Third world schools provide a stark lesson on the need for pupil testing and league tables

Like many higher education establishments, the University of Liberia holds an annual entrance exam. This year the results came as a bit of a shock – the pass rate was precisely zero. Out of 25,000 people who sat the exam not one made the grade.

For most media outlets around the world this was a perfect ‘and finally...’ news item – but, writing for Businessweek, Charles Kenny gets to the real story, which is the enormous learning gap between the developed and developing world:

• “Analysis by Harvard’s Lant Pritchett suggests that the average eighth-grader in Ghana has test scores on math and science that would place her in the bottom one-five-hundredth of U.S. students. Even richer and more successful countries such as Argentina or Indonesia see scores on international math and science tests that would rank the average test-taker in the bottom 10 percent of the student population of a country like Denmark.”

You might think that students in less developed countries do much worse because they don’t get much schooling. But, in fact, the last few decades have seen rapid progress on access to formal education:

• “Of the world’s population, about 7 out of 10 live in a country where pretty much every child completes primary school. The proportion of secondary-school-aged kids who are in classes has climbed from about half to two-thirds over the past 15 years...
• “The learning gap helps to explain how developing countries can be so poor despite high educational attainment. In 2010 the average Kenyan adult had spent more years in school than the average French adult had as recently as 1985. Sadly, that didn’t convert into a Kenyan income per capita equal to France’s two decades ago—in fact, the gross domestic product per head in Kenya in 2010 was only 7 percent of France’s in 1985.”

Obviously a school in a remote part of Africa or India will only have a fraction of the resources available to a school in the developed world – and yet that doesn’t appear to be the key factor:

• “From 2007 to 2011, India increased its per-student expenditure on elementary education by 80 percent while student learning outcomes were declining.”

Health outcomes are also improving across much of the developing world, with progress on indicators like child mortality out-stripping economic growth.

Charles Kenny argues that the major problem with schooling in poorer countries (including those that aren’t much poorer than the West) is simply the quality of the education provided. While children are spending more time in school they’re not necessarily learning much while they’re there.

Fortunately, experience shows that there's an affordable way of lifting standards:

• “Testing is cheap—reviews of experience across countries suggests that an assessment system rarely costs more than 0.3 percent of the education budget. And countries that have introduced testing as part of a school reform effort have shown real results. Brazil and Chile have both introduced all-student testing regimes alongside accountability and autonomy reforms over the past few years, and both have seen better performance in international student assessments—Chile improved student learning at the fastest rate worldwide from 1995 to 2011.”

In this country we’ve become increasingly sceptical about the imposition of onerous reporting requirements on schools and other frontline public services. To a large extent, we’re right to be so. However, the lesson from elsewhere in the world is that an objective and transparent measure of performance can still make all the difference.

And there’s another lesson we should learn before it’s too late. The under-performance of schools in the developing world shows just how much untapped potential these countries possess. Sooner or later that potential will be released into economies that are already growing fast. We’d better be ready for the competition.

What’s so special about chemical weapons?

Who could not be horrified by the sight of children slain by sarin gas? Thanks to the newspapers we’ve all seen the photographic evidence. But if those children had been killed by conventional munitions – as many thousands of others have been in Syria – would the front pages have shown their corpses then?

Probably not. To use a nerve agent against innocent civilians is a crime against humanity, but surely the same applies to the use of burning, crushing and dismembering agents – or 'bombs' as they're otherwise known. 

Given the foreign policy implications, we need to ask if our special horror of chemical weapons is justified. Writing in Foreign Affairs, John Mueller is sceptical:

• “The notion that killing with gas is more reprehensible than killing with bullets or shrapnel came out of World War I, in which chemical weapons, introduced by the Germans in 1915, were used extensively. The British emphasized the weapons’ inhumane aspects as part of their ongoing program to entice the United States into taking their side in the war. It is estimated that the British quintupled their gas casualty figures from the first German attack for dramatic effect.”
• “As it happened, chemical weapons accounted for considerably less than one percent of the battle deaths in the war, and, on average, it took over a ton of gas to produce a single fatality.”

