by KIRKPATRICK SALE
Have you noticed? From Hong Kong to Baghdad, Paris to Tehran, 2019 is shaping up to be, as the New York Times dubbed it, “the year of the protest.” Violent—and often deadly—anti-government protests are breaking out throughout the world in an unprecedented fashion, in rich countries as well as poor, as people everywhere are expressing their anger at corrupt, inefficient, brutal, and unresponsive regimes.
But what isn’t so much in the news is worse—worse enough that they don’t want to tell you. At the moment, there are no less than 65 countries are now fighting wars—there are only 193 countries recognized by the United Nations, so that’s a third of the world. These are wars with modern weapons, organized troops, and serious casualties—five of them, like Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, with 10,000 or more deaths a year, another 15 with more than 1,000 a year—all of them causing disruptions and disintegrations of all normal political and economic systems, leaving no attacked nation in a condition to protect and provide for its citizens. From 2015 to 2019 more state-based conflicts were engaged in than at any time since World War II, with an estimated 1 million deaths in all.
In addition, there are at least 638 other conflicts between various insurgent and separatist militias, armed drug bands, and terrorist organizations, increasing each year as states fail or collapse completely.
What has made the wars and internal disputes even more egregious as the years go on is that chaotic weather has a direct effect on how societies function. Agriculture, of course, is impacted by higher temperatures, lack of rain, droughts, and wildfires, and crops have failed in many places over the last five years, including North and Central Africa, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, northern China, northern Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Central America, and even parts of North America. The collapse of Syria, for example, and subsequent civil wars were made more devastating if not directly caused by the drought of 2006-2011, in which 75 per cent of the farms failed and 85 per cent of the livestock died. And an official United Nations report in 2019, by 100 experts from 52 countries, warned that things will only get worse, with the world’s land and water resources exploited at “unprecedented rates,” threatening “the ability of humanity to feed itself.”
One obvious consequence, beyond death, famine, disease and starvation, is, as the U.N. report’s lead author says, “a massive pressure for migration,” a desperate attempt to find some refuge and relief when homes have been destroyed and families are uprooted. According to the United Nations, in what I regard as a certain undercount, in 2019 there were 272 million migrants worldwide, up from 258 million in 2017, with the weather in 2019 causing more refugees even than warfare. (The unprecedented crisis at the U.S. southern border in 2019 is only one manifestation of the porous and chaotic collapse of boundaries across the Americas, Africa, and most of Asia.) And meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2018 estimated that more than 100,000 people are simply “missing,” a figure it admits “represents only a fraction” of those who are unaccounted for by any government or organization.
Given the turmoil over wars and immigration threats, it is not surprising that half the world is without coherent government.
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