After America - Mark Steyn [137]
The world after America is beginning to take shape, a planet where the loons and the hard men make the running and the rest go along to get along. Picture the UN a few years down the road: for three of the Security Council’s permanent members (Britain, France, Russia), an accommodation with Islam will be a domestic political imperative, and getting along with China will be the overriding foreign priority. In the practical sense, this will shrink “the West” and destroy the post-war balance of power in which three permanent members from the free world balanced two authoritarian powers. Nudge things a little further down the road—a fractious planet of hostile forces—Russia, China, a semi-Islamized Europe, the aspiring caliphate, whatever the new Chavismo bequeaths Latin America—all mutually antipathetic yet for whom the flailing America remains the biggest and most inviting target. There will be no “new world order,” only a world with no order, in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations are unable to defend their borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, whatever survives of the United States will still be the most inviting target—first because it’s big; and second because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.
Listen to the way Washington’s European “allies” and Sunni Arab “allies” and UN “human rights” bigwigs talk about the Jewish state today. That’s how they’ll be talking about the U.S. tomorrow. In a post-American world, the kind of world Barack Obama is committed to building, America will be surrounded on all sides by hostile forces and more globally demonized than ever. Another half-a-decade on, and there’ll be an informal Islamoveto over European policy. Russia and China have already determined that, whatever their own little local difficulties with Muslims, their long-term strategic interest lies in keeping the jihad as an American problem. The internal logic of the demographic shifts will be to make much of the world figure it makes sense to be on the side America’s not.
They got the post-American world they always dreamed of, and, as they adjust to a poorer and more violent planet, they will blame Washington for the horrors of the new age more furiously than ever. Think of Netanyahu alone at the podium trying to demonstrate objective facts to a roomful of madmen, liars, and appeasers. He’s the warm-up act, and that’s the reception Washington will get in a world after American power.
Western civilization is a synthesis—a multicultural synthesis, if you like: Athenian democracy, Roman law, the Hebrew Bible, dispersed by London to every corner of the globe. If Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem are the three temple mounts of the modern world and all its blessings, none has had a rougher ride than the last: attacked, besieged, captured, and recaptured dozens of times across the centuries—and twice destroyed. Today, Jerusalem is home to the Knesset and all Israeli government ministries, and the universally unrecognized capital of a universally delegitimized nation. Because the civilized world could not summon up the will to prevent Iran going nuclear, Israel will live on a thin line between the advanced civilized state they have built and oblivion, a permanent state of high alert in which the difference between first-world prosperity and extinction will come down to the hair-trigger reactions of bureaucratic monitoring of an implacable foe.