Gas was also a notoriously difficult weapon to use – sometimes blowing back in the faces of those deploying it. It is therefore not surprising that the “militaries of the combatant nations were quite happy to get rid of the weapons.”

In more recent times, chemical weapons have come under the politically-potent heading of WMD:

• “...as the Cold War came to an end, the phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was coming into vogue. Earlier, the term had generally been taken as a dramatic synonym for nuclear weapons or weapons of similar destructive capacity that might be developed in the future. In 1992, however, the phrase was explicitly codified into American law and was determined to include not only nuclear weapons but chemical and biological ones as well.”

Yet, as John Mueller points out, chemical weapons are not especially destructive – not when compared to other instruments of war: 

• “A single nuclear weapon can indeed inflict massive destruction; a single chemical weapon cannot. For chemical weapons to cause extensive damage, many of them must be used – just like conventional weapons. As a presidential advisory panel noted in 1999, it would take a full ton of sarin gas released under favorable weather conditions for the destructive effects to become distinctly greater than those that could be achieved with conventional explosives.”

Indeed, if you want to see what mass destruction looks like, then the conventional shelling and aerial bombardment of Syria’s towns and cities provides a stark modern-day example. Nerve agents, by way of contrast, leave buildings and infrastructure completely untouched – which, while of little consolation to those killed, means that post-conflict recovery is that much easier. 

Yet this is precisely why chemical weapons are so dangerous. Quite simply there is no more efficient an instrument in the ethnic cleanser’s tool-kit. The destructiveness of each individual attack may be limited, but that’s the point: Enemy populations can be eliminated at the level of the village or the neighbourhood – always handy when the ethnic mix is as granular as it is in Syria.

The only constraint on the use of chemical weapons is the morality of those who possess them or the fear of external punishment – and, in Syria it is difficult to see where either of those are going to come from.

Heresy of the week: The spectre of peak oil still looms over us

The Syrian conflict is full of complicating factors, but oil isn’t one of them. Syria accounts for less than half of one per cent of global production, most of which is consumed domestically. That said, Iran and Saudi Arabia stand on opposite sides of Syria’s civil war – and of the world’s most important oil and gas shipping lane. Fears of a wider regional conflict are therefore putting upward pressure on energy prices.

Still, at least we don’t have to worry about ‘peak oil’ anymore. Though we may face serious threats to security of supply, fears of an imminent decline in the world’s capacity to produce oil are subsiding. 

In an article for IEEE Spectrum, Bill Sweet says that this new confidence has been engendered by technological advances: 

• “A recent report from analysts at Lux Research, 'Evaluating New EOR [Enhanced Oil Recovery] Technologies in Oil Industry Mega-projects,' proposes that by means of EOR, the industry may be able to tap up to 10.2 trillion barrels of unconventional oil, over and above 1.4 to 1.6 trillion barrels of conventional oil...
• “[Michael] Klare, a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, seems to be in general accord with Lux's view that the age of oil is far from over. Writing in the Huffington Post, the left-liberal online publication, Klare said that ‘humanity is not entering a period that will be dominated by renewables. Instead, it is pioneering the third great carbon era, The Age of Unconventional Oil and Gas.’”

Not every expert agrees:

• “An article that appeared in the July 13 issue of Eos (the transactions of the American Geophysical Union) presented a radically different view of things. Taking a more economic view of what it means for oil to be recoverable, scientist James W. Murray and analyst Jim Hansen suggest that oil prices—and with them oil production—already have arrived at the limit of what consumers worldwide are willing to pay.”

This is a crucial point that many people miss in the debate over peak oil. No one doubts the fact that most of the world’s oil remains in the ground. But the question that matters is whether we can continue to extract it at a reasonable price. The true limiting factor in the most credible peak oil scenario is not so much our capacity to produce oil as our capacity to pay for it: 

• “‘Global production of crude oil and condensates…has essentially remained on a plateau of about 75 million barrels per day since 2005 despite a very large increase in the price of oil,’ say Murray and Hansen… In effect, they suggest, prices have reached a level where consumers seek alternatives or conserve, rather than pay more…”

Huge sums are being invested in new extractive technologies, but it remains to be seen whether these efforts can shift oil prices downwards or whether such investment depends on oil prices remaining high.

Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that conventional oil production will continue for some time to come. In particular, major oil fields in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran have yet to be exhausted. Thanks to high oil prices they provide their owners with a fat profit – and a means of funding the slaughter of Syria’s unfortunate people. 

Inside every terrorist there’s a petty bureaucrat trying to get out

This would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. It’s a eye-opening piece by Jacob Shapiro for Foreign Affairs, on the petty-minded, nit-picking mindset of your typical terrorist supremo:

• “In addition to being a ruthless jihadist, Ayman al-Zawahiri long ago earned a reputation for being a terrible boss. When he took over al Qaeda in 2011, senior U.S. intelligence officials were already pointing out his penchant for micro-management. (In one instance in the 1990s, he reached out to operatives in Yemen to castigate them for buying a new fax machine when their old one was working just fine.)”

An over-zealous approach to cost control may be the least of al-Zawahiri’s faults, but it is of relevance to the war on terror:

• “Given that terrorists are, by definition, engaged in criminal activity, you would think that they would place a premium on secrecy. But historically, many terrorist groups have been meticulous record keepers. Members of the Red Brigades, an Italian terrorist group active in the 1970s and early 1980s, report having spent more time accounting for their activities than actually training or preparing attacks...
• “Placing calls, sending e-mails, keeping spreadsheets, and having members request reimbursements all create opportunities for intelligence agencies to learn what terrorists are up to and then disrupt them. In that way, Zawahiri’s failures are not just a reflection of his personal weaknesses but a case study in the inherent limits that all terror groups face.”

Shapiro argues that terrorist groups have no choice but to be bureaucratically-minded:

• “...managers of terrorist organizations face the same basic challenges as the managers of any large organization. What is true for Walmart is true for al Qaeda: Managers need to keep tabs on what their people are doing and devote resources to motivate their underlings to pursue the organization’s aims. In fact, terrorist managers face a much tougher challenge. Whereas most businesses have the blunt goal of maximizing profits, terrorists’ aims are more precisely calibrated: An attack that is too violent can be just as damaging to the cause as an attack that is not violent enough.”

Terror bosses face some tricky personnel management issues too:

• “...as the alleged chief of the Palestinian group Black September wrote in his memoir, ‘diehard extremists are either imbeciles or traitors.’”

Contrary to what one might imagine, disciplinary options are limited:

• “When Walmart managers want to deal with an unruly employee or a supplier who is defaulting on a contract, they can turn to formal legal procedures. Terrorists have no such option. David Ervine, a deceased Irish Unionist politician and onetime bomb maker for the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), neatly described this dilemma to me in 2006. “We had some very heinous and counterproductive activities being carried out that the leadership didn’t punish because they had to maintain the hearts and minds within the organization,” he said…”

Therefore, with staff you can neither easily trust nor punish, top-down micromanagement is the only way to keep things under control.

Of course, there is another explanation for why terror-bosses tend to be such control-freaks – which is that they enjoy it.  Most terrorists are totalitarians, and totalitarianism and bureaucracy go hand in hand. From Joseph Stalin to Adolf Eichmann, history's greatest monsters do like a spot of paperwork. 

Italy: the ticking time-bomb at the heart of Europe

So that's the economy sorted, then. 

Jobs, growth, investment, exports – all on the up! Of course, the usual caveats apply, all that stuff about long-term challenges, underlying weaknesses and so on. Still, the next two years are looking good – and for shallow political types, that’s all that really matters.

There is one cloud on the horizon, though – the remnant of a storm that most people think has blown itself out. Simon Johnson, writing for Bloomberg is not so sure:

• “It has become fashionable not to worry about Europe and the euro area...
• “Optimists argue that Europe is on the mend. The central bank is maintaining stimulus, Germany’s export potential remains large, and France will continue to be a haven for investors. Struggling countries such as Greece and Portugal represent less than a 10th of the euro area’s economic output and population.”

What could possibly go wrong? The answer to that is Italy:

• “...the third-largest economy in the euro area, with a population of more than 60 million and gross domestic product of more than $2 trillion. The government’s debt burden, at about 1.3 times GDP, is among the largest in the world.” 

