Johann Hari

Are we living in the final days of American dominance? The Newsweek honcho Fareed Zakaria opens his latest work with some slap-in-the-face facts: “The world’s tallest building is now in Taipei, and it will soon be overtaken by one being built in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is under construction in India, and its largest factories are all in China.” But this is not a Rome-style collapse, with the amphitheatres of America regressing to scrub. America is standing still, or only moderately declining. What we are witnessing is “the rise of the rest.”

Zakaria argues there have been three tectonic power-shifts in the past half-millennium. In the fifteenth century, the West began to spurt ahead. In the late nineteenth century, the US zoomed ahead within the West. Today, we are living through the catch-up of the rest of the world. In China alone, the average income has multiplied sevenfold in the lifetime of a 30 year old. So what will the planet look like as America becomes only one strong power-player among many?

In some ways, Zakaria is one of the least irritating of market fundamentalist commentators. A super-smart Indian immigrant to the US, his reading, travelling and learning are wide – even if they are then squeezed into through a tiny ideological window. A certain amount of reality percolates into his writing – which is an accolade on the American right.

So at periodic intervals in ‘The Post-American World’, he punctures some of the most feverish National Review-style fantasies about what a post-American world will be like. For example, he deflates the idea that Europe is about to become a shariah-law-enforcing ‘Eurabia’ with a few brusque statistics: “The best estimates, from US intelligence agencies, indicate that Muslims constitute about three percent of Europe’s population now, and will rise to between 5 and 8 percent by 2025, after which they will probably plateau.” He says panic about Chinese military capacity or the small numbers of foul jihadis is overblown. He gawks at Dick Cheney lamenting he can’t be as “tough” as the tyrannical Soviet Union, and laughs out loud at Cheney’s advisor Bernard Lewis claiming confidently “that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh planned to mark an auspicious date on the Islamic calendar (August 22, 2006) by ending the world. (Yes, he actually wrote that.)”

But in his sober analytical style, he offers some ideological assertions that are just as shocking and counter-factual. Zakaria asserts – quoting Margaret Thatcher – that “There Is No Alternative” about which direction all countries must travel in if they are to continue rising: small states and pure markets. Only a limp, passive state that lets corporations run where they will can ensure progress and a fall in poverty. So all the ‘post-American’ countries must as an urgent matter demolish the active state (whatever their people want) and become Thatcho-Reaganites – only more so. He mocks the “unreconstructed left” who beg to differ.

Yet this book comes as the market fundamentalist bubble is bursting. Zakaria says with admiration that “London’s financial system was overhauled in 2001, with a single entity replacing a confusing mish-mash of regulators, [and this is] one reason that London’s financial sector now beats out New York’s.” Not long after this work went to press, that very act of deregulation-mania caused the first British bank run in over a century. As hundreds of thousands of savers rushed to withdraw their savings, the British state had to step in with a $45bn bank-saving guarantee – a potential expenditure larger than the country’s entire schools budget.

The prescription Zakaria is pushing has been disastrous time after time. To give just one more example, he lauds the lifting of capital controls in the 1970s and 1980s in developing countries as a quasi-divine act of wisdom, providing a “celestial mechanism for discipline”. He doesn’t acknowledge it produced significantly lower growth in the developing world than in the “bad old days” – just 1.7 percent annually, compared to 3 percent before. Worse, he doesn’t even note it led directly to the catastrophic collapse of Argentina from a middle-class country to a beggared one almost overnight. For him, it is as if this didn’t happen, and the vision must push on regardless.

Indeed, Zakaria’s claim that “There Is No Alternative” is demolished by a piece of evidence he himself offers, in a few skimmed sentences he doesn’t spot the significance of. He brags that the US has the most competitive economy in the world – “slipping sometimes in recent years to small northern European countries like Sweden, Denmark and Finland.” But – wait. Is this the Sweden that takes 51 percent of GDP in taxes, and spends it on the most lavish welfare state in the world – producing the most content population according to international studies? And it’s more competitive than America? So it turns out There Is An Alternative course for the post-American world to pursue – an extraordinarily impressive one – but Zakaria just doesn’t want to acknowledge it, because he would have to rethink some of his dogmas. When a poor country like Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela tries to imitate this social democratic vision rather than Zakaria’s, he abuses them as “trouble makers” prone to “insane rants.”

