Thanks in part to Alexander's Cockburn's attack in The
Nation, I made a point of searching out Robert D. Kaplan's
essay in the Feb 1994 Atlantic, "The Coming Anarchy: How
scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are
rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet."
Cockburn's denunciation appeared in his column entitled
"The Horror", in the March 28, 1994 edition of The
Nation; and
in response to a reader comment, Cockburn followed up two
weeks later in the April 11, 1994 edition with another attack on
what he termed the "repulsive" Kaplan piece.
In his first article, Cockburn called Kaplan "a rabid
Malthusian" who was influenced by "the reactionary
geographer Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon ..." Cockburn sneered
at "environmentalists who love Kaplan's catastrophic
impressionism" and accused Kaplan of "racist uniculturalism
..."
In the end I had to thank Alexander Cockburn for putting me
on to a very powerful piece of reporting. As an "environ-
mentalist," I applauded the Kaplan piece -- especially the
first part -- because it looked plainly at the reality of
our current situation and dared to suggest that the future
would resemble the present.
In the following selections, I try to give some of the
substance and flavor of Kaplan's article. I begin with
Kaplan's description of what he saw in West Africa.
(Emphasis in original.)
"The cities of West Africa at night are some of the
unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often
lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars,
carjackers, and muggers proliferate. `The government in
Sierra Leone has no writ after dark,' says a foreign
resident, shrugging. When I was in the capital, Freetown,
last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the
house of an American man. They tied him up and stole
everything of value. Forget Miami: direct flights between
the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in
neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been
suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation
because of ineffective security at the terminal and its
environs. A State Department report cited the airport for
'extortion by law-enforcement and immigration officials.'
This is one of the few times that the U.S. government has
embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked
purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of
the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick-and-
gun-wielding guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so
between your car and the entrance, giving you an eerie
taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An
Italian ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers
invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian
ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the
ambassador's residence...."
"A PREMONITION OF THE FUTURE"
"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. ..."
"As a consequence [of civil war and anarchy in Sierra
Leone], roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally
displaced, 280,000 more have fled to neighboring Guinea,
and another 100,000 have fled to Liberia, even as 400,000
Liberians have fled to Sierra Leone. The third largest
city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp.
With an additional 600,000 Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in
the Ivory Coast, the borders dividing these four countries have
become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones none of
the governments except the Ivory Coast's maintains the schools,
bridges, roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for
functional sovereignty...."
"In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as
in Ghana, most of the primary rain forest and the secondary
bush is being destroyed at an alarming rate. I saw convoys
of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal
ports. When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as
much as 60 percent of the country was primary rain forest.
Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the proportion has
fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. The deforestation
has led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and
more mosquitoes. Virtually everyone in the West African
interior has some form of malaria.
"Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit
in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa
and much of the undeveloped world: the withering away of
central governments, the rise of tribal and regional
domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing
pervasiveness of war....[I]t is Thomas Malthus, the
philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet
of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future,
eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the
world."
In a section entitled "The Environment As a Hostile Power"
the author focuses on the growing connection between the
earth's environment and the foreign policy of nations.
"It is time to understand `the environment' for what it is:
THE national security issue of the early twenty-first
century. The political and strategic impact of surging
populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil
erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly,
rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the
Nile Delta and Bangladesh -- developments that will prompt
mass migrations and in turn, incite group conflicts -- will
be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others
will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting
assorted interests left over from the Cold War. In the
twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short
supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central
Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could
erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water. Even in
Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia
over the damming of the Danube, a classic case of how
environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and historical
ones.
"The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser
Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy
today in the shape of a doughnut -- lots of peripheral
interests but nothing at the center." The environment, I
will argue is part of a terrifying array of problems that
will define a new threat to our security, filling the hole
in Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a post-Cold War
foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by
design."
As Cockburn points out, Kaplan bases his view and has high
praise for Thomas F. Homer Dixon who, Kaplan says, ""
"In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence will
often arise from scarcities of resources such as water,
cropland, forests, and fish. Just as there will be
environmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will
be environmentally induced praetorian regimes -- or, as he
puts it, `hard regimes.'"
"Homer-Dixon says that `for too long we've been prisoners
of "social-social" theory, which assumes there are only social
causes for social and political changes, rather than
natural causes, too. This social-social mentality emerged with the
Industrial Revolution, which separated us from nature. But
nature is coming back with a vengeance, tied to population
growth. It will have incredible security implications."
Kaplan continues.
"We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is
inhabited by Hegel's and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well
fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is
inhabited by Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that
is `poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Although both parts
will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be
able to master it; the First Man will not."
THE END
rbleier@igc.apc.org
If we do not act now, we will surely end up where
we are heading. -- Chinese Proverb
