Recent history

Main articles: 21st century

The 21st century has been marked by growing economic globalization and integration, with consequent increased risk to interlinked economies, as exemplified by the Great Recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s; and by the expansion of communications with mobile phones and the Internet, which have caused fundamental societal changes in business, politics, and individuals' personal lives, including the advent of social-media platforms such as Facebook.

The early 21st century saw escalating intra- and international strife in the Near East and Afghanistan, stimulated by vast economic disparities, by dissatisfaction with governments dominated by Western interests, by inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian feuds, and by the longest war in the history of the United States, the proximate cause for which was Osama bin Laden's provocative 2001 destruction of New York City's World Trade Center. The Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave of uprisings in North Africa and the Near East in the early 2010's, produced power vacuums that led to a resurgence of authoritarianism and the advent of reactionary groups like the Islamic State.

U.S. military involvements in the Near East and Afghanistan, along with a financial crisis and resultant recession, have drained U.S. economic resources at a time when the U.S. and other Western countries are experiencing mounting socioeconomic dislocations aggravated by the robotization of work and the export of industries to cheaper-workforce countries. Meanwhile, ancient and populous Asian civilizations, namely India and especially China, have been emerging from centuries of relative scientific, technological, and economic dormancy to become potential economic and political rivals for Western powers.

Worldwide competition for resources has risen due to growing populations and industrialization, especially in India, China, and Brazil. The increased demand is contributing to increased environmental degradation and global warming. That, and a need for safe, reliable energy supplies independent of politically volatile regions, has spurred the development of renewable sources of energy, chiefly solar and wind energy, in place of the "fissile-fossil complex" of nuclear energy and carbon-based energy (petroleum, coal, natural gas). In recognition of the existential threat posed by climate change, in December 2015 195 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement, though in 2017 President Donald Trump announced his withdrawal of the United States from the Agreement.

International tensions were heightened in connection with the efforts of some nuclear-armed states to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, and to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

In May 2019 a United Nations intergovernmental scientific panel released a report stating that, due to human activities excessively focused on economic growth, a million of Earth's plant and animal species are at imminent risk of extinction, which will wreak havoc with the planet's ecology and capacity to feed the world's human population.

