Taiwan
The world’s first information war erupts after Washington ships reconnaissance aircraft cloaked in a new “stealth paint” to Taiwan. Beijing is furious. Before 2010, China had expressed its violent displeasure by conducting missile tests in the Taiwan Strait. But now, just as Taipei strategists warned in 2002, the Chinese have a new method of intimidation: electromagnetic-pulse weaponry.
Beijing fires one brief, powerful, targeted pulse from a satellite in low Earth orbit. It strikes the capital city of Taipei at noon, shutting down the stock market, banks, air-traffic control, e-mail networks. The city is thrown into chaos for an afternoon. Beijing Foreign Ministry officials insist the assault “did not reflect official policy,” hinting that rogue generals were behind the attack. Taiwanese officials denounce the assault as a “monstrous new form of barbarity” and demand a full explanation. Taipei hackers don’t wait: they let loose computer worms that paralyze Beijing’s high-tech enclave of Zhongguancun. American and European leaders urge everyone to stand down. To that, Beijing hawks and Taipei hackers both claim the high road, saying info weapons are a laudable step backward in the history of weapons that have otherwise grown more and more lethal.
Colombia
America’s next Vietnam emerges from George W. Bush’s 2002 decision to arm an “anti-terror” battalion in Colombia. The government is hanging on in the cities, battered by mortar attacks from all sides. Paramilitary armies of the left and right have splintered with the death of their top leaders, and no longer fear drawing America into the conflict. That line is crossed. Now they host anyone with money or guns: Mideast arms merchants and European and Latin mercenaries.
China Sea
No one ever believed those strange huts on stilts were just “fishermen’s shelters,” as China had claimed. Each year they got a little bigger, a little more elaborate; concrete replaced wood, satellite dishes replaced flimsy antennas. Now they are pontoon cities clinging to exposed reefs, and the unlikely naval base from which Beijing is pressing its claim to sovereignty over nearly all of the China Sea. Chinese officials still insist, when asked, that they want to settle all claims to the sea peacefully. But from Vietnam to the Philippines, other nations with a claim to the sea look on in alarm as Beijing dispatches naval vessels to escort ships searching for oil, fish and other treasures under the sea.
Tensions spill over when China begins patrolling the shipping lanes of the China Sea, through which much of Asia’s trade with the West must pass. The patrols appear to be a defiant thumb in the eye of the United States, which has re-established major naval bases in the Philippines and Singapore in the years since 9-11. But American officers believe the patrols may be just a way to divert U.S. attention–and aircraft carriers–from an even hotter spot: Taiwan. The uninhabited atolls of the China Sea have thus become a potential battlefield in what is still the world’s most dangerous arena of Great Power conflict.
Middle East
The terrible bloodshed of the Al Aqsa intifada proves the impetus for a new era of peace and stability in the region. Ariel Sharon’s resounding defeat in the fall 2003 election by dovish Labor leader Amram Mitzna paved the way for a resumption of peace talks, which culminated in the historic accord of 2005. With both side exhausted, and inspired by their eloquent leaders, efforts to rebuild trust have finally paid off. Under its terms, Israel withdrew totally from Gaza, abandons dozens of isolated settlements in the West Bank and surrenders control of East Jerusalem to the Palestinian National Authority, headed by Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader released from prison after months of secret negotiations. International peace monitors maintain a thin presence along the Jordanian border and atop the Temple Mount, now under Palestinian sovereignty, with full recognition of the site’s importance for Jews.
The militant bomb makers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been driven underground by the Palestinian Authority; trade between Israel and Palestine flourishes and, despite the dispute between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights, tensions have abated. The most potent symbol of the new era? The now-routine five-hour drive along the Mediterranean from Tel Aviv to Beirut, across a border that opened to traffic in 2008 for the first time in 60 years.
The Koreas
The Korean Cold War ends as the big one did, with the collapse of the weak side. The only hereditary dictator of the communist era, Kim Jong Il never got reform. He agreed to extend the Trans-Siberian Railway through Pyongyang to Seoul, but never let anyone get off in North Korea. He allowed prices to rise–to what he decided were “market” rates. He experimented with private markets in the countryside, but most North Koreans live in cities. By 2002 workers were escaping through China to rally against Kim in Western capitals, smuggling the truth back to his “socialist paradise.”
The revolt begins when closet reformers in Pyongyang discover that the Great Leader has executed one of their own. Word gets out, a few brave workers hit the streets, hungry Army officers refuse to respond. The sick economy comes to a stop. Idle citizens gather by the thousands, not knowing how to complain after years of silence, but listening raptly to dissidents sneaking in from Seoul. Kim sees the future, and flees on his bulletproof train to exile in Moscow.
Pakistan
The Pathan leader Wali Khan once quipped that Pakistan was not a nation, but a crowd brought together by an accident of history–the British partition of the Subcontinent. The ensuing fight with India over Kashmir bound Pakistan’s fractious people together under the generals. But when the Subcontinental cold war grows hot again, India’s conventional forces trounce Pakistan’s. With the economy in advanced decay, the defeat topples the generals, and threatens to transform Pakistan back into a crowd.
The crisis precipitates a scrap among the other major power centers: feudal families, industrialists, bureaucrats and Islamists. The Islamists have lost power due to the U.S. war on terror, which has shut down the madrasas that are their main base of strength. The industrialists and bureaucrats, scions of feudal families, come out on top. The 2,000 clans who own 70 percent of all Pakistan’s land take control in its four provinces, putting mujahedin returning from Kashmir to work as guns for hire. Mired in feudal chaos, Pakistan is more dangerous than ever to itself, but possibly less dangerous to others. It all depends on who gets their hands on the nukes.
