July, 2006

Those who wonder what Kim Jong-Il is up to should stay in more, and read more nursery tales. In one of them, a little boy unversed in courtiers' flattery pokes fun at a naked emperor who he alone can see clearly, because he's not a flatterer, has no clothes on. Kim Jong-Il is like that little boy. He sees with kindergarten clarity America's present impotence and pokes hearty fun at it. Look, look, he is chuckling, Saddam didn't have any WMDs, but look, look, I do. You smashed up his country but you won't -- because you can't any more, because Congress won't let you -- smash up mine. And you can't, any more, smash up anyone else's. Because you have no credibility. Because you're losing in Iraq and Afghanistan as you lost in Vietnam and Korea, and you're mocked in Iran, and you hold no sway in South America, and not even Israel does what you want any more. And Condoleezza doesn't scare anyone, any more than Minnie Mouse. So here I am, in my 'rogue state' with rockets aimed at your staunchest ally Japan, and there's nothing you can do about it; boo sucks to you, big bully, go home Yank, I break wind in your general direction, and so on.

No-one should underrate the Dear Leader's historic achievement in this childish act of mockery. For he's proved, in a couple of days, that there is no superpower any more. There was for a while, but there isn't now. And anyone with a big bomb and a missile launcher or two is safe now, at last, from America. Nor should we underrate, in this silly, world-changing tale, not only the crazy dumbness of Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld, but the uselessness of Condoleezza. Far from being 'the most powerful woman in the world', she is everywhere derided and disobeyed. If there's any world leader she's made to change his ways, would he please put up his hand?

And it shows with her every initiative and utterance. If all she can do for bombarded Gaza is ask Israel to 'show restraint'; if all she can do to the daily slaughter in Iraq is ask Sunni and Shi'ite to 'resolve their differences'; if all she can do to North Korea is ask other nations to 'speak with one voice', then it's clear for all to see that she's impacting less on world history than Tammy Wynette, who at least gave monogamy a leg-up for a week or two.

Power is a funny thing. It resides, as a rule, in those who never use it. The US had limitless power in all those menacing months before it went into Iraq. But after Shock and Awe, and Mission Accomplished, and the De Mello killing, and the UN pull-out, and the Berg decapitation, and the Shi'ite mosque bombings, and the Abu Ghraib photos, and the murders of Saddam's lawyers, and the plummeting Bush poll figures, and the Guantanamo ruling, that power pretty much vanished. Because it became plainly known and clear as day to all observers, like the little boy in the fable, that the US dare not invade or blow up anyone else, nor bully anyone else, nor even cut off trade with those, like Spain, who pulled their troops out prematurely, lest Bush lose control of the House and Senate, and the House then impeach him, and Humpty-Dumpty mightily, finally topple.

(Had Rumsfeld heeded his generals' advice, of course, and gone in with six hundred thousand troops, subjugated Iraq with tact and efficiency, and set up swiftly a puppet government guarded by Saddam's unhumiliated army, things might be very different now, and America still a force in the world. But those are the breaks. Had Hitler heeded his experts' advice, and developed with speed the A-bomb and used it on London, things might be different now in another way. But he didn't, it isn't, tough cheddar and there you go.)

And so it came to pass, or this is my view, that the world has lost its last superpower, America. Can America make a comeback? I don't see how. A much more likely hypothesis is a multipolar world in which America's principal creditor China has primacy, and huffs and puffs up and down the latitudes for a century or so and then is gone in its turn.

What's happened to war-waging nations, I think, is what happened to H-bomb-brandishing nations: their threats became incredible. No US leader now thinks the H-bombing of Moscow a good career move. Nor, these days, does he think the invasion of Iran, with 'embedded' reporters in every advancing tank column, a worthwhile strategic plan. With oil at eighty dollars a barrel, no-one sane thinks further war in the Middle East makes any sense at all.

And so it is the American Century has rolled its curtain down, and the American Empire so soon, so very soon, lies in the Ozymandian dust alongside Thebes and Babylon and Nineveh and Tyre. And even Kim Jong-Il, like Putin, and Chavez, and Lula, and Castro, and Bambang, and Gusmao, and the Mayor of Mullumbimby can thumb his nose with impunity, and bare his hindquarters and waggle them, at the cringeing giant in its foolish, blustering latter days. It didn't take long, but neither did World War One. And a great chapter is closed.