Does all that debt really matter? As Johnson reminds us, other “countries have grown their way out of even larger debt burdens.”

Unfortunately, the Italians have a long-standing problem with growth as well as debt:

• “During the 1990s, the country’s economy expanded at an average annual inflation-adjusted rate of just 1.2 percent, compared with the euro area’s 1.8 percent. From there, it only got worse: Italy’s average growth rate since 2000 has been 0.4 percent, compared with 1.3 percent for the euro area.”

This looks like a fundamental weakness, one that started well before the financial crisis and which will continue long after it:

• “The main obstacle to growth in Italy is the government itself. As Daniel Gros, a leading European economist, put it in 2011: ‘The only factors that have deteriorated absolutely and relative to the core of the Eurozone are indicators of governance – such as corruption and rule of law.’ On some measures of governance, Italy does worse than even Greece.”

A lot of this is down to regional variations within Italy:

• “A recent report from the World Bank, for example, found that a municipal building permit takes six months to obtain in Palermo, compared with just one month in Milan.”

The implication is that deep-down cultural change is required, of the sort that could take a generation or more – which means no quick fix for Italian debt:

• “Even if interest rates stay low for a long time, just keeping the debt burden stable as a percentage of GDP will require impressive spending restraint. At any point, the market could lose faith in Italy’s ability to handle its financial challenges.”

And if interest rates don’t stay low for a long time? Right now, the Eurozone is in a strange situation where low interest rates suit all member states. But there are signs that the healthier economies will be back on their feet soon – at which point they’ll be needing higher interest rates.

Thus it could be recovery, not recession, that tears the Eurozone apart.

Is Stephen Fry right about Russia and the Winter Olympics?

In an open letter to David Cameron, Sebastian Coe and others, Stephen Fry has called for a “absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014”. His argument is that by turning a blind eye to the persecution of homosexuals in Russia, the Olympic movement would be repeating the mistakes of 1936:

• “The Olympic movement at that time paid precisely no attention to this evil and proceeded with the notorious Berlin Olympiad, which provided a stage for a gleeful Führer and only increased his status at home and abroad. It gave him confidence. All historians are agreed on that. What he did with that confidence we all know.”

There was a swift and brutal reaction to Fry’s letter – not from Vladimir Putin, but Andrew Pierce of the Daily Mail:

• “As one gay man to another, I say to Stephen Fry: You should be ashamed for outrageously distorting the facts surrounding the Holocaust. The truth is that Putin is not herding gays into trains and transporting them to concentration camps to be used as slave labour before being gassed to death when they were no longer capable of any meaningful work.”

This is unfair. The comparison that Fry actually made was between Putin’s Russia today and Hitler’s Germany in 1936. The anti-Jewish measures enacted up until that point were deeply unpleasant, but a mere shadow of the horror that was to come.

This is Fry’s description of the situation in Germany at the time of the Berlin Olympics:

• “[Hitler] banned Jews from academic tenure or public office, he made sure that the police turned a blind eye to any beatings, thefts or humiliations afflicted on them, he burned and banned books written by them. He claimed they ‘polluted’ the purity and tradition of what it was to be German, that they were a threat to the state, to the children and the future of the Reich.”

And this is the parallel he draws with the present-day plight of homosexuals in Russia:

• “Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law. Any statement, for example, that Tchaikovsky was gay and that his art and life reflects this sexuality and are an inspiration to other gay artists would be punishable by imprisonment.”

So, despite what his critics might say, Fry is not comparing the Holocaust to a ban on gay pride marches. He is comparing harassment and discrimination with harassment and discrimination. That, of course, still raises questions about whether the scale and intensity of the two situations can be legitimately equated. One also has to doubt whether Russia in 2013 is really on the same trajectory as Germany in 1936.

Then again, the moral case for action doesn't depend on whether the present situation for gays in Russia is as bad as it was for German Jews in 1936, but whether it is bad enough. 

That, of course, would require one to draw some kind of line – and, having done so, to consider how it might apply to other cases. For instance, Andrew Pierce raises the matter of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when things in China were also bad enough for the enemies of the Communist government (and still are). Furthermore, if Russia is to be ruled out as an Olympic host as a result of laws which discriminate against homosexuals, then what about those countries in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere in which homosexuality is banned altogether?