To prop up this ideological vision, he has to go even further and draw a false version of history. He says that “for almost three centuries, the world has been undergirded by the presence of a large liberal hegemon – first Britain, then the United States” who “kept their own markets open” and “travelled around the world pushing countries to… free up their politics.”

This is startling in its ignorance. Far from keeping its markets open, the United States developed by protecting its industries behind huge tariff walls. By 1820, the average US tariff was 40 per cent; Abraham Lincoln then pushed them higher, and they stayed there until the First World War – the very period Zakaria identifies as era when the US spurted ahead. Yet this is the very route Zakaria wants to deny to developing countries today; he derides anybody in the poor world who wants Lincoln-style subsidy and protections. The only criticism he has of the IMF and World Bank – who push this brutal vision on the world’s poor – is that they are always headed by a European and an American respectively. He would apparently like to place a brown-skinned corporate logo at their head instead to pursue the same path. As for the idea that the US pushed countries to “free up their politics”… what can we say? This will be interesting news to the peoples of Chile, Iran, Congo, Indonesia and Nicaragua, who saw their democrats murdered with US support.

But Zakaria clings so fervently to his flailing ideology that he has a chilling contempt for any democratic resistance to it. He wants the post-American world to be a market fundamentalist one where counter-balancing state action occurs only if businesses demand it to make themselves work more smoothly. To achieve this, he repeatedly lauds the Chinese dictatorship for being able to impose this vision on their people, unlike those scrappy, messy democracies.

With fawning admiration, he quotes a Chinese official saying: “We have to let markets work. They draw people off the land and into industry, out of farms and into cities.” Then Zakaria notes sadly that when he discusses this same subject with Indian or Latin American official, “they launch into complicated explanations of the need for rural welfare, subsidies for poor farmers, and other such programs, all designed to slow down market forces and retard the historical process of market-driven industrialization.” He says with regret: “Politicians need votes in the short term. China can take the long view…. [The Chinese way] would be impossible in democratic India, where vast resources are spent on short-term subsidies to satisfy voters.”

Never mind that the Indians and Latin Americans are reacting to the will of their peoples, and those “short term” subsidies keep people alive during economic transitions. The peoples are wrong, and any concessions to them is “populism” – the ultimate market fundamentalist swear-word. Zakaria has a teleological world-view: the world will inevitably go in one direction, so we might as well speed it up. Messy human will mustn’t be allowed to get in the way; don’t they know There Is No Alternative? So thousands of Indian farmers commit suicide if their subsidies are stripped away and they can’t move to the cities; that’s History. It had to happen. Teleology is always dangerous, whether Marxist or market fundamentalist, because it renders actual living people as irrelevant, disposable extras in the inexorable March of History.

This becomes most clear in a sinister anecdote he offers, apparently as praise. He writes: “One American CEO recalled how Chinese officials took him to a site they proposed for his new (and very large) facility. It was central, well located, and met almost all his criteria – except that it was filled with existing buildings and people, making up a small township. The CEO pointed that out to his host. The official smiled and said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, they won’t be here in eighteen months.’ And they weren’t.” He then notes, apparently with sadness, “India does not have a government that can or will move people for the sake of foreign investors.”

Note how he sees the world entirely from the perspective of a CEO. He doesn’t ask: how did the ordinary Chinese people who lived in this town feel about being driven out of their homes by the secret police acting on behalf of a foreign corporation? They don’t even seem to cross his mind; it is the CEO’s convenience and the onward march of markets that are everything. Later, he quotes a senior banker saying: “I’ve dealt with governments all over the world, and the Chinese are probably the most impressive.” The fact that an investment banker prefers dictatorship is, for Zakaria, evidence that we all should.

Zakaria’s book is badly timed; it is restating dogmas as they lie on their death-bed. Talking about the resilience of the global economy to disruption, he argues “the front page of the newspaper seems unconnected to the business section.” This standard Tom Friedman-fodder might have seemed true a decade ago – but it lies moribund on the page today when oil and food prices are sky-rocketing (and economies wilting) due to a cocktail of war, competition and global warming.

