The Self-Doubting Superpower
Most Americans think their country is in decline. In 2018, when the Pew Research Center asked Americans how they felt their country would perform in 2050, 54 percent of respondents agreed that the U.S. economy would be weaker. An even larger number, 60 percent, agreed that the United States would be less important in the world. This should not be surprising; the political atmosphere has been pervaded for some time by a sense that the country is headed in the wrong direction. According to a long-running Gallup poll, the share of Americans who are “satisfied” with the way things are going has not crossed 50 percent in 20 years. It currently stands at 20 percent.
Over the decades, one way of thinking about who would win the presidency was to ask: Who is the more optimistic candidate? From John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, the sunnier outlook seemed to be the winning ticket. But in 2016, the United States elected a politician whose campaign was premised on doom and gloom. Donald Trump emphasized that the U.S. economy was in a “dismal state,” that the United States had been “disrespected, mocked, and ripped off” abroad, and that the world was “a total mess.” In his inaugural address, he spoke of “American carnage.” His current campaign has reprised these core themes. Three months before declaring his candidacy, he released a video titled “A Nation in Decline.”
Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign was far more traditional. He frequently extolled the United States’ virtues and often recited that familiar line, “Our best days still lie ahead.” And yet, much of his governing strategy has been predicated on the notion that the country has been following the wrong course, even under Democratic presidents, even during the Obama-Biden administration. In an April 2023 speech, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, criticized “much of the international economic policy of the last few decades,” blaming globalization and liberalization for hollowing out the country’s industrial base, exporting American jobs, and weakening some core industries. Writing later in these pages, he worried that “although the United States remained the world’s preeminent power, some of its most vital muscles atrophied.” This is a familiar critique of the neoliberal era, one in which a few prospered but many were left behind.
It goes beyond mere critique. Many of the Biden administration’s policies seek to rectify the apparent hollowing out of the United States, promoting the logic that its industries and people need to be protected and assisted by tariffs, subsidies, and other kinds of support. In part, this approach may be a political response to the reality that some Americans have in fact been left behind and happen to live in crucial swing states, making it important to court them and their votes. But the remedies are much more than political red meat; they are far-reaching and consequential. The United States currently has the highest tariffs on imports since the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. Washington’s economic policies are increasingly defensive, designed to protect a country that has supposedly lost out in the last few decades.
A U.S. grand strategy that is premised on mistaken assumptions will lead the country and the world astray. On measure after measure, the United States remains in a commanding position compared with its major competitors and rivals. Yet it does confront a very different international landscape. Many powers across the globe have risen in strength and confidence. They will not meekly assent to American directives. Some of them actively seek to challenge the United States’ dominant position and the order that has been built around it. In these new circumstances, Washington needs a new strategy, one that understands that it remains a formidable power but operates in a far less quiescent world. The challenge for Washington is to run fast but not run scared. Today, however, it remains gripped by panic and self-doubt.
STILL NUMBER ONE
Despite all the talk of American dysfunction and decay, the reality is quite different, especially when compared with other rich countries. In 1990, the United States’ per capita income (measured in terms of purchasing power) was 17 percent higher than Japan’s and 24 percent higher than Western Europe’s. Today, it is 54 percent and 32 percent higher, respectively. In 2008, at current prices, the American and eurozone economies were roughly the same size. The U.S. economy is now nearly twice as large as the eurozone. Those who blame decades of American stagnation on Washington’s policies might be asked a question: With which advanced economy would the United States want to have swapped places over the last 30 years?
In terms of hard power, the country is also in an extraordinary position. The economic historian Angus Maddison argued that the world’s greatest power is often the one that has the strongest lead in the most important technologies of the time—the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, and the United States in the twentieth century. America in the twenty-first century might be even stronger than it was in the twentieth. Compare its position in, say, the 1970s and 1980s with its position today. Back then, the leading technology companies of the time—manufacturers of consumer electronics, cars, computers—could be found in the United States but also in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea. In fact, of the ten most valuable companies in the world in 1989, only four were American, and the other six were Japanese. Today, nine of the top ten are American.
What is more, the top ten most valuable U.S. technology companies have a total market capitalization greater than the combined value of the stock markets of Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. And if the United States utterly dominates the technologies of the present—centered on digitization and the Internet—it also seems poised to succeed in the industries of the future, such as artificial intelligence and bioengineering. In 2023, as of this writing, the United States has attracted $26 billion in venture capital for artificial intelligence startups, about six times as much as China, the next highest recipient. In biotech, North America captures 38 percent of global revenues while all of Asia accounts for 24 percent.
Of the ten most valuable companies in the world, nine are American.
In addition, the United States leads in what has historically been a key attribute of a nation’s strength: energy. Today, it is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas—larger even than Russia or Saudi Arabia. The United States is also massively expanding production of green energy, thanks in part to the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. As for finance, look at the list of banks designated “globally systemically important” by the Financial Stability Board, a Switzerland-based oversight body; the United States has twice as many such banks as the next country, China. The dollar remains the currency used in almost 90 percent of international transactions. Even though central banks’ dollar reserves have dropped in the last 20 years, no other competitor currency even comes close.
Finally, if demography is destiny, the United States has a bright future. Alone among the world’s advanced economies, its demographic profile is reasonably healthy, even if it has worsened in recent years. The U.S. fertility rate now stands around 1.7 children per woman, below the replacement level of 2.1. But that compares favorably with 1.5 for Germany, 1.1 for China, and 0.8 for South Korea. Crucially, the United States makes up for its low fertility through immigration and successful assimilation. The country takes in around one million legal immigrants every year, a number that fell during the Trump and COVID-19 years but has since rebounded. One in five of all people on earth who live outside their country of birth live in the United States, and its immigrant population is nearly four times that of Germany, the next-largest immigration hub. For that reason, whereas China, Japan, and Europe are projected to experience population declines in the coming decades, the United States should keep growing.
Of course, the United States has many problems. What country doesn’t? But it has the resources to solve these problems far more easily than most other countries. China’s plunging fertility rate, for example, the legacy of the one-child policy, is proving impossible to reverse despite government inducements of all kinds. And since the government wants to maintain a monolithic culture, the country is not going to take in immigrants to compensate. The United States’ vulnerabilities, by contrast, often have ready solutions. The country has a high debt load and rising deficits. But its total tax burden is low compared with those of other rich countries. The U.S. government could raise enough revenues to stabilize its finances and maintain relatively low tax rates. One easy step would be to adopt a value-added tax. A version of the VAT exists in every other major economy across the globe, often with rates around 20 percent. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a five percent VAT would raise $3 trillion over a decade, and a higher rate would obviously raise even more. This is not a picture of irremediable structural dysfunction that will lead inexorably to collapse.
