies and
dizzying new wealth. Men and women barely out of college were making and
losing fortunes that might have turned John D. Rockefeller's head -- and
how? Strange, unsettling stuff: data harvesting, digital pet-food sales,
cooking the books.

And then, bin Laden brought his war to the American mainland. Hitler
couldn't get here. Brezhnev couldn't get here. But the radical Islamists
managed to hit us harder than we had been hit at home since the Civil War.

Followed by Afghanistan and Iraq. Some people have begun using the phrase
"World War IV." (No, you didn't miss one: WWIII is what used to be called
the Cold War.)

 Rogue states are developing nukes.

There's a plague decimating Africa.

The polar ice caps are melting.

It's no wonder our civic mood is grouchy. We are bombarded by banner
headlines, caught in CAPS LOCK mode, deluged with dire declarations. Tom
Wolfe dubbed the 1970s the Me Decade. We're living in the Yikes Years.

BACK IN THE SUNLIT ERA WHEN THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN, before all hell
broke loose, a theorist named Francis Fukuyama published an influential
essay announcing "The End of History." It was a highly philosophical piece
having to do with the ideological triumph of democracy and free markets,
but the catchy title took on a life of its own, coming to stand for the
ascendancy of the United States and its ideals.

 We're going to pay a visit to Fukuyama later in this article, and we'll
hear what he now has to say about history. For the moment, though, just try
to recall those days, when our leaders blithely wondered what to buy with
our "peace dividend" and how best to manage the "Pax Americana."

Some people actually felt a twinge of regret at Fukuyama's coinage. No more
history? What a drag! It was such an American response -- after all,
history had been good to us, nationally speaking. History gathered up
various scattered bands of religious outcasts, economic refugees and
insatiable colonists; history molded these elements into a nation; history
boosted that nation into the global driver's seat. Several years after
Fukuyama wrote his essay, a French leader, Hubert Vedrine, decided that the
word "superpower" wasn't enough for us anymore. America wasn't just
"super," America was "hyper," as in hyperpuissance, hyperpower. It sounded
like something out of a DC Comics futurama. The world had never seen our
equal -- a single nation dominating the globe militarily, economically,
culturally.

In those naive days, it seemed both a great relief and a slight shame to
think that Americans might be done with an era of true significance and
entering a time of uneventful sameness, that we might be embarking on a
tranquil but meaningless period that would eventually be boiled down to a
mere sentence or two in the history texts of our grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. Were we destined to share the fate of the citizens of
the Gilded Age, who apparently liked to argue over "free silver" while
riding bicycles with absurdly large front wheels?

Now we see there was no need to worry.

One last belaboring of Pasternak: It's clear now that the end of the Cold
War wasn't the end of grass; it was more like resodding the lawn. For a
while there, nothing seemed to be growing. But new roots were going down,
and once they took hold, the grass came back stronger and thicker than
before.

So, what does this all point to? What does it mean? Years from now, when a
virtual teacher downloads the history of our time into a microchip in our
great-grandchild's brain, what will the data say?

"History?" President Bush answered with a shrug when Bob Woodward asked him
how the future will view the Iraq war. "We don't know. We'll all be dead."
I've become curious, though, about where the strange and unnerving events
of recent years might be heading, and whether we can steer our course or
must simply ride irresistible currents. I wanted a hint as to how this
movie might end.

So while most Washington journalists were tracking each up and down of the
presidential campaign, I tried to look past this single election, and even
Bush's second term, toward the larger pattern of things. I began reading
books with titles like The Future of Freedom and The Clash of
Civilizations, magazines with names like Foreign Affairs and the National
Interest and Technology Review. I began e-mailing provocative young
scholars and sage older ones. I started paying visits to the offices of
learned women and men who are paid to ponder where America is and where it
is headed. I discovered that they tend to be concentrated along a stretch
of Massachusetts Avenue NW, which I came to refer to as "Big Think
Boulevard."

This is an intimidating world for a layperson to enter. The hushed hallways
and book-lined offices of Big Think Boulevard are home to a priesthood that
knows precisely the difference between "hegemony" and "empire," not to
mention the difference between entente and detente.

