Читаем After America полностью

Whether or not Iran was being “contained” from killing the Jews, there was no strategy for “containing” Iran’s use of its nuclear status to advance its interests more discreetly, and no strategy for “containing” the mullahs’ generosity to states and groups more inclined to use the technology. It should have been obvious that, even before obliterating Israel, Teheran intended to derive some benefit from its nuclear status. Entirely rational leverage would include: controlling the supply of Gulf oil, setting the price, and determining the customers; getting vulnerable emirates such as Kuwait and Qatar to close U.S. military bases; and turning American allies in Europe into de facto members of the non-aligned movement. Whatever deterrent effect it might have had on first use or proliferation, there was no reason to believe any U.S. “containment” strategy would prevent Iran accomplishing its broader strategic goals. And sure enough all came to pass, very quickly. Why wouldn’t they? Soviet containment had been introduced a couple years after Washington had nuked Japan. Iranian “containment” followed years of inaction, in which America and its allies had passively acquiesced in the ayatollahs’ ambitions. Unlike the 1940s, there was a fundamental credibility issue.

Saudi Arabia began its own nuclear acquisition program, and continued with it even after it became clear that, on balance, Shia Persian nuclearization worked, like so much else, to Wahhabi Arab advantage. It clarified the good cop/bad cop relationship. The Saudi annexation of the West was now backed by Iranian nuclear muscle.

For the most part, China stands aloof from these disputes. It has no pretensions to succeed America as the global order maker, and, while preferring likeminded authoritarian regimes, is happy to do business with whom-soever finds themselves in power in Africa, South America, or anywhere else. For their part, China’s trading partners have no desire to provoke Beijing, not with all those surplus young men it’s so eager to dispatch abroad. In a world in which American battleships no longer ply the Pacific, Australia understands that it lives on a Chinese lake. How silly was the assumption that “globalization” meant “westernization” or even “Americanization”—for little reason other than that, when a Danish businessman conversed with his Indonesian supplier, he did so in English. There have always been lingua francas—Latin, French—and their moments came and went. In 1958, just under 10 percent of the world’s people spoke English and 15.6 percent spoke Mandarin.⁶² By 1992, Mandarin was 15.2 percent, and English was down to 7.6. Today, business computers from Canada to New Zealand have keyboards in Roman and Chinese characters.

Even as it de-anglicizes, so the world after America is reprimitivizing, fast. In the early years of the century, in many columns filed from the VIP lounges of the world’s airports, Thomas L. Friedman, the in-house “thinker” at the New York Times, had an analogy to which he was especially partial.

From December 2008:

And it wasn’t just space-age Hong Kong! From May 2008: In JFK’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout.

We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons.⁶⁴

And it wasn’t just stone-age JFK! From 2007: Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.⁶⁵

I gather that “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” were two popular TV cartoon series of the mid-twentieth century. If you still have difficulty grasping Mr. Friedman’s point, here he is in 2010, bemoaning the “faded, cramped domestic terminal” in Los Angeles, yet another example of America’s, er, terminal decline:

More fool them. Scholars of twentieth century popular culture say you’d have made a ton more money if you’d invested in “The Flintstones,” which was a classic, instead of “The Jetsons,” which was a stale knock-off with the veneer of modernity. But, if you were as invested in this theory of terminal decline as Friedman was, it would have helped to think it through a little.

Here’s one more from the New York Times’ cartoon thinker, from January 2002, when Americans were, for once, the Jetsons: For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones—and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.⁶⁷