Nationalism Trumps Globalization in New IT Era

Robert Kaplan is one of the most accomplished foreign policy and historical analysts in the USA. Kaplan correctly skewers the self-referential boobies stateside and in Europe who interview each other and like-minded liberal elites in Egypt and India and elsewhere to give a false sense of kumbayeh peace and harmony breaking out everywhere. Here's Kaplan:

Western elites believe that universal values are trumping the forces of reaction. They wax eloquent about the triumph of human rights, women's liberation, social media, financial markets, international and regional organizations and all the other forces that are breaking down boundaries separating humanity.

Tragically, they are really observing a self-referential world of global cosmopolitans like themselves. In country after country, the Westerners identify like-minded, educated elites and mistake them for the population at large. They prefer not to see the regressive and exclusivist forces—such as nationalism and sectarianism—that are mightily reshaping the future.

Take Cairo's Tahrir Square in early 2011. Western journalists celebrated the gathering of relatively upper-income Arab liberals with whom they felt much in common, only to see these activists quickly retreat as post-autocratic Egypt became for many months a struggle among the military, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist Salafists—with the Coptic Christians fearing for their communal survival.

Though secular liberals have resurfaced to challenge Egypt's Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, do not be deceived. The military and the Muslim Brotherhood both have organized infrastructures. The liberals have only spontaneous emotion and ad hoc organizations. An Islamist-Nasserite regime-of-sorts is likely to emerge, as the military uses the current vulnerability of the Muslim Brotherhood to drive a harder bargain.

I have been to Egypt a dozen times while doing political risk assessments for Amoco and know that the Ikhwan & Army have gigantic networks of members comprising over 50% of the population. I saw the pathetic Mohammed El Baradei on a PBS interview last night downplay the size and importance of these two controlling influences on Egypt. El Baradei said to wait for the upcoming parliamentary elections to see.

Sadly, there is little prospect of a liberal majority, unless, as in the constitutional referendum polling last week, there is a very low turnout. [The referendum failed in Cairo and other large cities, by the way, but the large rural turnout, including many of the 30% of Egyptians who are illiterate, voted for the Islamist agenda.]

But wait, there's more bad news for the Boy Wonder to "lead from behind" on:

Egypt and the Middle East now offer a panorama of sectarianism and religious and ethnic divides. Freedom, at least in its initial stages, unleashes not only individual identity but, more crucially, the freedom to identify with a blood-based solidarity group. Beyond that group, feelings of love and humanity do not apply. That is a signal lesson of the Arab Spring.

An analogous process is at work in Asia. Nationalism there is young and vibrant—as it was in the West in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Asia is in the midst of a feverish arms race, featuring advanced diesel-electric submarines, the latest fighter jets and ballistic missiles. China, having consolidated its land borders following nearly two centuries of disorder, is projecting air and sea power into what it regards as the blue national soil of the South China and East China seas.

Japan and other countries are reacting in kind. Slipping out of its quasi-pacifistic shell, Japan is rediscovering nationalism as a default option. The Japanese navy boasts roughly four times as many major warships as the British Royal Navy. As for Vietnam and the Philippines, nobody who visits those countries and talks with their officials, as I have, about their territorial claims would imagine for a moment that we live in a post-national age.

The disputes in Asia are not about ideology or any uplifting moral philosophy; they are about who gets to control space on the map. The same drama is being played out in Syria where Alawites, Sunnis and Kurds are in a territorial contest over power and control as much as over ideas. Syria's writhing sectarianism—in which Bashar Assad is merely the leading warlord among many—is a far cruder, chaotic and primitive version of the primate game of king of the hill.

The US and Europe are introspective and distracted. America under this second-rate president is fast losing ANY leverage in foreign policy except that wielded by its overwhelming military advantage---which Obama will be loath to ever use, given the vociferous self-referential imbecility of his left-wing Demonrats.

But wait, there's more:

Nationalism is alive and thriving in India and Russia as well. India's navy and air force are in the process of becoming among the world's largest. Throughout most of history, India and China had little to do with each other, separated as they were by the Himalayas. But the collapse of distance by way of technology has created a new strategic geography for two big nations. Now Indian space satellites monitor Chinese military installations, even as Chinese fighter jets in Tibet have the possibility of including India within their arc of operations. This rivalry has further refined and invigorated nationalism in both countries.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin's nationalism is a large factor in his high popularity. President Putin's nationalism is geographical determinism: He wants to recreate buffer states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, like in the old Soviet Union. So he does everything he can to undermine the countries in these regions.

