“Would you bring forth a child into the world today?” asked my friend Brian Cloughley. Brian – defense analyst, prolific columnist, author of books on the Pakistani military – and I were talking back and forth about how the entire world is in the process of violent societal change, akin to a Leviathan in convulsion, shedding its skin, changing form, morphing, like a caterpillar becomes a cocoon and then emerges either as a butterfly or a moth. Such massive change on a global scale is more complex, more intricate and more multi-dimensional than any dialectics imagined by man.
Never has the world seen such political, economic and societal convulsions before, not even after the three great wars of the last century that led to geographic, political and economic reconfiguration, albeit imperfect. While the world will keep fine-tuning itself through evolution, it will never achieve perfection. If it were to, it would fly in the face of the Creator and His Purpose. If He didn’t want change, He would have made a static universe, not a dynamic one.
So many man-made systems have come and gone – divine right, dynasticism, Muslim rule, colonialism, Soviet communism… Now runaway Wall Street capitalism is in meltdown and electoral democracy is being questioned for its tendency to throw up the inadequate and the inept. Only neo-colonialism, economic, political and military, remains. Only one new system has emerged and is working so far: China’s marriage between the communist political system and strictly regulated capitalism. First, Mao Zedong cleansed the country and wiped the slate clean. Then Deng Xiao Ping came and wrote his thought on it. So far this marriage has been brilliant. In just 32 years, a very backward country has been propelled into the 21st Century and become the second largest economy in the world, soon to become the largest. But China’s imperative must remain the continuing education its people and enlarging of its knowledge bank. And not make their military-industrial complex the engine of their economy but keep well being of the people central to every policy.
As for America, Japan and Europe, their diminishment now seems inevitable. The IMF says that the Chinese economy will overtake America’s by 2016. The US government’s debt has already hit the ceiling of some $14.94 trillion, which is more than its GDP. America’s total public liabilities are mind-bending – around $75 trillion. Can that ever be repaid? Will it? I wouldn’t bet on it.
If Congress doesn’t increase the debt ceiling, America will default on its next debt servicing payment on August 2, 2011. When that happens, a country is declared a ‘failed state’. America’s credit rating has been lowered by its own rating agencies. It gets damaged both ways: raising the debt ceiling signals a deep malaise in the economy; defaulting will cause a run on the dollar and expose the truth that it is fast becoming worthless. The global economy will crash.
European economies are falling like ninepins. The UK’s debt too is more than its GDP with no manufacturing base left. Iceland, Ireland, Portugal have had bailouts. Greece has had to suffer two. Spain and Italy are teetering. Poor Japan: its debt is twice its GDP. The earthquake and tsunami has shaken the Japanese economy to its foundations, putting it beyond full recovery.
When the fall first came in October 2008, Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned that the world’s financial system is teetering on the “brink of a systemic meltdown.” But America treated the symptoms, not the disease, for the very banks and bankers who took the US economy to the brink are also the decision makers. What chance does the patient have when the very doctors that gave him a headache are providing only temporary relief with aspirin instead of treating the tumour in the brain?
Porter Stansberry, founder and the managing director of Stansberry & Associates, a Baltimore-based financial research firm, says: “I believe with 100 percent certainty that we as Americans are in the early stages of a crisis that will shake the very foundation of our nation…I was predicting that, as a result of this emerging crisis, there would be riots in the streets, protests, and martial law, enforced by the military. Well, I have to admit that in recent months, these events have moved more quickly than even I anticipated. Just look around at what’s happening today. Angry protests in Wisconsin made front-page news for weeks. Similar fights and protests are brewing in Indiana, Ohio, and Kansas, just to name a few. In fact, one political organisation organised a rally in every state on a single day in late February. Around the globe, there have been massive protests, hundreds of deaths, and even the overthrow of several governments… this is all related to the very same crisis that will soon erupt in full force here on US shores.
“I am not a radical. Our research firm doesn’t proclaim a crisis every other month…so let me state this as firmly and as plainly as I can…The current problems with our currency and our runaway deficit in the United States cannot be fixed without radical changes to our standard of living.”
Another ‘conspiracy theorist’, what? These ‘conspiracy theorists’ are sprouting up everywhere like mushrooms on a dung heap – mostly in America. When a Leviathan morphs, it convulses and the world changes. Geographies change. Old states die, new one’s form. Power shifts. We saw this after both World Wars and the Cold War. Now the ‘War on Terror’ is coming to an end. But there are two differences. One: this fourth is the only World War that America and its allies have lost. Two: adding to the pain, a simultaneous a shift in global power is taking place for only the second time in history. It shifted once before more than a thousand years ago from east to west. Now the pendulum is swinging back from west to east. Many peoples and states will get trampled underfoot.
History’s graveyards are full of civilisations, empires, nations and states – Greek, Roman, Arab, Mongol, Indian, old Chinese, Egypt, Arab, the British on which the sun would never set…all gone in a few massive convulsions. Sounds fanciful when it is happening. Looks so obvious after it has happened.
The writer is a political analyst. He can be contacted at humayun.gauhar786@gmail.com