The new old world
A Gulf war, an oil spike, a tense Europe: the 20th century is back
Janan Ganesh
A man hitchhikes to work in Oregon during the 1973 oil crisis © Getty ImagesIn the film Good Bye, Lenin! a devoted East German socialist falls into a coma.
Then the Berlin Wall comes down.
When she wakes, her son hides all signs of the new capitalist dispensation to avoid shocking her back into unconsciousness.
Commie-era furniture is salvaged for their home.
Advertisements (“Trink Coca-Cola”) are explained away.
Above all, TV news broadcasts are faked.
Today, if a beloved relative came around after a long sleep, would you need to bother?
The news is so evocative of yesteryear anyway.
There is a war in the Gulf, as there was when I was nine and 21.
Barack Obama wanted to turn American attention from that region to Asia.
Republicans have often justified stinting Ukraine on the same basis: that finite resources are better used against China.
After so much fancy geostrategy — “tilt” this, “pivot” that, “Indo-Pacific” the other — the US just slipped into the Middle East again like an old slipper.
Not only could it be 2003 or 1991, it could be 1953, when the CIA co-toppled Iran’s prime minister.
Another reassuringly trad spectacle is the worldwide fixation with the barrel price of oil.
Imagine being told, amid the Opec crises of the 1970s, that one region’s fossil fuels would still have this hold over humankind half a century in the future.
This despite an American shale bonanza in the meantime. And a global flowering of green consciousness.
When someone suggests the world is changing in a fundamental way, be sceptical
The world was meant to have changed after September 11, remember.
Counterinsurgency was to become more common than war between nation states.
This was the intellectual climate in which Britain skimped on traditional air and naval defences to become more nimble.
It now looks on as two interstate wars rage on adjoining continents.
Some of the ideas that have currency in Europe, such as conscription and nuclear weapons, were dismissed as Oldthink in the era of al-Qaeda and other light-footed enemies.
The defence strategists of that time have discovered, as musicians and novelists often do, that nothing dates quicker than an attempt to be relevant.
The lesson here?
Whenever someone suggests the world is transforming in a fundamental way, be sceptical.
That includes me.
The media is incentivised to talk up change, and so are other professions.
Which business would keep hiring a consultant who said not to tweak much?
Which politician would rule out “planning for the future” as expensive guesswork?
Yet betting on the status quo is so often rewarded.
If we are living in a sort of Long 20th Century, it is hard to know exactly why.
I am always inclined to cite the eternal power of geography.
There are certain physical facts — bodies of water, deposits of gas — that technology was never going to transcend, except in the ultra-long term.
Notice that Britain’s government is inching closer to the EU without much domestic political blowback.
If this goes on, the 2016 referendum will turn out to have been a blip.
The sheer inescapability of our geographic position will have told in the end.
But I mustn’t turn into a determinist.
The human factor matters too.
As ageist as it is to point this out, the current leaders of the US, China, Russia and India are all in their seventies.
So are those of Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Germany, Nigeria, South Africa and Indonesia, plus the president of Iran, whose previous Supreme Leader was 86 when he was killed.
Sure enough, their various obsessions, such as reclaiming Soviet ground, or “taking” Cuba, or preserving a now 47-year-old Islamic revolution, trace back to the century in which they came of age.
(Donald Trump was a teenager when the Bay of Pigs debacle happened.)
It is not axiomatic that an old person is backward-looking.
But the average of a large group of them might be expected to skew that way.
The spirit of this era is more restorationist than revolutionary.
No wonder the news nowadays so often seems a re-enactment of a world that was thought to have passed.
If lives and livelihoods were not on the line, I would adore the nostalgia.
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