Western elites hope that if somehow there were truly free elections in Russia, then this foreign policy might change. The evidence is to the contrary. Race-hatred against Muslims is high among Russians, and just as there are large rallies by civil-society types, there are also marches and protests by skinheads and neo-Nazis, who are less well-covered by the Western media. Local elections in October returned a strong showing for Mr. Putin's party. Like it or not, he is representative of the society he governs.

Nor can Europe be left out of this larger Eurasian trend. A weakening European Union, coupled with onerous social and economic conditions for years to come, invites a resurgence of nationalism and extremism, as we have already seen in countries as diverse as Hungary, Finland, Ukraine and Greece. That is exactly the fear of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee, which gave this year's award to the European Union in order to make a statement against this trend.

Fascists are not about to regain power anywhere on the Continent, but the age of deepening European integration is likely behind us. Get ready to see more nasty and thoroughly frightening political groupings like Greece's Golden Dawn emerge across the Continent.

Putin is no less than a new incarnation of the Czars, or more frighteningly, Stalin. Russia has a huge demographic problem in that sparsely populated Siberia looks tempting to a China burgeoning with hundreds of millions of Malthusian manpower. Siberia's natural resources would tempt any powerful neighbor and Putin is acutely aware of the necessity of keeping China in the friendship column.

India is also frightening, as the nationalist parties appear poised to make electoral gains against the Congress Party's wobbly cobbled-together scrum of squabbling factions. India with the bomb and Pakistan also with the bomb in turmoil, a situation Kaplan leaves out of his excellent analysis, could flare up as easily as a Sino-Indian contretemps.

Kaplan sums up the battle between values and interests:

We truly are in a battle between two epic forces: Those of integration based on civil society and human rights, and those of exclusion based on race, blood and radicalized faith. It is the mistake of Western elites to grant primacy to the first force, for it is the second that causes the crises with which policy makers must deal—often by interacting with technology in a toxic fashion, as when a video transported virtually at the speed of light ignites a spate of anti-Americanism (if not specifically in Benghazi).

The second force can and must be overcome, but one must first admit how formidable it is. It is formidable because nations and other solidarity groups tend to be concerned with needs and interests more than with values. Just as the requirement to eat comes before contemplation of the soul, interests come before values.

Yet because values like minority rights are under attack the world over, the United States must put them right alongside its own exclusivist national interests, such as preserving a favorable balance of power. Without universal values in our foreign policy, we have no identity as a nation—and that is the only way we can lead with moral legitimacy in an increasingly disorderly world. Yet we should not be overturning existing orders overnight. For it is precisely weak democracies and collapsing autocracies that provide the chaotic breathing room with which nationalist and sectarian extremists can thrive.

The narcissist in the White House toppled Mubarak after the aged Egyptian leader, who was never the fascist ogre portrayed by the silly libtard US media, gave the arrogant Boy Wonder a short lecture on the phone about ancient societies and the hazards of rapid political or economic change [The Shah's "White Revolution" led to a massive exodus from countryside to cities and sparked the 1979 Iranian Republic and its subsequent mischief-making.].

The miffed Child Wonder threw a tantrum and promptly phoned the Egyptian military to threaten withdrawal of US security assistance if Mubarak stayed in power. Mubarak departed against the advice of seasoned senior diplomats like Frank Wisner and now women and Copts in Egypt are in the gunsights of the new Islamist ascendancy, while the idiot in the White House golfs the time away, heedless of the turmoil he caused in touting what he imagined was the "Arab Spring," now rife with Summer thunderstorms.

Syria is the best example and Obama's cowardly diffidence will again show that the US is "leading from behind," afraid to ruffle the feathers of Russia and China. Now Obama can talk to Medvedev, as he promised to when an open mike betrayed this pernicious double-talking politico's perfidious underhanded dishonesty for all the world to see. The US will pay dearly for re-electing a stooge for POTUS.