The only truly sane monarch in antiquity was Alexander, the wild child, who came to within an inch of creating a world in which we now most wish we could live, one marked by community and not by conflict of cul¬tures. His only really rational successors were Mehmet the Conqueror and Genghis Khan. All were unquestionably destroyers, and all wrought terrible suffering in the world, but all three knew in their bones something that few others have seen or said and no others have been able to bring to reality. Can we dream their dream a bit?
We should be able to see their truth more clearly, with the hindsight of many centuries of recorded history and the accurate topography of modern cartography, and indeed, their truth is a simple one. The great fault line that runs across the landmass of the Old World, separating north and west from south and east, and occurring again in the geography of empires and wars of every generation since the rise of the Persian empire, has the ability to bring humankind to its ruin. In our own time, it has the potential to set loose unspeakable terrors.
Four human agglomerations
The fault line of geography has remained a fault line of peoples. Four human agglomerations divide the Eurasian landmass among them, while sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas stand dangerously outside the stories of those families. Americans—thought dangerous by many because of our self-satisfied exceptionalism—speak to the Europeans as to siblings or cousins, and Africans of the Sahara and the south are marginalized by all, their skin color a frivolous pretext for exclusion. Europeans, west Asians, south Asians, and east Asians compete over the right to define the main story of our species.9
The separate world of east Asia has mainly stood outside the Eurasian psychodrama and may well yet prevail over all its rivals. The two other boundaries of peoples, defining the two directions in which west Asians must look, have been killing fields and chasms of misunderstanding. The United States chose to go to war in 2001-2003 in both those regions.
Alexander had his chance.10 He was too young, too provincial (Macedonian, not Athenian or Corinthian), too libidinous, too fond of drink, too daring—too extreme in every way. Or at least that’s how we explain his ambition and his failure. And he conquered the Persian empire, only to die, deep inside Persian lands, too suddenly and too soon. His generals succeeded beyond what should have been their own wildest dreams in consolidating a remarkable amount of his power, and the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Asia succeeded in establishing Alexandrian kingdoms in lands that had never before thought of owing homage to the Greeks.