Quoting from the Olympic Charter, Fry calls upon the Olympic movement to act upon its stated principles. The following seems especially relevant:

• “Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.”

Yet if such a principle is to be applied at all, it must be applied consistently.

Nice, democratic, entrepreneurial India: the unhappy truth

Not so long ago, China and India were often mentioned in the same breath – the emerging industrial giants that were set to dominate the 21st century. It’s now clear that the Indian tiger lags the Chinese dragon by some distance.

In fact, the notion of anything approaching an equal contest can be seen as a matter of wish fulfilment – and not just on the part of the Indians. Many westerners have looked hopefully upon India as a friendly, democratic counterweight to the scary, Communist monolith on the other side of the Himalayas.

For a more sobering view of the largest English-speaking country in the world, you could do a lot worse than William Dalrymple in the New Statesman and his review of a new book by the Indian economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen:

• “Their thesis is simple: India’s failure to equal the success of China’s hyper-development is due in large part to the failure of the state to provide ‘essential public services – a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth’”.

There’s no doubting India’s enormous potential though:

• “Between 1991 and 2001, as the Indian economy trebled in size, the country’s IT sector alone earned almost $50bn a year, mostly in export revenues. Part of those profits were spent buying prestigious foreign businesses – for example, the much trumpeted acquisition of Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors.

• “Some of this continues today. Average incomes were projected to continue doubling every ten years. The number of mobile phone users has jumped from three million in 2000 to 100 million in 2005 and 929 million in 2012…. In 2006, 23 Indians appeared on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires; this year, the figure had more than doubled to 55.”

All of this in a country whose population is set to overtake China’s within fifteen years. And yet any comparison to China – or the other ‘BRIC’ nations of Brazil and Russia – cannot overlook the sheer crushing burden of Indian poverty:

• “Even today, a third of Indians do not have electricity, compared to 1 per cent in China. ‘Half of Indian homes remain without toilets, forcing half of all Indians to practise open defecation.’ Wages in manufacturing in China have grown by 12 per cent since 2000, compared with 2.5 per cent in India… Brazil, with much slower economic growth, has a far better record of poverty reduction. India remains an oddity among the Bric countries: ‘India’s per capita GDP is less than half of China’s, one third of Brazil’s and one fourth of Russia’s.’”

The worst thing is just how much of this is needless:

• “Every year, more children die in India than anywhere else in the world: 1.7 million children under the age of five, largely from easily preventable illnesses such as diarrhoea. Of those who do survive until the age of five, 48 per cent are stunted as a result of a lack of nutrients: child malnutrition in India is higher than in Eritrea.”

And how about this as an indictment of successive Indian governments:

• “‘More than 40 per cent of South Asian children (and a slightly higher proportion of Indian children) are underweight in terms of WHO norms, compared with 25 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.’”

There’s a dilemma here for western aid programmes. A malnourished Indian child is surely as deserving of our help as one in Africa. But can aid to a country that can find the money for its own spaceflight programme be justified? The British government thinks not, with Justine Greening’s recent announcement that Britain’s bilateral aid to India will be phased out by 2015.

One thing is for sure. India is wasting its most valuable resource – it’s people.

The long-running left-wing love affair with tyranny

James Bloodworth is the editor of the leftwing blog, Left Foot Forward. However, writing for the Independent, it is the backwardness of his fellow lefties that is his subject:

• “In the past decade or so some progressives have found themselves – either through political expediency or something worse – on the side of the far-right.
• “Some have intentionally thrown in their lot with what any politically astute person would recognise as fascism, while others have simply been unwilling to acknowledge that fanatical movements don’t always comprise of white skinheads with bad tattoos and football shirts.”

The 'far-right' he has in mind is the Islamist far-right. Whether labels of left and right usefully apply to militant fundamentalism is debatable, but whatever you call it, the conventional left has been getting into bed with it. The question is why?

• “The answer, I suspect, lies in the fact that many Islamists exhibit a pathological anti-Americanism that is quite attractive to a certain type of degenerated progressive.”