BETWEEN WORLDS
Despite its strength, the United States does not preside over a unipolar world. The 1990s was a world without geopolitical competitors. The Soviet Union was collapsing (and soon its successor, Russia, would be reeling), and China was still an infant on the international stage, generating less than two percent of global GDP. Consider what Washington was able to do in that era. To liberate Kuwait, it fought a war against Iraq with widespread international backing, including diplomatic approval from Moscow. It ended the Yugoslav wars. It got the Palestine Liberation Organization to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel, and it convinced Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to make peace and shake hands on the White House lawn with the PLO’s leader, Yasser Arafat. In 1994, even North Korea seemed willing to sign on to an American framework and end its nuclear weapons program (a momentary lapse into amicable cooperation from which it quickly recovered). When financial crises hit Mexico in 1994 and East Asian countries in 1997, the United States saved the day by organizing massive bailouts. All roads led to Washington.
Today, the United States faces a world with real competitors and many more countries vigorously asserting their interests, often in defiance of Washington. To understand the new dynamic, consider not Russia or China but Turkey. Thirty years ago, Turkey was an obedient U.S. ally, dependent on Washington for its security and prosperity. Whenever Turkey went through one of its periodic economic crises, the United States helped bail it out. Today, Turkey is a much richer and more politically mature country, led by a strong, popular, and populist leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It routinely defies the United States, even when requests are made at the highest levels.
Washington was unprepared for this shift. In 2003, the United States planned a two-front invasion of Iraq—from Kuwait in the south and from Turkey in the north—but failed to secure Turkey’s support preemptively, assuming it would be able to get that country’s assent as it always had. In fact, when the Pentagon asked, the Turkish parliament declined, and the invasion had to proceed in a hasty and ill-planned manner that might have had something to do with how things later unraveled. In 2017, Turkey inked a deal to buy a missile system from Russia—a brazen move for a NATO member. Two years later, Turkey again thumbed its nose at the United States by attacking Kurdish forces in Syria, American allies who had just helped defeat the Islamic State there.
Scholars are debating whether the world is currently unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, and there are metrics one can use to make each case. The United States remains the single strongest country when adding up all hard-power metrics. For example, it has 11 aircraft carriers in operation, compared with China’s two. Watching countries such as India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey flex their muscles, one can easily imagine that the world is multipolar. Yet China is clearly the second-biggest power, and the gap between the top two and the rest of the world is significant: China’s economy and its military spending exceed those of the next three countries combined. The gap between the top two and all others was the principle that led the scholar Hans Morgenthau to popularize the term “bipolarity” after World War II. With the collapse of British economic and military power, he argued, the United States and the Soviet Union were leagues ahead of every other country. Extending that logic to today, one might conclude that the world is again bipolar.
But China’s power also has limits, derived from factors that go beyond demographics. It has just one treaty ally, North Korea, and a handful of informal allies, such as Russia and Pakistan. The United States has dozens of allies. In the Middle East, China is not particularly active despite one recent success in presiding over the restoration of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In Asia, it is economically ubiquitous but also draws constant pushback from countries such as Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea. And in recent years, Western countries have become wary of China’s growing strength in technology and economics and have moved to limit its access.
China’s example helps clarify that there is a difference between power and influence. Power is made up of hard resources—economic, technological, and military. Influence is less tangible. It is the ability to make another country do something that it otherwise would not have done. To put it crudely, it means bending another country’s policies in the direction you prefer. That is ultimately the point of power: to be able to translate it into influence. And by that yardstick, both the United States and China face a world of constraints.
Other countries have risen in terms of resources, fueling their confidence, pride, and nationalism. In turn, they are likely to assert themselves more forcefully on the world stage. That is true of the smaller countries surrounding China but also of the many countries that have long been subservient to the United States. And there is a new class of medium powers, such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia, that are searching for their own distinctive strategies. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has pursued a policy of “multi-alignment,” choosing when and where to make common cause with Russia or the United States. In the BRICS grouping, it has even aligned itself with China, a country with which it has engaged in deadly border skirmishes as recently as 2020.
In a 1999 article in these pages, “The Lonely Superpower,” the political scientist Samuel Huntington tried to look beyond unipolarity and describe the emerging world order. The term he came up with was “uni-multipolar,” an extremely awkward turn of phrase yet one that captured something real. In 2008, when I was trying to describe the emerging reality, I called it a “post-American world” because it struck me that the most salient characteristic was that everyone was trying to navigate the world as U.S. unipolarity began to wane. It still seems to be the best way to describe the international system.
THE NEW DISORDER
Consider the two great international crises of the moment, the invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war. In Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, his country was humiliated during the age of unipolarity. Since then, mainly as a result of rising energy prices, Russia has been able to return to the world stage as a great power. Putin has rebuilt the power of the Russian state, which can extract revenues from its many natural resources. And now he wants to undo the concessions Moscow made during the unipolar era, when it was weak. It has been seeking to reclaim those parts of the Russian Empire that are central to Putin’s vision of a great Russia—Ukraine above all else, but also Georgia, which it invaded in 2008. Moldova, where Russia already has a foothold in the breakaway Transnistria republic, could be next.
Putin’s aggression in Ukraine was premised on the notion that the United States was losing interest in its European allies and that they were weak, divided, and dependent on Russian energy. He gobbled up Crimea and the borderlands of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and then, just after the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bringing Russian gas to Germany, decided to frontally attack Ukraine. He hoped to conquer the country, thus reversing the greatest setback Russia had endured in the unipolar age. Putin miscalculated, but it was not a crazy move. After all, his previous incursions had been met with little resistance.
In the Middle East, the geopolitical climate has been shaped by Washington’s steady desire to withdraw from the region militarily over the last 15 years. That policy began under President George W. Bush, who was chastened by the fiasco of the war he had started in Iraq. It continued under President Barack Obama, who articulated the need to reduce the United States’ profile in the region so that Washington could take on the more pressing issue of China’s rise. This strategy was advertised as a pivot to Asia but also a pivot away from the Middle East, where the administration felt the United States was overinvested militarily. That shift was underscored by Washington’s sudden and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021.
