by Andrew Marr
The look on President George W. Bush’s face when he was told of the al Qaeda attacks on the ‘twin towers’ of the New York World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 was a defining image: the world’s last superpower hearing that history had not ended, after all. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, which killed nearly three thousand people there and in Virginia and Pennsylvania, had been meticulously planned and carried out. They provoked a surge of patriotic anger and defiance in the United States. A swift military campaign by the US and her allies in Afghanistan, where bin Laden and his organization were based, toppled the Taliban regime which had been harbouring them. This began a long war, still not over, in which the West and its local allies tried, and failed, to subdue Afghani resistance and create a democratic state. The corruption and unpopularity of the Kabul regime and the ability of Taliban fighters to withdraw across the border to Pakistan have made this an impossible war for the Americans and Europeans to win, even though bin Laden himself was finally hunted down inside Pakistan, and killed, in 2011.
Significant, too, was the decision by President Bush and allies led by Britain’s Tony Blair to invade Iraq for failing to abide by UN resolutions on disarmament. Blair had faced large anti-war protests, while allies such as France protested hotly against invasion. It later became clear that Saddam Hussein did not have the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and Blair had said he did; and that he may have miscalculated in deciding that he would be safer if they thought he did have them. At all events, a huge bombardment of Baghdad began in March 2003, leading to a swift military victory against Saddam’s army. Saddam, once Washington’s least-bad friend, was eventually tracked down and hanged. Rarely has success on the battlefield, however, led to such a difficult aftermath. Widespread disorder, followed by a vicious civil war, kept US, British and other troops in Iraq in large numbers until 2011. Appalling abuse of prisoners, the inability of the Coalition to damp down sectarian violence, and a chaotic refugee crisis, undermined much of the moral authority Western forces had claimed at the start of the conflict. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths have ranged widely, from more than 600,000 to around 150,000.
The Afghan and Iraq wars had been battlefield successes but strategic failures. They reminded the world that not even the most apparently dominant superpower can do whatever it wants; and that invading somebody else’s culture (as well as their land) to impose democracy is a risky idea. It had worked with West Germany and Japan after the Second World War, but that was in countries that had had some prior democratic experience and had been militarily devastated after global conflict. They were also more worried about the threat of Soviet hegemony than American. More generally, the Afghan and Iraq experiences challenged the idea that the whole world was converging on a single political-economic system, or could do.
Instead of the end of history, more was heard about culture wars, or clashes of ‘civilization’, including religion. In parts of the West with large Muslim populations, such as England, Holland and France, a new edge of suspicion was detectable. In parts of the Muslim world such as Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt (even after the overthrow of its dictator Mubarak) that had Christian populations, these minorities felt more threatened. With the US opening a large and secretive detention centre for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, deploying torture and introducing fiercer security legislation, it became clear how badly the ‘war on terror’ had damaged open societies – and their highest ideals, too. Dilemmas about how to deal with dangerous Islamist critics returned the West to problems raised, but never solved, by the trial of Socrates in ancient Athens.
Splurge
Had the West at least continued to dominate economically, that would have been something. But by 2009, the People’s Republic of China was contributing more than half of the world’s economic growth. China today is doing nothing new. It is going through the shift from country to city, into basic manufacturing and thence to more sophisticated manufacturing, that happened to Britain and the eastern US in the first industrial revolution, and to Japan, Korea and Taiwan after the Second World War. The grim working conditions in the factories, the raucous enjoyment of material plenty by the winners in the cities, and a certain recklessness about pollution as the country goes for growth at all costs, have all been seen before. This is a familiar trading-up. Only three things are different. First, China is run by men who call themselves Communists. Second, China is very big. Third, all this is happening at warp speed.
By the year 2025, China is expected to have 219 cities of more than a million, compared with thirty-five in Europe.49 Its growth has affected almost every part of the globe. China is gorging on minerals and land in Africa, Mongolia, Latin America and Australia. Its low-cost manufacturing has given the West a glut of cheap goods, helping destroy manufacturing businesses here. As a consequence, it has a vast chest of foreign exchange which, the writer Jonathan Fenby points out, ‘could buy the whole of Italy, or all the sovereign debt of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain as of 2011, plus Google, Apple, IBM and Microsoft plus all the real estate in Manhattan and Washington DC, plus the world’s fifty most valuable sports franchises’.50
In 2010 China ran a $273 billion trade surplus with the US. There has never been a significant instance in history of an underlying economic power not mutating into political, and generally military, power. Countries can maintain a previous dominance with a swollen and technically advanced military for quite some time after their economic advantage has slipped. Britain did it in the early twentieth century. America is doing so now. But it comes at a high cost: energy and treasure that could have been used to recharge an economy are being spent on overseas commitments. The American economy is still four times larger than China’s, but Chinese growth rates are shrinking the gap at an impressive pace. Recent studies suggest China may overtake the US by 2020, and thirty years later might have an economy twice the size of America’s.51
So China’s power will change the world hugely. Chinese leaders still claim sovereignty over Taiwan, as well as small islands in the South China Sea, and refuse to acknowledge protests about human rights abuses at home, or in Tibet. The growing size of the Chinese navy has produced a ripple of unease around the region, from Australia and the Philippines to Vietnam and India. China’s Communist rulers, no longer presenting quite such a united front as they once did, face their biggest problems at home, dealing with the need for constant high growth to keep a more assertive and consumer-minded population content, with challenges to official censorship, with pollution threats, and with the difficulties of diversifying their economy. They proclaim their peaceful intentions. But economic power brings political power. It always has; and as the Chinese sovereign wealth funds probe deeper into Western corporate life, Americans and Europeans are uneasily aware of how little they know about where the Chinese government ends and Chinese business begins.
