The World

Even though no empire nations have fought each other since 1945, the time will come when they do and they are developing new killing machines – intergalactic and thermobaric – as well as improving their traditional heavy metal. ‘Never place a loaded rifle on the stage,’ wrote Chekhov, ‘if it isn’t going to go off.’ He was talking about theatre, but this is true in warfare too: ultimately all those weapons will be used. Thousands of tanks can still clash like steel cavalry as they did in the last century, but in this new world cheap gadgets – tank- and plane-smashing drones and portable missiles – mean that smaller countries can destroy the expensive toys of larger ones. This is wonderful if they are being used against an evil empire, less so if used against us. Before nuclear weapons, the west would have gone to war against Russia for invading Ukraine – as it did in the Crimean War – and the US–Chinese rivalry would most likely have led to war too. There are only nine nuclear powers – not a bad record – but actually around forty states could adapt their peaceful nuclear facilities to get nuclear weaponry in a few years. The use of tactical atomic weapons would perhaps be equivalent to the Chernobyl accident; the use of hydrogen bombs could destroy the world. Nuclear war on some scale is not just plausible but likely – and it is worth reflecting that, at the time of writing, no nuclear power has ever lost a war.

The number of autocracies is surging, that of democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun, a character in this story and its presiding spirit, identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: ‘Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.’

Control states disdain but also fear and envy the gaudy, outrageous, ingenious, clamorous mess – part fairground, part farmyard – that is freedom in our open world. Dictatorships move faster under experienced leaders, but violence and control are wired into the closed world. The rigidity and delusions of tyrannies are incorrigible, their virtue-spirals end in executions, not just cancellations, their adventures end in devastation and slaughter. When they fail, autocrats take state and people down too.

The only leaders more buffoonish and lethal than the fairground hucksters elected in our flailing democracies are the omnipotent clowns of the tyranny. The challenge for open states is to channel their freedoms and pluralism creatively, rather than indulging in schisms about small differences. Democracies are built on invisible trust: over and over again, when anomie strikes, trust is lost and so is openness. ‘As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, “What does it matter to me?”’ wrote Rousseau, ‘the state may be given up as lost.’ The lesson of recent years is that the gains that were taken as won – the lessons of 1945, the evil of antisemitism, the crimes of genocide and war-making; the right to abortion and triumphs of the 1960s great liberal reformation – have to be fought for again.

But there is hope too: during the American ascendancy, US-style presidencies and elections became essential for legitimacy in old and new post-colonial states. If Theodore Parker’s fashionable dictum that ‘the arc of the moral universe … bends towards justice’ seems over-optimistic, it says something that since 1945 even the most brazen tyrannies feel obliged to pretend to hold elections and respect laws and legislatures – even when they are ‘cosplay democracies’. The open world is still the happiest and freest place to live.

Open societies are slow, their leaders amateurish, their policies inconsistent, but when they mobilize they are flexible, efficient and creative. Technology undermines democratic solidarity and aids tyranny and conspiracy, yet it also advances openness and justice. Its very facility means atrocities and wars can be instantly recorded and viewed everywhere in our new virtual-arena world. The immediate challenge of technology is to learn to control its addictiveness and surveillance while enjoying its benefits. The unelected, invisible power of the despots of data must be diminished. States and individuals have to work that out.

Population growth and climate change can only be solved by either catastrophic population decline – pandemic, natural disaster or thermonuclear war – or by cooperation on a titanic scale. And here too the tendency towards power blocs might actually be helpful: when the time comes – if it comes – a cabal of potentates could make those decisions.