 I found that some of these thinkers fear we are living through the end of
the Western alliance, while others believe America's power is already
seeping away to China. I met thinkers who fret most about nuclear weapons
in the hands of terrorists and others who prefer to worry about the speed
at which our debtor nation is skidding toward fiscal crisis. You know
things are scary when you find a wistful note of nostalgia for the relative
stability of the Cold War creeping into the voices of level-headed people.

True, the brains of Big Think Boulevard have always shown a tendency to be
worrywarts, except for when they are overly optimistic. Through the years,
a visitor could have heard deep and earnest discussions along that street
of the domino theory (by which the communists would conquer the world), the
triumph of the German economy (which also did not happen) and the rise of
superpower Japan (ditto). But just because predicting the future is
difficult doesn't mean thinking about the future is pointless.

I found widespread agreement on at least two propositions:

First, that some very different sort of world is roaring up at us.

Second, that the history of our times will be the story of how we prepared
for this different world -- which, so far, is mostly a story of how we have
failed to prepare.

Yikes.

 A FORMER GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL, THINK-TANK STAR AND NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST,
Jessica Tuchman Mathews is now the president of a venerable outfit called
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The endowment occupies a
handsome eight-story building in a prime spot on Big Think Boulevard -- a
quietly elegant structure of glass and stone and wood, silent testimony to
the power of Andrew Carnegie's millions multiplied by nearly a century of
wise investment and compound interest. Human frailty being what it is,
Carnegie's original goal of eliminating war has been scaled back over the
years, and now the endowment is plenty busy just trying to keep wars from
going nuclear.

I was hoping that Mathews might be able to summarize why being a hyperpower
has turned out to be so unpleasant. Why, just a few years after the dawn of
a new American epoch, it sort of feels like a fast-fading twilight.

 "The past couple of years have shown us that the way we felt at the end of
the Cold War -- the dominance we felt in terms of military power, economic
power, so-called 'soft' cultural power -- was too facile," she began.
America's power is "not at all as clear as it seemed just four years ago.
Although we're spending approximately one-half of all the world's total
military expenditures, and our power on that plane is supreme, it is not
that usable against the enemies we now face."

She said this on a late-summer morning when Osama was still in his cave (or
wherever he might be) and the low-tech insurgency in Iraq was
metastasizing. So it was hard to argue with her assertion that certain foes
are not cowed by the most awesome conventional military the world has ever
seen. The United States has a fleet of nuclear submarines, every one of
which packs enough megatons to decimate a nation. We have 12 aircraft
carriers, every one of which totes more power than the entire air force of
virtually any other country. We have stockpiles of laser-guided bombs and
missiles that we can land on the proverbial dime. Yet we are flummoxed by
beheadings -- a technology from the days of Salome and John the Baptist.

As it happens, this is a common problem for global powers: Conventional
strength doesn't always succeed. The Romans had a similar experience with
the Huns. Or a more recent example: In 1898, the British army won an
overwhelming victory at Omdurman to regain control of Sudan and establish
itself as the supreme fighting force on Earth. Within a year, the same army
under the same general went off to fight the Boers in South Africa. At
first, all went well: The British quickly seized the Boer capitals. Mission
accomplished. But the opposing forces simply melted into the population,
then launched a devastating guerrilla war that exposed the vulnerabilities
of the superpower army.

 Which sounds familiar.

Mathews continued: "On the economic side, we are very, very vulnerable."
Strange: Wasn't it just a few years ago that the American economy was
crushing its competitors like Godzilla mashing Toyotas? She cited two
reasons to feel nervous. First, while the U.S. economy is easily the
largest in the world, we're not even paying the bills of our own government
-- not by a long shot. The federal deficit is more than $400 billion this
year. And worse is sure to come when the baby boomers start retiring later
this decade and Social Security and Medicare become massive drains. For the
first time in our history, approximately half of our deficit spending is
being financed by foreign nations. It can't bode well for a major power
when its potential competitors hold the mortgage on its future.

The second economic weak spot Mathews sees is the explosive growth of the
global labor market. With populous countries like China and India and
Singapore and Malaysia rushing into the manufacturing age, "we're looking
at a global labor surplus for an extended period, which is something new,"
Mathews said.

Let that sink in for a moment. An oversupply of a commodity means a
declining price. A surplus of labor should mean lower wages, which means
less saving and less spending, which means a sluggish economy, if not
worse. Even the upside of cheap foreign labor -- the low prices we pay for
clothes and gizmos -- often comes with a downside: a staggering trade
deficit. At best, the coming years will be a nerve-racking race to convert
those global workers into buyers of American exports, not just competitors
for American jobs.

