My former colleague and mentor, Prof. David Boyce, loved Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works.  In a short email sent earlier this year, he urged me to read it, adding, “of the nearly 100 books I read this year, this one was the best”.  As encouragement he even mailed a hardcopy to me all the way from his retirement home in Arizona, to my pleasant surprise.  I’ve never heard of Smil before.   According to Wikipedia, he is a prolific and decorated author who counts Bill Gates among his fans.  An immigrant from Czech Republic, he had a PhD in geography but wrote about a wide variety of topics ranging from energy and environment to economics and public policy.

I don’t quite know how to make sense of the book’s seemingly pretentious title. If not for David’s recommendation, the title would probably have turned me away.  Having read the book, I suspect Smil had chosen the title to hide the controversial thesis of the book, which I think is an earnest pushback on the current “mainstream” climate policies and initiatives. Had the book been entitled to reflect this position, however, I imagine many people from the left would reject it out of hand as a manifesto from yet another climate change denier.  Here is Smil’s thesis in a nutshell:

“Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter?”

Let me first unpack how he reached this conclusion.

Citing Ludwig Boltzmann, Smil argues that free energy (i.e., energy available for conversion) is “the object of struggle for life”.   In the past two centuries, humans have gradually gained access to “a tremendous amount of energy at low cost” from burning fossil fuels.  This has largely transformed life on earth, from scarcity and misery that plagued much of human history to abundance and comfort that so many today had taken for granted.  By 2020, the annual energy consumed by an average person reached 34 GJ, equal to the energy content of about 0.8 tons of crude oil.  If the person would source this amount of energy from physical labor, Smil estimates they would need 60 adult servants working non-stop, day and night.  In affluent countries, this number would increase to approximately 200 to 240.  Clearly, before the energy revolution, only a very small minority could ever hope to avoid hard labor necessary to sustain and advance civilization.  As Thomas Piketty explained in his Capital in 21^st Century, in such a world, social inequality was not only inevitable but maybe necessary because “if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival.” Moreover, “without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life”.   Of course, the energy revolution did not eradicate inequality; but living a dignified life and thinking beyond mere survival is no longer the privilege of the super-rich. For this newfound luxury we have the fossil fuel industry to thank.

Central to Smil’s argument is, therefore, the observation that humanity has become deeply dependent on the cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.  The book explores this dependency in the production of electricity, food, industrial materials, and transportation.

• Although the share of renewable energy (hydropower, solar and wind) in global electricity generation has reached 32% by 2022, fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) remained the dominant source (about 60%). As the uptake of renewables continues, however, the challenge lies not so much in converting solar and wind energy to electricity as in addressing their uneven spatiotemporal distribution.   Tackling this challenge requires the ability to store a massive amount of electricity and transmit it across vast distances. The former is contingent upon a technological breakthrough and the latter, even if we tolerate the cost of transmission, needs expensive infrastructure that currently does not exist. As Peter Nihan pointed out, there is a reason why “95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away”.  Indeed, Germany had to keep almost 90% of its fossil fuel power plants as backup despite more than half of the country’s electricity is now generated from renewable sources.
• The agricultural industries depend on fossil fuels for synthetic fertilizers, among other things (e.g., power for machinery). Smil estimates that more than two thirds of the nitrogen needed for growing crops worldwide is supplied by fertilizers produced from natural gas using the Haber-Bosch process. If we decide to only feed crops by organic wastes, he concluded, more than half of the current global population would be wiped out, and those lucky enough to stick around would struggle to afford regular consumption of meat.  To drive home the crucial importance of fossil fuel to our food supply, Smil painstakingly calculated the life cycle “oil contents” in several staple food items. Perhaps the most memorable example was the tomato grown in the heated greenhouses of Almería, Spain, which consumes more than half liter diesel fuel per kilogram of edible fruit. In contrast, a kilogram of chicken, the most “efficient” meat in terms of energy conversion, can be produced with as little as 0.15 liters of diesel fuel.
• Smil also surveyed the ubiquitous presence of cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia in our life. The production of these “four pillars of modern civilization”, as he like to call them, relies heavily on energy- and carbon-intensive processes, collectively accounting for about one sixth of the global energy supply and a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption.  Smil asserts that we won’t be able to displace these materials anytime soon given their extensive current utilization. Nor could they be readily decarbonized because their established production processes have no “commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives”.
• As for transportation, there are two major obstacles. First, electric motors are still far from a viable substitute to turbofan engines currently powering long-haul aviation.  After all, the energy density of today’s best Li-ion batteries only amounts to about 5% that of jet fuel.  Second, the raw materials needed to build batteries – lithium, cobalt, and nickel, to name a few – may not be able to keep up with the enthusiasm of EV advocates.   To reach a 50% EV market share globally by 2050, Smil estimated that the demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel would grow by a factor of, respectively, 20, 19 and 31.  Take cobalt for example.  A quick Google search shows that, as of now (2022), the world has a cobalt reserve of about 8.3 million tons and an annual production of about 190,000 tons. Per Smil’s estimation, the production of cobalt would rise to nearly 4 million tons in 2050, or nearly half of the entire current reserve.

