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"EXTREMELY poor societies…provide optimal breeding grounds for disease, terrorism and conflict." So said Barack Obama, arguing in favour of more development aid to poor countries. Mr Obama is not alone in regarding economic development as a weapon against terrorism. Hillary Clinton, America's secretary of state, has called development "an integral part of America's national security policy". The idea that poverty could be associated with terrorism is not implausible. If acts of terror are committed by people with little to lose, then it is reasonable to expect them to be carried out disproportionately by poor, ill-educated people with dismal economic prospects.

I've recently re-read the bestselling book Guns, Germs, and Steel by the American evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond. What strikes me is how Diamond, with his emphasis on geography and diseases, fails to explain the rise of the West and especially why English, not Arabic, Chinese, Sanskrit or Mayan, became the world's lingua franca. His most important flaw is his failure to explain how the Middle East went from being a global center of civilization to being the global center of anti-civilization it arguably is today. This was not caused by smallpox or because zebras are more difficult to domesticate than water buffaloes; it was caused by Islam, which remains the main cause of the backwardness of this region.

Eine Großmacht kann vieles überleben, aber keine „mittelmäßige Stimmung". Eine reiche Nation, die von dem angesammelten kulturellen Kapital einer glorreichen Vergangenheit lebt, kann ihrem Rendezvous mit dem Schicksal aus dem Weg gehen, aber nur eine bestimmte Zeit lang. Der Klang, den wir in Kairo hören konnten, ist der Glockenanschlag einer ausgehöhlten Supermacht.