 Brightening briefly, Mathews added: "We're still best in the world at
adapting to rapidly changing circumstances. No other nation takes
disruption in stride the way we do."

So the good news is, we're good at handling bad news.

Finally, as satisfying as it may be to many Americans, even U.N.-bashing
may be beyond our power in the future. "I think it's clear there are not
many really important issues we can tackle alone," Mathews said. Take the
example currently occupying her attention -- the proliferation of nuclear
technology in places such as North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, places that are
hostile, unstable or both.

"A huge amount of work needs to be done on proliferation by a lot of
countries working together," she said. "We can't accomplish what needs to
be done by ourselves. And yet, what's the level of our political influence
on other countries right now? When we were going into Iraq and the U.N. was
resisting, I must have had 300 people say to me: 'Jessica, don't be silly.
When push comes to shove, we'll get the votes.' But then it happened, and
we couldn't get Mexico, for heaven's sake. Talk about a country that
depends on us. Chile, which had a free-trade agreement on the line with us
-- we couldn't get their vote.

"This is a long-winded way of saying that we are not nearly as dominant as
we all thought we were just a few years ago."

I was surprised by how much agreement I found on this general idea among
big thinkers, ranging from neoconservatives to multilateral peaceniks, from
Republicans to Democrats to unaffiliated foreign intellectuals. They
disagreed over nuances, but nearly all of them concurred that the rosy
assumptions of the recent past must be completely reexamined. If the
touchstone title of the 1990s was "The End of History," the title that
speaks to the dawn of this decade might be Robert D. Kaplan's "The Coming
Anarchy."

So where are we headed? Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard offered an early
take on that question in his influential 1996 book, The Clash of
Civilizations:

"In sum, overall the West will remain the most powerful civilization well
into the early decades of the twenty-first century. . . . [But] the West's
control of [key] resources peaked in the 1920s and has been declining
irregularly but significantly. In the 2020s, a hundred years after that
peak, the West will probably control about 24 percent of the world's
territory (down from a peak of 49 percent), 10 percent of the total world
population (down from 48 percent) . . . about 30 percent of the world's
economic product (down from a peak of probably 70 percent), perhaps 25
percent of manufacturing output (down from a peak of 84 percent), and less
than 10 percent of global military manpower (down from 45 percent).

"In 1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau together
virtually controlled the world. Sitting in Paris, they determined what
countries would exist and which would not, what new countries would be
created, what their boundaries would be and who would rule them, and how
the Middle East and other parts of the world would be divided up among the
victorious powers. . . . A hundred years later . . . the age of Western
dominance will be over."

AND WHAT, YOU MIGHT ASK, WOULD BE SO BAD ABOUT THAT?

Back when happy students were building a papier-mache replica of the Statue
of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, and Russian kids were waving American flags
in Moscow, and the president of the United States and the chancellor of
Germany were fast friends, American dominance felt like a rewarding and
gratifying pursuit. Now, we read bestsellers like Blowback and The Sorrows
of Empire, both by Asia expert Chalmers Johnson -- books in which the
purported costs of our dominance are counted in a litany of miserable
tolls. We're hated, Johnson informs us. We're resented. We're increasingly
opposed by other nations. And a fair number of the world's people would
like to kill as many of us as they possibly can. "In the long run," Johnson
writes, "the people of the United States are neither militaristic enough
nor rich enough to engage in the perpetual police actions, wars, and
bailouts their government's hegemonic policies will require."

I once had the good fortune to visit Rome and found myself sitting on a
perfect late-summer evening at a cafe on the vast Piazza Navona. Thousands
of Romans, ineffably beautiful and thoroughly relaxed, were gliding happily
back and forth across the plaza, hailing their many friends. The whole
city, it seemed, had just returned from a month's vacation in the hills or
by the sea. Shouted greetings and untroubled laughter were accompanied by
the soothing music of water splashing in a huge fountain wrought by the
master carver Bernini. My tummy was pleasantly full of prosciutto and figs
and warm bread dipped in olive oil, and I found myself thinking that the
best places to live in the whole world might be the capitals of former
empires -- Athens, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Vienna and right there in
Rome -- where people enjoy all the cultural riches of having once dominated
the world but are blissfully free of the burdens of leadership.