Having explained why we will be stuck with fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, Smil turned to address what he considered hyperbolic responses to the unfolding climate crisis.  To be sure, Smil is no climate change denier. However, he does raise serious concerns regarding climate science and the way it is being portrayed to mobilize mass action.   Smil tells us the cutting-edge global climate models contributed little to advance our understanding about the greenhouse effect and its long-term consequences.   Instead, the scientific community has been “aware of them for more than 150 years, and in a clear and explicit manner for more than a century”.  He also questions the value of performing long-term forecast with these large, ostensibly sophisticated, and complex models.  Such exercises may produce headlines decorated with impressive numbers.  However, riddled with “layered and often questionable assumptions”, they are little more than “computerized fairy tales”, whose primary function is to help the users
“reinforce their own prejudices or to dismiss plausible alternatives”, rather than reliably informing decision making. Smil’s distaste for complex forecasting models reminds me of Douglas J. Lee who, in his famous Requiem for Large-Scale Models, criticized the development of integrated land use and transportation models for the purpose of infrastructure planning. To explain why a more complex model isn’t necessarily better, Lee wrote,

“Including more components in a model generates the illusion that refinements are being added and uncertainty eliminated, but, in practice, every additional component introduces less that is known than is not known”.

In a nutshell, the climate models cannot really tell us what is going to happen in 30 years and to believe otherwise is “to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change”.  Thus, Smil rejects the grim warning that our fossil-fueled civilization will soon collapse unless we immediately take drastic actions to decarbonize the world economy.   He also dismisses the grandiose claims that technological breakthroughs will somehow save humanity from this impending calamity, if only we have faith in them.  He ruthlessly mocks the “techno-optimists” –– who promised that 80 percent of global energy supply can be decarbonized by 2030, and an economy fueled by 100% renewables actually “needs less energy, costs less, and creates more jobs” –– and likens them to “green hymn” singers.

So, what is Smil for?  First, he prefers steady and mundane strategies to “sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe”. Two specific actions he suggested does make sense: reducing food waste, which shockingly amounts to a third of the overall food supply, and curtailing the ownership of SUVs, whose wide adoption had more than offset in the past decade the decarbonization gains resulting from the slow adoption of EVs.  Second, he wants us to “be agnostic about the distant future”, to admit the limits of our understanding, to “approach all planetary challenges with humility”, and to recognize no amount of planning can assure ultimate success.

Smil likes to build his argument around numbers and facts.  However, absorbing all the numbers can sometimes become such a mental burden that the reader may be distracted from the flow of the book.  Of course, this may be a feature rather than a bug; after all, Smil also wrote a popular book called Numbers Do Not Lie.  The chapter discussing risks and life expectancy seems a little baffling to me: it may be interesting in its own right, but a poor fit for the main theme.   That said, the book is a joy to read overall: Smil writes elegantly, his argument well-construed and his conclusions convincing.  Harsh as his critique of the climate modelers may be, it did resonate with me –– and I am a bit of a modeler myself.  However, I am probably not the kind of audience that Smil intends (need) to win over. To young liberals like AOC and Greta Thunberg, Smil’s even-headed message may be too conservative to swallow.  They might even find his lectures on “how the world really works” nerdy and old-fashioned, if not condescending and insulting.  Many a climate action enthusiast would probably never have time and patience to hear the old man out anyway, as they are so preoccupied by the continuous flow of new bad news that implore them to do something, anything, here and now, and at any cost if necessary.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I was drawn to the book largely because of the provocative title. The “end of something” is one of my favorite genres – somehow part of me just cannot resist that whiff of fatalism.  In any case, if you crave for apocalypse, Peter Zeihan will not disappoint.

