There is an email list on foreign policy where the average comment is of the same caliber as a good diary here. I won't name this place as I'm not sure it's public and I won't include the comment I was responding to, but I penned the following doomerish pronouncement in response to a comment on Afghanistan.
And while proofing I realized it needed just a few good links to make a nice diary here ... farewell, Pax Americana, a bright theory of the 20th century.
The Soviet Union was cynically worked to provide support for a 'communist' regime in Afghanistan the same way the American people get worked to support Karzai's "Democratic government". This forbidding geographic territory has never really been a state, it's always been tribal lands with the occasional empire attempting to control roads and passes against the will of the locals.
The United States has previously stirred itself in response to communism (Cuba, Korea, Vietnam), oil and other natural resources (Chile, Iraq, Kuwait), or for specific strategic concerns (Panama, Balkans). We tried to do the right thing in Somalia and discovered we had neither the talent nor the stomach for trying to hold things together that Mother Nature was intent on breaking to bits. We let Rwanda slide, we let Darfur slide, we let the Lord's Resistance army roam free when there has never been a better case for fixed wing gunships loitering over troubled areas until the source of the trouble was turned to pulp.
The key drivers for the next century will be threefold.
First, all of the junk paper Wall Street spewed during the Bush years is going to get found out; what happened in Iceland, and Greece, what's happening with Portugal now, will become endemic. Some of it is the purely fraudulent nature of mistaking "financial innovation" for actual production.
Second, most of that unwinding will come because compound debt is based on the assumption that we'll have lots of readily available liquid fuel with little direct and indirect costs. That assumption is incorrect. The last great supergiant oil field beneath the sands of Kurdistan is likely staying there. What we can get at without a constant fight are dirtier, deeper, smaller pools. Biofuels make the situation worse, deepwater exploration makes the situation worse; we have nowhere to go but back towards the solar maximum for this planet.
Third and grimmest of all is our badly overdrawn environment. Our government rests on the foundation of Locke's thinking and his assumption that labor, adding value to natural materials taken from an infinite Earth, as the source of wealth is just fundamentally wrong. Some combination of resource depletion, climate change, and acidified, plasticized, nanoparticle polluted oceans is going to combine to put an end to our massive population overshoot.
Solarmax in a world that seems determined to repeat the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. Fossil fuels exhausted, fossil nitrates exhausted, easily accessible phosphate sources exhausted, acidified oceans with biomass levels across the entire food chain crashing, and aquifers ruined for a geological age so that obscenely wealthy, delusional corporate personae might chalk up a few more quarters of "profit".
Seven billion of us are going into this and I doubt there will be two billion to celebrate the next turning of the millennium.
Pax Americana's last few ragged breaths come at a terrible price. I don't worry about Afghanistan; soon enough our major investors will balk at taking our sovereign debt to fund such foolishness and our troops will come home. I suspect the next hot, dry, land of religious fanatics that will require peacekeeping is most likely ... Arizona.
A short coda here for those who want to see the thinking behind this.
Disorder, Disaster & Debt
The Iron Triangle Of Collapse
Egypt's Grim Future