Over the Horizon: Viewing the Future Through the Lens of Past
By Robert Farley | 27 Jul 2011
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| 1941: Pearl Harbor. |
As the father of 2-year-old twin daughters, I often find myself thinking about how international politics and foreign policy will play out across their lives. Of course, parents aren't the only "institutions" that wonder about the possibility of forecasting and shaping the future. Governments, international organizations and companies make huge investments of both lives and money based on expectations with time horizons of 10, 20 and even 50 years. Nimitz-class aircraft carriers have been in service for more than 30 years and may serve for another 40. The United States is currently wrestling, in a very public manner, with the long-term implications of its tax and entitlement policies. Expectations of Chinese and Indian economic growth, not to mention climate change and "peak oil," help structure how every nation thinks about its future.
But my role as a parent has led me to a thought experiment: How might international affairs have affected my daughters' lives had they been born in 1909, instead of in 2009? What key events would have shaped their outlooks and expectations? More importantly, how can using the vantage point of 1909 to contextualize contemporary events help us think about the century ahead?
Had my daughters, Miriam and Elisha, been born in the United States in 1909, their life expectancy would have been somewhere around 54 years, although that would have risen considerably once they survived infancy. They would have entered a world in which war between great powers was relatively rare. The birth pangs of the German Empire had involved the military defeat of Austria and France, but both conflicts remained relatively discrete. Similarly, Japan had recently emerged on the international stage by militarily defeating China and Russia, but neither of those two conflicts produced a wider war.
Nevertheless, at age eight, my daughters would have found their country engaged in a war involving all the European great powers. Fortunately, their father would have been too old -- 43 -- for the draft, but the anti-German hysteria that gripped the country during World War I would have been on display with particular intensity in their native Cincinnati, with its large German population. In 1918 and 1919, they would have lived through a genuine global pandemic, as the Spanish Flu would kill more than half a million Americans, almost five times as many as the Great War. In April 1919, just before their 10th birthday, a series of attempted terrorist bombings would combine with fear of the Russian Revolution to generate America's first Red Scare.
On the positive side of the ledger, the experience of Americans living abroad after the Great War would lead to a social and intellectual flowering, helping to produce a wave of great American literature in the 1920s. Unfortunately, after almost a decade of relatively robust economic growth, the U.S. economy would contract by about 25 percent between 1929 and 1932, with similar devastation visiting the most exposed European economies.
The 1909 versions of Elisha and Miriam would have been 32 when the Japanese Imperial Navy struck Pearl Harbor. It is unlikely that they would have had any sons old enough for the draft, but they might have seen husbands go to war, or served in noncombat capacities themselves. As Jewish Americans, they would have been disproportionately likely to serve, mostly in response to the depredations of the genocidal Nazi regime. Like most Americans, they would have enjoyed the fruits of the postwar economic boom, the first moments of American global hegemony. Part of the price for this might have been sending their sons and daughters to Korea or Vietnam.
In retrospect, we can identify the structural factors that motivated the century's great clashes and set the framework of national competition, but this is different than being able to predict specific events. In fact, from the vantage point of 1909, what is striking is just how unpredictable the past century worth of foreign affairs is. Much less could anyone have predicted how its international and foreign policy concerns would affect and shape the lives of individuals. And yet, what we think of as the international phenomena of the past century -- including war, pandemic, genocide, revolution, economic collapse and reconstruction, and cultural renaissance -- help constitute a very substantial part of how we would understand the contours of an individual's life who had lived in that time.
What does this tell us about the future? Having actually been born in 2009, the girls are healthier, wealthier and likely to live longer than their counterparts from the thought experiment. It is likely that they will see both the Chinese and Indian economies surpass the American in total size, if not in per capita wealth. We can reasonably expect, at least, that they will have greater opportunities to conduct foreign policy careers than their 1909 dopplegangers. Three of the last four secretaries of state have been women, and it is reasonable to assume that by the time they achieve adulthood, women will also have served as defense secretary and president.
I would like to think that great power war of the scale seen in the 20th century will not recur in the 21st, but then I would have likely felt the same way in 1909. It is not at all impossible that my daughters, like their imaginary 1909 counterparts, will see the detonation of a nuclear weapon in anger. Looming energy and environmental crises may have effects that can barely be envisioned from our current perspective.
But these are just the structural factors that will shape the coming century. Beyond them, however, it is frustratingly difficult to envision what the future of international politics will look like, or how it will affect the lives of two little girls born in 2009 in Cincinnati, Ohio.
It is almost too trite to point out that foreign policy professionals from around the world would agree in principle that the next 80 years should ideally be better than the past 80. Every analyst, diplomat, soldier and policymaker hopes to make a better world for his or her children. Unfortunately, this common hope cannot, in and of itself, solve most international disputes. People continue to disagree about both what constitutes a better world and how we should divide its fruits.
It is heartening that the prospects of twin girls born in 2009 appear to be so much better than the prospects of twin girls born in 1909. Staggering advances in health, education and wealth have transformed life in the United States and around the world. However, we cannot take for granted that the trends of the past century will continue throughout the next. More importantly, despite the many investments we make today based on long-term projections, we often overestimate the degree to which we can either shape the future or predict the course of international events. For all the tools that we have developed in order to prepare for the most important events of our lives, the future remains discouragingly opaque.
Dr. Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His interests include national security, military doctrine, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination. His weekly WPR column, Over the Horizon, appears every Wednesday.
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