I should first clarify that the “End” spoken of here is not really the “world” itself, but rather the “Order”, the US-led, post-cold-war world order that centers on globalization.  Here is Zeihan’s verdict on the Order in his characteristically assertive tone:

“The globalization game is not simply ending. It is already over. Most countries will never return to the degree of stability or growth they experienced in 2019.”

Let me first walk you through why Zeihan thinks the game is doomed.

First and foremost, the Order is not normal. It was possible entirely because the only superpower on earth, the US, guarantees global security by suspending geopolitical competition.   Zeihan asserted our current era is “the most distorted moment in human history” and thus cannot be indefinitely sustained.

Second, globalization has been subsidized by America’s massive military spending and voluntary de-industrialization of her heartland. However, in the past five decades, this policy has squeezed the once mighty American middle class so hard that a major course correction seems inevitable.

Third, globalization went hand in hand with industrialization, urbanization, and women’s rights movement, which, while pulling billions out of poverty, has depressed birth rate below replacement levels in all but a handful of countries that “have managed a high degree of development”.  Where these processes were artificially accelerated thanks to rapid diffusion of technologies –– the so-called latecomer advantage –– populations also age at an artificially accelerated pace, fast approaching what Zeihan called “postindustrial demographic collapse”.   In fact, Zeihan claims that many countries have already passed the point of no-return, demographically.  The shrinking population will pull the rug out from under the consumption-based global economy.

To summarize Zeihan’s proposition, the Order is inherently unsustainable, can no longer be sustained as of today, and has already produced its own grave digger: the impending population crash.

Well, that explains the “end”. What about “the beginning” part, namely what is going to happen when the Order dissolves?

The first casualty is long-haul transportation.  According to Zeihan,  once the US   withdraws from policing the ocean surface, the global shipping industry will kiss goodbye to its most important asset: the impeccable safety record. Even a small uptick in the risk of losing cargo to pirates or rogue states will drastically increase transportation costs, in the form of rising insurance premiums, lost time, and disruptions to today’s hyper-efficient supply chains.  Without reliable and cheap transportation, moving raw materials and goods halfway around the world would make no economic sense.  As a result, every country must become less specialized and more self-sufficient –– growing all (or most) of one’s own food, rather than importing it from another continent, will become the new norm.  The countries that have selected (or been selected) to turn their entire economies into niche specialties at the behest of globalization will face upheavals, if not existential threats.   Unfortunately, not every country will make it.  Zeihan predicts the places that don’t have “the right geography to make a go of civilization” before the Order will experience not only depopulation –– a euphemism for mass starvation –– but also de-civilization (whatever that means).

The next victim is what Steven Pinker would call Long Peace.  Without effective law enforcement, the world will morph into the jungle that it once was. Under the rule of Darwinism, smaller nation states will have trouble protecting and feeding themselves.  A natural coping strategy is to coalesce around their regional hegemons to form military and economic alliances that would look disturbingly similar to the great powers of the past centuries. As these new empires begin to quarrel over resources and territories, violence ensues. Indeed, war has already returned to Europe when Putin’s Russia launched its bid to regain control over Ukraine about a year ago. Many people thought Putin had committed a huge blunder. However, if the future were to unfold as described in Zeihan’s book, the invasion may well be understood as a strategic imperative: grabbing “the granary of Europe” to ensure Russia can feed her own people when things go south.

While desolation will be widespread, not every country will suffer equally. Zeihan thinks the US and its neighbors will be doing just fine, because collectively they are endowed with rich natural resources, relatively young and still growing populations, and above all a powerful military that can secure industrial inputs and protect trade routes wherever needed.  America’s European allies, however, will not be so lucky.  The shockwave will break up Europe into small blocks led by the legacy powers – the likes of UK, France, Germany, and Turkey – who unfortunately can no longer count on colonialism and imperialism to get ahead like in the good old days.