Bloodworth is not alone in feeling that the left is betraying its values. The likes of Nick Cohen and Martin Bright have written extensively and persuasively on this issue. Where they sometimes go wrong, however, is to give the impression that this betrayal is something new – when in fact it goes back all the way.

In an insightful piece for the Daily Beast, Adam Kirsch looks at the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre – the founding father of the contemporary left. 

The left of old was a collectivist movement, uninterested in, or hostile to, ideas of personal liberty. Sartre, though, fused Marxism with the philosophy of Existentialism:

• “Existentialism, for Sartre, was a philosophy of liberty, insisting that human beings, entangled as they are in circumstances not of their own making, can always rebel against those circumstances by asserting their free will.”

Sartre's ideas were an inspiration to a new generation of leftwingers – at least as interested in rebelling against traditional social norms as in bringing down the established economic order.

But there was a glaring contradiction in Sartre’s thought:

• “...starting in the mid-1940s, and increasingly over the next 10 years, Sartre begins to worship at another altar: the altar of Communism. This is an ideology that has notoriously little use for individual freedom; instead of human beings freely making themselves, it sees them acting out the roles imposed on them by the class struggle.”

What made Sartre’s betrayal of liberty all the more disgraceful was that he was aware of it: 

• “This tension between the demands of the revolution and the demands of the free individual continued to toss Sartre to and fro, politically speaking. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he writes The Ghost of Stalin, in which he condemns Stalinist crimes while still trying to extenuate them as the necessary birth pangs of socialism: ‘Must one give the name of socialism to this bloody monster that tears itself apart? I answer frankly: yes … we had to have that one or none at all.’”

Then, in 1968, came the crushing of the Prague Spring. This was too much even for Sartre:

• “‘The Socialism That Came In From the Cold,’ his essay on Czech culture under communism, is as clear-eyed an analysis as any dissident could offer.”

Yet, instead of fundamentally rethinking his politics, he transferred his affections to a new source of tyranny – the revolutionary movements and governments of the Third World: 

• “In his famous introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he writes with unconcealed glee about the prospect of Algerians killing their former masters, which happen to be the French.”

The cosseted lefties of the First World followed suit, holding up Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Yasser Arafat as their new heroes. But, of course, these too would prove a disappointment – not so much in the terrible things they did to their own people – but in failing to provide a viable challenge to the West.

The fact that the left is now making common cause with Islamists is straight out of the Sartre playbook. It doesn’t matter if these new allies veil women and hang gays in their own lands, just as long as they also stick it to Uncle Sam.

From one side of the world to the other, the middle class is revolting

In Cairo, Istanbul and Rio de Janeiro, the people are angry and out on the streets. But why now? These should be the best of times for the up-and-coming, middle income nations of the world. 

Of course, prosperity is not enjoyed by all in these countries, but what we’ve seen in recent months is not, by and large, the unrest of the poor. Indeed, as Francis Fukuyama explains in an essay for the Wall Street Journal – the common theme of these upheavals is the revolt of the new global middle class:

• “In Turkey and Brazil, as in Tunisia and Egypt before them, political protest has been led not by the poor but by young people with higher-than-average levels of education and income. They are technology-savvy and use social media like and Twitter to broadcast information and organize demonstrations. Even when they live in countries that hold regular democratic elections, they feel alienated from the ruling political elite.”

But, surely, these people have never had it so good? That's precisely the point, says Fukuyama:

• “Families who have durable assets like a house or apartment have a much greater stake in politics, since these are things that the government could take away from them. Since the middle classes tend to be the ones who pay taxes, they have a direct interest in making government accountable.”

It’s also the case that once you give people a taste of genuine prosperity, they want some more – which means trouble if they don’t get it:

• “Most importantly, newly arrived members of the middle class are more likely to be spurred to action by what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called ‘the gap’: that is, the failure of society to meet their rapidly rising expectations for economic and social advancement. While the poor struggle to survive from day to day, disappointed middle-class people are much more likely to engage in political activism to get their way.”