## Notes

1. ↑ In consequence, write Robert Malley and Jon Finer in *Foreign Affairs*, "The United States has become captive to a national security paradigm that ends up magnifying the very fears from which it was born.... One possible explanation for the resilience of the terrorist threat is that an overly militarized approach aggravates the very conditions on which terrorist recruitment thrives. The destruction of entire cities and the unintentional killing of civilians, in addition to being tragic, serve as powerful propaganda tools for jihadists. Such incidents feed resentment, grievances, and anti-Americanism."
2. ↑ Andrew J. Bacevich urges "a fundamental reassessment of US national-security policy in those parts of the Islamic world [at a time when US] political elites... manifest... indifference to endless war [and when] American wars continue as if on autopilot." The public, writes Bacevich, needs to be informed that "the national security of the United States may not require... stationing... US troops in [over] 170 countries around the world, a massive military budget... or the continuous dropping of ordnance on targets in distant lands of marginal or nonexistent relevance to [the US's] well-being."
3. ↑ Shlomo Ben-Ami writes that "the West is beset by deep social inequalities, reinforced in recent decades by poorly managed globalization." He urges the necessity of [g]iving a humane face to the embrace of globalization and innovation..."
4. ↑ The socioeconomic dislocations have prompted, in several countries, proposals for, and experiments with, citizens' guaranteed basic incomes, which had been proposed in Sir Thomas More's *Utopia* (1516) and in Thomas Paine's *Agrarian Justice* (1797). The proposals' purposes and prospects are discussed in Benjamin M. Friedman, "Born to Be Free" (review of Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, *Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy*, Harvard University Press, 2017), *The New York Review of Books*, vol. LXIV, no. 15 (12 October 2017), pp. 39–41.
5. ↑ Nathan Heller writes that a Universal Basic Income in the United States, of perhaps $1,000 a month per individual, would automatically provide a modest social safety net for everyone who could become redundant in the job market due to automation or job exportation – without the current cumbersome, often demeaning bureaucratic mechanisms for means testing and beneficiary supervision. UBI would create, for many persons, life choices not now available to them, and might reduce criminality spawned by desperate living conditions. UBI's supporters have included politicians across the political spectrum such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney.
6. ↑ See List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions per capita.
7. ↑ The threats caused by the greenhouse effect and global warming, their remedies, and the broader, growing matergetic crisis facing Earth were fairly comprehensively discussed in the December 1970 *Scientific American* "Biosphere" issue.
8. ↑ The "greenhouse effect", substantially responsible for Earth's global warming, was first described in 1824 by the French mathematician Joseph Fourier. The greenhouse effect is a natural mechanism that becomes dangerous if the atmosphere's greenhouse-gas concentrations exceed environmentally safe levels, as they have gradually been doing since the start of the Industrial Revolution. As predicted, this is already increasing the frequency and severity of floods and droughts due to accelerated melting of icecaps, glaciers, and snowpacks; flooding of low-lying coasts; storms; agricultural disruption and famines; ecological displacements; ocean acidification with havoc to marine life; release, from thawing Arctic permafrost, of methane, a greenhouse gas more powerful than carbon dioxide; and intra- and intersocietal conflicts, with increased crime and warfare. The multifarious, irreversible damage from global warming will accelerate as environmental tipping points are reached. The late physicist–cosmologist Stephen Hawking on 2 July 2017, belatedly celebrating his 75th birthday, warned that planet Earth is rapidly approaching an irreversible tipping point that will leave the planet with an uninhabitable environment like that of Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees and sulfuric-acid rain. The U.S. military are already forced to factor global-warming effects into their planning for military infrastructure, war, and disaster relief.
9. ↑ On 8 October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a *Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C* stating that, if drastic changes in the global energy base and lifestyle are not made by about 2030—within a dozen years—civilization on planet Earth will become unsalvageable.
10. ↑ Astrophysicist John Gribbin, writing in *Scientific American*, contemplates the evolution of the cosmic infrastructure that made the history of the world possible, and concludes that "we are probably the only intelligent life in the Milky Way galaxy.... And if our planet is so special, it becomes all the more important to preserve this unique world for ourselves, our descendants and the many creatures that call Earth home." He explains that the universe's first stars after the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago, could not have had planets because chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium had not yet been cooked up inside stars. By the time our star, the Sun, came into being 4.5 billion years ago, there were sufficient amounts of heavier elements available to form Earth. The Sun resides within a fairly narrow "galactic habitable zone" that is at reduced risk from destructive supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. An orderly arrangement of planets in nearly circular orbits providing long-term stability – as in our solar system – is uncommon. "Earth-like planets" that have been discovered are generally uninhabitable, by contrast with Earth with its thin mobile crust where tectonic activity brings ores and nutrients to the surface through volcanism. Earth also has a large metallic core that, coupled with Earth's rapid rotation, produces a strong magnetic field that shields