Sometimes they come
I hate doing political science.
I spent four years learning how at what they insisted on repeatedly informing me was one of the most prestigious institutions of learning in the world, and I can’t stand doing it. Even thinking about politics frustrates me. Talking about it is almost physically painful. And I wish you the sincerest of luck if you want to get me to write about it.
I hate doing it, because, like every other navel-gazing presumptuous genius saviour-of-mankind before me, I am always wrong.
If you’ve taken maybe three university-level political science courses in your life, you’ve almost certainly been told of the cliché that a monkey throwing darts at a wall affixed with cards indicating possible world events is statistically better at making predictions than any political scientist. Some variants of the account maintain that this was an actual study conducted by some researcher(s) who actually proceeded to publish a paper about it. I’ve actively refused to verify this paper’s existence because I choose to continue to believe in the possibility of good in humanity.
Regardless, the heart of the idea rings true. We can’t predict political events with any consistency using the blunt intellectual instruments available to us (history, the vaguest approximation of math, good looks and charm). This is first because there are simply too many factors to consider in making any given useful prediction without infinite time and resources, and second because people *react* to political predictions, making it so the very act of an academic consensus advancing an ‘educated’ guess using the knowledge available to us can actually render the guess less likely to be correct, or can at the very least bend the decisions that actors end up choosing.
So it’s basically always much more advisable to say nothing instead, and watch others squabble. God strike you down if you think you’re helping anybody by doing it, of course, but at least it’s much better for the ego, silently observing political discourse and only occasionally raining missiles of arrogance down upon discussions like a narcissistic archer in a masturbatory turret.
But I feel now there is something to say.
On March 22, 2016 in Brussels, at least 34 people died in bombing attacks for which ISIS has claimed responsibility. This came on the heels of a series of attacks in Turkey that in total killed more than 80 people (ISIS claims responsibilty for two out of four of the attacks), which in turn followed an attack on Paris which killed 130.
This is as good a time as any to bring up a neat rhetorical trick that a number of news organizations around the world are trying. Many non-English publications have long referred to ISIS as ‘Daesh,’ a transliteration of an acronym for its original Arabic name (for the hopefully obvious reason that ‘ISIS’ doesn’t stand for anything in languages other than English). Some English-language publications are recently following suit, ostensibly because they consider the organization neither Islamic nor a state. That first point of apprehension is a useful smokescreen for progressive sensibilities, but the second is much more telling.
ISIS controls a vast swath of the geographic area nominally claimed by the official Syrian and Iraqi governments. Estimates for the population of this territory range from 2 to 8 million. It would be difficult to convincingly argue that they govern this area well, but neither the official Iraqi and Syrian governments nor any other coherent body has the ability to enforce power in the region comparable to that of ISIS.
Like so many governments (for better or worse) established by violent overthrow before it, ISIS’s claim to statehood lacks only official international recognition. Whether the self-styled caliphate is ‘Islamic’ is as material a question as whether the DPRK is democratic (or whether the U.S.A. are in fact states haha zing). I see no compelling reason to stop referring to the organization by its chosen name, but that I and others can possibly come to that conclusion is understandably disturbing for western intellectuals (a group among which I would be happy to count myself if I had any realistic claim to intellectualism).
Barring a serious collapse of its economic infrastructure (not far-fetched by any means) or an overwhelming increase in the amount of military force resisting it, ISIS appears to be able to conquer and consolidate power in a substantial geographic area.
I say this because with those two factors as they currently are, ISIS is conquering and consolidating power in a substantial geographic area.
Why are they doing this? Because they hate freedom? Because they hate Christianity? Because they hate white people? At least in part, I suppose, but it’s a favourite pet thesis of mine that humans are usually too lazy to revolt against extant governing institutions as long as they have food on the table and children without bullets in them, at least in the past 150 years or so.
To what degree this contributes to the ideological and military successes of ISIS in comparison to the possibility that every individual who signed up with it is rabidly hateful and nakedly evil is a much more involved argument than I can in good conscience address in a blog post that is pointedly not citing sources. As is the question of what exactly made it so said individuals’ tables and children came to such a state.
Now let’s give the globe a twist.
The U.S.’s Obama administration has been speaking for a number of years now about a ‘pivot’ to East Asia. The logic runs that, with the amount of resources that America has devoted to addressing security threats in the oblong area between Europe and Central Asia, possibly destabilizing powers could rise in East Asia (read: China is getting uppity). For now, the ‘threat’ in the region has evolved little past pointed sabre-rattling, ships cheekily appearing in contested waters like the South China Sea or around the Senkakku/Diaoyu Islands, China commissioning its first aicraft carrier. Grandstanding among great powers, however, is at the very least ominous.
