It was the Atlantic Monthly that first catalogued, in February 1994, Robert Kaplan’s apocalyptic vision of Africa in “The Coming Anarchy.” Anyone who hasn’t read the article or the follow-up book should read it. Now the May issue, just on the newsstands this week, features Jeffrey Tayler’s account of Russia and its future. Tayler is an American who has lived in Russia for over a decade, and the name of his piece says it all: “Russia Is Finished.” He chronicles a former superpower’s decline into irrelevance, and as much as some people may disagree with his conclusion, it’s hard to argue with what he sees happening there today and tomorrow.

It all fits in very nicely with a thread at Flavius Aetius’s energy EZ board, http://pub49.ezboard.com/fbottleneckfrm1, titled Russia: Poster Child for the Dieoff.

The new Atlantic Monthly -- which I have absolutely no connection with, BTW, except an appreciation for excellent, realistic writing – also contains a piece by Peter Maass called “Ayn Rand Comes to Somalia,” about how business is flourishing in Mogadishu despite – or because of – the lack of a government. Maher might be interested in another piece, by Benjamin Ryder, about El Salvador’s acceptance of the U.S. dollar as its official currency. None of these articles are on the website ( http://www.theatlantic.com/ ) yet, probably won’t be until the May issue is off the stands.

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001

Answers

thanks to Old git for tracking down the article URL:

Rusia is Finished

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001

The Coming Anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet. Some quotes:

West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence--as I intend to do in this article--I find I must begin with West Africa.

* * *

Of the approximately 4,000 newly diagnosed tuberculosis patients in Abidjan, 45 percent were also found to be HIV-positive. As African birth rates soar and slums proliferate, some experts worry that viral mutations and hybridizations might, just conceivably, result in a form of the AIDS virus that is easier to catch than the present strain.

* * *

And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the future while driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The forty-five-minute journey in heavy traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence. The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls were coated with black slime. Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers, junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle of floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead rats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eight years Guinea's population will double if growth goes on at current rates.

* * *

To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the transformation of war. The order in which I have named these is not accidental. Each concept except the first relies partly on the one or ones before it, meaning that the last two--new approaches to mapmaking and to warfare--are the most important. They are also the least understood. I will now look at each idea, drawing upon the work of specialists and also my own travel experiences in various parts of the globe besides Africa, in order to fill in the blanks of a new political atlas.

* * *

The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground water tables in the western United States. He will build dikes to save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake beaches from rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast of India, sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt, Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of millions of people inland where there is no room for them, and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.

Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in his Toronto office. "The darker the map color, the worse the degradation," he explains. The West African coast, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related to winds, chemicals, and water problems. "The worst degradation is generally where the population is highest. The population is generally highest where the soil is the best. So we're degrading earth's best soil."

China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential example of environmental degradation. Its current economic "success" masks deeper problems. "China's fourteen percent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power. It means that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking place, is joining the rest of the Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is intensifying." Referring to the environmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of arable land in interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that the quality of that land has been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinization. He mentions the loss and contamination of water supplies, the exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 billion by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China has gotten its population under control. Large-scale population movements are under way, from inland China to coastal China and from villages to cities, leading to a crime surge like the one in Africa and to growing regional disparities and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism and a weak tradition of central government--again as in Africa. "We will probably see the center challenged and fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map," Homer-Dixon says.

Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power relationships, at which we now look. This really is an important article and I urge you to make time to read it.

-- Anonymous, April 26, 2001

OG

Excellent find! Long and well worth the read.

-- Anonymous, April 27, 2001

So glad you liked it, PA. It's like one of those books you can't put down,isn't it? I've been urging people to read it ever since I frirst saw it in the hard copy magazine and it's even more valid now than it was seven years ago, as Coast Watcher also suggests.

Kaplan took the bits and pieces I knew and suspected, expanded upon them, added bits and pieces I didn't know, and connected them all together in an understandable way. He doesn't talk down to the reader, just lays out what he saw and heard on his many travels and it held me spellbound.

About 12 years earlier, I had taken a bus down through Mexico and stayed in local hotels rather than tourist resort areas. It was a shuddering eye-opener. You can see the poverty and pollution on TV and read about the bribery and corruption in the paper, but you can't feel it until you go and experience it for yourself. (And almost get kidnapped in the process!) Kaplan's writings helped me understand the interconnectedness of it all and why and how things happen in other developing countries.

The current Atlantic article on Russia fits in very nicely and I'm grateful to Coast Watcher for finding it. I don't have as much time as I'd like to check sites on the Web and it's articles just such as this which add to our valuable store of useful and practical knowledge. If you don't read anything else this year, please read these two articles.

-- Anonymous, April 27, 2001

OG Yaaaawwwwnnnn. Yep. Hard to put down (till about three this morning).

I spent extensive time on projects in Southern Mexico, the middle east (predominately Saudi) and Nigeria. Eight years of my life were spent in these countries and I can attest to much that Kaplan says. The issue of nation states, political boundaries, cultural deterioration and spread of Islam were particularly familiar to me. The clincher was however the issue of the "map".

OG, check the last thread on Russia. My link was to the Atlantic article. I claim first rights of recognition on that one.

-- Anonymous, April 27, 2001