The result has not been the happy formation of a new balance of power but rather a vacuum that regional players have aggressively sought to fill. Iran has expanded its influence, thanks to the Iraq war, which upset the balance of power between the region’s Sunnis and Shiites. With Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime toppled, Iraq was governed by its Shiite majority, many of whose leaders had close ties to Iran. This expansion of Iranian influence continued into Syria, where Tehran backed the government of Bashar al-Assad, allowing it to survive a brutal insurgency. Iran supported the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Israel’s occupied territories.
There is a difference between power and influence.
Rattled by all this, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and some other moderate Sunni states began a process of tacit cooperation with Iran’s other great enemy, Israel. That burgeoning alliance, with the 2020 Abraham Accords as an important milestone, seemed destined to culminate in the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The obstacle to such an alliance had always been the Palestinian issue, but the retreat of Washington and the advances of Tehran made the Arabs willing to ignore that once central issue. Watching closely, Hamas, an ally of Iran, chose to burn down the house, returning the group and its cause to the spotlight.
The most portentous challenge to the current international order comes in Asia, with the rise of Chinese power. This could produce another crisis—far bigger than the other two—if China were to test the resolve of the United States and its allies by trying to forcibly reunify Taiwan with the mainland. So far, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s hesitation about using military force serves as a reminder that his country, unlike Russia, Iran, and Hamas, gains much from being tightly integrated into the world and its economy. But whether this restraint will hold is an open question. And the increased odds of an invasion of Taiwan today compared with, say, 20 years ago are one more signal of the weakening of unipolarity and the rise of a post-American world.
Yet another indication of the United States’ reduced leverage in this emerging order is that informal security guarantees might give way to more formal ones. For decades, Saudi Arabia has lived under an American security umbrella, but it was a sort of gentleman’s agreement. Washington made no commitments or guarantees to Riyadh. Were the Saudi monarchy to be threatened, it had to hope that the U.S. president at the time would come to its rescue. In fact, in 1990, when Iraq menaced Saudi Arabia after invading Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush did come to the rescue with military force—but he was not required to do so by any treaty or agreement. Today, Saudi Arabia is feeling much stronger and is being courted actively by the other world power, China, which is its largest customer by far. Under its assertive crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom has become more demanding, asking Washington for a formal security guarantee like the one extended to NATO allies and the technology to build a nuclear industry. It remains unclear whether the United States will grant those requests—the question is tied in with a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel—but the very fact that the Saudi demands are being taken seriously is a sign of a changing power dynamic.
STAYING POWER
The international order that the United States built and sustained is being challenged on many fronts. But it remains the most powerful player in that order. Its share of global GDP remains roughly what it was in 1980 or 1990. Perhaps more significant, it has racked up even more allies. By the end of the 1950s, the “free world” coalition that fought and would win the Cold War was made up of the members of NATO—the United States, Canada, 11 Western European countries, Greece, and Turkey—plus Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Today, the coalition supporting Ukraine’s military or enforcing sanctions against Russia has expanded to include almost every country in Europe, as well as a smattering of other states. Overall, the “West Plus” encompasses about 60 percent of the world’s GDP and 65 percent of global military spending.
The challenge of combating Russian expansionism is real and formidable. Before the war, the Russian economy was about ten times the size of Ukraine’s. Its population is almost four times larger. Its military-industrial complex is vast. But its aggression cannot be allowed to succeed. One of the core features of the liberal international order put in place after World War II has been that borders changed by brute military force are not recognized by the international community. Since 1945, there have been very few successful acts of aggression of this sort, in marked contrast to before then, when borders around the world changed hands routinely because of war and conquest. Russia’s success in its naked conquest would shatter a hard-won precedent.
The China challenge is a different one. No matter its exact economic trajectory in the years ahead, China is a superpower. Its economy already accounts for close to 20 percent of global GDP. It is second only to the United States in military spending. Although it does not have nearly as much clout as the United States on the global stage, its ability to influence countries around the world has increased, thanks in no small measure to the vast array of loans, grants, and assistance it has offered. But China is not a spoiler state like Russia. It has grown rich and powerful within the international system and because of it; it is far more uneasy about overturning that system.
More broadly, China is searching for a way to expand its power. If it believes that it can find no way to do so other than to act as a spoiler, then it will. The United States should accommodate legitimate Chinese efforts to enhance its influence in keeping with its rising economic clout while deterring illegitimate ones. Over the past few years, Beijing has seen how its overly aggressive foreign policy has backfired. It has now pulled back on its assertive “Wolf Warrior diplomacy,” and some of the arrogance of Xi’s earlier pronouncements about a “new era” of Chinese dominance has given way to a recognition of America’s strengths and China’s problems. At least for tactical reasons, Xi seems to be searching for a modus vivendi with America. In September 2023, he told a visiting group of U.S. senators, “We have 1,000 reasons to improve China-U.S. relations, but not one reason to ruin them.”
Regardless of China’s intentions, the United States has significant structural advantages. It enjoys a unique geographic and geopolitical leg up. It is surrounded by two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors. China, on the other hand, is rising in a crowded and hostile continent. Every time it flexes its muscles, it alienates one of its powerful neighbors, from India to Japan to Vietnam. Several countries in the region—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea—are actual treaty allies with the United States and host U.S. troops. These dynamics hem China in.
Washington’s alliances in Asia and elsewhere act as a bulwark against its adversaries. For that reality to hold, the United States must make shoring up its alliances the centerpiece of its foreign policy. Indeed, that has been at the heart of Biden’s approach to foreign policy. He has repaired the ties that frayed under the Trump administration and strengthened those that didn’t. He has put in place checks on Chinese power and bolstered alliances in Asia yet reached out to build a working relationship with Beijing. He reacted to the Ukraine crisis with a speed and skill that must have surprised Putin, who now faces a West that has weaned itself from Russian energy and instituted the most punishing sanctions against a great power in history. None of these steps obviate the need for Ukraine to win on the battlefield, but they create a context in which the West Plus has substantial leverage and Russia faces a bleak long-term future.