There's just one problem with that, said Niall Ferguson. "There isn't
always a contender to take over" the job of leading the world; or sometimes
there is a contender, but one who happens to be a genocidal maniac. "If the
U.S. draws back from the imperial hubris of 2003 -- which I guess it
already is doing; after all, it's hard to imagine America taking any new
significant military actions for a while -- then the short-term and
medium-term scenario is that large parts of the world will be left in a
state of misrule under dictators, or in a state of no rule at all. That is
rather a troubling prospect."

Ferguson is one of the hottest young stars in the foreign policy world, a
thinker so big right now that he has hardly any fixed address. Just a few
years ago, he was an unknown Oxford scholar working on a history of global
fiscal policy (insert enormous yawn here). But it turned out that money
really does make the world go around, or at least that it helps enormously
to understand money if you want to understand history. Plus, Ferguson
writes with flash and verve. His first book was a hit in brainy circles,
and he followed it up with book after provocative book.

Now, at 40, he's a globe-trotting, multinational theorist of empire. It can
take days of e-mail exchanges and transatlantic telephone tag just to track
him down; when we finally did talk, he was taking a brief break from a
conference in Lisbon. At least I think he was still in Lisbon.

While I was trying to find him, I read Ferguson's recent cover article in
Foreign Policy magazine, a harrowing vision of a world without a dominant
country -- a condition he called "apolarity" or "a global vacuum of power."
We've seen such periods before, he observed: the so-called Dark Ages, for
example, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and, more recently, the
demoralized 1920s, which gave rise to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini in
Europe and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan in the United States. We now see that
the '20s also sowed the seeds of today's violent Islamicism, thanks to the
dispirited intellectuals of the former Ottoman Empire, who began dreaming
of a new order founded on strict Islamic law.

So: "Be careful what you wish for," Ferguson warned those who might like to
see America pull back from world leadership. "Apolarity could turn out to
mean an anarchic new Dark Age: an era of waning empires and religious
fanaticism; of endemic plunder and pillage in the world's forgotten
regions; of economic stagnation and civilization's retreat into a few
fortified enclaves."

It's one thing to say, as most big thinkers do, that no nation has ever
remained on top forever, and thus the United States, too, will someday see
its period of dominance come to an end. The tricky part, as Ferguson's
worries about a new dark age remind us, is figuring out a relatively
peaceful path from hyperpower to former power.

There are plenty of theories about potential rivals to American power 20 or
50 or 100 years from now. At current levels of growth, China will blow past
the United States as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next
half-century, according to economists at Goldman Sachs. China's influence
over East Asia is growing even faster than that. China's military is no
match for ours today, but it has nuclear-tipped missiles and a big army,
and the wealthier China becomes the more it can spend on guns, bombs,
airplanes and warships, if it so chooses. Many theorists can paint a vivid
picture of a not-so-distant world in which Asia is the center of the
action, with China dominating the continent. One piece of that picture
appeared in a recent article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
magazine Technology Review, which declared that the "world's hottest
computer lab" is the one Microsoft has established in Beijing.

 If Bill Gates is betting on China, perhaps we all should.

But even if things go smoothly for the Chinese, their nation is years away
from rivaling the United States. And things are not likely to go smoothly.
The coming years for China are precisely the phase in which other
developing countries have experienced financial panics, civic unrest,
economic meltdown and stagnation of trade.

 Maybe Europe? Charles A. Kupchan of Georgetown University said the United
States and Europe were bound to clash after their common enemy -- communism
-- was conquered. Arguments over Iraq and the global warming treaty simply
sped up a process already underway. The development of the European Union
is moving much faster than anyone expected, Kupchan said, and the United
States might soon find itself competing with a confederation of European
countries. There may be a tipping point when the combined EU economy
becomes larger than the U.S. economy, when the euro rivals the dollar as
the global currency, and when America no longer sets the rules for global
banking and finance.

Not everyone buys the idea of a bulked-up Europe, however, because Europe
has problems of its own. European military power is mostly hollow, and some
of Europe's leading economies are wheezing. The demographic picture is
bleak: Native populations, especially in Western Europe, are aging and
shrinking, which means fewer workers and more pensioners -- not exactly the
muscular image of a rising superpower.