That the biggest loser will be China Zeihan is absolutely certain.  The first and foremost problem for China is demography.  Most peoples in the world are getting older, but Chinese would allow no one to beat them at the game of speed, including aging.  Even according to official data, China’s population has already begun to shrink in 2022, with a birth rate standing at 1.3 and (most likely) still dropping.  Thanks in part to a ruthless but successful family planning scheme, China has become “the fastest-aging society in human history”, and at this point, her demographic collapse is inescapable and imminent. Second, China is highly specialized in low-value-add manufacturing to which long-haul transportation is indispensable.  This economic model must be completely restructured to cope with a post-Order world. However, the transformation will dramatically slow the economic growth, thereby undermining the foundation for legitimacy and stability of the Chinese polity.  Third, China could even lose full access to the resources essential to support her current population, including agriculture products and their inputs (fossil fuels and fertilizers), because she does not have a navy capable of projecting power a continent away.  In fact, as Zeihan remarked contemptuously, the Chinese navy “can’t make it past Vietnam, even in an era of peace.”

Specious as Zeihan’s doomsday theory might sound, he did attempt to back it up with witty geopolitical analysis and (re)interpretation of the history of technology and economics.  In fact, most pages of the book are filled with those contents, which, unlike the hysterical predictions, often make a more enjoyable read.   However, Zeihan’s central thesis is so preposterous that it hardly deserves a serious rebuttal.   History tells us doomsday predictions, especially something this extreme, rarely come true.  It is almost certain that the Order won’t end anytime soon, and when the end does come, won’t be in the same fashion imagined by Zeihan.

Zeihan is right about the formidable challenges posed by rapidly aging populations, and the unprecedented nature of the current demographic shift.  Older societies will grow more slowly because their people work and consume less on average. However, a slower accumulation of wealth does not have to trigger a panic stampede and tear the world apart in its wake.  Living in an older world could simply mean we must fix our deeply entrenched obsession for perpetual exponential economic growth.

Zeihan is right about America’s withering commitment to global security and leadership.  It may be true that the cost of upholding the Order has become too high to bear by any single country. However, it does not follow that the US and her allies would sit idly watching the Order collapse in front of their eyes.  If, as Zeihan prophesized, most countries will be so much worse off without the Order, why would they not fight with everything at their disposal to keep it alive?

Zeihan is also right about the worldwide retreat from globalization. The trend has been accelerated dramatically by COVID-19, which had exposed the startling vulnerability of the current system to large-scale disruptions, and forced many countries and cooperations to re-consider the premiums set for resilience and reliability.  However, this does not mean international criminals and thugs will come out overnight in droves, wipe out inter-continental commerce, and shatter the Earth Community into pieces.  Homo sapiens have seen better for far too long to willingly return to the dark ages.

Sometimes I doubt Zeihan actually believes his outlandish predictions. After all, he seems too smart to fall for the fallacies.   Maybe he thinks crying wolf gets the ears anyway, not only of ordinary readers like me, but also of politicians and even world leaders.  My other theory is that he was writing to vent his grievances.  To be sure, he pointedly denied this allegation, claiming in the epilogue that his book is not “a lamentation for the world that could have been”.  Yet, right after this disclaimer, he grumbled about America’s “lazy descent into narcissistic populism”.  He chastised the Europeans for their inability to come together for “a common strategic policy”.   His loathing of China and Russia feels strangely personal, and his harshest words and most vicious prophecies are always reserved for them, especially China.  Here is a remarkable paragraph he wrote at the end of the book.

“China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas. In the post–Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order …created… the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known. Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structures. Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.”

