Then there is Africa. As Chinese-financed port projects take shape along the Indian Ocean coast, railroad networks expand from the coast to the African interior, rich with hydrocarbons and strategic minerals and metals. Meanwhile, the population of sub-Saharan Africa could grow from 1.1 billion people to 4.1 billion people by the end of the century, according to the World Population Review. And this is not necessarily a linear projection, but one based on declining birth rates. So even as the interior of Africa becomes interconnected with the Oikoumene, and urban middle classes burgeon on the African continent, conflict, too, will proliferate there: for despite advances in agriculture, environmentally fragile zones such as the Sahel and the water-starved slums of major cities will simply be unable to support a population growing so dramatically in absolute numbers.
And it’s often those fundamental factors of absolute population growth, resource scarcity and climate change—not just evil individuals or disputes between groups—that drives conflict, as I elaborated on 20 years ago in my February 1994 Atlantic cover story, “The Coming Anarchy.” The breakdown of states here and there across sub-Saharan Africa since the late-1990s is a demonstration of this. Such chaos will merge with the burgeoning anarchy along the North African coast, where Libya has already crumbled into its constituent parts, igniting further unrest in nearby Sahelian countries like Mali and Niger. (And this is not to mention tribal conflict in the Central African Republic and South Sudan.) Algeria is on the brink of a political transition that could weaken its grip upon its own Saharan back-of-beyond. Tunisia, as central authority weakens even there, is less and less in control of its southern borderlands. But we might not always hear about it right away—academic and journalistic elites pay far too much attention to fellow civil society types in foreign capitals, and not enough time exploring the security situation on the ground in remote border regions where the writ of governments no longer obtains.
So just as modernism—that is, the Industrial Revolution—did not lead to a reduction in conflict, neither will postmodernism, as defined by the electronic and communications revolution. Electronic and satellite communications; further developments in rail, road, and maritime transport; technological advances in warfare; and absolute rises in population are together not negating geography, but only making geography more claustrophobic through the shrinkage of distance. Thus, the collapse of leftover Cold War-area designations will continue as conflict sweeps across traditional geographical boundaries.
What does all this mean for the United States? Rather than think in terms of the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, we should now think in terms of an Afro-Asian Oikoumene on land and a Greater Indian Ocean rimland connecting Africa with the Western Pacific at sea. It is only at sea and from the sea where the United States will still yield considerable influence by virtue of its naval and air power. The proliferation of irregular conflict and internal rebellions, violent or not, across Afro-Asia, will reduce the power of centrally controlled regimes, and consequently make it harder for Washington to project influence in foreign capitals, and will in any case make policymakers more reluctant to even try. Thanks to America’s exalted geographical position and abundant energy resources, its power will grow in relative terms, while its ability to affect political outcomes on the ground in the Eastern Hemisphere will continue to diminish. The United States would then be a nexus of prosperity that views Hodgson’s Nile-to-Oxus with a mixture of morbid fascination and magisterial indifference. And that indifference could yet emerge as the great moral issue of our time.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly named Yangon as the capital of Myanmar; the capital of Myanmar is Naypyidaw.