The National Journal asks:
If the economic crisis deepens, which areas of the world are most vulnerable to political turmoil and instability, and what form might that take? Is there any danger that the current economic crisis could unleash additional forces of violent extremism and upheaval above what we already face, and perhaps on a par with those spawned by the economic turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s?
Money quote: The United States is now the great creator of failed states.
And this:
Our global system is really a network. We like to champion Net-strengths: how networks degrade gracefully, node by node; how a network can lose many nodes and still function. But networks can also be surprisingly vulnerable: threats race from periphery to center, and can spread quickly to everywhere.
But there is another network fragility. Our civilization of modernity is dependent on a surprisingly small constellation of “creative cities” (Richard Florida), just as was the world of late antiquity (Peter Brown). A global system that depends on the economic and creative exchange between just 40 nodes, or city clusters worldwide, represents a fragile network — especially in the face of what lies ahead.
A mature global system already under stress and visibly ineffective on defense thus can be overstressed by exogenous shock. Shocks lead to both deglobalization and decompression.
Deglobalization means the system cores pull away from each other, look inward, and hunker down. Decompression follows as trade declines and networked relationships attenuate. As deglobalization and decompression gain momentum and become self-reinforcing, there will be more and more abandoned places. It is there — as it is now — that new identities and ideas spread and root.
Read more here.