THE DANGER OF DECLINISM
The greatest flaw in Trump’s and Biden’s approaches to foreign policy—and here the two do converge—derives from their similarly pessimistic outlooks. Both assume that the United States has been the great victim of the international economic system that it created. Both assume that the country cannot compete in a world of open markets and free trade. It is reasonable to put in place some restrictions on China’s access to the United States’ highest-tech exports, but Washington has gone much further, levying tariffs on its closest allies on commodities and goods from lumber to steel to washing machines. It has imposed requirements that U.S. government funds be used to “buy American.” Those provisions are even more restrictive than tariffs. Tariffs raise the cost of imported goods; “buy American” prevents foreign goods from being bought at any price. Even smart policies such as the push toward green energy are undermined by pervasive protectionism that alienates the United States’ friends and allies.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organization, has argued that rich countries are now engaging in acts of supreme hypocrisy. Having spent decades urging the developing world to liberalize and participate in the open world economy and castigating countries for protectionism, subsidies, and industrial policies, the Western world has stopped practicing what it has long preached. Having grown to wealth and power under such a system, rich countries have decided to pull up the ladder. In her words, they “now no longer want to compete on a level playing field and would prefer instead to shift to a power-based rather than a rules-based system.”
U.S. officials spend much time and energy talking about the need to sustain the rules-based international system. At its heart is the open trading framework put in place by the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade of 1947. The statesmen who came out of World War II saw where competitive nationalism and protectionism had led and were determined to prevent the world from going back down that path. And they succeeded, creating a world of peace and prosperity that expanded to the four corners of the earth. The system of free trade they designed allowed poor countries to grow rich and powerful, making it less attractive for everyone to wage war and try to conquer territory.
China is not a spoiler state like Russia.
There is more to the rules-based order than trade. It also involves international treaties, procedures, and norms—a vision of a world that is not characterized by the laws of the jungle but rather by a degree of order and justice. Here as well, the United States has been better at preaching than practicing. The Iraq war was a gross violation of the United Nations’ principles against unprovoked aggression. Washington routinely picks and chooses which international conventions it observes and which it ignores. It criticizes China for violating the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea when Beijing claims sovereignty over waters in East Asia—never mind that Washington itself has never ratified that treaty. When Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal with Iran signed by all the other great powers, despite confirmation that Tehran was adhering to its terms, he wrecked the hope of global cooperation on a key security challenge. He then maintained secondary sanctions to force those other great powers not to trade with Iran, abusing the power of the dollar in a move that accelerated efforts in Beijing, Moscow, and even European capitals to find alternatives to the dollar payment system. American unilateralism was tolerated in a unipolar world. Today, it is creating the search—even among the United States’ closest allies—for ways to escape, counter, and challenge it.
Much of the appeal of the United States has been that the country was never an imperial power on the scale of the United Kingdom or France. It was itself a colony. It sits far from the main arenas of global power politics, and it entered the twentieth century’s two world wars late and reluctantly. It has rarely sought territory when it has ventured abroad. But perhaps above all, after 1945, it articulated a vision of the world that considered the interests of others. The world order it proposed, created, and underwrote was good for the United States but also good for the rest of the world. It sought to help other nations rise to greater wealth, confidence, and dignity. That remains the United States’ greatest strength. People around the world may want the loans and aid they can get from China, but they have a sense that China’s worldview is essentially to make China great. Beijing often talks about “win-win cooperation.” Washington has a track record of actually doing it.
KEEP THE FAITH
If the United States reneges on this broad, open, generous vision of the world out of fear and pessimism, it will have lost a great deal of its natural advantages. For too long, it has rationalized individual actions that are contrary to its avowed principles as the exceptions it must make to shore up its own situation and thereby bolster the order as a whole. It breaks a norm to get a quick result. But you cannot destroy the rules-based system in order to save it. The rest of the world watches and learns. Already, countries are in a competitive race, enacting subsidies, preferences, and barriers to protect their own economies. Already, countries violate international rules and point to Washington’s hypocrisy as justification. This pattern unfortunately includes the previous president’s lack of respect for democratic norms. Poland’s ruling party spun Trump-like conspiracy theories after it lost a recent election, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s claims of election fraud drove his supporters to mount a January 6–style attack on his country’s capital.
The most worrying challenge to the rules-based international order does not come from China, Russia, or Iran. It comes from the United States. If America, consumed by exaggerated fears of its own decline, retreats from its leading role in world affairs, it will open up power vacuums across the globe and encourage a variety of powers and players to try to step into the disarray. We have seen what a post-American Middle East looks like. Imagine something similar in Europe and Asia, but this time with great powers, not regional ones, doing the disrupting, and with seismic global consequences. It is disturbing to watch as parts of the Republican Party return to the isolationism that characterized the party in the 1930s, when it resolutely opposed U.S. intervention even as Europe and Asia burned.
Since 1945, America has debated the nature of its engagement with the world, but not whether it should be engaged to begin with. Were the country to truly turn inward, it would mark a retreat for the forces of order and progress. Washington can still set the agenda, build alliances, help solve global problems, and deter aggression while using limited resources—well below the levels that it spent during the Cold War. It would have to pay a far higher price if order collapsed, rogue powers rose, and the open world economy fractured or closed.
The United States has been central to establishing a new kind of international relations since 1945, one that has grown in strength and depth over the decades. That system serves the interests of most countries in the world, as well as those of the United States. It faces new stresses and challenges, but many powerful countries also benefit from peace, prosperity, and a world of rules and norms. Those challenging the current system have no alternative vision that would rally the world; they merely seek a narrow advantage for themselves. And for all its internal difficulties, the United States above all others remains uniquely capable and positioned to play the central role in sustaining this international system. As long as America does not lose faith in its own project, the current international order can thrive for decades to come.
