China-Japan is likely to co-operate with Australasia to its south, in order to help bring humane and sensible telecommuter-era government to the troubled areas between them. Some of their joint methods of neo-gunboat diplomacy will be called neo-colonialism; but as they will be a multi-racial partnership they will get away with a lot. North America may co-operate similarly with Brazil, to create its own north-south axis and an area of prosperity between them.
There will be a school of thought that thinks that the new EEC should ally itself with white South Africa, as China-Japan with Australia, and the United States with Brazil. But the EEC might then find that it had made racial problems in its ‘wild south’ even more likely to bring riot upon itself.
At the eastern end of Europe’s southern border, none of the problems of the Middle East has been resolved. An EEC’s southeastern border would lie on the Caspian Sea, including a short land frontier with triumphant Iran.
As Iran has been on the winning side, it may have temptations to extend a new Persian empire across Arabia. There will be fierce resistance if this is attempted. This uncovers two other problems: first, the fact that Iran is now the cockpit between the China-Japan and EEC spheres of interest; second, the question of how long Middle Eastern oil is likely to remain important.
While Iran’s western border is with Iraq and the Gulf, its north-eastern border is with the Asiatic republics of the former Soviet Union, now under Chinese influence, and its south-eastern border is with Pakistan. India-Pakistan was not a scene of fighting in the war; the new generation of youngsters coming out of its schools is the first generation to be almost entirely literate (like the first generation of literate Chinese to emerge from their schools fifteen years ago, and look how they’ve progressed); some people therefore expect rapid economic development in India-Pakistan at last. Some trends suggest it may become the manufacturing area for the China-Japan co-prosperity sphere, the place to which that rich area devolves its pollutant heavy industries. This may be especially likely if nearby Middle Eastern oil remains an important industrial fuel.
There could be a paradox here. The Japanese remember all too well that, on the day in 1941 when they started their war with the United States, a paper before the imperial government had said that war was necessary because of the coming shortage of oil. In that December of 1941 Japan had a reserve of oil sufficient for its needs for a few months ahead; the Japanese government believed that it would never have so much oil again unless it seized control of the oilfields of Indonesia and perhaps Burma. Thirty years later oil supplies from Indonesia and Burma were much less important than anybody had forecast. Though Japan had been defeated, Japanese industry was using every six hours an amount of oil equal to the entire stock that Japan held on Pearl Harbor day. It was buying it easily from temporarily glutted supplies in the Middle East.
The 1985 war also owed its start partly to fears on the part of the great nations that they would face penury unless they could secure physical possession of oil-producing areas. One remembers the competition run in 1920 by an Austrian newspaper for the most dramatic conceivable newspaper headline. The winning entry was ‘Archduke Franz Ferdinand alive. World war fought by mistake.’
The history of energy supplies during the recent conflict has raised some question as to whether, in relation to the ‘oil shortage’, that sort of headline may not now be proved apposite.
The areas that have increased their industrial production most in recent years (Japan-China and South America) were cut off from imported supplies of oil when the 1985 war broke out. Each had accumulated large reserve stocks before the war and the war was far shorter than they expected. They got by with ease. The Japanese, who are now the world’s most advanced technicians and who had feared that the impeding of oil supplies from the Middle East might prove much longer-lasting, have progressed dramatically with experiments on the thousands of possible other ways of releasing energy from storage in matter. This does not apply simply to nuclear, solar, wave and geothermal energy, but also to, for example, creating artificial rain in large tanks by allowing warm air above sea water to rise through deliberately cooled upper air and getting hydro-electric power from that. Also, the protests of environmentalists against nuclear fission have diminished since the war, and nuclear fusion is at hand.
One must beware of any forecasts about fuel supplies now the war is behind us. In February of 1947, during the Shinwell fuel crisis, Britain’s Prime Minister, Clem Attlee, said that no coal miner need fear for his job for the rest of the century. Within twelve years, a majority of the then existing coal mines in Europe and Japan had closed down. The forecast ‘oil-short 1990s’ may prove like that. The Middle East may, like the coal-mining districts at the end of the coal age, have tragically priced itself into standards of living it will no longer be able to afford. Or it could still prove for some years (as many people suppose) to be the main supply area for a valuable and depleted natural resource.
In either event, the Middle East is not going to be a comfortable southern neighbour for the new EEC. If oil is still scarce, there will be a jockeying for positions there. If the area is going to be poorer than it has grown accustomed to thinking it has a right to be, there may be constant coups d’état. It became fashionable in the 1970s and early 1980s to suppose that a main object of diplomacy would always be to make good friends of the rulers of Iran and the Arab oil countries. But billionaire shahs and sheikhs are not likely to be the most popular folk heroes for the last decade of the twentieth century.
After each major war this century, a great empire has melted away. After the 1914-18 war, the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire. After the 1939-45 war, the victorious British empire. After the 1985 war, the defeated Soviet Union. That last is the only result of the late war that can be accounted as certain so far. For the rest, the most accurate prophecies could prove to be the ones that seem least likely now.
There is a nice story of a political prophet in Munich in 1928, who was asked to prophesy what would be happening to the burghers of his city in five, fifteen, twenty and forty years’ time. He began: ‘I prophesy that in five years’ time, in 1933, Munich will be part of a Germany that has just suffered 5 million unemployed and that is ruled by a dictator with a certifiable mental illness who will proceed to murder 6 million Jews.’
His audience said: ‘Ah, then you must think that in fifteen years’ time we will be in a sad plight.’
‘No,’ replied the prophet, ‘I prophesy that in 1943 Munich will be part of a Greater Germany whose flag will fly from the Volga to Bordeaux, from northern Norway to the Sahara.’
‘Ah, then you must think that in twenty years’ time, we will be mighty indeed.’
‘No, my guess is that in 1948 Munich will be part of a Germany that stretches only from the Elbe to the Rhine, and whose ruined cities will recently have seen production down to only 10 per cent of the 1928 level.’
‘So you think we face black ruin in forty years’ time?’
‘No, by 1968 I prophesy that real income per head in Munich will be four times greater than now, and that in the year after that 90 per cent of German adults will sit looking at a box in a corner of their drawing rooms, which will show live pictures of a man walking upon the moon.’