The History of Tomorrow
What will be the great historical themes of the 21st Century?
In America’s New Map, I forecast (with great accuracy, it turns out) how the book was to be received among the US national security establishment, to wit:
America must manage more than one global security crisis at a time with- out resorting to Cold War defense paradigms. Foreign policy “realists” deem such thinking naïve, sticking with their balance-of-power models. They will always find firm validation in any Russian move against former vassal states, just as any China-Taiwan scenario is reflexively cast as a world-system breaker. Like a broken face clock, these pessimists are correct twice each day.
When trying to balance climate change with the fate of the global middle class, such “realism” can feel like reshuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. While it is tempting to fight one doomsday argument with another, understanding globalization’s trajectory yields more accurate strategies.
I don’t necessarily blame experts for sticking with what they know in terms of mental models. They’re deeply comfortable with, and career-invested in, an East-West strategic perspective that sees only nefarious, system-replacing forces in any and all “vacuums” created by any US approach that does not consist of Washington taking on all comers (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea in their recently christened “CRINK” axis of evil) all over the world at all times. That well-honed strategic instinct dies hard.
Thus, to expect a pivot to a North-South perspective any time soon with the Boomers and Gen Xs is wishful thinking. Climate change, I readily admit, will never change those crews’ minds. Instead of fixing America and readying it for these North-South dynamics, our current generations of senior leadership will choose any number of self-declared “cold wars” (with plenty of our flag officers overtly scheduling a hot one with China over Taiwan).
We are far from done learning, it would seem, what climate change and demographic aging has to teach us about this century. We are also, without a doubt, oblivious to the rise of a majority global middle class, whose ideological choices will determine this century’s geopolitical landscape — not Ukraine, not Taiwan, and not Gaza.
All three of those conflicts will be footnotes in the histories to be penned about this century (much like the Vietnam War fades into almost complete irrelevancy in 20th century histories), which time will describe as the century of climate change, rapid demographic aging (and the peaking of human population), and a planet-wide reordering of species and climates on a location by location basis (already well underway). On top of all that will come the flowering of two fantastic solution-sets: AI and the deep extension of human lifespan — both of which will address the most perplexing situations we now face (e.g., the existential threats of climate chaos and depopulation).
Rest assured that reactionaries (many of them hailing from the IT sector) will busily focus on recasting those two solution sets as existential threats of their own (Killer robots and AI! The fatal deconstruction of human life by technology!). Those Cassandras only grow in number with each passing year, and remind me of the nuclear doomsday types as they headed off to retirement in the late Cold War and early post-Cold War eras. As we see with our currently exotic array of end-times cults (to include a good portion of the GOP base right now), Chicken Littles abound at times of ambiguity and uncertainty, two attributes that define our debates right now between an aging (mean of 58) White Christian Nationalist America and the demonized “woke” youth-driven (mean of 27) post-White-majority America.
Thus, both our domestic political reactionaries and our foreign policy establishment tend to favor increasingly inaccurate mental models of our world today, particularly in casting globalization as an us-or-them outcome that amounts to geostrategic mercantilism (Sanction City, here we come! Right back where we started from!”). There can be no co-evolution between the US and China, for example — only conflict pre-ordained by Thucydides thousands of years ago. Honestly, their sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped them conjure up a future worth creating. Instead, they promise us a path of hunkering down, containing others’ advances, stopping (and killing) them at the border, and so on — essentially a resurrection of their Cold War childhood and youth. No wonder we are awash in Camp of the Saints and Le Grand Remplacement imagery, dog whistles, and secret handshakes.
As far as grand strategic thinking goes, this is brain death — a sort of strategic Alzheimer’s.
I don’t want to pass on to subsequent generations a grand strategy of fear, loathing, nostalgia, and grievance. That is where our domestic political polarization takes us today, and our foreign policy is doing nothing — at all — to address that reality head-on and correct course. We still see the world in zero-sum, military-centric terms — as in, somebody’s gotta win and the rest gotta lose. How else to make America great again?
That needs to end, preferably well before the Boomers and Xs reach political extinction. Echoing the radical Sixties, one is tempted to say, don’t believe any politician over 45! — a fair extrapolation of that generational suspicion to match today’s longer-lifespans (also endangered by our political evolution right now). We’re already seeing the new faces emerge (AOC with her Green New Deal and a focus on Latin America, and Ramaswamy with “climate hoax” and his talk of bombing Mexico into cartel submission).
Honestly, I will take those odds over the ones we face today with the Boomer and GenX political classes, where it’s Gavin Newsom vs. the World!
What is to be done? What do we say to younger generations right now (a question I get often)?
We give them different means to view the world, escaping the soda-straw perspective offered by so many of our elders’ mental models carried over from a century long-since passed.
America’s New Map is my primary tool for now, but many others are in the works by me and a host of others. It is a good fight and I remain eager to wage it on behalf of, and in collaboration with, those upcoming generations.
With a firm grip on which dynamics will define the histories of this century, one can only move forward with confidence and conviction.
So ends today’s service …
The appropriate response is, Go Pack! Go!