Indeed, it is here – in the destabilisation of the planet’s climate with greenhouse gases – that we find the biggest hole in Zakaria’s vision. He talks at length about how the new multipolar powers will interact, without seriously considering that – unless we change course rapidly – this will take place on a planet where the climate is thrown into chaos, and resource-competition becomes ever-more vicious. He isn’t a global warming denier; he even notes: “If water sources dry up in the future, tens of millions of people will be forced to start moving.” But he offers it a few fleeting paragraphs. He doesn’t seem to see that global warming will determine the stage on which this power-play will be acted out. It’s as if he thinks the planet’s climate and ecosystems can dramatically shift and the consequences on global order will be incidental.

For example, the great rivers of China and India all originate in the Himalayan glaciers. Water falls as snow in winter, and melts off in summer – becoming the Ganges, the Yellow River, and more. Those glaciers are melting rapidly, and on course to disappear – endangering the water supply of a billion people. Won’t that affect the pacific development of India and China that Zakaria envisions? Won’t it make conflict far more likely? Indeed, another throwaway sentence reveals a cavernous hole in his Weltanschaung. He says with a flick of the wrist: “Over the past decade, many predictions about the effect of climate change have proven to be underestimates because global growth has exceeded all projections.” But if growth ineluctably causes global warming, doesn’t this suggest – as the environmentalist George Monbiot has suggested – that an economic model built on perpetual economic growth is untenable? Shouldn’t we be trying to develop different models urgently?

This, in turn, shapes Zakaria’s vision of America in a post-American world. He believes the US should accept the rise of the rest, and try to maintain its position by being an “honest broker” between them all. Like Bismarck’s Germany, it should be “better friends” with every country “than they are with each other.” This is an improvement on the neoconservative belief outlined by the Project for a New American Century – apparently endorsed by John McCain – that the US needs to retain “full spectrum dominance,” crippling rivals before they emerge as a “threat”. But if the US remains by far the largest per capita contributor to unleashing Weather of Mass Destruction, how can they be regarded as a reasonable umpire?

And this is only one reason why this America-as-referee vision is flawed. Zakaria can acknowledge that the rest of the world has grievances against America – but they are always minor “mistakes”, or safely located in the distant past. So for example, he notes that “Russians have long chafed at the standard narrative about World War Two,” which is presented as a US-British victory – when actually the Eastern Front was where the Nazis suffered 70 percent of their casualties. Similarly, he can acknowledge that India is uncomfortable with this narrative, quoting one Indian who says: “London told us to die for an idea of freedom that it was at that very moment brutally denying to us.”

But when it comes to the present, he says Americans “are right” to believe criticism of them is “irrational, and that the country is unfairly turned into a punching bag.” Spearheading global warming, invading Iraq and killing at least 600,000 people, forcing market fundamentalism on the world through the IMF… if you complain about this, you are “irrational.” You should shut up and accept the US as your best friend and “honest broker.” Zakaria acknowledges that at home, the US government has been “captured by money.” He says “those who advocate sensible solutions” will “lose funds from special interest groups.” But he seems to think this Big Money discreetly drives around the State Department. If he acknowledged that special interests can drive foreign policy too – pushing for attacks on Iraq or coups in Venezuela, for example – he might have to understand why the idea of the US as an honest broker seems untenable to much of the world.

‘The Post-American World’ is a fascinating book, but not for the reasons its author intended. It is a character-study of a highly intelligent man who believes himself to be rational and humane and impartially sifting the evidence – but actually pushes a vicious vision antithetical to both democracy and environmental sanity.

Thank you so much for this. Environmental stories are, I think, the most important story in any newspaper now. The rest of the paper - the sport and arts and politics and ordinary human squabbles - can't happen on a planet with a drastically destabilised climate. If we ignore the environmental stories, they will flood into every other section of our lives - so it's a particular honour to win this award for this subject.

I'd like to thank everyone at the Independent, which it is a constant privlege to work for, and Abdul Halim and Shambrat Hassan, who were my wonderful stringer, translator and driver in Bangladesh. I'd also like to thank the extraordinary and brave people I met in Bangladesh who are living - and dying - with man-made global warming today.

