Niall Ferguson’s 'War of the World' foresees 'Descent of the West' [audio 60min]

China is out-manufacturing us. Islam is outbreeding us -- even as Muslim sects tear each other apart. The price of all-the-world’s energy, oil, is going nuts. The Anglo-American end of the Atlantic alliance seems to have spiraled down in embarrassment in Iraq. These are the fresh elements in the Scots historian Niall Ferguson’s recurrent War of the World nightmare. And they extend the theme in his subtitle: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. Ferguson’s monster page-turner (all 767 of them, including fascinating notes, acknowledgements, bibliography and an appendix about war deaths) is notionally about the past. The war in his title was the 50-year"Age of Hatred," from Japan’s war with Russia in 1904 to the end of the Korean War in 1953. The scary point, though, is that the three-E root causes of the Fifty Years War as Ferguson tracks them through Central and Eastern Europe a century ago all turn up anew in the Middle East today and tomorrow. Ferguson’s lethal E’s are: (1) Ethnic hatred, or the break-up even of intermarried"pudding" populations like Sarajevo of old, or Beirut; (2) Empires in the falling-apart stage, more dangerous than empires in full bloom; and (3) Economic volatility, which can undo social harmony whether prices and profits are shooting up, down or sideways.