In some sense China was indeed the largest beneficiary of the Order. However, this does not mean her incredible fortune will continue if she just promises to stay the course.  A geopolitical analyst like Zeihan should know strategic decisions are Markovian: they are always driven by the national interest in the future, not the rewards received in the past. Could China preserve her magical moment by simply “seeking rapprochement with the Americans”?  I doubt it.  Once China is deemed to have become too powerful for the Order to contain, she must either faithfully subscribe to the Order’s ideology or conspire to replace it with a new world order.  Judged by the recent developments, China has unequivocally rejected the first option.   Is her choice a stupid and fatal mistake, the lesser of two evils, or, as Toutiao (头条) News would make you believe, about to usher in the greatest era in the five thousand years of Chinese history?  The die has been cast; only time can answer the question.

Before August 2021 I knew almost nothing about Afghan history. Nor did I care.  As a country, Afghanistan seems neither interesting nor important, culturally or geopolitically.  Yes, it is famous for feverish Islamism, extreme poverty, and brutality against women; but there are plenty of such failed states to go around in the world.  Yes, it is nicknamed the “graveyard of empires”; but to most Chinese, there is nothing mysterious about burying empires in what Chairman Mao would call “boundless ocean of people’s war”.

Then, in April 2021, President Biden announced the plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of August that year.  Shortly after, Taliban soldiers began to emerge from caves and tunnels. As they swept through the country with breathtaking speed, their opponents, more than 300,000 strong and trained, equipped, and paid for by NATO, simply melted away.  To be sure, Americans did not think highly of the Afghan legions procured with their money, initially predicting they could not hold off Taliban offense for more than a year.  Yet, they were still caught completely off guard when the Afghan government collapsed in Mid-August, well before the deadline of the planned withdrawal. If Americans had dreamed about a gracious if melancholy farewell from a country that they thought they had liberated and rebuilt, the dream had turned into a nightmare that will be remembered for generations to come.

Like most observers, I watched the events unfolding in Afghanistan that summer with shock, amusement, and confusion.  How could a poorly trained guerrilla force defeat a larger, better-equipped national army in just a few months? Why did not most Afghans fight harder to protect their political freedom, personal liberty, and women’s rights, the things that Americans insisted they should cherish the most? Even Biden seemed genuinely baffled at Afghans’ lack of will “to fight for their own future” despite Americans had given them “every tool they could need”.  These questions had prompted me to find answers in Afghan history.   The book I stumbled on was Games Without Rules by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American author who was born in Kabul after WWII. Ansary covers the 250-year history of modern Afghanistan, starting from its legendary founder, Ahmad Shah Baba, and ending with the Islamic Republic in the 21^st century.   An easy and enjoyable read, the book did not just answer most of my questions, it answered them head on, as if the author knew the questions would be asked ten years later.

First, a few things that surprised me.

I once thought that Afghans have always been living under a somewhat barbarous regime similar to Taliban, and that it was Americans who incidentally liberated them from the subjection by their antiquated institutions.   I was wrong.

Taliban movement was in fact a new phenomenon that bears little resemblance with most Afghan regimes that came before it.  The reign of Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) ––also known as the Iron Amir––may be a close match in terms of brutality and religious rigidity, but he is also remembered by many as the king who united Afghanistan under one flag and set her on the path toward modernization.  Like many peoples that came in contact with the West in the past two centuries, Afghans had gone through, sometimes not under their own initiatives and terms, multiple iterations of modernization projects.  Amanullah Khan (1919 -1929), who fought for and won Afghan independence from the British Empire, was a radical reformer.  Among his daring edicts was a new law meant to replace Shari’a, which guaranteed many basic human rights, including freedom of religion and women’s rights – yes, a hundred years ago, Amanullah’s code already proclaimed no girls should be denied the right to education and no women should be required to wear burqa.   However, Amanullah’s reform was way ahead of its time.  Afghans rebelled and kicked him out of the country; he ended up in Italy as a refugee, where he spent the rest of his life working as a carpenter.  After a few years of turmoil, the reign of Zahir Shah (1933 – 1973) charted a more moderate and successful trajectory, which culminated in the enactment of the 1964 constitution.   By introducing free elections, a parliament, civil and political rights and universal suffrage––and effectively banning any members of royal family to hold high-level government offices––the constitution created a modern democratic state that is, in principle, similar to the Islamic Republic of 2000s. By early 1960s, Ansary wrote,

“in the big city of Kabul, women were beginning to appear in public showing not just their faces but their arms, their legs, even cleavage. Afghan girls of the elite technocratic class were beginning to cotton to Western fashions. They were wearing miniskirts and low-cut blouses. Nightclubs were popping up, which served beer and wine and whiskey—and not just to foreigners. Afghans were drinking and making no bones about it.”

So, how did Afghanistan descend from this lovely modern democracy to Taliban’s Islamic Emirate? Well, it had much to do with geopolitics.

Contrary to my naïve preconception, Afghanistan has been enormously important to the struggles of great powers, especially those between Russia and the West. In the 19^th century, the Russians attempted to reach the Indian Ocean from the central Asia. Determined to protect their enormous trade interests in the region from Russian interferences, the British took Afghanistan as their protectorate by force.  If the objective was to stop Russians, the British succeeded.  However, their control of the country had always been fragile and treacherous.  According to Ansary, they had “won jurisdiction of every patch of Afghan territory their guns could cover—but not one inch more”. Eventually, after countless lives on both sides lost to violence and a world war that permanently weakened Europe, the British granted independence to Afghans. However, the domination of great power politics did not fade away. Instead, it morphed into a form that had briefly become a benefactor, when Russians and Americans, in their attempt to recruit Afghans to fight for their causes in the Cold War, offered extravagant aid packages.  In 1950s and 1960s, the two superpowers “constructed over twelve hundred miles of superb paved roads through some of the planet’s most difficult terrain”, which connected “all of Afghanistan’s major cities”. Unfortunately, this relatively peaceful and prosperous era was interrupted by the rise of the communist movement in the late 1960s.   Social unrest ensued, followed by three coup d’etat in the 1970s.  From the upheavals a deeply unpopular communist regime emerged in 1978, whose internal strife soon killed its pro-Soviet leader, Nur Mohammed Taraki, and forced his slayer and successor, Hafizullah Amin, to consider jumping ship to the Americans. The Soviet Union intervened, plunging into a 10-year war from which she would never recover.  Like the British in the 19^th century, Russians soon discovered that their war machine could easily crash the Afghan army and state but not the Afghan people.  Frustrated by the tenacious opposition led by Mujahideen (Islam Jihadists), the Russians resorted to a scorched earth policy that aimed at depopulating rural Afghanistan. Their grotesque tactics did little to win the war but unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportion.   According to Ansary, a million Afghans were killed and six million displaced in 1985 alone.

An entire generation of Afghan boys would grow up in the refugee camps and receive education in religious madrassas (schools).  Having suffered through the worst childhood on earth, they were “allowed to imagine that it might be their destiny to establish the community that would save the world”.   From the schools of these refugee camps would rise the loyal followers of Mullah Omar, the founder of the “student movement”, or Taliban (literally means students in Arab).   Under Omar’s leadership, Taliban would win a bloody civil war in 1990s, only to be dethroned a few years later in the wake of America’s anti-terrorist crusade.

The rest is history.

Let me get back to the questions that drew me to this book in the first place. Why didn’t the Afghan people fight harder for their freedom? The short answer is there were two Afghan peoples: westernized urban elites and common folks from the countryside. The “Afghan people” often spoken of in the western media might only refer to the former.  While the elites considered Taliban an archenemy, the masses did not see Taliban’s moral and religious imperatives conflict with theirs.  While the elites were supposedly in charge, they have never gained full control of the other Afghanistan.  Most importantly, when push comes to shove, they had no idea how to “fight the fight and win the war”.

Why is Afghanistan so deeply divided?  As a collection of tribes and ethnic groups that loosely coalesced around an Islamic culture over a tough terrain, Afghanistan is an inherently weak state. This made it very hard for anyone, even the most powerful country in the world, to penetrate through the layers of physical and cultural barriers that historically separate urban centers from rural communities. Without a strong state, most Afghans naturally turned to tribal and religious authorities for such basic state services as security, law enforcement and education. Ansary likened ruling Afghanistan through a puppet government to swinging a pot by grasping its handle: the foreign powers thought they could swing the pot however they wanted; yet, because the handle was never firmly attached to the pot, they often ended up shattering the pot while holding nothing but a useless handle.

