Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
In 1996 John Perry Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, addressed to the "governments of the industrial world." He told them defiantly: "Cyberspace does not lie within your borders."
Just over two decades later, borders are back. In his speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump was unequivocal: "We must uphold respect for law [and] respect for borders."
Like Trump's reference to the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, as "Rocket Man" and his threat to "totally destroy" Kim's country, this was calculated to appall the people Steve Bannon calls "globalists." Yet Trump's assertion of national sovereignty was one of the few lines in the speech that won applause.
The world itself is not in a globalist mood. Brexit is about reasserting sovereignty, above all over immigration. Angela Merkel was reelected as German chancellor on Sunday, but her party's share of the vote was reduced, mainly because she lost control of Germany's borders two years ago. And Trump himself clings to his election promise to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, as well as to exclude from the United States the citizens of mainly Muslim countries associated with terrorism.
European elites sneer compulsively at Trump, but polls show that majorities of their citizens would support a similar ban on Muslim immigration into the European Union. Meanwhile, the same European elites are ramping up their efforts to tax and regulate the principal beneficiaries of the borderless world, the giant American tech companies of Silicon Valley.
Yet when you reflect for a moment on the "back to borders" movement, you see how strange the world is. Nations are not like individual humans, normally distributed in size along a bell curve. More than 36 percent of the world's population live in just two countries, China and India, each with a billion-plus population. A quarter (26 percent) live in 11 countries with populations in the hundreds of millions. And another third live in 75 countries with populations in the tens of millions. In other words, 95 percent of all people live in fewer than 90 countries. Yet the United Nations has 193 members. Among its most recent recruits are Timor-Leste (pop. 1.3 million) and Montenegro (629,000).
Why is this? Why do the Kurds not yet have a nation state with borders of their own, despite numbering between 30 million and 45 million? Why do the Catalans not? On Monday, Iraqi Kurdistan vote on independence from Iraq. On Oct. 1, Catalonia will vote on independence from Spain. Neither referendum is seen as legitimate by the states from which Kurds and Catalans would secede. Yet if the tiny Pacific island of Nauru (pop. 11,359) is a sovereign state, what is the argument against an independent Kurdistan or Catalonia?
Or what about the Rohingya, the Muslim minority in Burma whose plight has attracted the world's attention? Would Aung San Suu Kyi's critics cheer if she proclaimed the independence of Rohingyastan (a country as likely to come into existence as "Nambia," the African state invented by Trump last week)?
The explanation for all these anomalies is history. Small countries can attain independence where the strategic stakes are low. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Thucydides's Melian dialogue, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
The modern world order is not fair. There are nearly as many Indians as Chinese, but only China enjoys permanent membership of the UN Security Council. There are more Germans than French or British citizens, yet it is France and Britain that are members of the "P5," along with the two superpowers of the mid-20th century, America and Russia. Like the five great powers that dominated Europe after the Congress of Vienna, the five permanent members owe their privileged status to history: to past victories, or past alliances that compensated for defeat.
Nevertheless, despite no fewer than 18 resolutions since Pyongyang began its quest to acquire nuclear weapons 24 years ago, the Security Council has yet to impose its will on North Korea (pop. 25 million), a medium-sized state that ranks between Madagascar and Australia in the league table of size. Last week's tough talk - Rocket Man retorted by calling Trump a "mentally deranged US dotard" - took the world another step closer to a day of reckoning. The other members of the P5 are waking up to the possibility that Trump has a real, if risky, military option, and is capable of using it.
In the final analysis, borders are a function of power. If you can't defend them, they are just dotted lines. The Kim dynasty's calculation has been that nukes are the ultimate border guards. We shall soon find out if that calculation was correct. If so, many more states will want them. If not, we shall be back in the 19th century, when the great powers played their great game with everyone else's borders.
Previously:
• 09/20/17: History's first bipartisan president?
• 09/07/17: Hell hath no fury like a spurned EU
• 08/29/17: The Coming World Crisis
• 08/23/17: There's more than one side to the story
• 08/16/17: What the second most powerful man in a country one-fifth of humanity is reading this summer --- and why it matters
• 08/08/17: America's Left must stop ever-rising tyranny. Or else
• 07/18/17: Our beloved, corrupt, low-life president
• 05/31/17: The value of Trump's vow with the Saudis to battle extremism
• 05/10/17: Is social democracy shattered?
• 04/19/17: Are we on the brink of a second Korean War?
• 04/04/17: Watching the EU destruct
• 03/28/17: What comes before jihad
• 03/22/17: China has taken on Silicon Valley, and guess who is winning?
• 03/15/17: Cyber War I has already begun
• 03/07/17: Shades of Nixon: Why Trump must tread carefully in the swamp
• 02/28/17: In praise of American militarism
• 02/21/17: The global network has become dangerously unstable
• 02/14/17: The battles the president can -- and must -- win
• 02/07/17: Dr. Donald And Mr. Trump
• 01/31/17: The nature of power in the networked age
• 01/24/17: Can Trump's art of the deal make America great again?
• 01/18/17: The 'Wettergate' delusion
• 12/14/16: I was wrong
• 12/06/16: Trump's Mad Dog is the sane warrior we need to make the world safer
• 11/30/16: Trump's Catch-22
• 11/10/16: Populism as a backlash against globalization: Historical perspectives
• 10/05/16: Simplifiers v. complicators
• 09/27/16: From Jolie-Pitt to the jolly pit of globaloney
• 09/21/16: The fight isn't going Hillary's way
• 06/28/16: The year of living improbably
• 05/17/16: Welcome to 1984
• 04/19/16: The rise of caveman politics
• 04/05/16: Tay, Trump, and artificial stupidity