Going forward, the reader can decide what is most conducive to human peace and prosperity: a renewed Pax Anglosphere or the expansion of aggressive regional powers spreading chaos and war throughout the world.

South Africa

A few years back, I had the opportunity to interview African economist Dr. George Ayittey, a veteran commentator for various journals and newspapers as diverse as the New York Times, The Ghana Drum and the Wall Street Journal. His book, "Africa Betrayed" presents a myth- shattering view of the myriad problems of his native continent.

No friend of western imperialism or black African tyranny, Ayittey contended that the pre-colonial cultures of the African continent were rich in both social and economic institutions - a past that provides the implicit key to a future African renaissance today. Africa's abysmal realities belie its amazing potential. Compared to the Asian economic tigers - South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan- Africa is blessed with an abundance of mineral wealth and a relatively low population density.

Pre-colonial Africa was poised in many respects to follow a development curve similar to that of late-medieval Europe. Authoritarian regimes, such as those of the Fertile Crescent, the Nile, the Indus, and the Yellow River were not part of the African heritage. "Land was abundant," Dr. Ayittey wrote, "and tribes that found themselves subjugated could always move elsewhere." The most successful African empires were loose confederations of vassal states. The Ghanaian Empire lasted for some 900 years. By contrast, the Zulu Empire of Shaka, centralized and authoritarian, lasted a mere ten years. Pre-colonial Africans, members of 2,000 tribes were ill inclined toward the authoritarian systems, which impeded modernity in the great empires of the East and Middle East.

Pre-colonial Africa was rich in nascent free market institutions as well. "The means of production in traditional Africa," says Ayittey, "were privately owned and never owned by the Chief or the King.... Village markets were free and the Chief did not fix prices."

Imagine what Europe would have looked like if the twin bulwarks of the Franks and the Byzantines had not prevented the establishment of a trans- Mediterranean Islamic Empire in the middle Ages. Decentralized Europe, isolated in the backwaters of the great authoritarian civilizations, leapt from feudalism, to commercial empire, to industrial empire and finally to political hegemony.

Africa was less fortunate. Successive waves of slavers - first Islamic, then European-were followed by the colonialists. The abrupt departure of the Europeans resulted in totalitarian states based on the structures they'd left behind - bureaucracies not organic to African institutions, unbounded by popular restraints of any kind.