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Stephen Walt, May 13 2020, “Will a Global Depression Trigger Another World War?” Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/05/13/coronavirus-pandemic-depression-economy-world-war/

If one takes a longer-term perspective, however, a sustained economic depression could make war more likely by strengthening fascist or xenophobic political movements, fueling protectionism and hypernationalism, and making it more difficult for countries to reach mutually acceptable bargains with each other. The history of the 1930s shows where such trends can lead, although the economic effects of the Depression are hardly the only reason world politics took such a deadly turn in the 1930s. Nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarian rule were making a comeback well before COVID-19 struck, but the economic misery now occurring in every corner of the world could intensify these trends and leave us in a more war-prone condition when fear of the virus has diminished.

The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict. The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates. But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything from financial and labor markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies.1 Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more time than actual governing. And Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment. The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008. In the United States, housing prices are now 8% higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929. As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilize and stimulate the economy. If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy. According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been characterized also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries – attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war. For example, during the Great Depression, US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun. To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking conflict.3 According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high levels. This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and diplomatic tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis, anxiety over globalization, political polarization, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis.

Today, the nine nuclear weapons arsenals not only can annihilate hundreds of cities, but also cause nuclear winter and mass starvation of a billion or more people, if not the entire human species. Concurrently, climate change is enveloping the planet with more frequent and intense storms, accelerating sea level rise, and advancing rapid ecological change, expressed in unprecedented forest fires across the world. Already stretched to a breaking point in many countries, the current pandemic may overcome resilience to the point of near or actual collapse of social, economic, and political order.

In this extraordinary moment, it is timely to reflect on the existence and possible uses of weapons of mass destruction under pandemic conditions – most importantly, nuclear weapons, but also chemical and biological weapons. Moments of extreme crisis and vulnerability can prompt aggressive and counterintuitive actions that in turn may destabilize already precariously balanced threat systems, underpinned by conventional and nuclear weapons, as well as the threat of weaponized chemical and biological technologies. Consequently, the risk of the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), especially nuclear weapons, increases at such times, possibly sharply.

Forced to choose sides, governments may face economic or diplomatic consequences, as proxy disputes play out in control over economic or geographic resources. The deepening of geopolitical fault lines and the lack of viable middle power alternatives make it harder for countries to cultivate connective tissue with a diverse set of partner countries based on mutual values and maximizing efficiencies. Instead, networks will become thick in some directions and non-existent in others. The COVID-19 crisis has amplified this dynamic, as digital interactions represent a “huge loss in efficiency for diplomacy” compared with face-to-face discussions.23 With some alliances weakening, diplomatic relationships will become more unstable at points where superpower tectonic plates meet or withdraw.

At the same time, without superpower referees or middle power enforcement, global norms may no longer govern state behaviour. Some governments will thus see the solidification of rival blocs as an opportunity to engage in regional posturing, which will have destabilizing effects.24 Across societies, domestic discord and economic crises will increase the risk of autocracy, with corresponding censorship, surveillance, restriction of movement and abrogation of rights.25

Hal Brands, Henry Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a Jeane Kirkpatrick visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem: The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not because its rival is rising but because of the opposite., 24 September 2021, Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/24/china-great-power-united-states/

Over the past 150 years, peaking powers—great powers that had been growing dramatically faster than the world average and then suffered a severe, prolonged slowdown—usually don’t fade away quietly. Rather, they become brash and aggressive. They suppress dissent at home and try to regain economic momentum by creating exclusive spheres of influence abroad. They pour money into their militaries and use force to expand their influence. This behavior commonly provokes great-power tensions. In some cases, it touches disastrous wars.

Healthcare spending in the United States totaled 18.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in their most recent data update. That’s down from 19.7 percent of GDP in 2020, primarily due to an increase in economic growth as well as a decline in . However, healthcare costs in the United States remain above their pre-pandemic levels, and they remain a primary driver of our unsustainable national debt.