There’s something strangely soothing about this year’s ‘I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!’ If the credit crunch gets much worse we’ll all be living on kangaroo testicles with a side-dish of maggots, so it is pleasing to see Robert Kilroy-Silk go through it first, in a cage, on live television, with Timmy Mallet cackling in his face. But there’s something even richer and sweeter about this series: the Zen-like poise of Martina Navratilova as she wades through slime and Wags. The tennis genius has an inherent dignity that even Ant and Dec cannot dent. If – when – she is voted Queen of the Jungle by the British public, it will be another small symbolic step in the struggle for equality for lesbians.

Gay women face a different kind of prejudice to gay men, and in many ways they are trailing twenty years behind. It is only now that major public figures are finally coming out, and if you look at the crude abuse Navratoliva was pepper-sprayed with for decades, it’s not hard to see why. Her biography is remarkable. She became a refugee from Czech Communist tyranny at the age of 18, swiftly thwacked her way to the top of women’s tennis, and stayed there for 25 years. Yet from the moment she began to speak about her sexuality, she was portrayed as a robotic muscle-dyke cruelly pounding her wholesome blonde all-American rival Chrissy Evert. She lost her lucrative sponsorship deals. She was booed in the stands.

But the lesbian writer Julie Bindel tells me: “Seeing her walk out onto the court at Wimbledon was the best feeling in the world. She was the first role model for my generation of lesbians. You suddenly had this woman who was immensely talented, a feminist of sorts, and even won the respect of the men in the sport. You thought – if she can do it after all she’s been through, you can too.”

Yet you can see on the show how much more comfortable we are with gay men than lesbians. The contestants have a vocabulary to talk affectionately about sexuality to the gay men there: they make joshing camp asides, and everyone laughs. But when it comes to Martina’s lesbianism, they are silent, or bemused. Kilroy asked her: “Do you look at girls and fancy them?” Yes, Robert, lesbians fancy women.

This ripple of bemusement – tinged with hostility – runs through our culture. (As a gay man, I’m embarrassed to say that even gay culture is littered with anti-lesbian jokes.) Last year, it was ruled that lesbians could be denied IVF treatment and there was very little protest. This weekend, a smear-piece in a right-wing newspaper said Navratilova “broke up a family” by snatching away “a devoted home-maker.” The dykes want your wives! Run!

Prejudice against gay men has receded more quickly; it’s rarely expressed as blatantly as this in public. Why? Perhaps the most obvious explanation lies with sexism. Lesbians reject men sexually – and that shocks us. A woman who doesn’t want to please men? Wha-at? Our culture is – in its very bone marrow – built around pleasing men: little girls are taught it as an automatic assumption. So the only way we can assimilate lesbians is to turn them into porn. Then they are useful to men once more.

But the reasons also lie in the crooked timber of history. In most cultures at most points in history, gay men have found small cultural niches where they could meet, but gay women have been denied even that. Women were dependent on men for money and they were largely confined to the home. We know sometimes they found each other. The recently-discovered diaries of an early nineteenth-century Yorkshire woman called Ann Lister show how she sought out affairs with women by asking if they had read Sappho – but these opportunities were fleeting.

So for millennia, lesbians weren’t even demonised as gay men were; the world simply said they didn’t exist. Whenever proof emerged that women could lust after women, it was swiftly burned: the amazing poetry of Sappho was incinerated in era after era by Popes and Crusaders. In more subtle ways, this denial persists. When Pam St. Clement was on This Is Your Life, her female partner was nowhere to be seen; the role of spouse was taken by the actor who played her husband on Eastenders. When Susan Sontag died recently, most obituaries didn’t mention her sexuality, or her partner, Annie Leibowitz, as if they were holes in the air.

Lesbians have had to swing from invisible to mainstream in just a century – and to do it while climbing up the sheer face of sexism. The coming out of the Hollywood star Lyndsay Lohan was an achievement, but buried in her story was also a sign of how far we all still have to go. Several gossip-sheets gleefully showed close-ups of the scars on her arms. If Lohan does cut herself, it wouldn’t be surprising: gay teenagers are seven times more likely to self-harm or commit suicide than their straight siblings.

