Watch Out

Yet it seems a perverse denial of progress to portray this as the dominant trend of our time. If you take a long step back from the dark intricacy of the Middle East, and look at other changes in the past five years, such apocalyptic pro- jections seem unjustified.

I don’t mean to suggest that there is some economist’s scale in which we can weigh human wellbeing and find it, for the planet overall, ahead by several per cent. That would not just be fanciful, but inhumane, given the extreme suffering in so many places.

But all the same, the world’s stock markets offer one barometer of an aspect of the world’s wellbeing: a judgment of future prosperity. The Dow Jones index (the broadly based Wilshire index of 5,000 stocks) is up by 29 per cent compared with September 10, 2001.

The most dramatic trough on the charts between those dates represents the bursting of the technology bubble in 2002 and 2003, as well as apprehension about the Iraq war. But once that conflict started, in the spring of 2003, the index ploughed on upwards. Disappointment in Iraq and fears about Iran have caused some small setbacks. But even though those have also pushed up the price of oil, which will curb world growth, the markets have still moved up.

The main building blocks of that optimism are clear. The largest is the strength of the US economy, partly because of the US’s success in blending in new immigrants. Its controversial politics have not held back its growth, to the world’s benefit.

After that, we should list the solid emergence of China and India as giants of the developing world, and to some extent Brazil as well. That position was more fragile five years ago.

You might add, then, the calm with which the European Union has blended in eight former Soviet bloc countries.

These transformations have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and radically changed the opportunities open to them, within an astonishingly short span of time.

They set a badly needed model of successful development. I am not dismissing the distress of countries that have not managed that change, particularly in those parts of Africa where Aids has cut nearly 30 years off life expectancy in a matter of years (and it is a serious threat to India).

But the hope of that kind of change is the best long-term answer to the threat of terrorism.

One effect of the new outspokenness of China, India, Brazil (and, in Europe, Poland) has been to make institutions more unwieldy, from the United Nations Security Council, to the World Trade Organisation, or the EU constitution.

The collapse of the Doha Round of trade negotiations is indeed one of the most dispiriting events of the year, with profound consequences for prosperity, including that of the poorest countries. But it would be hard to regret the new assertiveness; the old paternal diplomacy had had its day.

The core of the case that the world is now better off than on 9/11 rests outside the Middle East. But even if we step back for a moment into that turmoil, there is hope. On Iraq itself, the best that can be said is that the Government, the army and the oil industry have held together; while they do, the chance of a stable society remains.

Tehran’s nuclear ambitions have been exposed since 9/11, but predate it by decades. Iraq and high oil prices may have boosted Iran’s confidence, but anxiety about the region has also strengthened the world’s interest in curbing it.

Saudi Arabia, long the subject of predictions of disaster, now appears to have got a grip on its own extremists, after years of denying the threat existed. The oil bonanza has given it much-needed cash to make its people feel better off.

No one can be blithe about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a big step towards the establishment of two separate states, which remains the only imaginable peaceful solution.

And al-Qaeda itself? Bin Laden is still on the run, but there are signs that his network has has been severely curtailed.

For all the undoubted traffic of jihadists between separate conflicts, it is striking that concerns remain local: to “liberate” Kashmir from India, or Chechnya from Russia; to chase the US and Tajiks out of Afghanistan. Even in Iraq, the sectar-ian fight for power dominates over the ideological “War on Terror” against the US.

One senior Bush Administration official argued in London last week that optimists, including the stock market, may not take enough account of the risk of, say, a nuclear bomb attack on Manhattan from the Hudson River. Perhaps. No one is good at judging the tiny risk of an apocalyptic event.

But that is precisely the insidious effect of 9/11. It made the world seem smaller: any imaginable threat became immediate. Reassurance comes from observing that the world is not as shrunken as this fearful sketch suggests. Risks are real, but most remain small. Countries are more diverse, more complicated, more prosperous and less interlinked than the terrorists’ own ideology would have it or, indeed, the rhetoric of the “War on Terror”.

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