China is also a key part of the great capitalist imbalance that followed the Cold War. The West relaxed. It makes too little and spends too much, a process greatly aided by China’s deliberate undervaluing of its currency. The fragility of Western capitalism today was first shown up by a banking crisis in 2008, in essence not much different from that of 1929. Then, as before, bankers had been using novel and little-understood ways of lending more money, including to house-buyers who were gambling on prices rising so they could pay off their debts. Complex algorithms used to measure risk meant that only a very small number of people, even in the relevant banks, understood what they were doing. This might have carried on for a long time in periods of ever-upward growth, but despite important new revenue-producing electronic products, the boom did not reflect underlying economic strength. America was buying cheap goods from China and living, in effect, on Chinese credit.
When in 2007 the US housing bubble burst, many banks found they were sitting on assets such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) worth nothing like their assumed value. Some big companies went bust, and a wave of failure swept the U
S and Europe, leading to costly bail-outs of banks by Britain, Ireland and the US. Only fast action by leading governments staved off a sharp and general recession, though the West was plunged into a period of low, or no, growth, and political leaders lost much authority.
So they should have done; for behind the crisis was a failure of political gumption. In the United States and in European countries, notably Britain, the tycoons of a deregulated financial world had intimidated everyone else. Old safeguards separating traditional banking from riskier forms of investment banking had gone. Regulation was ‘light-touch’. Bankers were paid astronomical salaries and bonuses, without much comment. Politicians seemed content to take the taxes a rampant financial sector offered, spend them on things electorates wanted, and not ask too many questions. Meanwhile, Western economies were looking unbalanced. There was much less manufacturing.
Both governments and private individuals had learned to ramp up debt, to spend now and pay later. Economic policy had virtually vanished from political debate. So once the good times ended, there came a period of reckoning and anguish. In the US, among Republicans, this led to a revival of aggressively anti-state free-market rhetoric. In Europe, entire countries tottered on the edge of bankruptcy, and of falling out of the euro. There were riots in Athens, London and Madrid; there were protests on Wall Street. None of it felt like the victory of the West.
Thus Cold War triumph, which had had Washington cavorting with delight at the new ‘unipolar’ world (a concept not known to geometry, never mind politics), was followed by a stinging political hangover. The West’s economic dominance was slipping away to China. The fashionable form of Wall Street capitalism was having a nervous breakdown. And far from there being no new enemies, the US and her allies were confronted around the world by adherents of an ancient religion who seemed to reject the entire project of modernity as it had developed in the twentieth century, but who could not be destroyed on the battlefield.
Was any of this surprising? Financial capitalism has always evolved through bubbles and crashes. Wherever wealthy companies or individuals are able to huddle together, improperly regulated, they will conspire against the public. Adam Smith told us that. The failures were to be located inside the same democratic-representative structures that were supposed to be the trump card of the West: politicians who spent too much money campaigning to really get tough on the bankers, and too much time worrying about geopolitics to attend to the health of their own economies. Their voters wanted cheap goods and easy credit, and it was comfortable to give them what they wanted. Finally, the philosophy of modern market capitalism, while greatly superior to that of state socialism, was narrow and unhistorical. It put consumerism on a pedestal while underestimating long-term human instincts such as spiritual questing, tribalism and fear. But they hadn’t gone away.
The Thinking Machine52
On 11 May 1997 an event happened in New York that deserves to be remembered far into the future. Someone who had a good claim to be the world’s sharpest man was defeated by a computer. Garry Kasparov is held by many to be the greatest chess-player of all time, a grandmaster so good he is in a category all of his own. It would be lazy to say that Kasparov played like a machine. He had an astonishing memory and a great sense of strategy, but he was also courageous and emotional. A reflective, pugnacious Jewish Armenian who had grown up in the high-pressure world of Soviet chess, he became the world’s number one player aged just twenty-two and kept the title for most of the following two decades until he retired in 2005.