弛禁派和严禁派
鸦片泛滥导致了一系列危及国家根本的问题。
一、国家安全问题。
林则徐在给道光皇帝的上书中提到鸦片流毒会使“中原几无可以御敌之兵，且无可以充饷之银。”
二、经济衰退问题。
内部，因为贫穷，清朝百姓的消费能力本来就弱，吸鸦片的又多是底层百姓，仅有的一点钱拿去吸鸦片，消费市场更加萎缩。
外部，鸦片交易导致大量白银外流。从1821年到1840年间，清朝五分之一的白银流出国外，直接导致各地银价上涨。如在山东，乾隆年间1450文铜钱兑换一两银子，到1800年需要1650文，到1830年升到2700文。
鸦片贸易中有一个至今也没有合理解释的奇特原因，世界各国都有鸦片贸易，但都没成气候，为什么唯独在清朝受到社会各阶层的疯狂喜爱？取得巨大的商业成功？多年以后，鲁迅先生试着解释这个现象，说：“鸦片非常适合中国的国民性，它能帮助国人扩大这种国民性的麻醉效果。”这个见解显然是文人意绪，没有可靠的证据来证实，其中不乏对中国人的族群歧视。有兴趣的朋友可以研究一下这个问题，个人觉得可以从清朝人口基数大，吸鸦片的人口相应较多的角度来研究。
中国不是产银国。明清以前，中国的货币主要是铜钱。大航海时代，西班牙等欧洲国家在南美开采银矿，然后用银元到中国来买茶叶、瓷器、丝绸到欧洲销售，挣了钱又投入南美开矿。中国因此反而成了拥有最多银子的国家，货币也转为银本位。老百姓平常只有铜钱，交税则必须用银子，银价飞涨，直接加重老百姓的负担。清朝皇帝不像明朝皇帝随便增加赋税，农民的税费负担是中国历史上最轻的。改革开放后，田纪云副总理曾经组织过一次全国农民税费负担情况调研，结果发现比清朝农民还重。
三、吏治腐败问题。
清朝官员本来就腐败，鸦片贸易更加恶化了这个问题。
四、社会治安问题。
这个很容易理解，大批底层穷人吸食鸦片，由此滋生的各种犯罪行为恶化了社会治安。
乾隆皇帝晚年为追求十全老人的虚荣，四处惹事，大肆挥霍，等到平定白莲教川楚之乱后，国库几乎空了。嘉庆、道光、咸丰都是穷皇帝，特别节俭，特别抠门，道光皇帝的龙袍都是缝缝补补又一年。没钱，没办法。
白花花的银子就这么哗哗地流，皇帝心痛啊，这鸦片不禁不行啊，从雍正到嘉庆，几个皇帝都没办法禁止。到了道光时期，大家也都同意禁烟，但对怎么禁，则形成了驰禁派与严禁派两种意见。
弛禁派的意见是：一、体制内严禁，凡是吃皇粮的一律严禁；二、民间放任自流；三、鸦片交 易合法化，既可以增加国家税收，又可以规范管理。四、在国内种植鸦片，防止白银外流。
严禁派的意见比较简单，就是严厉处罚买卖和吸鸦片的人，彻底消除鸦片消费市场。
仅从操作层面上来看，弛禁派的做法要复杂一些，见效的时间也要长一些。但更接近现实；严禁派简单一些，见效更快一些，但有许多想当然的水分在里面，看似简单，其实做不到。
两派各有各的理由，道光皇帝最终选择了严禁派，有理由相信道光皇帝是心里急，想尽早解决这个问题，被严禁派慷慨激昂的言辞所打动才做出了这个选择。
1838年11月15日，道光皇帝任严禁派代表人物湖广总督林则徐为钦差大臣，赴广州禁烟。
道光与林则徐蜡像
英国方面呢？
此时驻广州的是1836年12月上任的义律。义律本人非常厌恶鸦片贸易，认为这是英国的耻辱和罪恶，更不要说鸦片走私买卖。但是鸦片贸易并不违反英国法律，作为英国政府官员，他只能在他的权力范围内尽量约束鸦片走私商人。义律多次按照清朝的规矩，以卑微的口气写信给两广总督邓廷桢，恳求当面会谈包括鸦片在内的贸易事宜，可是，按照清朝的制度，邓廷桢不能也不敢和义律面谈。这种老死不相往来的做法，导致许多问题得不到及时的解决，许多想法得不到交流讨论，出现争端时双方都不知道对方怎么想怎么做。
是不是很奇葩？
虎门销烟
林则徐是福建省侯官县人，出身贫穷，通过科举考试进入官场，按当时的标准来说，是个忠君爱民，廉洁奉公的能臣、清官。四处为官，都能造福一方，老百姓称之为“林青天”。这可不是小说里编出来的，是林则徐任江苏按察使时真正发生过的。从林则徐接手禁烟这件事上也可以看出来，谁都知道禁烟难，禁了这么多年都没能禁止，亲朋好友都劝他别去，弄不好会有杀头的危险，林则徐的回答是“苟利国家生死以，岂因祸福避趋之”。这种舍生取义的士人风范感人至深。
按照旧的传统，道光皇帝也是明君。在首崇满人的祖制里，仍然重用林则徐，赏赐黄马褂、紫禁城骑马，这是许多满人亲贵都难以得到的殊荣。
穿黄马褂的林则徐
1839年3月，钦差大臣林则徐到达广州，严正声明：“若鸦片一日不绝，本大人一日不回，誓与此事相始终，断无中止之理。”接着从三个方面开始禁烟：一、对内，消除鸦片消费市场；二、对外，恩威并施，收缴鸦片，杜绝源头；三、了解洋夷情况，积极备战。
发现里面存在的问题了吗？上面说过，走私鸦片泛滥是由东印度公司和清朝官员的腐败造成的，这里却没有提到对官员腐败的整顿。
据说林则徐到广州后，接到许多举报官员参与走私鸦片的信件，林则徐当众焚烧了这些信件，表示既往不咎。就算这是真的，但对禁烟开始后如果还有官员参与鸦片走私，该如何惩治呢？不能惩治这些官员，想彻底禁烟是不可能的。林则徐不可能自己天天开着缉私船出海去巡查啊。
罂粟花
有两个原因让林则徐这样做。一个是林则徐知道自己治理不了这些官员的腐败。那么多腐败官员不可能全都抓起来，那样的话，就没人做事了。一个是林则徐认为只要从源头上控制了鸦片，取消了鸦片贸易，这些官员也就没有腐败的机会和环境了。
接下来，林则徐开始紧锣密鼓地实施禁烟。首先是宣传造势，在广州城内广发告示，劝喻百姓不要再吸鸦片，如果再犯将加以严惩。然后将几个鸦片贩子明正典刑，杀鸡给猴看。派兵出去收缴鸦片烟具，关闭烟馆。
