Gimme The Water

Longtime readers will be aware that I sometimes try my hand at writing fiction. I spare all of you my efforts in that regard because the bulk of it is simply awful. So awful that upon finishing some work and returning to it later I declare it unreadable and delete it immediately lest anyone actually blame me for it.

I have been professionally swamped and socially busy lately so writing cultural-legal-political commentary here has been enough of a challenge. Nevertheless I’ve happened on an idea that I enjoy enough to have revisited and find myself with a deep and abiding desire to return to it and enough quality to count as “merely bad.” My idea is set about two centuries in the future and therefore requires some consideration of what kind of history happens between now and the future. It’s not necessary for purposes of fiction that I pick a future timeline that will or even could actually come true, but I think it is necessary that it be plausible enough that a reader be willing to at least sustain a suspension of disbelief.

Future technologies play a role in my story, as do clashes of religious belief systems and geopolitics. I’m more worried about the plausibility of my future geopolitical timeline than I am about future technology. For instance, when looking at the future history underlying Star Trek, it’s easier for me to accept the idea of warp engines allowing faster-than-light space travel and transporter cells than the idea that nation-states on Earth would have dissolved into “factions” and the spiritually inspiring visit of Vulcans would have caused humans around the world to set aside their regional small-arms warfare between these “factions” and cooperatively knit into a global government.

Neither Star Trek‘s future politics nor its future technologies are realistic from a contemporary skeptic’s point of view, but the idea of miraculous future technology is easier to swallow than the idea of miraculous political behavior. At least for me. So when I try my hand at this, I’m not nearly as concerned that my science-fiction technology will seem silly or implausible as I am that the future history be silly or implausible. That’s where you come in, my friends — I’m asking you to tell me whether I’m so completely out of the range of what you would be willing to accept that you’d put down my book without finishing it, and if so what I might alter to support your ability to say to yourself, “It probably won’t be like this, but I could see how it could be.”

By the middle of the twenty-first century, reliable sources of fresh water will be at least as important as oil, and because water is so logistically difficult to move in useful quantities it necessarily requires seizure of resources geographically near the aggressor who finds it economically feasible to risk war in exchange for the possibility of gaining that resource. The idea of water as an object of future war is hardly original to me so I’m not worried about the plausibility of this.

For instance, Turkey controls most of the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, upon which Iraq depends for its survival. It seems at least within the range of plausibility that Iraq would engage in aggression to Turkey to secure the free flow of those rivers.

Similarly, Egypt has already made indications that it considers the free flow of Nile water a national security issue of sufficient importance that it would use its military to keep it secure. Conveniently for me, there are a number of nations further upstream from the Nile against whom Egypt might plausibly follow through on that threat.

And China controls at least some of the headwaters of the three major rivers of the Subcontinent, is actually already engaged in an effort to divert some of those waters to its thirsty arid northern industrial regions, and has a strong working alliance with Pakistan, which as an author I need only intensify a small amount before India could begin to plausibly consider aggression there.

My challenge is linking all of these things together into a chain of rival alliances forming between nations of sufficient complexity and geographic proximity, but also of a reasonable level of plausibility, that the igniting of a water war in one area would, in a manner similar to the tripwire network of alliances leading up to World War I, draw most of the world’s major powers into conflict with one another. Right now I’ve been sort of ambiguous about how it might be set up and I suppose for narrative purposes I don’t need to spell it all out in my writing — but I do want to have a more solid idea of that timeline at least for myself, so I can feel confident that I’m within the range of suspension of disbelief.

So if I work in to the exposition the idea that such a network of alliances got tripped and a series of regional wars got linked together into a global conflict, and leave it at that, is that enough for you?

There’s more. I’m presuming that the various global powers all find that they are more evenly matched than recent real-world conflicts will have shown. Much more like the first two world wars, my third world war will find the United States and Europe allied but seriously challenged in terms of logistics, manpower, and military strength by its rivals and will only overcome those challenges through technological innovation driven by the need to win the war. The use of nuclear fission weapons in my imagined World War 3 — in some cases seriously compromising the original object of aggression, access to fresh water — will both equalize the strength of the combatants and impel the need for resolution. I’m pretty confident that this would be acceptable to most readers.

Recall that the war I’m imagining will have been ignited by regional rivalries to claim access to sources of potable water. Use of nuclear weapons in the war will badly frighten pretty much everyone when it’s all over and make at least some of the lands from which that water is derived unusable. And as happened in the wake of world wars before (the Napoleonic Wars leading to the Concert of Europe, WWI leading to the League of Nations, and WWII leading to the UN) there will be a desire on the part of nearly all the nation-states to devise a means of using diplomacy to prevent a war like this from occurring again.

Now here’s where it gets dicey for me. Because the root cause of the war will have been sources of water, which are inherently regionalized, the diplomatic preventative will not be the creation of a single supernational diplomatic regime to resolve conflicts. Instead, the various belligerents will recognize the need to form superstates imposed atop existing national governments, initially for the limited purpose of fairly controlling access to and use of water among the various nation-states participating therein. These will form the foundation of newly-expanded political entities, which in some cases envelop and change the former alliances as new unified nation-states evolve out of the former regional rivals.

I don’t think this is implausible, because I see precedent for it in Europe. The UK, Germany, and France were great rivals and were periodically belligerent to one another for hundreds of years. Then they formed the core of a supernational entity for the common economic management of coal. That supernational entity led the way to the formation of the European Union, a more comprehensive political and economic binding together of former enemies. The idea that the EU will in turn lead to the creation of a single nation goes back at least to Winston Churchill’s vision of a “United States of Europe” and while getting there today still looks difficult, it is not implausible to imagine that one day, the Europeans will get there.

So I think that the formation of such superstates need not be confined to Europe, if I project far enough out in my future history and make World War 3 horrific enough to cause peoples to step back and, if only for a decade or so, put regional political or ethnic rivalries in perspective. Inevitably, another resource will become both important and scarce for these new superstates, and this will lead to further conflict.

And I’m sure that this will draw some criticism: what I see driving World War 4 will be competition for access to geosynchronous orbital space, which I expect will become of significant economic importance as technology advances. Right now there is an abundance of points from which space can be continually accessed, but already there is a need for orbital traffic control because of the many satellites orbiting the earth within a relatively small band of altitude. It isn’t hard to imagine a nation claiming that it has a zone of control of orbital space above its geographic borders just as today nations claim sovereignty over a zone of the seas near their geographic borders.

So I’m thinking World War 4 starts about a century after World War 3 resolves. It starts in near space rather than on the surface of the Earth, as the superstates variously probe or protect their orbital borders after good near earth orbit positions all become occupied and thus that valuable resource becomes scarce and therefore worth fighting over. As before, the war spreads from the initial spark of that contest for resources, and resolves after a ghastly cost in life and destruction, once again by way of a technological innovation that gives one side an advantage that the formerly-evenly-matched other side cannot overcome.

After World War 4 concludes, that’s when my story is set. And remember, I’m not shooting for a “Wow, that’s a really insightful prediction,” so much as “I can accept that as plausible enough to not distract me from the main story.” Are you buying it or are you rolling your eyes by now?