On losing control of the border

There's a depressing analysis on Nightwatch about the "cartel" warfare on the American border, where the Mexican military are proving unable to defend themselves, let alone control the gangs. Mr. McCleary speculates that the cartels are hoping to establish a lawless zone like the one the Taliban enjoy on the AfPak frontier.

This resonates because last night I finished reading Sam Huntington's splendid The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. A recurring theme in that book is that the Southwestern states of the United States have become a Latin American sub-nation with the potential to turn this country into what Huntington calls a "cleft nation."

This is an astonishing book. It was published in 1996, the year Osama bin Laden issued his little-noticed "declaration of war" against the United States, but it predicts and explains the bloody battles to come between Islam and the West. Some time ago I blogged about a later book by the same author that addressed this question more directly: Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity. Now we seem to be living the history that Sam Huntington foresaw. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford