Through a Glass Darkly

The United States of Dystopia

There was a time, not that long ago in fact, when the American military and national security establishment thought a great deal about the future, particularly what science fiction writers call the ‘near future’. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, military thinktanks and annual reviews regularly produced futurist reports and papers, which attempted to anticipate what might be lurking just around the corner and how the military might respond to it.

Generally speaking, these possibilities tended to accentuate the negative. In fact, the future was often imagined in strikingly bleak terms. Pandemics; ‘feral cities’ taken over by terrorists or organized crime; abrupt climate change events followed by migratory surges and the collapse of borders; rogue states; strategic reversals in Afghanistan; challenges to US military power; the breakdown of globalisation - all these scenarios flitted through the anxious minds of the military futurists.

Against the background of the ‘global war on terror’, it was all too easy to extrapolate the worst that the present had to offer into a hellish future.

Terrorism and 9/11 were recurring themes in these dystopian musings. In the wake of 9/11, American military and national security intellectuals were encouraged to ‘think the unthinkable’ and imagine that everything that could go wrong, might go wrong, and try to second guess every ‘known unknown’ or unanticipated ‘black swan’ event that might catch the US by surprise.

Imagination was crucial to this process. Military futurists drew heavily on science fiction, cyberpunk, and dystopian movies that already depicted a future world that no one would willingly choose to inhabit. In effect, the military took inspiration from what the cyberpunk writer and near future pioneer William Gibson calls ‘the fuckedness quotient of the day.’

For those who are interested, I wrote a piece about this phenomenon back in 2010, which you can find here.

At the time, I was struck by the astonishing grimness of the Pentagon’s imagined futures, and curious about why this was happening. After all, it wasn’t that long since we had been told that the good guys had won the Cold War, that history was over, and that our ‘borderless’ world was advancing towards a common future of prosperity and the irresistible advance of liberal democracy - all this policed by the most powerful military force in human history.

Yet less than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, here were military futurists contemplating a future in which the US military might be operating in ‘arcs of instability’ and ‘arcs of chaos’, in response to the nefarious permutations of the ‘dark side of globalisation.’

Some of this dystopianism was a consequence of 9/11. Having been taken by surprise by an attack that was considered ‘unimaginable’, the US military set out to out-imagine its enemies. Vulnerability and strategic anxiety was also accompanied by megalomania. In the first decade of the century, the US military was still intent on attaining ‘full spectrum dominance’ in every theatre of war, in order to eliminate any regional ‘challenger.’

At a time when US marines were fighting ‘insurgents’ in cities like Mosul and Fallujah, and trying to develop the tactics and strategies to conduct Military Operations on Urban Terran (MOUT), it was easy for US futurists to project the actual ‘feral cities’ of the present onto the future.

This was a period in which politicians from Tony Blair, to Richard Perle and Dick Cheney used the threat of the ‘next 9/11’ and the changed ‘calculus of risk’ to justify military ‘interventions’ anywhere.

And so the present bled into the future, and the future bled into the present.

Obsessed with the prospect of full spectrum dominance and maintaining global American ‘primacy’ through military means, the Pentagon and its affiliated research departments imagined a new era of warfare, in which the military would be able to ‘dominate’ the battlegrounds of the future.

Autonomous robots, nanotechnologies, ‘Pulsed Energy Projectiles’ (PEPs), super-soldiers with ‘self-healing uniforms’; killer wasps and mosquitoes; the Pentagon’s ‘Prompt Global Strike’ programme - these were only some of the options through which the US military sought to extend its global reach indefinitely.

Borrowing from the Israeli military, the US military constructed mock ’Arab cities’ where its soldiers rehearsed tactics to use against ‘insurgents’ played by actors, in preparation for wars of the present and wars of the future. The US National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced a series of regular future-planning reviews, often illustrated with dramatised hypothetical outcomes to concentrate the mind.

One scenario imagined China taking over security following the NATO evacuation of Afghanistan. Another contained a ‘hypothetical letter’ written by the (fictional) grandson of Osama bin Laden announcing the creation of a ‘partial Islamic Caliphate’ in an unnamed Middle Eastern country in 2020.

These predictions were not entirely wrong. The NATO occupation of Afghanistan did collapse. Islamic State did create a ‘partial Islamic Caliphate’ in Iraq and Syria, using the US military’s own weapons in the first instance. There has been a global pandemic.

But that’s the future for you: If you set out to imagine everything that can go wrong, you will inevitably get some things right. But knowing this did not make the military any more effective. By the time, NATO withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2022, the US had spent two decades fighting an open-ended ‘war on terror’ that left a swathe of death, chaos and destruction across the world without achieving a single coherent strategic objective.

For all its attempts to achieve ‘full spectrum dominance’, the US could not translate its military power into strategic victory either in Afghanistan, or in its showcase ‘bringing democracy to the Middle East’ war in Iraq.