林则徐这样做算仁厚的了，没有像严禁派中的强硬人物龚自珍所建议的那样，连吸鸦片的人也要杀。
怎样保证禁烟令持续有效呢？连坐。官员、士绅、士兵、百姓实行五人连坐制度。一人吸鸦片，五人受惩罚。
和大多数清朝官员一样，林则徐对洋夷也不了解，马上要和洋夷打交道，必须有所了解才行。林则徐开始恶补这方面的知识，派人从澳门购买各种报纸、书籍，组织幕僚翻译整理，汇集成册。其中有传教士写的《对华鸦片的罪恶》，翻译的《万国律法》；有英国人写的《四洲志》《华事夷言》等。魏源就是在《四洲志》的基础上综合其他材料，编辑整理成《海国图志》，在清朝产生了一些影响，在日本则产生了巨大的影响。
魏源与海国图志
说林则徐是“中国开眼看世界的第一人”的原因就在这里，但这么说不准确，十三行的商人早就开眼看过了，准确地说，林则徐是中国官员中开眼看世界的第一人。
林则徐以他恶补得来的洋夷的情况开始备战。
一、购置了一些洋枪洋炮、一艘洋军舰。这笔钱是摊派给广州商人处的，后来林则徐因此受到言官弹劾。
二、由士绅们兴办乡勇团练。
就这么两条，是不是有些轻率、托大？是。因为林则徐得到了一些错误情报和信息，他据此做出了错误的判断。这些情报很奇特，在今天没人信，那时人还真信。
乡勇
来看看有哪些？
一、英国国内是禁烟的，这些洋夷是非法之徒，可以告诉英国政府处置他们国王；二、洋夷离不开茶叶和大黄，只要停止供应这两样东西，洋夷都会便秘而死；三、洋夷不可怕，就算他们炮舰厉害，但只要上岸，就能消灭他们。因为他们的腿不能打弯。
第一个情报就错了，估计林则徐是把合法贸易和走私贸易弄混了。下面两个更离谱了，第二个情报应该是清朝和草原游牧族群打交道得出的经验，林则徐不知道英国不是草原大漠，而是和清朝一样什么都有的国家。第三个说不清楚是怎么来的。
大黄
林则徐在给道光皇帝的上书中信誓旦旦地向道光皇帝保证，只要断绝供应，洋人就会不战而败。林则徐没有欺君的意思，他是真正相信这些消息。
这就是“真诚的无知”。鸦片战争是清朝第一次面对西方的武力入侵，绝大部分文武官员都能够本着忠君的道德规范来捍卫皇帝的尊严和利益，第一次鸦片战争的惨烈是最好的说明。但他们确实对西方世界无知，他们所表现出来的愚昧顽固，和他们所处的时代有关，他们认为这些办法是最好的办法。不要拿今天的知识和标准去指责他们。我们今天看起心酸、愤懑，有些还可笑，是我们用今天的三观去看待古人的行为，这对古人不公平。学习历史要回到当时的环境，这样才知道古人为什么那么做，才能得到教训，知道今天不能这么做。其实今天愚昧无知的人不一定就比清朝少，说不定还多得多。
商人在中国历史上的地位从来都不高，林则徐把洋商等同于本地商人，对治理这些洋商信心满满。他基于自己的判断要求洋夷交出鸦片。上面说过，他弄不清楚合法贸易和走私贸易的区别，就按国籍把这些商人分开，要求他们交出鸦片，并且写下保证书，保证以后不再进行鸦片贸易。按照清国律令，这个要求合法合理。
林则徐还告诉洋夷，本大人旧居闽海，早就知道你们洋夷守信用，写了保证就不会再犯，本钦差可以既往不咎。
清朝禁烟对这些洋夷来说，早已经不是新鲜事了，这些洋夷也不在意，以为林则徐和以前的禁烟官员一样，就是想要些孝敬而已，所以也不大理会这件事。
林则徐下令封锁十三行，所有清国雇员立刻撤出，清兵日夜围困，断水停粮，直至交出鸦片。包括从澳门赶来处理危机的英国商务监督义律在内的350多名英国人被封锁在内。
林则徐这么做也是符合清朝律令规矩的，没有抓几个洋商来杀了，已算是仁至义尽。但英国人不这么看啊，英国人认为清朝有两个地方冒犯了英国。首先是把英国的官员给监禁了，其次是非法禁锢英国国民，而且还断水停粮。
义律当时就写信问林则徐，“你这是要开战吗？”
义律和林则徐都觉得对方脑子进水了，咋这么不讲理呢？两个不同的文明怎么讲理啊，讲起来也是鸡同鸭讲。
林则徐和邓廷桢商量，这些洋夷不讲理，我们干脆让皇帝给英国女王下道“谕令”，让女王收拾这些人。“谕令”起草好后报道光皇帝，道光皇帝觉得写得很好，同意下旨给英女王。
林则徐这封信都写了些什么呢？照今天的标准话，那是相当的雷人。
首先是赞颂我天朝大皇帝是天下共主，洪福齐天，仙福永享之类。然后表扬英国表现不错，几代国君都很恭顺，都派人来朝贡，所以大皇帝恩赏你们作买卖发财致富，你要感激天恩。
接下来开始讲道理，你们番邦有些歹徒忘恩负义，把毒品鸦片卖到这里来，我知道你是不允许你的百姓抽鸦片的，这事你得管管。我知道你一向仰慕天国，一定可以管好你的臣民。你要敬畏天朝的法律。
天朝恩赏给你们的东西，都是可以让你们赚钱的好东西。如果天朝不是出于好心，不卖茶叶和大黄给你们，你们还有活路吗？天朝要不是体谅爱惜你们，早就闭关绝市了。你们赶紧铲除鸦片改种庄稼，这才是仁政，才会蒙上天祝福保佑。你要是不听，后果非常严重。
最后命令英女王，接到此令后立即执行，不可延误。
林则徐写给英女王的信，中英文
如果林则徐了解现代国家体制，会写出这么一封荒唐愚昧的信吗？肯定不会。林则徐的学问才华在当时是佼佼者，换成其他人来写，还写不出这么一封信。
皇帝同意了，林则徐就找人翻译。先是让幕僚袁德辉翻译。翻译好后，林则徐不放心，找来两个洋人把英文翻译回汉文，再来对照，确保袁德辉翻译的没问题。最后，找了一个名叫希尔Hill的英国水手来看看这信有没有问题。
希尔一看就笑喷了，林则徐看他发笑，赶紧问他是不是写得不合适，希尔不敢说实话，胡乱说是有几个单词不准确才发笑，蒙混过去了。这时是1839年12月16日。