If it's true that no other power is ready -- or even close to being ready
-- to step into the yoke of history, America's choice is to either hang in
there or give up. Much of the world is not going to like either choice.

"Our real enemy may simply be . . . chaos in the world," said Walter
Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy
at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mead is another of the hot hands in
the foreign policy business, harder to reach than a mid-list movie star.
When I spoke to him by telephone, Iraq was boiling over and the United
Nations was dithering about the genocide in Sudan. Yet Mead pronounced
himself "optimistic" about the way history is unfolding -- as long as
events aren't allowed to drift into madness.

"Where I worry," he said, "is that the social and economic changes underway
are going to create chaos." Some countries, like the change-loving United
States, will be able to hack it in a world of change. Others will not. The
widening gap between the two is a zone of enormous danger, Mead believes.

"In many ways, I see Islamic terrorism as reflecting the changes of
modernity in societies that may not be ready for them, or are divided by
them," he said. "As the pace of change accelerates, and more and more
people are affected, I worry we will see increasing resentment aimed at the
country often seen as the source of these changes -- the United States."

Which brings us back to: Yikes.

 I HALF-EXPECTED TO FIND FRANCIS FUKUYAMA SMOKING A PIPE AND PEERING AT A
GLOBE WITH HIS BROW FURROWED. Or standing over a huge table covered with
maps and encoded dispatches, his hands clasped behind him. Fukuyama is
among the most widely acclaimed foreign policy theorists in the world. Even
people who disagree with him routinely describe him as "brilliant."

But no, Fukuyama works in an ordinary professor's lodgings at 1619 Big
Think Blvd. His is one of several small offices grouped around a bullpen at
the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of
Advanced International Studies. (Eggheads simply call it SAIS -- pronounced
"sice.") His standard-issue desk is heaped with the usual mounds of paper,
and his nondescript bookshelves overflow with volumes that pool on the
tables and spill to the floor. There is an appealing humility about the
place; you have to scour the jumble with your eyes to spot The End of
History and the Last Man, Fukuyama's book-length extension of his
influential essay.

Contrary to the assumptions of people who only read the title, Fukuyama
never claimed that historic events were going to stop happening after the
fall of the Berlin Wall. His thesis was limited to a philosophical claim.
He reminded readers that for almost 200 years, dating back to the German
philosopher G.F. Hegel, many big thinkers -- notably Karl Marx -- viewed
"history" as a sometimes violent struggle to determine the best way to
structure society. History was believed to be headed toward a solution.
Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War was "the end of history"
because it left no plausible alternative to free markets and liberal
democracy. End of argument, end of history.

Within that narrow definition, he may still be correct. The global clash of
ideologies may well be over. Bin Laden isn't trying to create the future so
much as he is trying to escape from it to the past, and a very distant,
parochial past at that: medieval Arabia, and step on it. Still, Fukuyama
acknowledged that this rarified use of the word "history" is less
enlightening than it once seemed, because any notion of history that
doesn't include the destruction of the World Trade Center is of dubious
value.

The world has moved on, and so has Fukuyama's thinking. His recent
cogitation has produced a seemingly simple but subtle realization that
might explain a lot about why America's role in the world has become so
difficult. America's enormous power, he noted, actually violates an axiom
of the political philosophy we have been promoting for the past two
centuries.

How so? As every civics class graduate knows, liberal democracy and free
markets depend on "checks and balances" to rein in excess, to correct
mistakes and to unleash creativity by bringing more ideas to the table. But
now the unmatched military, economic and cultural power of the United
States flouts the principle of checks and balances on a global scale. We
don't expect monopolies to work well in economic markets. We don't expect
dictatorships to survive free elections. Perhaps, he suggested, we should
not be surprised to find that hyperpower has not ushered in a pastoral
future.

"We believe that power without checks and balances is not safe -- even in
the hands of well-meaning people. But today, we are an unchecked power,"
Fukuyama said. "After September 11, the world saw America's unchecked power
in the military sphere. We reached out and overturned two regimes halfway
around the world, essentially without help, and said to other countries,
'If you don't like it, you can just stuff it.' "

This rankles the rest of the world, which is naturally suspicious of
unchecked power and, in fact, has a lot of practice in resisting it.
Europe, for example, relied for generations on a "balance of power"
strategy to stabilize the world. Whenever one government or axis became too
strong, a fluid system of treaties would generate a competing alliance to
level the field. This system wasn't pretty -- oceans of blood were shed in
the age of Napoleon, in World War I and in World War II. Yet rulers
preferred it to living with a single unchallenged power.

