The century of the stalemate

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":5,"text":"For a certain kind of football snob, the perfect game ends nil-nil with not even a goalscoring chance. The players are distributed, and their movements co-ordinated, to reduce space on the grass for individual flair. This ideal of tactical rigour is hard to achieve in three dimensions, but the 1994 World Cup final in Pasadena was a masterclass of mutual nullification. As the US prepares to host again, it will be dreading a repeat of those 120 scoreless minutes."}],[{"start":36.05,"text":"There are quite enough stalemates around. The two highest-profile wars in the world are stuck. In Ukraine, an invasion that was meant to succeed within weeks is nearing first world war length. The front line moves at a hideous human cost when it moves at all. In the Gulf, the apparent mismatch between the US and Iran has settled into deadlock. Even Gaza remains a contested space. So, after more than a decade of fighting, does Yemen."}],[{"start":64.9,"text":"Something similar is going on in the domestic realm. Each US presidential election this century has been competitive. No one has won 400 electoral college votes — a once-banal achievement — since 1988. If the Republicans lose the House of Representatives in the coming midterms, that will be the sixth transfer of control since 1994. Before that, the Democrats ran the place for four straight decades."}],[{"start":89.30000000000001,"text":"This week, as Donald Trump met Xi Jinping, there was talk of another cold war. But the original one had a winner. It is hard to see how the US-China race can ever be so decisive. Even aside from their interdependence (the US cannot have a cold war with its third-biggest trade partner and holder of Treasuries) the two countries are well matched. Except in nuke count and certain other fields, the USSR did not get close to rivalling America like this. Nor did Japan, Germany or the late-stage Spanish empire."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":120.05000000000001,"text":"How did stalemate become the pattern of our century? And how can it not have something to do with the internet?"}],[{"start":125.95000000000002,"text":"Unequal performance often rests on unequal knowledge. That is much harder to achieve now. If a tactic works on the battlefield, the other side can share it among their comrades at digital speed. If a political movement whips up its members online, the opposing movement learns to do the same. (Pre-internet, the two sides might not have even encountered the other.) An industrial secret is easier to pinch if a photo of it can be emailed home in seconds. This is doubly true if, as is often the case now, the secret is itself just a piece of code, not an engine or warhead."}],[{"start":159.70000000000002,"text":"In our world, an initial advantage does not last for long. Before, even the fact of the advantage might only be known to the side in possession of it. Some Soviet citizens genuinely did not understand or believe how rich the west was. With the dawn of the internet — firewall or no firewall — the Chinese were left in less doubt. What an impetus to press on with market reforms. And this is before language-translation software becomes as sinisterly good as it is going to be."}],[{"start":188.95000000000002,"text":"In all sorts of fields, it has become difficult to be much better than a rival for much time. This “should” reduce human conflict. A stalemate gives all parties something. Yet look around. It turns out that stability within and between nations so often depends on one side winning."}],[{"start":209.10000000000002,"text":"In politics, if a party keeps clinching elections, its rival has no choice but to adopt some of its ideas. Hence the middle ground. If both sides can count on a huge minimum vote regardless, and perhaps one win in two, the incentive to compromise is what, exactly? The GOP could nominate Cruella de Vil as president and still get to a respectable 230-ish in the electoral college. In war, too, there is no pressure to sue for peace if eternal stalemate is available at tolerable cost. (With surveillance drones, there is almost no such thing as a surprise attack now.) The dirty secret of the stable world in which I grew up was that it rested on a certain one-sidedness: Pax Americana was just one example of it. The spread of knowledge and power since then has been fair, just and ruinous."}],[{"start":266.70000000000005,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778909509_5952.mp3"}