Having watched all the debates and seen all these people running for president, I cannot suppress the thought: Why would anyone want this job now? Do you people realize what is going on out there?
US President Barack Obama’s hair has not gone early gray for nothing. I mean, Air Force One is great and all, but it now comes with Afghanistan, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (IS) and the Republican Freedom Caucus — not to mention a lot of people, places and things all coming unstuck at once.
Consider the scariest news article this year.
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that “the [US] Justice Department has charged a hacker in Malaysia with stealing the personal data of US service members and passing it to the Islamic State terrorist group, which urged supporters online to attack them.”
The article explained that in June Ardit Ferizi, the leader of a group of ethnic Albanian hackers from Kosovo who call themselves Kosova Hackers Security, “hacked into a server used by a US online retail company” and “obtained data on about 100,000 people.”
Ferizi, it said, “is accused of passing the data to Islamic State member Junaid Hussain, a British citizen who in August posted links on Twitter to the names, e-mail addresses, passwords, locations and phone numbers of 1,351 US military and other government personnel. He included a warning that Islamic State soldiers ... will strike at your necks in your own lands!’” FBI agents tracked Ferizi “to a computer with an Internet address in Malaysia,” where he was arrested. Meanwhile, Hussain was killed by a US drone in Syria.
Wow: An Albanian hacker in Malaysia collaborating with an IS militant on Twitter to intimidate US soldiers online — before the Americans killed the militant with a drone.
Welcome to the future of warfare: superpowers versus superempowered angry people — and a tag-team of cybercriminals and cybermilitants. They are all a byproduct of a profound technology-driven inflection point that would greet the next US president and would make the current debates look laughably obsolete in four years.
I was born into the Cold War era. It was a dangerous time with two nuclear-armed superpowers each holding a gun to the other’s head and the doctrine of “mutually assured destruction” kept both in check, but we now know that the regimes that both the US and Russia propped up in the Middle East and Africa suppressed volcanic sectarian conflicts.
The first decades of the post-Cold War era were also a time of relative stability. Dictators in Eastern Europe and Latin America gave way to democratically elected governments and free markets. Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin never challenged NATO expansion, and the Internet and global supply chains drove profitability up and the cost of labor and goods down. Interest rates were low and although the income of people without college degrees declined, it was masked by rising home prices, subprime mortgages, easy credit, falling taxes and women joining the workforce, so many household incomes continued to rise.
“Up until the year 2000, over 95 percent of the next generation were better off than the previous generation,” McKinsey Global Institute director Richard Dobbs said.
Therefore, even though the rich were getting even richer than those down the income ladder “it did not lead to political unrest because the middle was moving ahead, too” and were sure to be richer than their parents.
However, in the last decade, we entered the post-post-Cold War era. The combination of technological, economic and climate pressures is literally blowing the lid off nation-states in the Middle East and Africa, unleashing sectarian conflicts that no dictator can suppress. Bad guys are getting superempowered and “mutually assured destruction” to IS is not a deterrent, but an invitation to heaven. Robots are milking cows and IBM’s Watson computer can beat you at “Jeopardy!” and your doctor at radiology, so every decent job requires more technical and social skills — and continuous learning.
In the West, a smaller number of young people, with billions in college tuition debts, would have to pay the Medicare and Social Security for the baby boomers now retiring, who would be living longer.
“Suddenly,” Dobbs said, “the number of people who don’t believe they will be better off than their parents goes from zero to 25 percent or more.”
When you are advancing, you buy the system; you do not care who is a billionaire, because your life is improving, but when you stop advancing, Dobbs added, you can “lose faith in the system — whether that be globalization, free-trade, offshoring, immigration, traditional Republicans or traditional Democrats. Because in one way or another they can be perceived as not working for you.”
And that is why US presidential candidate Donald Trump is resonating in the US, French National Front President Marine Le Pen in France, the IS caliph in the Arab world and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Russia.
They all promise to bring back the certainties and prosperity of the Cold War or post-Cold War eras — by sacking the traditional elites who got us here and by building walls against change and against the superempowered angry people. They are all false prophets, but the storm they promise to hold back is very real.
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