林则徐觉得义律不靠谱，没有把信交给义律转交，而是在第二年1月18号把信交给英国船“担麻士葛”号船主带回英国。这个船主还真把这封信带回去交给英国外交部，可是外交部拒绝接收，这是外交礼仪和程序的问题。英国和清朝没有外交关系，这封信虽然是清朝官方文件，但却是由民间人士转交，不符合规定。这个船主很仗义，你不收我就把信交给《泰晤士报》，发表在报纸上你总看得见。《泰晤士报》全文登发，英国人把这看成是一个笑话，有评价说：“林则徐这种无力的恐吓看起来真是好笑。”
担麻士葛号
林则徐在外面字斟句酌地写信，被围困在十三行里的英国商人则受不了饥渴和恐惧，他们为什么不交出鸦片呢？因为太多了。这些人判断错了形势，在清朝争论驰禁还是严禁时，他们以为鸦片贸易要合法化了，囤积了大量鸦片。另外来做贸易的英国公司是股份制，这些商人只是股东之一，交出鸦片，他们马上就破产了，回去怎么向其他股东交待？
清朝官府可以随意收缴商人产品产业，英国官府没有这个权力，义律也拿这些商人没办法，但总不能困死在十三行里啊。义律就提出个建议，以英国政府的名义，让商人交出鸦片，并保证能得到相应的赔偿。英国商人这才交出了鸦片，共计20283箱。林则徐解除了对十三行的围困。
隐患就出在这里，林则徐是从英国政府外交官义律手上接收的这批鸦片。对英国来说，这是公然冒犯了英国的尊严，英国政府的理解是清朝通过威胁手段，胁迫英国外交代表屈服。当然，林则徐是意识不到这一点的。
不光如此，林则徐还大摆宴席犒赏这些英国商人，奖励每人五斤茶叶。这是当初林则徐的承诺。这里又出现了一个理解上的冲突，后来在英国国会作证的鸦片商人宣称，他们把林则徐说的奖励理解为是按当时的鸦片最低市价，一箱五百两银子作赔偿。南京条约谈判时英国坚持要求赔偿被没收的鸦片，源头就在这里。
1839年6月3日开始，林则徐禁烟行动中最辉煌的虎门销烟出现了，至当月25日结束，共销毁两百三十七万六千二百五十四斤鸦片。当地官员百姓和除英国人以外的一些洋商、传教士、官员都纷纷前来观看。
可是，鸦片走私断绝了么？没有，反而价格高涨，最高时达到一箱三千两的天价。
虎门销烟，举国欢庆，都没有意识到危险即将来临。
战争爆发
义律先写信给外相巴麦尊，说中国已经对英国官员和臣民犯下了严重的战争罪行，用突然而残酷的方式强迫英国交出财产。建议英国对这种暴行作出迅速而沉重的打击。
然后劝告英商不要签署保证字据，因为按清朝的连坐制度，一旦有一个船员私藏鸦片都可能导致整条船上的人受到牵连。美商当时已经全部按照清朝官府的要求签署了保证书，英商可以通过美商作为中间商同十三行进行交易。
义律带领英商船队退出广州，停泊在香港海面。英商不签字，林则徐也不敢掉以轻心，加紧战备工作，同时下令百姓不得出售食物和水给英商，想以此逼迫英商签字。香港百姓很听话，不光不卖食物，还往井里下毒。
1839年6月，在香港尖沙咀，酒后的英国水手和尖沙咀村民打起来了，村民林维喜伤重致死。人命关天，义律知道事情闹大了，打算赔钱私了。清朝是允许拿钱偿命的，但这次林则徐不同意，严令义律交出凶手，义律坚决不干，说他有领事裁判权，这事归他管。义律不交出凶手，是他觉得清朝断案方式太野蛮，公诉人、警长、陪审团、法官全都由官老爷一个人包办，不认罪还要打板子。他要保护英国人的人权，自己在船上按照英国法律开堂审问，查出五个有关联的罪犯，罚款判刑，押回英国服刑。
林则徐不知道什么是领事裁判权，也不敢贸然上船抓人，担心引起更大的纠纷。林则徐内心不想开战，因为清朝太穷，负担不起战争费用。回去后就命令幕僚去查万国公法，同时还让一个美国医生帮着查。一查之下，根本没这说法，义律就是在忽悠。林则徐大怒，马上命令义律交人，杀人偿命。义律告诉他，罪犯我查出来押送回英国去了。
因为这件事，英国人在香港待不下去了，全跑澳门去了。林则徐下令军队进澳门，驱逐英国人。
澳门不是归葡萄牙管么？林则徐怎么敢派军队进澳门？这不是对葡萄牙宣战吗？
澳门是笔糊涂账，到底是租借？还是割让？清朝和葡萄牙之间从来没有正式的官方说法。清朝没人理会这事，葡萄牙也装糊涂，从明朝时就这么不明不白地继续占着澳门。一直到1887年两国才签署了租借条约。
澳门局部
1839年8月，清军进入澳门，撤出清国雇员，断水停粮。英国人全体上船出海，躲在海面上。林则徐宣布，只要有英国人上岸，立刻格杀勿论。
9月5日，英船上的粮食和淡水出现紧缺，义律派传教士跟林则徐谈判，要求供应粮食和淡水，请求允许英商贸易。林则徐当然不答应。下午，义律发出最后通牒，包围英国商船的清国军队不为所动（清朝没有最后通牒的概念），英国军舰开火，鸦片战争第一场战斗爆发。
第一场战斗
战后双方都宣称取得了辉煌胜利，林则徐应该是在说谎，因为英国人最后都上岸了，重新补给了粮食和淡水。义律没有得到授权，不能向清国宣战，他命令所有英商不得再和清朝作任何买卖，直到问题解决。事实上，英商也做不成买卖，都还没签字。
经过第一次交战后，双方都没有扩大战事，处于僵持状态。打破这种状态的是来了新的英国商船。
10月，来了一艘英国商船，船长是个贵格教派的教徒，（贵格教派主张信徒平等，宣称爱与包容等）这个船长反对一切与鸦片有关的贸易行为，认为鸦片就是毒品。他告诉义律自己要和清朝作买卖，按照英国法律，义律没办法限制他的自由，英国和清朝都没正式宣战，没进入战争状态。
这船长到了广州后向清朝官府提出允许他们在穿鼻岛上卸货。在清朝官员看来，这算是弃暗投明，欢迎欢迎，尽管用就是。紧接着又有两艘商船跟着在穿鼻岛下货。
义律担心新来的商船贸然和清朝签字保证不销售鸦片，更担心在澳门滞留的商人眼红，也要求签字继续贸易，于是下令封锁珠江出海口，这是单方面进入战争状态。两国之间并没宣战，他却界定了封锁线