Earth from harmful cosmic radiation; without this screen, "our atomosphere would probably erode, and any living thing on the surface would get fried." These planetary attributes are diredtly related to our Moon, which probably formed early in the solar system's history when a Mars-size object struck the nascent Earth a glancing blow, causing both protoplanets to melt; the metallic material from the two objects settled into Earth's center, and much of Earth's original lighter rocky material splashed out to become the Moon, leaving Earth with a thinner crust. Without that impact, Earth would lack its crucial magnetic field and plate tectonics. The presence of such a large Moon stabilizes Earth, preventing it from toppling far from the vertical, as happened with Mars. Once the Earth-Moon system settled down, "life emerged with almost indecent rapidity": fossils of single-celled prokaryotes have been found in rocks 3.4 billion years old – about a billion years younger than Earth. But it was only about 1.5 billion years ago that more complex, eukaryote cells, the stuff of all plants and animals, arose from a single merging of two types of primordial single-celled organisms: bacteria and archaea. "It is a measure of how unlikely such a single fusion of cells was that it took two billion years of evolution to occur." Even then, little changed for about a billion years, apart from early eukaryotes forming flat, soft-bodied multicellular organisms, until the Cambrian explosion some 550 million years ago. DNA analysis, showing extremely close similarities among the most diverse human populations, indicates that all humans are descended from a tiny population, possibly survivors of some catastrophe or catastrophes. DNA evidence pinpoints two evolutionary bottlenecks: 150,000 years ago, the human population was reduced to no more than a few thousand breeding pairs; and about 70,000 years ago, the entire human population fell to about 1,000. "Is life likely to exist elsewhere in the galaxy?" asks John Gribbin. "Almost certainly, given the speed with which it appeared on Earth. Is another technological civilization likely to exist today? Almost certainly no, given the chain of circumstances that led to our existence."
11. ↑ Historian Christopher R. Browning concludes an article on "The Suffocation of Democracy": "[W]ithin several decades after Trump's presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events....".
12. ↑ Environmentalist Bill McKibben explains that the 2018 *IPCC Special Report* understates the climatic perils to Earth and adds: "[E]ngineers have [made] remarkable advances, and the price of [electrical energy] generated by the sun or wind has continued to plunge... these are now the cheapest sources of power across much of the globe. Battery storage technology has progressed too; the fact that the sun goes down at night is no longer the obstacle to solar power many once presumed.... California, the planet's fifth-largest economy, promise[s] to be carbon-neutral by 2045.... [The] paramount reason we didn't heed... earlier warnings [is] the power of the fossil fuel industry.... [But] the relentless floods and storms and fires have gotten Americans' attention... 93 percent of Democrats want more solar farms; so do 84 percent of Republicans.... In October [2017] the [New York State] attorney general...filed suit against Exxon-Mobil, claiming the company defrauded shareholders by downplaying the risks of climate change. In January [2018] New York City joined the growing fossil fuel divestment campaign... Mayor Bill de Blasio is working with London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, to convince their colleagues around the world to do likewise. In July [2018] Ireland became the first nation to join the campaign... This kind of pressure on [fossil-fuel] investors needs to continue..."
13. ↑ The U.S. Government’s *Fourth National Climate Assessment*, released on November 23, 2018, describes the horrific prospects for the “U.S. economy, human health, and the environment” if emissions of greenhouse gases are not curtailed substantially on an urgent basis.
14. ↑ Bill McKibben sees encouraging signs of progress in the worldwide campaign to replace the fissile-fossil complex with solar energy, direct and indirect (wind power). "Over the last decade, there has been a staggering fall in the price of solar and wind power, and of the lithium-ion batteries used to store energy.... Who is going to invest in [a fossil-fuel] industry that is clearly destined to shrink?... [Petroleum's] price should fall if it has to compete with the price of sunshine.... [T]he world's largest private-sector coal-mining company, [Peabody, went from the *Fortune 500* list of most prosperous U.S. corporations] to bankrupt[cy] in 2016.... [O]ver the first nine months of 2018, India installed forty times more capacity for renewable than for coal-fired power.... Even "cheap" natural gas is... starting to look expensive compared to... sun, wind, and batteries.... [Once-powerful] General Electric [has become] "a thermal-power-reliant basket case" [and in 2018] was dropped from the Dow Industrial Index... The world's leading car companies have become convinced that electric vehicles will account for all the growth in demand by the early 2020s.... An effort... launch[ed] in 2012 to persuade universities and churches to divest their fossil fuel shares has... become the largest divestment campaign in history.... Countries in Africa and South Asia have a[n] opportunity to avoid expensive fixed investments in fossil fuels and centralized grids by adopting mini-grids and decentralized solar and wind energy deployed off-grid – just as they jumped straight to mobile phones and obviated the need to lay expensive copper-wired telephone networks.... Imagine a world in which the tortured politics of the Middle East weren't magnified in importance by the value of the hydrocarbons beneath its sands.... The question, of course, is whether we can reach that new world in time."
15. ↑ Historian Christopher Clark writes: "The quest for peace, like the struggle to arrest climate change, requires that we think of ourselves not just as states, tribes, or nations, but as the human inhabitants of a shared space."