Kasparov had taken on machines before. In Hamburg in 1985 he played simultaneous matches against thirty-two chess programs, and beat them all. Four years later at a match in New York, IBM challenged him with their ‘Deep Thought’ computer. Kasparov had warned that if he lost, it would be ‘unpleasant’ for the human race. He wanted ‘to be the man who saved human pride’. He won the game in two and a half hours. Seven years on, the IBM team had a new machine, ‘Deep Blue’. In Philadelphia in 1996 Kasparov lost a game to it, but had come back to win the match. Now came the much-hyped, much-touted rematch. At a tower block in Manhattan, the Equitable Center, the world’s media were watching for what both sides suggested would be an epic struggle between the human brain and the new power of computing. Posters around the city showed Kasparov staring intently into the middle distance, with the caption: ‘How do you make a computer blink?’ Newsweek magazine carried a cover shouting: ‘The Brain’s Last Stand’.
Was all this mere commercial hyperbole? Not entirely. Ever since chess spread from its origins in India in the 500s, first through Persia and the Muslim world and then into Europe, it has been recognized as a special game that tests human memory and planning to the maximum. It is often, and naturally, compared to mathematics; the brains that are good at chess are also often good at maths. Yet it also requires a kind of genius that cannot be reduced to rules. It is a severe test of logic, but it has always had a mystique that neither card games nor other board games, even chess’s Chinese rival, Go, possess.
Feng-Hsiung Hsu, one of the scientists behind Deep Blue, says that since the 1940s computer theorists had dreamed of a machine that could play chess. One of the pioneers of Artificial Intelligence said in the 1950s: ‘If one could devise a successful chess machine, one would seem to have penetrated to the core of human intellectual endeavor.’53 Kasparov agreed: but he was determined to prove that a machine could only play like a machine, and that at some important level it was stupid, emanating no creative energy.
The first game seemed to confirm Kasparov’s confidence – he won easily. The second game was the turning-point. For non-chess-players its importance can be hard to understand; but it was important. Kasparov decided to sacrifice a pawn to give himself a better position later. Computer chess programmes are designed to grab short-term advantage, and therefore Deep Blue ought to have told its non-human player to take Kasparov’s pawn. He assumed it would. Computers play chess not by intuition but by giving a score or number to all possible moves, then scoring the possible counter-moves of its opponent, then scoring its own next possible moves, and so on.
Easy? The number of possible combinations of moves in a game of chess is greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Just to look a few stages ahead requires extraordinary computing power; human chess-players use their sense of patterns and psychology instead. But now Deep Blue behaved like a (very good) human player. After some time in what its creators called ‘panic mode’, the fridge-sized metal box refused to take Kasparov’s pawn. It made another, long-term, tactical move instead. It was not playing like a machine.
Kasparov seemed to have been spooked by the computer’s apparent intuition. Shortly afterwards, he conceded the game and stalked off, shaking his head. In fact, the computer had made a mistake in a later move and Kasparov could still have managed a draw rather than losing – something he was shocked by when told later. He has argued that, on this basis, he did not really lose. In the following games he drew three and lost the last, playing so badly that it was hardly considered a contest at all.
In the post-match press conference, Kasparov was asked whether the IBM team had cheated – whether there had been ‘some kind of human intervention during this game’. He replied that it reminded him of the goal that the Argentinian footballer Maradona had scored against England in 1986, when he had knocked the ball into the net with his hand but had not been caught by the referee, and had claimed: ‘It was the hand of God.’ The IBM team of scientists, lined up beside him on the platform, were furious at the slur. From their point of view, many years of hard work were being denigrated by a bad loser. The controversies about this episode will never subside. Kasparov had repeatedly asked for printouts of what the computer was doing, and never got them, because the IBM team thought that would have given him an unfair advantage, including in any future match. After the match was over, Deep Blue was disassembled and put into storage; it has never been used since.
There is another poi
nt about the kind of contest that was going on here. Was it really man against machine? Kasparov suffered from exhaustion, worry, anger and suspicion, which the computer, using vastly more computational power than any Kasparov had encountered before, did not. So to that extent, it was. He had an ego. It had none. Yet Deep Blue was itself the creation of human brains, who described its chess struggle with fatherly concern. Feng-Hsiung Hsu has written that the contest ‘was really between men in two different roles: man as a performer and man as a toolmaker . . . Deep Blue is not intelligent. It is only a finely crafted tool that exhibits intelligent behaviour in a limited domain.’ Though Kasparov lost the match, he added with a feline twist, only he had real intelligence: ‘Deep Blue would never have been able to come up with the imaginative accusations.’54
Later Kasparov himself came close to agreeing: Deep Blue was a great achievement, he said, but it was ‘a human achievement by the members of the IBM team . . . Deep Blue was only intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.’55 Alongside the computer scientists, no fewer than six chess grandmasters had been working on the programmes: Kasparov was taking on not simply a corporation (and IBM did massively well from the publicity, gaining kudos it had been losing to the new kids of Silicon Valley), but also a lot of accumulated human knowledge and preparation.