Then came a streamlined version of the same idea: the Cold War, in which
two nuclear superpowers checked and balanced each other through the threat
of mutual destruction.

American power "generates a big backlash," Fukuyama continued. While no
nation is in a position to offset American military power, the world has
other ways to thwart our intentions. Fukuyama envisions a difficult period
in which the United States is stymied by "the rest of the world [deciding]
not to cooperate with us on a lot of little things that, over time, really
matter."

Iraq may be one of those "little" things.

Al Qaeda could turn into another.

The doozy, though, is nukes.

Nukes are the great X-factor, the cloud of uncertainty, floating over Big
Think Boulevard. The future of Europe, the challenge of China -- such
topics are good for the next conference in Lisbon or Aspen or New York. But
bin Laden with a nuke: That's not a conference, it's a nightmare.

Everyone knows this, on some level. During the presidential campaign, both
George W. Bush and John F. Kerry agreed that it was the No. 1 national
security threat to the United States. But not everyone has really digested
the problem, which is significantly more complicated than the nuclear
threat during the Cold War. Having lived their entire lives in the shadow
of The Bomb, many Americans prefer not to ponder the ways in which today's
nuclear picture is more dangerous than ever.

During the Cold War, the world's security was built on a handful of
interlocking truths that were dreadful to contemplate, but blessedly
stable. First truth: It took a lot of money to develop a nuclear weapon.
Second truth: It wasn't easy to deliver those weapons. You needed a
long-range aircraft or intercontinental missile to put a nuke on a target
without being vaporized yourself. Together, these facts created the third
truth: We felt pretty sure that if we were going to be hit with a nuclear
attack, we would know where it came from and whom to bomb back. The fact
that nuclear bombs came with return addresses allowed us to deter nuclear
attacks by threatening apocalyptic, glowing-molten-rubble retaliation.

Every brick of that deterrent edifice is now crumbling. Technology makes
all things cheaper, including nukes. North Korea, a country where peasants
forage for grass like goats, has nukes. Pakistan, where impoverished youths
seeking an education must turn to schools preaching radical Islamism, has
nukes. Some experts might call them "crude" nuclear bombs, but remember:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit by "crude" nuclear bombs.

Nor do you need a sophisticated jet or missile to deliver a bomb anymore.
It turns out that suicidal zealots driving panel trucks are very cheap,
very precise guidance systems. Who knew the world contained so many of them?

Cheap bombs plus cheap guidance systems mean that a nuke could go off in
Washington tomorrow, and we might never learn for sure where it came from.
Nor, as we've seen in our hunt for bin Laden, would we necessarily know
where to find the culprits. Nor, with an enemy that fetishizes death, could
we be sure the culprits would fear retaliation. For all these reasons, what
worked in the Cold War won't work anymore.

The bomb will determine whether America's current fight against radical
Islam represents a bump in the road of history or, as the venerable
neoconservative Norman Podhoretz argued recently in Commentary magazine,
"World War IV." Minus the bomb, in Fukuyama's words, "Islamism is much
weaker than fascism or communism were. Its appeal is limited to Arab and
Muslim countries. It has come to power in just three places -- Afghanistan,
Iran and Saudi Arabia -- and all three are a mess. It's a protest movement
of angry, marginalized people who haven't been able to integrate into the
modern world."

But . . .

 "If they take over Pakistan, say, then they have 60 nukes. And all of a
sudden you have to take them pretty seriously." In other words, one of the
biggest historical questions the United States now faces is impossible to
answer. Ten years from now, will al Qaeda be a fading threat, or will
downtown Washington be a pile of radioactive debris?

Before leaving his office, I asked the professor to think back to the End
of History days. He smiled ruefully. "It's definitely less pleasant today,"
he said. "We've got some real problems now."

"YOU WANT TO HAVE SOME SOBERING THOUGHTS?" Walter Russell Mead had asked
during our conversation about world chaos.

Before I could answer no, he posed a mental experiment: "Ask yourself,
what's the worst that terrorists could do to us in 1901?"

