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A page of history is turning. After some 20 years in transition, the new international chessboard is finally taking shape. As in 1991, when the first Gulf War was the curtain-raiser for a new world, freed from Soviet communism and dominated now by just one superpower, the brief Russian/Georgian conflict has shed a raw light on a new landscape hitherto not fully apprehended.
The multipolar world is a reality. Historians will use pictures from the Olympic Games in Beijing to illustrate the extraordinary rise of the ‘Middle Kingdom’, but India and Brazil too are shaping up as global players, in the World Trade Organization and beyond it. Russia, meanwhile, is reasserting itself by resorting to methods of international politics which we thought had gone out with the Soviet Union. In a painful sort of symmetry, and despite its hugely increased budget, the USA is demonstrating the limitations of military might as it pays the price of its bizarre illogic in turning an effort to combat crazed Islamic fundamentalists into a ‘clash of civilisations’.
War – real, bloody war – has made a comeback. Admittedly the world has not actually been at peace since the end of the Cold War: apart from the whole succession of conflicts in the Balkans and the Middle East, there have been less televised, though much more murderous, struggles, including the civil war in the Congo, where the flames of hatred were fanned by neighbouring countries and more than five million people were killed at the beginning of the new millennium. Yet still we continued to drift along in a bubble of high-minded pacifism, firmly convinced that by stamping out the virus of aggression in the nations that had spawned two world wars we had done enough to ensure perpetual peace. War was an outdated, unfashionable activity, a relic of the past – now to be found only among the unfortunates of the developing world. And we were gradually getting over it there too, with the help of humanitarian aid and UN peacekeeping missions, whose casualty rates were roughly similar to that of a busy fire brigade. Seven years after the destruction of the Twin Towers, however, the threat of Al Qaeda still hangs over our capital cities. Dozens of British, Canadian and now French soldiers have fallen in Afghanistan, without preventing the Taliban from regaining substantial tracts of lost ground. The President of Iran is no longer content to threaten Israel with nuclear attack: he is developing missiles capable of targeting European town and cities, and using our airspace for strikes on the United States, thus placing Europe in the front line of America’s anti-nuclear defences. The Russian response has been to put European disarmament deals on ice. And now, in a shocking and grimly symbolic development, the Russians and Georgians have used their respective ‘peacekeeping’ contingents to wage open warfare!
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Fear of global warming has led us to invent a new planet-wide doctrine.
It consists of half a dozen observations, analyses, conjectures and conclusions that have come to be presented as an indivisible whole, although it is useful to consider them separately for they do not all carry the same scientific weight. They are as follows.
The earth’s average temperature has been rising ever since the Industrial Revolution, with a very marked acceleration in recent decades; this phenomenon is largely a result of human activity producing CO2 emissions that accumulate in the upper atmosphere and cause a ‘greenhouse effect’; the consequences are catastrophic and irreversible for the earth in general and the human race in particular, with the poorest countries in the front line; neither the inherent biological forces of plant and animal life (mutation, migration or the emergence of new species) nor human societies’ traditional avenues of recourse (to migration, scientific innovation or tried-and-tested market mechanisms) are capable of offsetting – never mind halting – the literally apocalyptic process that is now under way; humanity as a whole therefore needs to make an unprecedented effort, entailing radical changes in methods of production and ways of life; if our generation can pull that off, the apocalypse will be averted.
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