Laura Rhodes – a witty, loud Welsh girl – is just another recent case showing why this long, long story has to end. She told her best friend she thought she might be gay when she was twelve, and she soon began to be attacked and beaten as “the school dyke.” She turned to her school for help – but they said she was the problem. Cefn Saesoon School’s education welfare officer, Helen Langford, said Laura’s “verbal indiscretion” – talking openly about her sexuality – was the cause of her bullying, and wrote: “Laura fully realises and appreciates she must accept the blame for the current situation.” In the end, the school decided the solution was expulsion – of Laura. She took an overdose of prescription pills and died in hospital.

The story of the denial of a basic human sexuality ends here, like this. But if they could watch Martina Navraliova – a wise, cool lesbian – win a national popularity contest, what would Laura Rhodes or Ann Taylor or Sappho say? I think they would feel a small sense of satisfaction – and then, with a warmed heart, they would vote for Kilroy to be force-fed more maggots.

So the British people are going to get a President after all. He will "speak for the nation and to the nation". He will rule over us with his "knowledge and contacts and unique ability." How do we know? Because Charles Windsor has just announced – via his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby – that he is seizing the role for himself, without an election. Explicitly citing the Presidencies of Ireland and Germany, Dimbleby says Charles intends to be a "political" King. It will be "a seismic shift in the role of the sovereign," he says, with "the potential to be politically and constitutionally explosive."

Sing it, sister. This is the best news we Republicans have had for years – and finally throws up a vision of how the rusty British monarchy will fall.

Charles says the "responsibility and authority of his position" – and the "wisdom" it entails – requires him to "speak out" and "pressure" our elected representatives. A bevy of fawning pundits have responded by crying – yes! Speak for us, oh sovereign! We commoners cannot produce one as wise as you! So I have to start with a point so obvious that it seems odd even to state it in 2008.

Charles's position stems from one thing and one thing only: he emerged from Elizabeth Windsor's womb 60 years ago. That's it. He has no "responsibility." He has no legitimate "authority." He has no more right to "speak for the nation and to the nation" – and pocket £7m a year for the bother – than you, me, or the next person you see at the bus stop.

If not for that fortuitous journey through a royal womb, Charles Windsor's "wise" arguments would be gathering dust in the reject bin at certain newspapers' letters pages. If his advocates didn't keep praising him as "a public intellectual" I wouldn't be rude enough to point it out, but Charles Windsor is a strikingly stupid man. Every time he has been put into a competitive situation where he is judged according to objective criteria, he has been a disaster.

Despite the most expensive education money can buy, he managed only to scrape a B and a C in his A-Levels. Despite this, he was admitted to Cambridge University, where he failed again, barely scraping a 2:2. When he was ushered into the Navy, he was so inept at navigation he kept crashing. Anybody else would have been court-martialled, but instead the Navy gave him one-on-one tuition for years. And still he failed.

And what of his arguments? They are garbled, uninformed, cliché-ridden repetitions of what the last person who spoke to him said. His very sympathetic biographer Dimbleby admits that his staff "were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought". Edward Adeane, Charles' private secretary for many years, was disturbed by the fact that "Charles was extraordinarily easy to lead by the nose".

What do these "interventions" really consist of? Charles Windsor scorns modern science, attacking it for its "lack of soul" and for "playing God". So he uses his position to attack qualified life-saving professionals who earned their position, like the General Medical Council – and says he knows better.

He demands that the NHS pay for "spiritual, alternative medicine", and has been a key player in ensuring the NHS now spends £200m a year on it. But as Professor Richard Dawkins explains, there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. If a treatment works in clinical trials, it ceases to be "alternative": it is classified as medicine and prescribed by doctors. So "alternative medicine" is – by definition – medicine that doesn't work in clinical trials. It is not medicine at all.

Charles's other arguments have just as much merit. Even on the (rare) occasions when he is right, Charles wrecks it with rancid hypocrisy. His claims to be opposed to global warming would be more persuasive if he were not one of the worst personal polluters in Britain, using a private jet for the most trivial of trips. His claims to be concerned for the poor would be more persuasive if he did not claim more than £300m of public land that should be used to pay for schools and hospitals to fund his own shocking decadence.

