A closer look at the novel ‘2034’ and the film ‘Civil War’

OPINION:

I finally got around to reading “2034,” which is a bit of fiction that describes what a conflict between China and the United States in 2034 might look like. 

In the novel, China dominates in cyberspace and, consequently, destroys an American fleet. The Americans, blinded without technology, resort to tactical nuclear weapons. China responds in kind, and — in the most bizarre twist — somehow India winds up enforcing a peace treaty.

The best news? By the end of the book, the United Nations has moved to Mumbai.

I also recently endured the movie “Civil War,” which is incomprehensible, except that it appears to be a road trip movie about members of the media heading to Washington to interview a barely disguised stand-in for former President Donald Trump, whose third term appears to have launched the nation into internal warfare. For much of the movie, the road trippers seem surprised that a civil war involves random violence.

These products of the American cultural-industrial complex share two unhappy deficiencies.

First, they are catastrophe porn, made to appeal mostly to those on the left who are unhappy with the current moment in the United States. That’s understandable. For the last 100 years or so — at least since the dawn of mass communication — the elites on the left have pretty much had their way in this country. It has to be disturbing when the great unwashed start elbowing their way into the conversation.

That the movie and the book are propaganda as thin as gossamer can be overlooked, but their indifference to facts can’t be.

The terrible truth is that the United States is probably better off now — compared with the remainder of the planet if in no other way — than it has been for some time. Pick a metric — the economy, innovation, education, population — and the United States is probably doing better than anyone else out there.

Could China surprise us in cyberspace? Of course. Is it likely? No. Could China survive a war with the United States? Let’s hope we never find out. But the simple reality of war is that the side with the most cash almost always wins. The United States’ gross domestic product is about $30 trillion; China’s is less than $20 trillion.

How about education? There are about 300,000 bright young communists from China in college and graduate school in the United States. Fewer than 10,000 Americans are in graduate school in China. More than half of the top 50 universities on the planet are in the United States. None are in China.

How about population? Each year, 1 million people immigrate into the United States legally, and probably 2 million or 3 million make it into the country illegally. Entire nations in Europe are dying. Each year, the regime in Beijing experiences net out-migration of more than half a million people. Not a problem here — people all over the world are voting with their feet for the United States.

It’s not even worth getting into India, which has a bright future, but where more than half of the population is trying to make it on about $3 a day. If they are going to be powerful enough to enforce global peace in 10 years, they’d better hustle.

With respect to the movie, it is difficult to take something like that seriously. The last time an advanced nation went to war with itself was during our own Civil War, and that was characterized by a remarkable degree of civility on both sides. There were few instances of noncombatants being targeted, and the winners didn’t even execute the ringleaders of the other side.

Before that, the French Revolution. So, it happens, but it is not exactly common.

The second and perhaps the most egregious problem with both the movie and the novel is that they are relentlessly boring. Somehow, the artists involved managed to make both a civil war and a global war seem tedious. That happens when one is more concerned with propaganda and polemics than with entertainment. If you are going to hammer your audience with an unsubtle message, at least try to make it entertaining.

• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times and a co-host of the podcast “The Unregulated.”