http://thechronicleherald.ca/world/1223384-friedman-global-forces-of-disorder-reshape-world-map
FRIEDMAN: Global forces of disorder reshape world map
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN NEW YORK TIMES
Published July 17, 2014 - 4:57pm
*PART ONE*
In the 1960s, there was a popular sitcom -- Get Smart -- about a hapless
secret agent named Maxwell Smart, played by Don Adams. Smart went by the
code name Agent 86. Get Smart famously introduced the shoe phone to U.S.
audiences, but the show also introduced something else: its own version of
the bipolar world. Do you remember the name of the intelligence agency
Maxwell Smart worked for? It was called Control. And do you remember the
name of Control's global opponent? It was called Kaos -- "an international
organization of evil."
The creators of Get Smart were ahead of their time. Because it increasingly
appears that the post-post-Cold War world is cleaving into the world of
"order" and the world of "disorder" -- or into the world of Control and the
world of Kaos.
How so? First, we said goodbye to imperialism and colonialism and all their
methods of controlling territory. Then we said goodbye to the Cold War
alliance system, which propped up many weak and newly independent states
with money to build infrastructure and to buy weapons to control their
borders and people -- because the stability of every square in the global
chessboard mattered to Washington and Moscow.
And, lately, we've been saying goodbye to top-down, iron-fisted monarchies
and autocracies, which have been challenged by massively urbanized,
technologically empowered citizens.
So, today, you have three basic systems: order provided by democratic,
inclusive governments; order imposed by autocratic exclusivist governments;
and ungoverned, or chaotically governed, spaces, where rickety failed
states, militias, tribes, pirates and gangs contest one another for
control, but there is no single power centre to answer the phone -- or, if
they do, it falls off the wall.
Look around: Boko Haram in Nigeria kidnaps 250 schoolgirls and then
disappears into a dark corner of that country. The Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant, or ISIL, a ragtag jihadist militia, carves out a caliphate
inside Syria and Iraq and boasts on Twitter of beheading opponents.
NATO decapitates Libya's regime and sets loose a tribal-militia war of all
against all, which, when combined with the crackup of Chad, spills arms and
refugees across African borders, threatening Tunisia and Morocco. Israel
has been flooded with more than 50,000 Eritreans and Sudanese refugees, who
crossed the Sinai Desert by foot, bus or car looking for work and security
in Israel's "island of order."
And, just since October, the U.S. has been flooded with more than 50,000
unaccompanied children from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
"They're fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries," noted
Vox.com, "where things have gotten so bad that many families believe that
they have no choice but to send their children on the long, dangerous
journey north."
Why is this happening now? Well, just as I've argued that "average is over"
for workers, now "average is over for states," too. Without the Cold War
system to prop them up, it is not so easy anymore for weak states to
provide the minimums of security, jobs, health and welfare. And thanks to
rapid advances in the market (globalization), Mother Nature (climate change
plus ecological destruction) and Moore's Law (computing power), some states
are just blowing up under the pressure.
Yes, we blew up Iraq, but you can't understand the uprising in Syria unless
you understand how a horrendous four-year drought there, coupled with a
demographic explosion, undermined its economy.
You can't understand Egypt's uprising without linking it to the 2010 global
wheat crisis and soaring bread prices, which inspired the anti-Hosni
Mubarak chant: "Bread, Freedom, Dignity." You also can't understand Egypt's
stress without understanding the challenge that China's huge labour pool
poses in a globalized world to every other low-wage country. Go into a
souvenir shop in Cairo, buy a Pyramids ashtray and turn it over. I'll bet
it says, Made in China. Today's globalization system rewards countries that
make their workers and markets efficient enough to take part in global
supply chains of goods and services faster than ever -- and punishes those
who don't more harshly than ever.
You can't understand the spread of ISIL or the Arab Spring without the
relentless advance in computing and telecom -- Moore's Law -- creating so
many cheap command-and-control Internet tools that super-empower small
groups to recruit adherents, challenge existing states and erase borders.
In a flat world, people can see faster than ever how far behind they are
and organize faster than ever to protest. When technology penetrates more
quickly than wealth and opportunity, watch out.
The combined pressures of the market, Mother Nature and Moore's Law are
creating the geopolitical equivalent of climate change, argues Michael
Mandelbaum, author of The Road to Global Prosperity, and "some familiar
species of government can't survive the stress."
So, please spare me the "it's all Obama's fault." There are plenty of
reasons to criticize President Barack Obama, but everything is not about
what we do. There are huge forces acting on these countries, and it will
take extraordinary collaboration by the whole world of order to contain
them. I'll address this Saturday.
Received on Wed Jul 23 2014 - 10:58:11 EDT