In nominal dollars,  totaled $4.3 trillion in 2021, or about $12,900 per person — an increase of nearly 3.0 percent from the previous year.  rose in both the public and private sectors in 2021 for these major sources of funds:

In all countries, health spending as a share of the overall economy has been steadily increasing since the 1980s, as spending growth has outpaced economic growth. This growth is in part because of medical technologies, rising prices in the health sector, and higher demand for services. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, health care spending rose rapidly in nearly all countries, as governments sought to mitigate the spread of the disease through COVID testing, vaccine development, relief funds, and other measures. Since then, spending has slowed but still remains higher from years prior.

In 2021, the U.S. spent 17.8 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, nearly twice as much as the average OECD country.

The administration is rolling out a framework to enforce the government’s march-in authorities on drugs developed with taxpayer dollars, saying if drugmakers refuse to make their products “reasonably” available, then the government is prepared to give other companies license to produce those drugs at a lower cost.

Under the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980, the government retains certain rights on any products produced through a public-private partnership using federal funding. This legislation allows federal agencies that provided the funding to compel companies that make such products to provide a “nonexclusive, partially exclusive, or exclusive” license to a “responsible applicant.”

New research released by HHS correlated the lack of competition in drug markets with higher prices, with the 25 largest pharmaceutical companies controlling around 70% of industry revenues. Consequently, nearly 3 in 10 individuals struggle to pay for the drugs they need.

As part of the Biden administration’s efforts to make health care more accessible, HHS and the Department of Commerce (DOC) released a proposed framework for agencies on the exercise of march-in rights, which specify that price can be a factor in determining whether a drug or other taxpayer-funded invention is accessible to the public or not. The Biden administration explained that because, over the years, taxpayers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on research to help in the development of new prescription drugs, these taxpayer-funded drugs and inventions should be affordable to the public. Consequently, the DOC and HHS invited the public to provide input on how the framework could promote both access and innovation.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Vladimir Popov, "Economic Crisis Can Trigger World War," Inter Press Service, 2-12-2019, http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/02/economic-crisis-can-trigger-world-war/

KUALA LUMPUR and BERLIN, Feb 12 2019 (IPS) - Economic recovery efforts since the 2008-2009 global financial crisis have mainly depended on unconventional monetary policies. As fears rise of yet another international financial crisis, there are growing concerns about the increased possibility of large-scale military conflict.

Until the 1980s, despite spending much less on health care, Americans were doing better than other countries in their health outcomes (Frakt, 2018). Something happened to US health care spending after 1980. Confronted with fiscal pressures, as the share of gross domestic product (GDP) absorbed by health care spending began to get serious, other nations put measures in place to hold down spending but the US did not. The differential between what the US and other developed coun- tries pay for prescriptions and for hospital and physician services has continued to widen over time. Suppliers of medical inputs marketed costly technological innovations (Callahan, 2009). They found ready customers in hospitals and medical practices eager to keep up with rivals in the medical arms race. In 1980, health care expenditures in the US were $256 billion, exploding to nearly $2.6 trillion in 2010, a ten- fold increase (Meissner, 2013). Health care expenditures spiked further to $3.8 trillion in 2019. What began as a small gap in performance when compared to other countries is now a yawning chasm.

The per capita spending on health care in the US towers over all other developed nations, and yet health care outcomes as reflected by key health indicators are at best average. In other words, the US health care system consumes far more resources to produce the same or worse health care outcomes as compared to the health care systems elsewhere. For example, the US spent $11,582 per capita in 2019 compared to $5,418 in Canada, $4,653 in the United Kingdom, $4,823 in Japan, and $4,224, the average of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (OECD, 2020). In total health care spending, the US spends 17.7 percent of its GDP, which is almost the double that of the average spending of 8.8 percent of GDP for the OECD countries. In a comparison to the overall performance of the health care systems of 11 developed countries, the US was found dangling alone with high health care spending and low system performance (Schneider et al., 2017). Seven countries (Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) bunch together and perform higher than the other four countries (Canada, France, Sweden, and the USA). Canada, France, and Sweden show mediocre performance with the US being the laggard.