History gives an approximate answer: In 1910, radical labor leaders bombed
the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times, whose publisher was a staunch
anti-unionist. The building collapsed, killing about two dozen people.

"Now, what's the worst they could do in 2001?"

That's easy. They did it on 9/11.

"Okay, what's the worst they could do on September 11, 2101?"

Ugh.

Advances in science and technology -- material progress in general -- are
not just a force for good. The bad guys also benefit. "It's not just
nuclear you have to worry about," Mead said. "It's biological, too." The
same genetic discoveries that promise new cures will, no doubt, reveal new
ways to kill as well. "See, technology strengthens the forces of order and
law, but it also strengthens the forces of anarchy and terror. Technology
is not the automatic problem solver. The notion of liberal democracy and
capitalism leading to the peaceful, quiet end of history underestimates the
dynamism that capitalism and liberalism actually contain. In that sense,
it's Pogo who has the last word: We have met the enemy and he's us . . .
It's not clear that our ability to cope with change is growing as fast as
the pace of change itself."

We might be getting to the nub of the matter here.

What were the 1990s all about in America if not a nation intoxicated by the
perfume of change and drunk on the promise of technology? We chose a
free-associating futurist, Newt Gingrich, to run Congress and a president
who painted word pictures of a sunny bridge to the 21st century. Business
leaders chanted the mantra "change or die," while the newsstands were full
of magazines offering to teach us how to make change our friend. There was
a giddiness to it all. In the future, people would live forever, and the
Dow would never go down. Only fuddy-duddies and Luddites and cranks saw any
drawbacks to the future.

But other people, including some cranks in caves, were taking a very
different view of change and of the future. They were asking which changes
they could prevent, which ones they could reverse, and which changes they
could turn into weapons against the future, judo-style. They failed to
rivet our attention because we didn't think they merited attention; they
weren't with the program. But guess what? Because of those people, the
"bleeding edge" of change that hip people enjoyed talking about 10 years
ago has turned out to involve a lot of actual bleeding.

The unsettling signs and portents of the late 1990s now strike us as the
burps and tremors of a volcano that was about to blow. The decadent trivia
of politics in those years -- the sex scandals, the debates over hairdos,
the millionaires and billionaires seeking to buy themselves high offices,
the extreme niche-marketing of issues that once led President Clinton to
offer a White House initiative on child safety seats -- all these combine
into a sort of barometer of our national blindness, and, as such, were
truly historic -- because they represent a generalized failure of the
futuristic hyperpower to see even the slightest distance into the actual
future.

Time and money wasted on such trivia could have been used instead to plan
for the menaces sure to crop up in the wreckage of the Cold War. Those
years could have been used to begin creating the new international
institutions, treaties and alliances that would allow the United States to
lead and stabilize the world without violating the tested principle of
checks and balances. They might have been used to craft a new strategy for
avoiding nuclear war that would have as much weight and urgency behind it
as the old strategy had.

To be fair, American leaders have tried, in various ways, to engage the
future. President Clinton pulled Bosnia back from the brink of chaos. The
first President Bush built a coalition to enforce the U.N. mandate to
liberate Kuwait. More recently, George W. Bush offered a doctrine of
preemptive action to replace the now-inadequate Cold War deterrence theory.

 But none of these efforts have so far proved compelling enough to mark a
clear path forward.

Along Big Think Boulevard, people have their doubts whether America's
leaders, from either party, will be able to brace the public for what
promises to be a long and often unpleasant engagement with our clouded
future. There is, after all, a strong and deep vein of isolationism bred in
the American character. If one day in the not-so-far-off tomorrow we find
that we must choose, for example, between paying the costs of global
leadership and paying the pensions of our burgeoning retiree class, isn't
it likely that we will pull back -- whether or not there is an acceptable
nation ready to step into the void?

Again and again, I heard big thinkers draw a contrast between this era and
another hugely historic period: the immediate aftermath of World War II.
They noted the alacrity with which the Allies, seasoned by economic
depression and catastrophic war, pivoted to comprehend and face the future.
The war ended in 1945. The following year, Winston Churchill delivered his
"Iron Curtain" speech warning of Soviet expansionism. The next year, 1947,
George Kennan laid out the strategy of "containment" that was quickly
embraced by a bipartisan consensus of Western leaders, and the massively
expensive Marshall Plan was launched. By 1948, President Harry Truman had
established the doctrine that would guide Western foreign policy through
Democratic and Republican administrations for the next 40-plus years. And
in 1949 NATO was created to implement that policy.