Especially considering what’s at stake here. China is the first power since the Soviet Union to meaningfully challenge the global political supremacy of NATO, an as yet mostly silent challenge though it may be. The second-largest and fastest-growing economy in the history of the world, China’s growth is slowing down, but still faster by degrees than that of western, developed countries. I will not attempt to predict whether its development, if undisturbed by non-economic factors, will allow it to eclipse the United States, or when it would happen if so, but strategists around the world have long considered it at least a realistic possibility.
And it wants control of its proverbial ‘backyard.’ In a bid similar to the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century United States, China seeks to take responsibility for protecting regional security and stability in East Asia. The problem with this is that, for a little over 20 years now, America’s ‘backyard’ has been the entire world, and its friendship with China is at best a terse one (terse like gritted teeth or terse like pistols gripped behind one’s back?) East Asia is home to some of the world’s most important economies (China itself, Japan, South Korea), and arguably its single most disturbing security dilemma (the Korean peninsula, a dispute upon which NATO and China stand on opposite sides).
Who controls East Asia makes a strong case for controlling the world, and all players at this table know it. If America truly wants to stop its bid for regional authority, China is not yet powerful enough to challenge it, but this window may be closing. If there is to be a ‘pivot’ of military resources toward, at least for a time, maintaining NATO’s supremacy in East Asia, it just might have to be now.
So what is it to be then? Should America stop this so-called ‘Caliphate’ rampaging through the Middle East, which, besides its economic importance as an energy nexus, is physically more or less next to Europe? This is not even to mention the fact that said organization is now getting to the point where one can say it regularly murders NATO civilians in their own countries. Or should ‘the world’s only superpower’ devote its resources to remaining that way, because a China that successfully consolidates influence over the strategically and economically critical region of East Asia may just be the point of no return for the democratic eagle that, in its own way, sought to unite the world. This is, of course, assuming that a war-weary demos would suffer any expansion and employment of military capacity at all.
There was a time when this situation wouldn’t even have necessitated a choice. Even as the Soviet Union breathed down its neck during the Cold War, America built a wall of plutonium and gold around it that could protect it and its friends from essentially any threat the world’s poorer states could in their wildest dreams imagine mustering. The bubble that the United States cast over the world was once airtight, as most of the peoples who could have served as competition spent the better part of a century stumbling temporarily blinded out of the darkness of imperialism. But now, for many, the emergence is well under way or nearly complete, and it is becoming apparent they did not come to the table to join the game, but to flip it onto the existing players.
In one of political science’s flagship accomplishments in the field of being wrong, Francis Fukuyama infamously declared in the early ’90s that the ‘end of history’ had been achieved. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he insisted, liberal democracy had established its supremacy as the ideal governing ideology for humanity. Major global conflicts were supposedly at an end, and it was only a matter of time before all peoples, nations, and states came to a peaceful liberal democratic equilibrium. Oh, Francis.
Oh, Francis.
Of late, I enjoy reading history much more than I do political science. Historians after all are essentially political scientists free of the pretense that we can ever hope to know anything about human events but what has already happened. I recently stumbled upon an explanatory statement much more compelling to me than anything I’ve ever read by a political scientist, and which just might be my favourite sliver of prose in any field or literary genre. Kotkin writes in Volume I of his biography of Stalin:
Revolutions are like earthquakes. They are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.
I hope I’ve done enough work in this piece to emphasize to you that any threats that exist could well simply evaporate. ISIS’s state infrastructure is maybe a step and a half away from vapour as it is, and if it’s not solidifed it could very well collapse entirely under its own weight with the barest nudge from NATO. China’s fabled economic juggernaut could be propped up by the largest financial bubble in the history of the world, which could mean that at any moment it will enter a collapse from which it could not conceivably emerge for the foreseeable future (read: Japan).
After all, I could be wrong. I’m almost certainly wrong, in fact, if history serves as a useful clue (which, once again, it almost never does).
But betting on that possibility is itself a gamble. Deciding to take no action is itself very much a decision, and if the problems do not solve themselves (which, once again, they reasonably could) then the world America wakes up to could be dramatically different from the one it goes to sleep in one night.
My best friend tells me that Kissinger once observed that the problem with decision-making is that the more time one spends gathering information, the less time there is to act, and that circumstances at any rate change faster than one can learn about them anyway. The time to act, in effect, is always now.
So what will it be, NATO? Chancellor Merkel? Prime Minister Abe? President Obama (Clinton? Trump? Sanders? Cruz? Some other name?) Where will you cast the die? Which die will you choose? The world needs a decision, and it needs one now.
Because sometimes the earthquake comes.