Harvard Law Today: What is your first impression of the Biden administration’s proposal to use march-in rights to lower drug costs?

Ruth Okediji: I think it is a step in the right direction, by which I mean it is an acknowledgement that we have a system that currently makes many vital drugs, including drugs funded with federal taxpayer money, inaccessible to many Americans. The administration’s proposal to use march-in rights is a move that I certainly welcome, given my scholarly focus on strengthening the government’s role in improving access to medicines generally. The fact is the government is not powerless — there are ethical, moral, and economic justifications for greater involvement nationally and globally. A substantial proportion of drug research and development is funded or subsidized by the federal government, whether you’re talking about COVID-19 vaccines, insulin for diabetes, or other prescription drugs. For much of our history, individual patients have been fighting this problem alone, and often unsuccessfully. Millions of patients in the U.S. have been unable to access essential drugs because they couldn’t afford them, including people of color, single moms, elderly citizens, and the most impoverished Americans in rural communities. The Biden administration is clearly signaling its concern about drug prices, and their impact on the quality of life for American patients and their families. Whether the administration’s draft proposal is in fact implemented and leads to measurable improvements in drug accessibility is a completely different story.

While Ferguson agreed with Allison’s argument that China and the U.S. are headed in the trajectory of war, he did say we have to be careful of the “Paul Kennedy Syndrome.” Kennedy, a professor at Yale, implied in his famous The Rise and Fall of Great Powers that West Germany and Japan were on the verge of overtaking the United States. Obviously that did not happen. If we apply similar skepticism to the U.S.-China scenario, we can see that the U.S. still maintains the world’s most powerful military by a huge margin, and that global interdependence is higher than ever. China and the U.S. need each other and China would not necessarily win a war. Furthermore, Chinese leaders do not want war and will take steps to prevent war from being necessary. It is possible that with Trump’s potential retreat from world, their takeover might become easier. Ferguson reported that in this respect, Chinese leaders feel as if history is going their way. (Although Trump’s latest action in Syria could signal that the “retreat” may not be happening). Ferguson concluded on a more positive note by saying that China’s leaders are perhaps the most history-minded in the world. They study history and they apply it. This makes them far less likely to be trigger happy and instead points them towards a strategy where war is far less likely. Conclusion: As China overtakes the United States’ geopolitical and economic supremacy, it is poised to become the world’s number one power. Thucydides warned us that this dynamic is a trap that often leads to war. However, with careful study from Professors like Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, and leadership from politicians like Ambassador Samantha Power, we may be to apply history and find a peaceful way forward. You can watch the full conversation at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum here.

The rise of China has sparked fear in some American thinkers and policymakers who believe that power equals threat and changes in relative power result in conflict and war.69 I argue, however, that such fear is unwarranted unless China has a status economy; status powers have an interest in sowing chaos wherever they lack control, which is diametrically opposed to the contractualist preference for order and self-determination. China, however, has neither a status nor a contractualist economy, but an axial economy (see table 1). As the world's largest exporter with considerable public and private trading sectors, China possesses an economy not unlike those of ancient Athens, the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, and the European kingdoms of the Enlightenment. The elites of those societies, like China's today, embraced long-distance commerce.

Axial states can wage wars over global markets. Historical examples include the Venetian-Genoese wars of the early Italian Renaissance, the Anglo-Dutch wars of the second half of the seventeenth century, and the Anglo-French wars of the eighteenth century. These wars were fought for control of markets and maritime trade routes, not global leadership. As discussed above, elites in axial economies perceive little interest in the welfare of strangers and thus non-discriminatory trade.

