THE rubbishy North Korean missile sent into the sky by a tin-pot dictatorship this week may not have been technically far off from having had a nuclear warhead.
Then it would not have fallen harmlessly into the Sea of Japan.
And what would have happened then? The US could hardly have retaliated with a massive nuclear attack on North Korea, killing millions of civilians who are as innocent as any other people enslaved by dictatorship.
It is a far cry from the Cold War when any Soviet or Chinese nuclear attack would have been met with immediate catastrophic nuclear onslaught.
In those days of mutually assured destruction we were more secure, not less. How naïve we were to think that the end of the Cold War would bring a linear historical march to capitalism, liberal democracy and peace, even to suggest the end of history.
Few expected the unexpected.
Look at us now. Rarely have we seen a leader in more vainglorious stupidity than George W. Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on 1 May 2003 under a sign “Mission Accomplished”.
He did not know what the mission was, let alone accomplish it.
Rarely have we seen one of the most economically powerful men in the world – Alan Greenspan – look so humiliated and bewildered when on 23 October last year he told the House Oversight Committee that he was in “shocked disbelief” at the “once-in-a-century credit tsunami”. At least he spoke in English rather than in the tea-leaf-like gibberish he used for his previous appearances in his 18 years as the head of the Federal Reserve.
The two incidences are exemplifying moments of US policy gone wrong since the fall of the Soviet Union 20 years ago.
This week’s Korean incident and the economic meltdown generally show the narrowness of earlier thinking.
Bush – whose father was CIA and was President at the time of the Soviet collapse – never escaped the cold war mentality of a tussle between nation states. After the attacks on the World Trade Center he responded with a nation-state mentality. He found some nation states to go to war with and started with Afghanistan and then went on to Iraq with North Korea still in his sights after that.
The policy was flawed through the illogic of simplicity and the folly of applying old thinking to a new world – Iraq is part of axis of evil, so it must have or be developing weapons of mass destruction and must be supporting terrorism, Bush reasoned, so let’s have a nation-state war. The result was more terrorists not fewer.
It was the same for Greenspan. His illogic of simplicity was a belief that the discipline of the market would correct itself by slowly weeding out miscreants. He was a market economist wrapped in a mix of Friedman and Keynes with no understanding of “30 something” hedge-fund manipulators and debt re-packagers. He failed to see the market had no discipline. Group-think financial commentators were incapable of thinking alone lest they be accused of talking the market down. So the sub-prime toxic debt grew until the bubble burst.
Greenspan thought the levers of monetary policy (interest rates) were enough to move or stabilise the financial world. But the financial world had moved on, the lever was no longer under it.
Greenspan and Bush applied old thinking to new events. The result was a war against terrorism that produced more terrorists, and the controller of the so-called levers of economic stability giving us the most unstable economic conditions in four generations.
And now the march of capitalism has been dealt a severe blow and the export of democracy is in tatters. How to you deal with a democratically elected government committed to violence (Hamas) except by patience, guile, carrot and stick – rather than the simplistically predictable full-on hostility of the Bush-Cheney Administration?
Observers did not see how some tiny event can lead to chaotic results – like the adding of the small piece to a large toy-block castle that causes the lot to collapse. Chads in Florida lead to millions dead and displaced in Iraq. The over-a-cup-of-coffee bright idea in the US to bundle mortgages and resell them leads to millions unemployed in Europe.
We may, however, be at a turning point. We did not get a bellicose response from President Barack Obama over the missile. Also, he has gone to Turkey to assure the world that the US is not at war with Islam.
More importantly, when you read his books, you get a feeling that here is a man who has an understanding of complexity and the intelligence to respond to complex problems in a complex way.
Moreover, it may be that the electorate, too, is sick of simple slogans and simple “solutions” that only make things worse, so they will tolerate patient, long-term responses. For all of its military strength, the US is as vulnerable now as it has ever been. Attack by enemies is relatively cheap and easy – maybe just $1 million for the September 11 attacks. Defence is costly and difficult.
On nuclear weapons, Obama at least in the long term accepts that the proposition under-pining of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is contrary to human nature. You cannot say to other nations: we will keep our nukes but you lot cannot get your own. We all have to give them up.
And then there is climate change. As with the economy and security, large destructive changes can be triggered by a small event like the block on the child’s castle.
Again we need flexible, complex, imaginative responses, not denials or simplistic slogans.
And again, maybe we are fortunate that the new president was a first-term senator whose thinking has not be moulded into conventional unwisdom.