But even if Charles Windsor was a genius who represented a political agenda I totally agreed with, I would still oppose his "right" to be an unelected Head of State. In a democracy, power should stem from voting lines, not blood-lines. Yet Charles has shown a willingness to use his unearned position to bully elected representatives for decades now. One former minister, Peter Morrison, has recounted how Charles called him into Kensington Palace and screamed and shouted and banged his fist on the table when Morrison wouldn't accept his arguments about the national curriculum.

It's easy to assume that as monarch Charles would have no powers – but it's untrue. The monarch gets an hour of face-time with the Prime Minister every week, has access to all government papers, and – in a tie-break election – gets to pick the Prime Minister. This isn't a fantasy-scenario: it happened as recently as 1974, and it will happen again.

To be fair, we should blame ourselves as much as Charles. Monarchy inevitably warps the personality of the people at its heart, because from childhood they hear nothing but sycophancy. One of Charles' ex-girlfriends said: "He lives in an isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and is told he's handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic genius like Peter Sellers, and they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and she tells him he's the greatest lover she's ever had." It is this system that made this dim-witted mediocrity believe he has a womb-given right to be our President. We made it. We created the monster.

So what happens when this man accedes to the throne and pretends to be our President? In Spain, Sophia Frederica, the "Queen", has begun to speak out – and support for the monarchy has withered.

So let Charles speak. Let him grab the reins of power. Let him spew his ignorant babble from his many golden palaces. Charles Windsor will – in an unprecedented moment of efficiency – lead us at last into the Republic of Great Britain.

POSTSCRIPT: Richard Dawkins has commented on this article. Check it out - I agree with every word.

Their story seems strange even after all this time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, small posses emerged from among the most privileged young people in Europe and America and took up arms against the society their parents had built. They bombed the Pentagon, killed some of the most senior businessmen and politicians in Germany and Italy, and became icons. Then they were forgotten – until now.

Across the West, the rebels of Christmas past are back, rattling their rusty old weapons once more. In the US, one of the Weathermen, Bill Ayers, was smeared across the Presidential election after it was revealed that Barack Obama had served on the board of a charity with him. In Germany and Italy, films about the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Brigades have become the home-grown hits of the year. In France, there has been a row after President Sarkozy refused to deport a hunger-striking ex-Red Brigader, Marina Petrella, to Rome.

It's easy to write-off everyone who participated in these acts as purposeless psychos, a Guerrilla High mirroring Columbine High, or to see them as spoiled Oedipussies trying to strike back at Daddy. But the truth is more complex and troubling than that.

Let's start with the group that killed nobody but themselves, because they illustrate the shades of grey in this tale. Bill Ayers joined the Weathermen, he says, for one reason. His country was annihilating a peasant society 10,000 miles away, and after long peaceful protests he kept asking himself: "How can we make the decision-makers hear us if they cannot hear the screams of a little girl burned by napalm?" Ayers' memoir, Fugitive Days, asks: when you see your country murdering three million people for nothing, what should you do?

He explains: "I felt as if my whole generation had turned a corner and walked smack into a rape in progress: the victim, a stranger – small and ragged, she looked poor, she spoke no English, she held no currency. But – and this was the shock – the attacker was a man we all knew well, somebody we'd admired vaguely without ever examining the basis for that admiration."

So they bombed targets linked to the war. They gave warnings, so nobody ever died, except three of the bomb-makers themselves.

In democracies change happens by building voter coalitions, and these bombings drove the centre towards the war-hugging Richard Nixon. One of the group, Diana Oughton, returned from Vietnam and admitted: "The Vietnamese were only mildly interested in our willingness to die and much more animated about how we were going to reach out to our Republican parents, something that didn't interest us at all." These groups had their own toxic ideology, calling for Maoism. Fighting for freedom in the name of Chairman Mao is like fighting for chickens in the name of Colonel Sanders.