(Joshua, “The rise of China, balance of power theory and US national security: Reasons for optimism?” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 43)

This framework carries large implications for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand China’s strategy as its power grows and US relative power declines. As noted, many analysts fear that a rising China will embark on a predatory course designed to push the United States down or from the great power ranks. Although it is difficult in the abstract to describe what the particular elements of Chinese predation may entail, the general concern seems to be that China will adopt steps that will rapidly shift the distribution of power its favour by enacting policies that are increasingly costly for a relatively declining United States to overcome, pushing the United States to exhaust itself competing or to surrender the issues at stake, and thus imperil the United States’ position as a great power. Elements of this approach might involve Chinese efforts to engage in economic warfare by hindering US economic competitiveness and limiting American economic opportunities; adumbrate US military advantages; undercut US credibility and prestige; and weaken US alliances in East Asia or beyond.55 Furthermore, recent Chinese actions in and around East Asia seemingly give credence to such concerns. After all, the last decade has witnessed China take an increasingly assertive stance in its maritime disputes in the South and East China Seas56 ; enact an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea57 ; make political and economic inroads into Central Asia and Africa58 ; influence the domestic politics of Asia-Pacific states to favour pro-China policies; and expand its defence budget.59 Concurrently, trade tensions with the United States are rising, and the Chinese government has tried to buttress its authority by cracking down on domestic opponents.60

To put it plainly, AI is somewhat stuck at the moment. Algorithms and neural networks continue to achieve new and impressive feats—like DeepMind’s AlphaFold accurately predicting protein structures or OpenAI’s GPT-3 writing convincing articles based on short prompts—but for the most part these systems’ capabilities are still defined as narrow intelligence: completing a specific task for which the system was painstakingly trained on loads of data.

(It’s worth noting here that some have speculated OpenAI’s GPT-3 may be an exception, the first example of machine intelligence that, while not “general,” has surpassed the definition of “narrow”; the algorithm was trained to write text, but ended up being able to translate between languages, write code, autocomplete images, do math, and perform other language-related tasks it wasn’t specifically trained for. However, all of GPT-3’s capabilities are limited to skills it learned in the language domain, whether spoken, written, or programming language).

In the decade after the Cold War, a similar process of threat identification took place as problems previously considered to be of minor, or at least of secondary, concern were promoted. Anxieties about international terrorism substantially increased during the 1990s and were set into highest relief with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Extrapolating wildly from 9/11, a terrorist event ten times more destructive than any other in history, terrorism of that sort has repeatedly been taken to present a direct, even existential, threat to the United States or to the West — or even to the world system or to civilization as we know it.6 Wild extrapolations have precipitated costly antiterrorism and antiproliferation wars and huge increases in security spending. In these ventures, trillions of dollars have been squandered and well over two hundred thousand people have perished, including more than twice as many Americans as were killed on 9/11.7 There has been a tendency to see these exercises as misguided elements of a coherent plan to establish a “liberal world order” or to apply “liberal hegemony.“8 However, the overwhelming impetus was far more banal: to get the bastards responsible for 9/11.

Islamist terrorism in the United States has killed some six people per year since 9/11, and far more people in Europe perished yearly at the hands of terrorists in most years in the 1970s and 1980s.9 But there has nonetheless been a tendency to continue to inflate al-Qaeda’s importance and effectiveness.

