The Islamic State panic is a tempest in a fairly small teacup. Casualties are small, and the region where it is there matters little economically except to a few
The main purpose of year-end reviews, of course, is to hold the ads apart. But they can also serve as a kind of annual check-up on the political health — and also on the economic, demographic and even physical health — of the planet and its teeming human population. So, imagine that we are a panel of high-priced medicos reviewing the health status of our most important client, the human race. The first thing to note is that the client is still piling on weight at an alarming rate — up from two billion units to seven billion in the past 75 years — but continues to thrive, for the most part. And most of the ailments that it worries about are mere hypochondria.
Take, for example, the widespread concern (at least in the media and among what Bob Fisk calls the ‘think-tank mountebanks’) that the emergence of the so-called Islamic State in the no man's land between Iraq and Syria will lead to catastrophe. There will allegedly be a surge in terrorist attacks around the world, a Sunni-Shia religious war spanning the entire Middle East, or even a global religious war between Muslims and everybody else.
The Sunni fanatics and the Shia fanatics are far too busy trying to kill each other to have time to spare for attacking non-Muslims. (Besides, most Muslims don't want to attack anybody; they just want to be left in peace.) Quite a lot of the slaughter in Iraq and Syria is driven by religion, but we are still a long way from a religious conflict that directly involves the really important states of the Middle East: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran.
Even the anticipated surge, in terrorist attacks outside the region is not likely to come to pass. The only strategic purpose for such attacks by any organised group of Islamist extremists is to gain support and recruits within their own region. If they can lure Western powers into killing lots of Muslims in their region, then their cause will prosper locally. As it turns out, Islamic State has not even needed to carry out terrorist attacks in the West to achieve this goal. Videos of Western hostages being beheaded have been enough to get the bombing going again, and Western Governments are no more troubled by the sheer pointlessness of the bombing than they were in the past. Both sides are playing for the home audience, and really don't care much about the impact of their actions on the alleged enemy.
The whole ‘Islamic State’ panic is a tempest in a fairly small teacup. The casualties are small, and the entire region matters little economically or strategically except to its own inhabitants. Even in the unlikely event that a Sunni-Shia religious war should engulf the whole of the Middle East, it would have no more effect on the rest of the planet than the European wars of religion, four centuries ago had on the Middle East. That is to say, hardly any.
The other great shock of 2014 was a war in Europe. The Ukrainian revolution of last February was a messy and complicated business, but it need not have ended in Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and in a Russian-backed separatist war in Ukraine's two easternmost provinces. We owe that mainly to Russian President Vladimir Putin's world-view as a former agent of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, which (as the old saying had it) thwarted 10 anti-Soviet plots for every one that actually existed.
There was no Western plot, but Mr Putin is driven by the belief that there was. He has taken Russia into a confrontation with the West that it cannot win, and the country's economy is already crumbling under the twin strains of coping with Western sanctions and the collapse of the oil price. He is finding it almost impossible to back away without losing face, but he has nothing to gain by continuing the conflict either. Risk of a new Cold War: Minimal. The only big worry the doctors have is the same one that has bothered them for the past 25 years: The patient simply won't stop smoking. Their increasingly grave warnings are met with empty promises to cut back or quit entirely, but not right now, just some time far in the future. Maybe.
Climate change is the spectre at every feast, the unstoppable rot that undermines every positive development. The failure at Copenhagen in 2009 bleeds indistinguishably into the fudge at Durban in 2011 and on into the feeble compromise in lima in 2014, which sets us up for the bigger disappointment of Paris in 2015. And even if by some miracle we get a useful agreement in Paris next year, nothing will actually be done until 2020. The patient thinks there's still plenty of time to quit. There isn't.