And despite its willingness to ‘think the unthinkable’, the military’s concern with the future did not predict the near-collapse of an unregulated financial system in 2007-2008 - a manifestation of the ‘dark side of globalisation’ that had nothing to do with al Qaeda or organized crime, and everything to with the inherent weaknesses and fragilities of the system that the US military was supposedly policing.

Militarism both concealed and exacerbated these weaknesses. And in their obsession with things breaking and cracking up beyond America’s borders, the military futurists did consider the possibility that the United States was also capable of collapse. It is true that in 2007, the US Army’s Strategic Studies Institute included the possibilities of ‘toxic populism’ and ‘catastrophic dislocation inside the United States or homegrown domestic civil disorder’ amongst the ‘known unknowns’ that the military might one day have to respond to.

But these dystopian scenarios did not include the possibility that a rightwing mob would attack the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow an elected government, with the support of the outgoing president; that a reality TV celebrity and corrupt real-estate magnate would become president not once, but twice, with the assistance of America’s enemies.

The military did not - and perhaps could not - imagine that the American public would vote for the worst president in US history, even after that same president had been found to be a criminal and a rapist.

No one imagined back then, that this president would appoint a billionaire to head a non-governmental agency named after a cryptocurrency, with a mandate to strip the US government to the bone. Or that a rapist and serial sex offender would appoint an alleged sex-trafficker and paedophile as his attorney-general, with orders to attack the officials who had attempted to bring him to justice.

Even William Gibson would struggle to imagine a world in which an American president would appoint a talk show host, alleged sex offender, white supremacist and former Guantanamo guard as defence secretary to lead the most powerful military in the world. How could the National Intelligence Council predict that a suspected ally of Vladimir Putin would be appointed as head of…the National Intelligence Council, as part of her remit as head of intelligence? Or that a vaccine-denying conspiracy theorist would become health secretary?

And all this supported by the Republican Party, by millions of voters, and with the passive acceptance of America’s famed democratic institutions.

Such outcomes were once beyond the imagination. Now they have become part of an already-existing dystopia that, until the last few weeks, most people believed was ‘unthinkable.’ As the military futurists once recognized, you can’t anticipate all the ‘known unknowns’ - there will always be something that eludes even the most imaginative and blue sky-thinking futurist.

But strategic forecasting is even more difficult if you do it with blinkers on. If, for example, you are too dazzled by your own military power to appreciate its limitations. If you take it for granted that global military dominance is the way to achieve national security, and you fight wars without clear goals and no interest in the strategies of your enemies.

Obsessed with repairing the damage to its aura of invulnerability after 9/11, the US launched itself into a military campaign against an enemy that cannot be defeated by purely military means - a war that, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project in 2021, had cost $8 trillion and 900,000 deaths. Only the arms companies and the military subcontractors and PMCs benefitted.

Al Qaeda’s devastating strike on September 11 deliberately invited precisely this kind of outcome as part of its strategy of radicalization. And in a sense, al-Qaeda has won, even though it no longer exists in any significant form.

It drew a wounded superpower into a global war that it could never hope to win, which wasted its resources and drained its credibility and prestige. Now, in part because of the lies, violence, and financial and human cost that made that war possible, American democracy is collapsing under the weight of its own unresolved problems.

Who can forget when George W. Bush boasted of victory in a war in Iraq that America ultimately lost? Or hailed a gathering of the ‘haves and have mores’ as his ‘base’?

We can only wonder what might have happened, if US governments - both Republican and Democrats - had paid more attention to the ‘have littles’ or ‘have nothings’ within their own borders. We cannot know what might have happened had some of that $8 trillion been spent on the communities that have now turned so destructively against their government, instead of on useless wars.

Instead, the likes of Richard Perle, John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney conned Americans into supporting a global military offensive against the ‘barbarians’ of the 21st century, in a vain attempt to impose a quasi-imperial Pax Americana on a turbulent and chaotic world.

Convinced of their country’s virtues, these shallow would-be statesman ignored its vices. Consumed by a concept of national security that exaggerated the dangers of terrorism, either wilfully and opportunistically or out of sheer naivete, they responded to al Qaeda’s savage challenge on al-Qaeda’s terms.

None of this made Americans any safer. It arguably made America weaker. And now America, and the rest of the world, must find a way to navigate the next four years of what is effectively a kakistocracy - the government of the worst possible people.

The seventeenth-century preacher Paul Gosnold once condemned a ‘mad kinde of Kakistocracy’, perpetuated by ‘Sanctimonious Incendiaries, who have fetched fire from heaven to set their Country in combustion’ and ‘set the Kingdome on fire to rost their owne egges.’

These sanctimonious incendiaries will be leading America into the future. Let’s condemn them, by all means, but let’s not forget the folly of those who set out to ‘own’ the dystopian future, and ultimately left their country fatally vulnerable to a dystopia they had not foreseen.