Challenges to Myth 5 There are two dimensions to Myth 5. The first is about the intention of would-be terrorists, and the assumption is that terrorists would seek to produce mass casualty weapons and pursue capabilities on the scale of twentieth century state-level bioweapons programs. While most leading biological disarmament and non-proliferation experts believe that the risk of a small-scale bioterrorism attack is very real and very present, they consider the risk of sophisticated large-scale bioterrorism attacks to be very small (65). This is backed up by historical evidence. The three confirmed attempts to use biological agents against humans in terrorist attacks in the past were small-scale, low casualty events aimed at causing panic, and disruption rather than excessive death tolls: (i) the Rajneesh cult’s use of Salmonella on salad bars in local restaurants to sicken potential voters and make them stay away from the polls during Oregon elections in 1984; (ii) the 1990–95 attempted use of botulinum toxin and anthrax by the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult; (iii) and the “anthrax letters” sent to media outlets and members of US Congress in 2001 resulting in at least 22 cases of anthrax, five of which were fatal (66, 67). The second dimension to Myth 5 is the implicit assumption that producing a pathogenic organism equates producing a weapon of mass destruction. It does not. Considerable knowledge and resources are necessary for the processes of scaling up, storage, and developing a suitable dissemination method. These processes present significant technical and logistical barriers. Drawing from her in-depth study of the Iraqi, Soviet, and US bioweapons programs (3, 4), Ben Ouagrham-Gormley explains: Scaling up fragile microorganisms that are sensitive to environmental conditions and susceptible to change — and viruses are more sensitive than bacteria — has been one of the stiffest challenges for past bioweapons programs to overcome, even with appropriate expertise at hand. Scaling-up requires a gradual approach, moving from laboratory sample, to a larger laboratory quantity, to pilot-scale production, and then to even larger-scale production. During each stage, the production parameters need to be tested and often modified to maintain the lethal qualities of the agent; the entire scaling-up process can take several years (68). The dissemination of biological agents also poses difficult technical challenges. Whereas persistent chemical agents such as sulfur mustard and VX nerve gas are readily absorbed through the intact skin, no bacteria and viruses can enter the body via that route unless the skin has already been broken. Biological agents must either be ingested or inhaled to cause infection. To expose large numbers of people through the gastrointestinal tract, possible means of delivery are contamination of food and drinking water, yet neither of these scenarios would be easy to accomplish. Large urban reservoirs are usually unguarded, but unless terrorists added massive quantities of biological agent, the dilution effect would be so great that no healthy person drinking the water would receive an infectious dose (66). Moreover, modern sanitary techniques such as chlorination and filtration are designed to kill pathogens from natural sources and would probably be equally effective against a deliberately released agent. Bacterial contamination of the food supply is also unlikely to inflict mass casualties. Cooking, boiling, pasteurization, and other routine safety precautions are generally sufficient to kill pathogenic bacteria. The most likely way to inflict mass casualties with a biological agent is by disseminating it as a respirable aerosol: an invisible cloud of infectious droplets or particles so tiny that they remain suspended in the air for long periods and can be inhaled by large numbers of people. A high-concentration aerosol of B. anthracis or some other pathogen, released into the air in a densely populated urban area, could potentially infect thousands of victims simultaneously. After an incubation period of a few days, depending on the type of agent and the inhaled dose, the exposed population would experience an outbreak of an incapacitating or fatal illness. Although aerosol delivery is potentially the most lethal way of delivering a biological attack, it involves major technical hurdles that most terrorists would be unlikely to overcome. To infect through the lungs, infectious particles must be microscopic in size – between 1 and 5 μm in diameter. Terrorists would therefore have to develop or acquire a sophisticated delivery system capable of generating an aerosol cloud with the necessary particle size range and a high enough agent concentration to cover a broad area. Overall, an important trade-off exists between ease of production and effectiveness of dissemination. The easiest way to produce microbial agents is in a liquid form, yet when such a “slurry” is sprayed into the air, it forms heavy droplets that fall to the ground so that only a small percentage of the agent is aerosolized. In contrast, if the bacteria are first dried to a solid cake and then milled into a fine powder, they become far easier to aerosolize, yet the drying and milling process is technically difficult. The Aum Shinrikyo cult struggled with dissemination (67, 69, 70). In one of its anthrax dissemination attempts, it sprayed unknown, but probably very large, quantities of a liquid aerosol (most likely crude culture, unprocessed in any way) of B. anthracis from the roof of the Aum’s headquarters building in Tokyo. For the dissemination, the Aum set up two sprayers on the roof of the eight-story building, each within a large round cooling tower. Pipes were extended from the cooling towers to tanks below, which were filled with a liquid suspension of B. anthracis. The device worked poorly, producing large droplets rather than the very fine aerosol needed for effective transmission of anthrax. It also appears the spore concentration was very low (at least five orders of magnitude below that necessary for a highly infectious wet aerosol). In another dissemination attempt, targeting the area around the Kanagawa prefectural office and the Imperial Palace, the Aum equipped vehicles with spraying devices, but according to prosecutors’ statements, the nozzle of the sprayer clogged and the operation failed. Despite its 200 m2 laboratory containing, amongst other equipment, a glove box, incubator, centrifuge, drier, DNA/RNA synthesizer, electron microscope, two fermenters each having about a 2,000 litre capacity, and an extensive scientific library, and despite its repeated attempts at dissemination, the Aum was unsuccessful in causing any disease, and in retrospect it is clear that the cult did not even make the first substantive step toward an effective bioweapon. If, despite the odds, aerosolization was achieved, the effective delivery of biological agents in the open air is highly dependent on atmospheric and wind conditions, creating additional uncertainties. Only under highly stable atmospheric conditions would the aerosol cloud remain close to the ground where it can be inhaled, rather than being rapidly dispersed. Moreover, most microorganisms are sensitive to ultraviolet radiation and cannot survive more than 30 min in bright sunlight, limiting their use to night-time attacks. One major exception is anthrax, which can be induced to form spores with tough outer coats that enable them to survive for several hours in sunlight. Terrorists could, of course, stage a biological attack inside an enclosed space such as a building, a subway station, a shopping mall, or a sports arena. Such an attack, if it involved a respiratory aerosol, might infect thousands of people, but even here the technical hurdles would by no means be trivial. Finally, even if a biological weapon had been disseminated successfully, the outcome of an attack would be affected by factors like the health of the people who are exposed to the agent, and the speed and manner with which public health authorities and medical professionals detected and were able to respond to the resulting outbreak. A prompt response with effective medical countermeasures, such as antibodies and vaccination, can significantly blunt the impact of an attack. Simple, proven ways to curtail epidemics, such as wearing face masks, hand washing, and avoiding hospitals where transmission rates might soar, can also prove effective in stemming the spread of a disease. Indeed, this aspect of a bioterrorism attack is often underplayed in scenarios like Tara O’Toole’s “Dark Winter” and “Atlantic Storm,” where the rates of contagion used are often significantly higher than those in historical cases of natural outbreaks (71).