As significant as the Turkish and Brazilian protests have been, they’re a mere curtain raiser to what could be the main event – China:

• “The industrial job machine that the regime has created since 1978 will no longer serve the aspirations of this population. It is already the case that China produces some six million to seven million new college graduates each year, whose job prospects are dimmer than those of their working-class parents. If ever there was a threatening gap between rapidly rising expectations and a disappointing reality, it will emerge in China over the next few years, with vast implications for the country's stability.”

Fukuyama has a further warning for the politicians of the West, which is to keep an eye on their own people:

• “The U.S. and Europe are experiencing sluggish growth and persistently high unemployment, which for young people in countries like Spain reaches 50%. In the rich world, the older generation also has failed the young by bequeathing them crushing debts. No politician in the U.S. or Europe should look down complacently on the events unfolding in the streets of Istanbul and São Paulo. It would be a grave mistake to think, ‘It can't happen here.’”

There is, after all, a key difference between what is happening in the emerging powers, where the middle class isn't going forward fast enough, and Europe and America, where it's now going backwards.

Afghanistan and Syria: Actually, it’s not all about us

You might not think that those in favour of the NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan have got much in common with those against it. One side sees it as a vital part of the 'war against terror', while the other side sees it as a war of neo-imperialist aggression – the ‘West versus the Rest’. However, the common link between these two interpretations is that we – meaning America, Britain and the other western nations – take the starring role (as hero or villain, depending on your point view).

But what if both sides are wrong? What if the Afghan conflict isn’t really about us at all?

In an extended essay for Brookings, William Dalrymple presents a very different perspective that we’d do very well to consider:

• “The hostility between India and Pakistan lies at the heart of the current war in Afghanistan. Most observers in the West view the Afghanistan conflict as a battle between the U.S. and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on one hand, and al-Qaida and the Taliban on the other. In reality this has long since ceased to be the case. Instead our troops are now caught up in a complex war shaped by two pre-existing and overlapping conflicts: one local and internal, the other regional.”

The local conflict emerges from Afghanistan’s ingrained ethnic and tribal rivalries:

• Within Afghanistan, the war is viewed primarily as a Pashtun rebellion against President Hamid Karzai’s regime, which has empowered three other ethnic groups—the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras of the north—to a degree that the Pashtuns resent. For example, the Tajiks, who constitute only 27% of the Afghan population, still make up 70% of the officers in the Afghan army.

• “By aligning with the Tajiks of the northern provinces against the Pashtuns of the south, the U.S. saw itself making common cause with the forces of secularism against militant Islam; but it was unwittingly taking sides in a complex civil war that has been going on since the 1970s.”

The local conflict is exacerbated by the regional conflict between India and Pakistan:

• “...Pakistani [military] planners long ago developed a doctrine of ‘strategic depth.’ The idea had its origins in the debacle of 1971, when, in less than two weeks, India crushingly defeated Pakistan in their third war…”

The  Pakistani fear is that, in a fourth war, Indian forces could quickly take control of the Indus valley that makes up the bulk of Pakistan. Afghanistan, however, offers a fall-back position – from which to re-group and counter-attack:

• “The porous border offers a route by which Pakistani leaders, troops and other assets, including its nuclear weapons, could retreat to the northwest in the case of an Indian invasion.

• “For the idea to work, it is essential that the Afghan government be a close ally of Pakistan, and willing to help fight India.”

Dalrymple goes on to describe the interactions between the local and regional conflicts, which, while highly complex, beg a simple question: can the West intervene without globalising this mess?

We could ask the same thing about Syria, where again we see the intersection of a local conflict with a regional conflict, neither of which have much to do with us. 

In fact, in Syria’s case there is not one, but two regional conflicts.

The first and more immediate is the cold war between, on the one hand, Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and, on the other, their Shi’ite rivals  – principally Iran and its Lebanese Hezbollah allies. The second of these regional conflicts is the re-emergence of the old rivalry between Turkey and Russia, who are backing opposite sides in Syria (just as they have in previous Caucasian and Balkan conflicts).

Like it or not, what we can see is evidence of an increasingly multipolar world. Even if we were willing and able to commit the military resources required to do so, we shouldn’t be be picking sides that we're not part of (and that aren't part of us). Rather the West should be promoting peace, both for our own sakes – and for those of the innocent civilians caught in the middle.