"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.
Amid nuclear tension, a North Korean soldier peers past South Korean border guards.
(Kim Kyung-Hoon - Reuters)
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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.
