Asleep Awakes

I fell asleep last night while thinking tiring thoughts.

Anglo-Saxons still carry the burden of their past, the unsettling lack of fit between empire-building and empire-burning. I looked across the darkling plain, as Matthew Arnold puts it, and saw ignorant armies clashing by night on the battlefield of the spirit.

How else to explain the contempt, revulsion, fear and disgust that comes out of the USA as it used to come out of Victorian England? There is a kind of socially-mandated or oddball respect for the ancient cultures of China, India, Persia and the rest of the cradle of civilisation — a cradle that runs from Asia's western border with the Mediterranean and Africa to its eastern border on the Pacific, rocking on its base in the Indian Ocean. But there is also a visceral horror at the purported barbarism and inhumanity of the evil Oriental who can be found throughout the region.

This is why the United States of America, while speaking peace and joy, still wants to keep bases in the Indian Ocean (where the US really doesn't belong), float navies in the South China Sea (which has been the Nanyang or Southern Ocean to China for centuries), and neutralise the Persian Iranian nuclear programme (despite the fact that Pakistan and India, just round the corner, already have nukes ready to go). They deny the overwhelming desire to obtain and keep a resource-rich empire, with very British precedent, while lusting after the kingdoms of the world.

Such an insecure power. When the crude but much-trumpeted beginning of that power came in 1776, my ancestors had left China and settled elsewhere already. My ancestors lost the use of their Chinese language before the USA was more than a dream. By the time the present 50-state confederation (with protectorates and assorted imperial fragments) was formed, English had become my mother tongue — but not American.

But America has a right to be an Eastern Pacific and Northern Atlantic power. Where it fails is its oil-driven hunger to be a Middle Eastern power (meddling through proxies) as well. This meddling in Asia is what did for Britain eventually, and may yet do for the Pax Americana. It ain't healthy, cowboy.

America the beautiful, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. But stay out of other people's seas, do.

Forgotten Lands

It's taken me a long time, but I've finally found my way through Parag Khanna's The Second World: How Emerging Powers are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-First Century. It's all about the new geopolitics and the new maps of the world.

Many amazing things that we've all forgotten come back to light; the fact of how big Xinjiang and Tibet are compared to the rest of China; the size of Brazil compared to that of the USA (8.5 million sq km vs 9.8 million sq km); how many pieces of desert with oil under them can be found in central Asia; the fact that on a clear day you can see Pakistan from Oman; the list goes on. It is a fantastic survey of all the world.

Quite often, in our obsession with the First World and the Third World, we forget that there was a Second World, once full of life and humanity, but drained by the First World over the last 150 years or so. As we head towards a new multipolarity, the mass of China, the European Union and the American hegemony will set these up as the new powers. True, the USA has a huge military edge — but what can it do with that edge?

Meanwhile, China and the EU chip and chisel away at the former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, Africa, west Asia, and even South America. It all depends on which way the remaining lesser powers of the First and Second World decide to go; huge Brazil, innovative Japan, massive India and its neighbour Pakistan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and others. What a wonderful world!