Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson, in an article in Foreign Policy Magazine, The Axis of Upheaval, is predicting a coming “Age of Upheaval.” He writes, “Forget Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil.’ As economic calamity meets political and social turmoil, the world’s worst problems may come from countries like Somalia, Russia, and Mexico. And they’re just the beginning.”
Ferguson sees a lethal combination of forces propelling coming upheavals: Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline. “We now have all three,” he says, “The age of upheaval starts now.” Ferguson writes, “The resources available for policing the world are certain to be reduced for the foreseeable future.”
Excerpts from the article:
- The bad news for Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, is that he now faces a much larger and potentially more troubling axis — an axis of upheaval. This axis has at least nine members, and quite possibly more. What unites them is not so much their wicked intentions as their instability, which the global financial crisis only makes worse every day. Unfortunately, that same crisis is making it far from easy for the United States to respond to this new “grave and growing danger.”
- The axis of upheaval is reminiscent of the decade before the outbreak of World War II, when the Great Depression unleashed a wave of global political crises.
- There is reason to fear that the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression could have comparable consequences for the international system.
- For more than a decade, I pondered the question of why the 20th century was characterized by so much brutal upheaval. I pored over primary and secondary literature. I wrote more than 800 pages on the subject. And ultimately I concluded, in The War of the World, that three factors made the location and timing of lethal organized violence more or less predictable in the last century. The first factor was ethnic disintegration: Violence was worst in areas of mounting ethnic tension. The second factor was economic volatility: The greater the magnitude of economic shocks, the more likely conflict was. And the third factor was empires in decline: When structures of imperial rule crumbled, battles for political power were most bloody.
- But no matter how low interest rates go or how high deficits rise, there will be a substantial increase in unemployment in most economies this year and a painful decline in incomes. Such economic pain nearly always has geopolitical consequences. Indeed, we can already see the first symptoms of the coming upheaval.
- The problem is that, as in the 1930s, most countries are looking inward, grappling with the domestic consequences of the economic crisis and paying little attention to the wider world crisis. This is true even of the United States, which is now so preoccupied with its own economic problems that countering global upheaval looks like an expensive luxury.
- The resources available for policing the world are certain to be reduced for the foreseeable future. That will be especially true if foreign investors start demanding higher yields on the bonds they buy from the United States or simply begin dumping dollars in exchange for other currencies.
- Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheaval starts now.
