While I’m a fan and admirer of the journalist responsible for the theme of this blog, I am not a practitioner of his self proclaimed ethos, “pessimistic realism.” When asked during an interview for our first ever pod cast to sum up what I thought the near future of global affairs entailed I answered “Unknown,” and asserted my sense of cautious optimism.

On any given day it’s easy to give over to the pessimistic vision of what’s going on around us. We are inundated by media reports rife with live reports depicting either the lowest points of humanity or the greatest suffering of humanity. In just the last few days news reports informed us of the fiery crash of an airliner out of Lebanon (breathlessly claiming that “sabotage,” despite the claims of the Lebanese government, was hardly off the table,) a synchronized series of explosions directed at hotels in Baghdad had killed at least twenty and of course the media’s darling of the year; Haiti’s being smashed from abjectly failed state to that of, well, no state.

Combine this with the likes of a decade long promise of apocalyptic climate change, the pervasive experts promising the next existential terrorist threat, the ever present promise of looming economic ruin and it’s no small reason that we look into our televisions, listen to our car radios and conclude that the near future of humanity is, as succinctly stated by my learned colleague; “fucked.”

So I read, with particular interest , this piece by Thomas Barnett titled “New Rules: The Fallacy of an Increasingly Dangerous World.”

The meat of the article expresses exactly what the title entails. As bad as things are we, as a planetary collective, are forging a legacy quite contrary to what pessimists might paint:

In 1950 the planet consisted of 2.5 billion souls, while today our global population approaches 7 billion. Likewise, the number of U.N. member states has roughly doubled to nearly 200, meaning a greater number of possible configurations for war. In short, despite far more bodies and far more states, wars have nonetheless become less frequent and less lethal, while we as a planet have grown stunningly more interconnected and thus interdependent. Even the three biggest conflicts of the last decade—Iraq, Sudan and Congo—involved, at most, 2 percent of the world’s population.

That amazing trajectory now places us far closer to Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace” than to Thomas Hobbes’ “state of nature.”

As I stated above, I’m not a “pessimistic realist.” While I’m loath to accept being pigeon-holed into some neat category either politically or intellectually I could live with the label “pragmatic optimist.” I agree that we are “far closer” to Kant’s perpetual peace than Hobbes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” but would argue that we’re only beginning to move away from Hobbes’ “war of all against all” in too many areas of the world. That’s a beginning that I’m much more willing to embrace than the pessimist’s embrace of the “beginning of the end.” We’re a fallible species and guilty of our own self induced eras of violence and ignorance but on the whole we’ve maintained a remarkable ability to advance. And I believe we’ll continue that advance.

I’d be curious to see what our own readers think in terms of just how dangerous our world is and just what their positions are regarding the overarching progress (or regress as it may be) of humanity.

The WSJ has an op-ed on the recent Abkhaz-Georgian-Russian tensions which for anyone following it, offers mainly a summary of the situation up until now recounting especially Georgian mistakes while spending little time on Russia. In fact, it fails to clearly define Russia’s role. While most articles continue to refer to Russian “peacekeepers” it seems a glaring oversight not to note that ongoing and very public threats against Georgia by Moscow makes it clear there are no peacekeepers in Abkhazia or South Ossetia but instead occupation troops. In what other conflict has the side (UN, NATO, AU) whose job it is to maintain peace constantly threatened the other party while actively violating its airspace and shooting down its planes?

Nevertheless, the op-ed ends with a fascinating suggestion for Tbilisi:

Abkhazia is now virtually lost to Georgia—almost as lost as Kosovo is to Serbia. The only chance for Tbilisi to reverse this process and see Georgian refugees ever returning to their home is, paradoxically, to let go. Tbilisi should open up Abkhazia and free it from dependence on Russia. That means lifting sanctions and permitting a sea link to Turkey and the re-opening of a railway line connecting it with Western Georgia.

Such a policy would change the atmosphere and call the Abkhaz bluff—forcing them to negotiate in earnest and confront the issue that holds the key to their future status: Abkhaz responsibilities to their prewar Georgian population. And the rest of us would sleep a little easier if only this tinderbox in the Caucasus could be damped down.

Such a plan would make Thomas Barnett proud.

Thomas de Waal also wrote the fantastic book Black Garden which I read as research for my trip and can highly recommend.

Rinderpest, an animal disease that plagued livestock and their human keepers across Eurasia and Africa for millennia, may be on the verge of joining smallpox as the only viral diseases to have been eradicated in human history.

The virus never became established in the western hemisphere. In the 1920s, Europe eradicated it by controlling animal movements and slaughtering infected animals. Worldwide control became a priority of the fledgling United Nations’ agricultural efforts in 1945. A vaccine grown in goats became available in the 1950s. And in the 1960s, a live attenuated vaccine became widely used in rinderpest-eradication efforts. A global campaign established in the early 1990s did much to control the spread of the virus and “reinfection” between Arabia and India through livestock export.

Sri Lanka and Iran reported their last outbreaks in 1994, India in 1995, Iraq in 1996, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1997, and Pakistan in 2000. In Africa, the virus was last detected in 2001 in wild buffaloes in Meru National Park in Kenya, which lies on the edge of the Somali ecosystem. This may be the last remaining reservoir of the virus. And pending confirmation it may finally be eradicated.

One small step for… well, certainly one giant leap in shrinking the gap.

UPDATE: Dr. Barnett responds in an unfortunately typical vitrioled post (“analytically-narrow”… “drunken [sic?] the Kool-Aid”… “Dark Lord”, etc., etc.). If anyone sees a real response in there, please share the substance in the comments.

ORIGINAL POST:

Dr. Thomas Barnett has built his career on describing the world as divided between a rich and developed “Core,” and an unconnected and undeveloped “Gap.” We’ve tried to “map” this gap several times here at CA to try and understand where the exact lines are. But when it comes down to it, the biggest indicator of the gap-core border is not homosexuality laws or war risk insurance policies, but simply looking at birth rates. All the developed societies in North America, Europe, and the Pacific quickly stopped producing babies once they became rich. The undeveloped world in Africa, South America, South Asia and the Middle East continues to grow at astounding rates. Compare a map of birth rates to a map of Barnett’s Gap and you get a crystal clear correlation: the higher the birth rate, the worse off the country.

It almost defies logic. The most miserable, ungoverned disasters of nations on this earth—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan—are the ones with the highest growth rates. Or as Robert D. Kaplan said in this interview on PBS more than a decade ago on April 5 1996:

All the new babies in the world are not being born in Japan or Scarsdale or Singapore. They’re being born in poor African countries, subcontinental India, and the poorest parts of our own societies. It’s like one part of the world is going in one direction, but a large swath of humanity is going in another. And overpopulation, disease pandemics, rising crime, cultural dysfunction, are going to make a critical mass of the Third World so far behind that they won’t be able to catch up.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is optimistic that the core counties can shrink the gap. Perhaps. But to paraphrase from Coming Anarchy, the world population in 1950 was 2.5 billion, it’s 6 billion today, and it will break 9 billion in 40 years. Although optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, a whopping 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world. Places like the Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan where governments do not function, the economy a wreck, and exports are non-existent. These places are already security black holes, and its only going to get worse as their populations explode.

This population growth will put an increasing strain on our environment and our energy resources. And while neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today’s environmental-social system, time may ultimately prove them right.