Four years to reinvent the world.

I got a lot of shrugs and groans when I asked if anyone perceives a similar
vision and unity of purpose today. Mead chose to answer by quoting
Churchill. "He said, You can always count on the Americans to do the right
thing -- after exhausting all the other possibilities."

THERE CAME A POINT IN THIS INVESTIGATION WHEN I NEEDED TO HEAR THE BRIGHT
SIDE, if there was one, in meatier form than the empty campaign-season
exhortations that were leading the morning newspapers. So I sought out
Joshua Muravchik, whose specialty is studying the spread of democracy and
freedom around the world. His little office is located at the American
Enterprise Institute, one of Washington's oldest and most influential think
tanks, where Muravchik is a resident scholar. AEI occupies several floors
of a nondescript Washington high-rise just off Big Think Boulevard -- a
gray building on a gray street under gray skies the morning I visited.

Muravchik is a neoconservative of the purest type, meaning that he started
out some 40 years ago as a hawkish Democrat and today is a hawkish
Republican. He is different from the classic conservatives of the GOP --
the "old-o-cons," as some call themselves. Neocons are more likely to
eagerly seek out opportunities to change the world; old-o-cons are more
likely to advise caution, on the theory that the world's biggest problem,
namely human nature, is stubbornly resistant to change.

Neocons in the Bush administration got much of the credit -- or blame, take
your pick -- for the decision to invade Iraq. So when you meet a thinker of
this sort, you might expect a fire-breather. Muravchik, however, turned out
to be a genial fellow of winning humility. "You're asking big questions,"
he said right off the bat. "I'll probably get myself into trouble here."

 Then in he dove. Sure, he said, we're looking at a tricky and scary patch
of history ahead. And yes, eventually, history will erode America's
dominance. "Obviously, our time on top won't last forever. Everything comes
to an end. But whether it lasts another 50 years or 500 years, I can't say.
My guess is, this has a long way yet to go."

He believes this because he sees a strong historical tide flowing in our
direction. "For how many millennia was the world run by kings and
warlords?" Muravchik asked. "And then the first elected democracy springs
to life in 1776. It was a very imperfect democracy, a slave democracy, but
still it contained this idea that people would elect a government
temporarily and then a few years later elect a new one.

"How many people participated? A small group: The entire political polity
of the early United States was what -- a million people? From then to now
is a blink of an eye in historical terms. But today, of the 192 countries
in the world . . . 120 have elected governments." Granted, many of those
are far from true democracies, but 89 qualify as "free" nations, Muravchik
said, in which citizens elect their leaders and enjoy human rights
guaranteed by the rule of law.

"Not all of that was accomplished by the United States," he concluded, "but
it began with the American model." This "remarkable triumph of American
ideas" leaves him in the "long-run view . . . optimistic."

 The neocon had the same worry as the rest of the Big Think gang: that
Americans, bloodied by Iraq, scorned by former allies, ill-served by
squabbling leaders, will elect to pull back from a menacing world. "People
could say: 'This is crazy! Bush bit off more than we could chew. We have a
good life here . . . let's just batten down the hatches,' " Muravchik said.

My mind drifted back to that evening in Rome, and my vision of the happy
lives of the formerly dominant.

"The withdrawal of American power would stir fears all over the world,"
Muravchik went on, puncturing my reverie. "It would create temptations,
because the people who rule nations are very ambitious men. Some would act
on those ambitions. The result would be lots of bloodshed, and at some
point, we would be dragged back in."

At that point, history suggests, things would look even worse than they do now.

I came away from Big Think Boulevard having reached a few conclusions, for
what they are worth.

The end of history was a dream, lovely and fleeting.

While we slumbered, the grass grew very tall.

Now we have to cut it, and if there is an easy way to accomplish the job,
no one knows what it is.

 And last: The very hope that such work would ever become easy -- the
eternal but vain wish that history will level off into a broad and
tranquil, sunlit meadow -- is a big part of the reason we're in such
trouble. The most enticing dreams can be the most dangerous.

 David Von Drehle is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions
and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at
washingtonpost.com/liveonline.

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'