Yet the row about Ayers reveals there is still a distortion in our memories of the violence of that time. After condemning Obama for vaguely knowing Ayers, John McCain boasted about his "close friendship" with Henry Kissinger – and nobody noticed the dissonance. While Ayers didn't kill anybody, Kissinger played a key role in killing three million people, overwhelmingly civilians, in a bogus cause. Can it be right to damn one as a terrorist and laud the other as a great statesman?

Other groups went even further than the Weathermen. In Germany, the Baader-Meinhof gang became convinced that fascism was rising again. "This is the generation of Auschwitz! They cannot be reasoned with!" declared leader Gudrun Ensslin. They murdered former Nazi functionaries who had been absorbed into the West German state. But then – drunk on violence – they killed totally innocent people: security guards and holidaymakers. As soon as you target civilians, you have become the monster you claim to be fighting against.

Today, there is another group of wealthy young Westerners determined to bomb their own societies, motivated by hatred of Anglo-American foreign policy and their own totalitarian ideology. Jihadis are much more likely to be doctors and BMW owners than lads from council estates. As Mark Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Of course there are variations in the tune. You can see this in The Baader-Meinhof Complex, where the gang arrive at a Palestinian training camp and proceed to strip. "Anti-imperialism and sexual revolution go together!" they jeer at the jihadis – who consider killing them.

But while the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the jihadis illustrate vile ways of breaching the law in the name of mad ideologies, this still leaves a painful question hanging: are there different times when it is right – morally necessary, even – to break the law? I think there is just such a situation today – and a jury of 12 ordinary British people just agreed with me.

The destruction wrought by global warming makes even the destruction of Vietnam pale. The President of the Maldives just revealed he has to buy land for his people to live on since his entire country is on course to drown in my lifetime. This is one small speck in a global maelstrom. When pundits lecture environmentalists on the need to be "moderate", they fail to see that the environment is not a swing voter in Iowa. It has an independent physical reality, and it is being disastrously destabilised today.

That's why last year, six environmental activists broke into Britain's dirtiest power station in Kingsnorth and tried to stop it spewing its warming gases into the atmosphere. When they came to trial, they called the world's leading scientists to testify. The jury of ordinary people had never seen the evidence presented plainly before. They were so horrified they acquitted the activists and several pledged to join the fight themselves.

These Sixties radicals may be poking back into our consciousness today because – for all their obvious ugliness – they remind us of our own passivity. Drugged by consumerism and comfort, we respond to the great history-shaking challenges of our times by changing our light bulbs. Shorn of the Baader-madness, the Kingsnorth activists – and thousands more environmentalists who lobby and persuade – remind us it doesn't have to be this way. We do not have to stand at the edge of a climatic atrocity and wait listlessly for somebody else to act.

The world is still pleasurably suffering from Woah-bama whiplash. Did he really win? Are we all awake? And would anybody mind if he starts a few months early? The need for decisions is rapidly piling up – and one of President-Elect Obama’s first choices is whether to bring to an end the strangest story ever told in American politics.

It is the tale of how a man with Alzheimer’s Disease came up with a physically impossible fantasy based on a B-movie he once starred in – and how the US spent $160bn trying to make it come true. These billions succeeded only in making some defence companies very rich, and making Russia point its nukes at Poland and Britain once more. Oh, and if Obama doesn’t decide to close this long-running farce now, it will make one more contribution to world history: the number of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the world will dramatically increase.

Here’s how this story began – and continued into our time. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan was increasingly worried a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, until a long-suppressed memory resurfaced in his mind. In 1940, he had starred in a hokey movie called ‘Murder in the Air’. He played a secret agent who had to protect a newly invented super-weapon called the “Intertia Projector” which fired an electrical current at any plane or missile approaching the United States, rendering it worthless. In the film, a scientist tells Reagan this weapon “makes the US invincible in war, and promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered.”

Why, Reagan wondered in the Oval Office, couldn’t he have a real Intertia Projector? Let’s create a machine that would detect any incoming nuke as it approached the US and zap it into nothing! The Cold War standoff would be over! Reagan was losing the ability to distinguish between reality and films: he repeatedly claimed he had been at the liberation of Auschwitz, when he had recreated it in Hollywood. After the Second World War, there had been a few studies trying to invent such a machine – but they all concluded it was “impossible.” Nonetheless, Reagan decided in 1983 to call on America’s scientists to make it happen.

