Esquire:Feature Story:No. 042: The Country to Watch
Let me give you the four scariest words I can’t pronounce in Arabic: Egypt after Hosni Mubarak.
Osama picked the time (9/11), and Bush picked the venue (Iraq), but this fight between radical Islam and globalization’s integrating forces was preordained the day Deng Xiaoping set in motion China’s eco¬nomic rise almost three decades ago. You can’t rapidly add billions of new capitalists to the global economy and pretend the Islamic Middle East will remain queerly disconnected forever, somehow fire-walled from that borglike assimilation.
Africa is where Al Qaeda hides its money, guns, recruits, training camps—and its future. Africa will be the last great stand in this Long War, where all those impossibly straight borders once drawn by colonial masters will inevitably be made squiggly again by globalization’s cultural reformatting process.