The world in 2031: How September 11 could shape our future

The world in 2031: How September 11 could shape our future

Last week, the Harvard academic Niall Ferguson offered an optimistic prediction of how our world could look, 30 years after the September 11 attacks. But is the future really so rosy? Will our society and way of life survive the traumas of war, terrorism and climate change? Here, three leading historians look ahead - to a time we can only imagine
Published: 11 September 2006

The new Thirty Years' War by Paul Kennedy

It seems very hard and strange now, to look back more than 30 years to that shocking morning of September 11 2001, and to attempt to reflect on how the world has changed and not changed during those decades. In the catastrophe's immediate aftermath and, in fact, for many years afterwards, it was common to believe that the world's scene was totally different; that the landscape of national and international politics had been transformed by the sabotage and deliberate crashes of four aircraft on American soil.

That certainly was the drumbeat message of the Bush administration of the time and, if anyone can recall those days, for the subsequent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, the emergency military expeditions to defend the oilfields of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and the welter of terrorist attacks upon Europe, North America and Japan in the critical years 2008-2012. They all seemed to justify an apocalyptic view.

How curious, in retrospect, appears that broad post-September 11 conviction that we were on the verge of Armageddon or, to use a softer but still powerful phrase, that we had entered a new Thirty Years War, this time between universalistic liberal values and the fanatic, destructive counter-attack of fundamental Islamicists.

Yet our later knowledge of how the world unfolded in ways very different from those ultra-gloomy assumptions is not just a display of being wise after the event. After all, what were regarded as the major tendencies in global affairs before al-Qa'ida struck the Pentagon and the Twin Towers? Surely they the following: the United States was unquestionably the global No 1, albeit facing serious financial imbalances and militarily overstretch abroad; Asia, led above all by China and India, was rising both economically and militarily; Russia, under Putin's coldly calculated mix of domestic and external stratagems, was steadily recovering its place in world affairs; Europe was getting older and slower but was still a nice place in which to live; Africa was grappling, with mixed results, with more disasters than any other broad region of the Earth; and the Middle East, with exceptions, could not manage the 21st century.

Thirty years later, those major tendencies seem to have held their course, and were to be far less disrupted by the impacts of the September 11 attacks than some of us assumed at the time. Just look at the world around us, in this pleasant early-autumnal week of 2031. The United States still possesses the greatest overall combination of military, economic and technological strengths, but it has been considerably checked and sobered by the fiscal crises and military setbacks of the decade that followed the Bush administration's decision to fight in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so that it now sensibly pursues policies of cooperation - with the other powers, and with international agencies - and much more restraint abroad.

China and India have indeed risen, not without enormous wrenches in their domestic social fabrics, and are now major, responsible actors on the world scene. Putin's clever Bismarckian policies of internal and external improvements paid off; here is the fourth big player on the world chessboard. Europe worries incessantly about itself but, actually, is just fine, a comfortable antidote to America's habit of self-improving and Asia's blinkered commitment to 15-year-plans. Africa endured hell for the first half of these past three decades - continued civil wars, genocides, failed states, environmental calamities - but resourceful peoples in Botswana, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Morocco, South Africa and elsewhere fought off those common foes and advanced, stronger than before, for the tests they endured.

The Middle East was different, but that was true before September 11, even if the subsequent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt between that date and the second decade of our 21st century intensified its convulsions. The annual Arab Development Reports composed by the UN Development Programme early in the 21st century had pointed to the many hindrances that would prevent this region from smoothly entering the comity of nations. Regional experts and CIA analysts warned that the area was unstable, unhinged, in so many ways.

Still, the convulsions of 2009-2012 came so thick and fast that, for all their failures, the policy-makers of those years can hardly be dismissed as buffoons; to be fair, they were humanly incapable of dealing with the almost-simultaneous collapse of the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, the worsening of the Iraqi civil war, the generational struggle for power in Iran, and, above all, the horrifying Iranian nuclear devastation of Tel Aviv as well as much of the city's surrounding suburbs.

The Israeli nuclear counter-strike killed 10 million Iranians, but the ancient Persian entity itself remained, eviscerated but not obliterated. The Great Powers were paralysed, for what exactly was one supposed to do following an Iranian-Israeli nuclear exchange? Frightened, they sought for compromises on all fronts, multiple UN-led peacekeeping missions, and then disentanglement and post-nuclear clean-up. Americans were aroused, but simultaneously scared at going back into that mire - and who exactly did you "nuke" just because Tel Aviv had disappeared?

Europeans were numbed. Putin kept his lips tightly closed. And why should the ever-more-prosperous Asia get involved in stupid religious and ideological wars far to the west? So Israel limped on, awfully damaged, still protected by the US, but facing an unclear future.

Thirty years after the September 11 attacks the Middle East remains unstable, even if moderate political groups are gaining ever more support from a newer generation of Arabs in the Gulf, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The most promising fact is that al-Qa'ida is a distant memory, like the anarchists of the 1870s and 1880s. They scared people for a long while, but ran themselves into the sand, especially with their foolish bombings in Shanghai and Beijing in the years 2010 to 2012 to protest at Chinese security measures against Muslims in the country's western provinces.

With an aroused China joining an already belligerent USA in the war against terror, with Putin agreeing and Europe and the rest of the world scuttling to destroy any home-grown terrorists, and with all possible al-Qa'ida financial supporters arrested by cooperative measures among banks (instigated by President Bush), they are now a busted flush. Indeed, the terror organisation is becoming a distant memory.

So, where are we, 30 years after the twin towers came down? Older, certainly; perhaps a bit wiser. It has not been a happy planet, especially in much of Africa and the Middle East. But, in truth, we are in 2031 a lot better off than most of the pundits of 2001 thought we might be. That itself is cause for some rejoicing. But not much.

Paul Kennedy is professor of history at Yale University. His latest book is 'The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government', Allen Lane, £25