In the decade after the Cold War, a similar process of threat identification took place as problems previously considered to be of minor, or at least of secondary, concern were promoted. Anxieties about international terrorism substantially increased during the 1990s and were set into highest relief with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Extrapolating wildly from 9/11, a terrorist event ten times more destructive than any other in history, terrorism of that sort has repeatedly been taken to present a direct, even existential, threat to the United States or to the West — or even to the world system or to civilization as we know it.6 Wild extrapolations have precipitated costly antiterrorism and antiproliferation wars and huge increases in security spending. In these ventures, trillions of dollars have been squandered and well over two hundred thousand people have perished, including more than twice as many Americans as were killed on 9/11.7 There has been a tendency to see these exercises as misguided elements of a coherent plan to establish a “liberal world order” or to apply “liberal hegemony.“8 However, the overwhelming impetus was far more banal: to get the bastards responsible for 9/11.

Islamist terrorism in the United States has killed some six people per year since 9/11, and far more people in Europe perished yearly at the hands of terrorists in most years in the 1970s and 1980s.9 But there has nonetheless been a tendency to continue to inflate al-Qaeda’s importance and effectiveness.

As a scientist, my responsibility is to separate fact from fiction, to follow evidence, not instinct. So when I read doomsday reports of a coming “antibiotic apocalypse”, I question their legitimacy. Are we really all standing on the edge of the medical precipice, about to tumble into an oblivion of death-by-superbug? We most certainly are not.

The end of the world may well be on the horizon, but it surely won’t be due to antibiotic resistance. In order to understand why, you need to understand resistance: where it comes from, what it can do, and crucially, what scientists are doing about it.