2011 in Review: The global war on...

By James Fallows

Too much happened this year, like most years, to fit into any manageable end-of-year list, but as I thought about the developments with the greatest chance of seeming significant five or ten years from now, I was struck by a similar set of groupings. The “Global War on…” leitmotif is, of course, partially flip, but not entirely so.

I think of the big events of the past year as being grouped this way:

1. The Global War on Terror

When President Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden in May, it seemed — momentarily, and prematurely — to end doubts about his prospects for re-election. In the longer term it suggested an opportunity to change both the international commitments (in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere) and the internal distortions in values (from defence spending to the suspension of constitutional protections) that had been undertaken in the name of an open-ended battle against the world terrorist threat.

The official end of the US military commitment in Iraq, while it of course neither resolves Iraq’s problems nor concludes U.S. exposure to development there, was another of these changes. And the year brought into new focus the contradictions in Pakistan’s role — relative to the US, to China, to Afghanistan, to India — and the practical and moral issues related to the West’s increasing reliance on drones.

2. The Global War on the Economy

The strains within the Eurozone called into question not simply the founding principles of the European Union over the past two decades and the future of the world’s largest economic unit, but also the larger phenomenon of “learning” from economic history. The arguments about “austerity versus stimulus” in Europe, North America, China, and Japan, so similar in their fundamentals to those of the late 1930s, made for one of the most apt books for the year, Keynes Hayek, by Nicholas Wapshott.

In the United States, the past half-century has shown reasonably impressive growth for the economy as a whole, but increasingly dramatic polarization, inequality, and constraints on social and economic mobility. The Occupy movement, which at first appeared a mere oddity, gained momentum as the first movement in decades to move “inequality” — in the shorthand form of “the 1 per cent” — closer to the realm of mainstream political discussion.

3. The Global War on Political Sanity

American politics has been raucous from the beginning, and in any political system it is normal to disagree about goals, values, and even “facts” to a certain degree. But the past year in US politics has shown an unusually sharp break from even a generously wide conception of rational disagreement. The Obama Administration had repeated standoffs with the Republican-run Congress not simply over shutting down the federal government, replaying disagreements from the Clinton years, but also about possibly defaulting on the Federal debt, a step never seriously contemplated under the 75 secretaries of the treasury from Alexander Hamilton to Timothy Geithner.

By any of the “normal” standards of qualification for the presidency, only three people who entered the Republican primary contest were “reasonable” candidates: the former governors Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, and Mitt Romney. But Pawlenty dropped out early, after one meaningless straw poll, and Huntsman has seemed stuck in the third tier. And poor Romney, by logical standards the “inevitable” nominee, has suffered the humiliation of running second or third, at different points, to the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich — for the most part fringe candidates whose combined chance of being elected president is zero. (The exception is Perry, who — had there never been debates that forced him to answer questions in real time — might have been a stronger contender.)

4. The Global War on Tyrants

The Arab Spring, with all the ambiguities of its short- and medium- term outcomes, in the long run has to be a welcome step away from taken-for-granted autocracies. It set the conditions for an intervention in Libya that also has mixed future prospects, but was overall a more positive story than many people (including me) feared and expected when it began. In the short run fear of “Spring” contagion led to tighter crackdowns in China and elsewhere, including, in different ways, Syria and Iran. No one knows what the change in North Korea, or the apparent reforms in Burma, or the resistance to Putin redux in Russia might portend. Still, the global net-balance of oppressors-versus-publics showed more progress than in some recent years.

5. The Global War on the Globe

After a year with more destructive extreme-weather episodes than any other in recorded history, it is hard to find much reason for optimism about collective or individual progress on the climate-change front.

A few other important elements don’t fit this pattern: Worsening problems between Israel and Palestine, and Israel and the United States. Worsening uncertainties about Iran’s nuclear plans and what to do about them. Whether China’s boom will continue or falter, and what that will mean for Australia and other important economies. Still, when I think about this past year, the “global war” model helps me make sense of it.

31 December 2011