Everyone was bewildered. Reagan’s undersecretary of Defence, Richard DeLauer demanded to know how such a “half-baked political travesty” got into a Presidential address. As the Pulitzer-prize winning historian Frances Fitzgerald explains: “Most of the scientists and defence experts invited to the White House for dinner that evening expressed incredulity. An umbrella defence of the United States was a virtual impossibility… [But] when the experts insisted that science was not magic and that American technology could no do everything, they would be accused of lack of patriotism.”

The lack of evidence didn’t deter Reagan’s team. The man he put in charge of the programme, James Abrahamson, declared: “I don’t think anything in this country is technically impossible. We have a nation which can indeed produce miracles.” The programme was dubbed ‘Star Wars’ – which was fitting, since it was science fiction. As the years passed, the US strategic planners developed ever-more-fevered fantasies of how the shield would allow them to strike anywhere in the world without any risk of retaliation.

By the time Reagan left office, there was a vast industry dedicated to chasing this will-o’-the-wisp. Huge defence contractors – including Boeing and Lockheed Martin – were making billions from it, and giving fat donations to politicians in both parties. In the decades since, the US has spent more and more, and asked the ‘shield’ to do less and less. Now they want it to just take out a single nuke – and it still doesn’t work. The tests only succeed when the interceptors know where the missile is being fired from, where it is heading to, and the warhead continually broadcasts its location to the interceptor. Some success. They have been given a near-impossible-task: scientists compare it to hitting a bullet with another bullet.

But while the system’s positive effects have failed to materialize, its negative consequences are real. America’s strategic opponents have assumed the leading super-power couldn’t possibly be spending this much on a pile of junk – so they are reacting on the assumption that the shield works. This means they are preparing bigger and more nukes, to preserve their ability to punch through the shield. They are retargeting their missiles at Poland, Britain and the Czech Republic, the countries hosting the dud-interceptors. If they believe they are being attacked, they will destroy us first, in order to destroy the ‘shield’ and have the ability to strike back. US intelligence has been blunt about what will happen if the interceptors continue to be constructed. China will increase its nuclear arsenal “tenfold”, India and Pakistan would “respond with their own build-ups,” and Russia’s “only rational response… would be to maintain, and strengthen, the existing nuclear force.”

So the US has spent $160bn, only to increase the nuclear danger to itself and the rest of us. Stars Wars is a perfect example of the magical thinking that now dominates the American right. Don’t like global warming? Don’t worry, it doesn’t exist! Don’t like evolution? It’s a myth! Didn’t find any WMD in Iraq? They must have been shipped to Syria! Want a magical nuclear shield? If you build it, it will work!

Sure, maybe one day scientists will discover some technological way to evaporate nukes in the brief window before they strike. Maybe they will discover how to turn lead into gold – a pursuit that obsessed Europe’s best minds for centuries. Maybe aliens will get in touch. But none of these assumptions are a sensible basis for government policy.

There is now a possibility this will end at last. After speaking to Obama on Tuesday, the Polish President Lech Kaczynski said the project was seriously in doubt. During the campaign, Obama offered a third-way dodge on Star Wars: he said he supported it but “only if the technology is proved to be workable.” Well, we know it isn’t workable. Obama is the first Presidential candidate of our time not to be taking money from the defence contractors. He has no political debt – but his country’s is huge. Can it afford $10bn a year on this dangerous techno-trash?

In the primaries, Obama pledged to pursue real multilateral nuclear disarmament – but the shield-fantasy ensures the opposite will happen: a dramatic increase in the nukes scattered across the globe. Of course, if Obama ditches Star Wars, the neoconservatives will accuse him of “backing down” and “showing weakness”. But is it really sensible to keep spending $10bn a year on an act of self-harm just to save face? The story that began with Reagan’s dementia-fantasies should end with Obama’s empiricism.

This decision isn’t just about a bogus nuclear shield, crucial though that is. It is a test of whether the government of the United States has returned to the firm land of empirical reality – or whether it is still way out there in the blue, gasping for air among the ideological stars.