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By Root 643 0

with whomsoever finds themselves in power in Africa, South America, or anywhere else. For their part, China’s trading partners have no desire to provoke Beijing, not with all those surplus young men it’s so eager to dispatch abroad. In a world in which American battleships no longer ply the Pacific, Australia understands that it lives on a Chinese lake. How silly was the assumption that “globalization” meant “westernization” or even “Americanization”—for little reason other than that, when a Danish businessman conversed with his Indonesian supplier, he did so in English. There have always been lingua francas—Latin, French—and their moments came and went. In 1958, just under 10 percent of the world’s people spoke English and 15.6 percent spoke Mandarin.62 By 1992, Mandarin was 15.2 percent, and English was down to 7.6. Today, business computers from Canada to New Zealand have keyboards in Roman and Chinese characters.

Even as it de-anglicizes, so the world after America is reprimitivizing, fast. In the early years of the century, in many columns filed from the VIP lounges of the world’s airports, Thomas L. Friedman, the in-house “thinker” at the New York Times, had an analogy to which he was especially partial. From December 2008:

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.63

And it wasn’t just space-age Hong Kong! From May 2008:

In JFK’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons.64

And it wasn’t just stone-age JFK! From 2007:

Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump. It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.65

I gather that “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons” were two popular TV cartoon series of the mid-twentieth century. If you still have difficulty grasping Mr. Friedman’s point, here he is in 2010, bemoaning the “faded, cramped domestic terminal” in Los Angeles, yet another example of America’s, er, terminal decline:

Businesses prefer to invest with the Jetsons more than the Flintstones.66

More fool them. Scholars of twentieth century popular culture say you’d have made a ton more money if you’d invested in “The Flintstones,” which was a classic, instead of “The Jetsons,” which was a stale knock-off with the veneer of modernity. But, if you were as invested in this theory of terminal decline as Friedman was, it would have helped to think it through a little. Here’s one more from the New York Times’ cartoon thinker, from January 2002, when Americans were, for once, the Jetsons:

For all the talk about the vaunted Afghan fighters, this was a war between the Jetsons and the Flintstones—and the Jetsons won and the Flintstones know it.67

But they didn’t, did they? To reprise the old Taliban saying: “Americans have all the watches, but we’ve got all the time.” The American Jetsons had all the high-tech gizmos, but the Afghan Flintstones had the string and fertilizer. The United States had accounted for almost half the world’s military expenditures. But somehow it didn’t feel like that. In Afghanistan, a few illiterate goatherds with IEDs had tied down the hyperpower for over twice as long as it took America to win victory in the Second World War. To be sure, counterinsurgency campaigns are difficult. But D-Day difficult? Liberatinga-continent difficult? Liberating a continent from a serious enemy with well-trained troops and state-of-the-art technology?

If the jihadists’ problem was an inability to forget the Crusades, perhaps the West suffered from an inability to remember. After Muslim provocations against Christians, Pope Urban II spoke to the Council of Clermont in 1095 and called for what we now know as the First Crusade. Within four years, an army had been raised, got to the Middle East (on foot for most of the journey), liberated the Holy Land, and established a Christian Kingdom