The innate weakness of the Afghan state was further reinforced by the powerful legacy of Islam and the recurrent interventions by the West.  Unfortunately, the Islam and the West have long been at odds with each other, and the animosity had only grown stronger in the past century.  As a result, the head of the Afghan state faces a constant dilemma.  On the one hand, as they need the support of the West––money, permission, or both––to secure power and to modernize the country, they must subscribe, or at least pay lip service, to Western values.   On the other hand, they could not afford to alienate the masses who remain loyal to traditional values, or risk being thrown out of the palace like Amanullah.  The balance between the two acts is so delicate that few could make it work, not for a long time anyway.  As a result, modernization in Afghanistan, because it is “foreign” in name and in essence, had actually widened the cultural and wealth chasm between the elites who welcomed the western influences and the masses who continued to resist them.  Any attempt by a foreign power to correct course by direct intervention, regardless of methods or intention, only serves to pour fuel on the fire.

Seen from this light, the Bush plan to rebuild Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion was doomed from the beginning.   On display in that 20-year nation building project, largely funded by American taxpayers, is not so much America’s idealism as her arrogance and ignorance of history.  Biden was right to cut the loss as soon as he could.   In the end, Ansary told us Afghanistan would probably do okay, regardless of who was in charge, if only other countries are willing to leave her alone.   Let’s see if the world will heed his advice this time.

I learned about R.G. Collingwood and his famous book from a Chinese podcaster who quoted Collingwood as saying, “All history is the history of thought” (in Chinese, 一切历史都是思想史). Struck by the profoundness of the quote, I decided to dig deeper.  Collingwood is known as the most underrated philosopher in history, a reputation largely earned by “The Idea of History”. The book was published posthumously after his premature death in 1943, at age of 53.

By “all history is the history of thought”, Collingwood means history can only exist in the re-enactment of the past in a historian’s mind. The past events are over, cease to exist, and hence cannot be perceived and studied as a real, actual object. Thus, history is knowable only by thinking, and the proper object of history is thought itself: “not things thought about, but the act of thinking itself”.   It follows, I believe, there is no such a thing as the true past, or the real history.  History is idealistic in nature.  Seen in this light, the translation—“一切历史都是思想史” —is misleading. The quote should rather read, “一切历史都是思考史“。

Collingwood believes that a historian must go beyond the materials inherited from authorities.  Otherwise, he is a mere “copy-and-paste” historian. Collingwood goes so far as suggesting history, like novel, is the work of imagination, and in this regard, they do not differ.  The historian must tell a coherent and believable story in which the actions of his characters are justified by circumstances, motives, and psychology.  I suppose Collingwood’s novelistic historian is in sharp contrast with most Chinese historians, who actually praised and cherished the copy-and-paste tradition, sticking to Confucian’s famous precept: 述而不作（pass on the wisdom of the sages without adding anything new to it）.

Collingwood argues the purpose of history is to inform the present, by revealing “what man has done and thus what man is”.  Reconstructing the past is always done to know the present and to tell us what to do in the present.  Moreover, the past and the present are the same object in different phases and therefore inseparable: we come to know the present naturally by studying the past, because the past is part of the present.

Collingwood believes all history is biased because everyone approaches history with their own biases. Indeed, if it were not for these biases, nobody would write history in the first place.   He does say a good historian must take no sides and “rejoices in nothing but the truth”, but how much of history is written by good historians?

Finally, Collingwood harshly criticized the “scientific” theories of universal history, i.e., the idea that the progress of human history is governed by some universal law.  Chinese students of my generation can attest this is exactly what we had learned in history classes.  According to Collingwood, the value of these theories “was exactly nil”, and, if they have been accepted by so many, it is only because they have “become the orthodoxy of a religious community”.  He claims only two types of people were still writing universal history at his time: the dishonest attempting to “spread their opinions by specious falsehoods”, and the ignorant naïvely writing down everything they know without “suspecting that they know it all wrong”.

To someone growing up in China where historical materialism is treated as the one and only truth, Collingwood’s idea seems like heresy at first glance.  However, the more I read, the more I agree with him.  Since much of the book was compiled from lecture notes, the experience is close to taking a philosophy course: not exactly fun but worth the effort.