11月3号，又一艘英国商船进来，无视义律划定的封锁线，驶向穿鼻岛。英军战舰开炮警告，清军水师前往护卫这艘英国商船，开炮还击。第二次战斗开始。
战后双方仍然各自号称大捷。
这里出现了林则徐谎报军情一事。林则徐给道光皇帝连报七捷，全是虚报战功。理由是：一、义律只有三艘军舰，林则徐七战七捷，义律的三艘军舰完好无损；二、七捷毙敌无数，但没有一个洋人首级被示众或者被献功；三、林则徐日记里记录的前线报来的战功，和他上报朝廷的对不上。
林则徐以报喜不报忧的官场传统和为君分忧的臣子心态撒谎，他以为是忠君，其实是真正的欺君误国。
首先，这些捷报严重误导了道光皇帝和朝廷决策。对英国人武力对抗一事，朝廷当作国内民变一样看待，都是犯上作乱。处理的方式仍然是传统的剿与抚。林则徐的谎报诱导了道光皇帝和朝廷剿的决心。洋人如此不堪，剿灭算了。
其次，七战七捷成就了林则徐的英名，却误导了社会。士人、百姓都认为要不是琦善当汉奸，林大帅早把那些洋夷灭了。
其实林则徐还有一个错误行为。鸦片战争后，叶名深接任两广总督，曾向林则徐请教对付洋夷的办法，林则徐给他出了个建议，叫“民心可用”。叶名深到广州后，真就鼓动民心，组织百姓阻止英国人进入广州城。林则徐也在福州用同样的办法阻止洋人进入福州城。他们心里真的是一点诚实守信的精神都没有，换来的是洋人更加严厉的惩罚和更多的索取。
果然，1840年1月，清朝宣布永远和英国断绝贸易关系。这是确定要剿了。
2月，英国政府任命懿律和义律为对清贸易正、副全权代表；懿律为在清英军总司令。懿律是义律的表兄。
4月，英国国会展开激烈辩论，讨论清朝局势。在广州的英国鸦片走私商人集资两万英镑交给“铁头老鼠”渣甸，让他专程赶回英国游说造势。渣甸一直就盼着英国和清朝开打，让鸦片贸易合法化。六年前鼓动律劳卑闹事的就是他。
国会里正反双方激烈交锋，反方理由是，用军队保护走私是英国的耻辱。没有说鸦片，英国不认为鸦片是毒品。反对吸鸦片的是教会势力，也是反方的主要势力。正方理由是，清朝禁烟过程中执法不公平，侵犯英国人的人权。正方主要发言人是小斯当东，就是曾经得到乾隆皇帝赏赐的那个小男孩，12岁时就与中国结下了不解之缘，后来成为英国的中国问题专家。他的发言极大地影响了最后的投票结果。
正方双方辩论完后，国会议员投票表决，271票对262票，以9票的简单多数通过对清朝的无理行为进行军事报复和索赔。只是报复性惩罚，没有宣战。
6月底，懿律率领48艘英国舰船（其中16艘风帆战舰，4艘最先进的蒸汽动力战舰，28艘运输舰）及4000名由孟加拉军团、喀麦隆军团和爱尔兰军团组成的部队从印度出发到达中国海面，标志着第一次鸦片战争正式开始。
林则徐也在加强战备。整修炮台、操练士兵，调配物资。可能林则徐熟知三国，学习东吴弄了个铁锁横江来阻拦英舰，还有放小船火烧敌舰的战术安排。明朝闭关锁国之后，官方再也没有熟悉海战的将领了，只有郑芝龙、郑成功父子这样的海盗。清朝连这样的海盗都没有。鸦片战争期间的战斗方式，就是清朝人固守炮台，城池，英国战舰用大跑轰打，轰到清军无抵抗力了才上岸插旗。
一、鸦片的来历
毫无疑问，鸦片战争作为中国近代史的源头，它总会引起中国人的痛楚:屈辱的时代由此开始。然而，这并非事情的全部。
鸦片，是罂粟的初级产品。而罂粟确实上帝赐予人类的一个大家族:它有28属，250多种；主要生长在北半球几乎整个温带和亚热带地区。而这个地方几乎是全人类文明的发祥地。在瑞士发掘的公元前4000年新石器时代屋村遗址中，考古学家便发现了“鸦片罂粟”的种子和果实的遗迹，并且属于人工杂交种植的品种。到公元前3400年，如今伊拉克地盘的两河流域，人们已经大面积地种植这种作物了，而且给它以“快乐植物(joy plant)”的美名。至少在公元前2160年，鸦片已经成为兽医和妇科药品。已经发掘的公元前1500年古埃及墓葬中，“底比斯鸦片”已经属于高级品牌。延续到公元前300年，古希腊已经把鸦片作为普遍的饮料。在《圣经》与荷马的《奥德赛》里，鸦片被描述成为“忘忧药”，上帝也使用它。至少在公元前两世纪的古希腊名医加仑(Galen)，就记录了鸦片可以治疗的疾病:头痛、目眩、耳聋、癫痫、中风、弱视、支气管炎、气喘、咳嗽、咯血、腹痛、黄疸、脾硬化、肾结石、泌尿疾病、发烧、浮肿、麻风病、月经不调、忧郁症、抗毒以及毒虫叮咬等等疾病。
繁亢的列举我们不再继续，总之一句话:鸦片几乎伴随着人类的全部历史。17世纪的英国医生、临床医学的奠基人托马斯.悉登汉姆(Thomas.Sydenham)歌颂道:“我忍不住要大声歌颂伟大的上帝，这个万物的制造者，它给人类的苦恼带来了舒适的鸦片，无论是从它能控制的疾病数量，还是从它能消除疾病的效率来看，没有一种药物有鸦片那样的价值。”“没有鸦片，医学将不过是个跛子”。这位医学大师因此也获得“鸦片哲人”的雅号。
我们的祖宗也早就熟悉鸦片。文字的记录是贫乏的，但至少在公元前139年张骞出使西域时，鸦片就传到了中国。三国时名医华佗就使用大麻和鸦片作为麻醉剂；在唐乾封二年(公元667年)，就有鸦片进口的记录，唐代阿拉伯鸦片被称为“阿芙蓉”；公元973年北宋印行的《开宝本草》中，鸦片定名为罂粟粟，这后一个“粟”当蒴果解。当成吉思汗的铁骑踏遍欧亚大陆以后，鸦片也成为社会商品的一个重要种类，但那都只是入药佳品。大约1600年代，荷兰人通过台湾把北美印第安人的烟斗连同烟叶传入中国，中国开始有吸烟者。其广泛程度令中国的统治者恐慌，崇帧皇帝下令禁烟。因为曾经有人把鸦片混入烟草吸食，始料不及的是，烟草被禁却导致了吸食纯鸦片的泛滥。直至18世纪中叶的清朝官员黄喻普才首次记录了台湾人吸食鸦片的具体过程。他断言:除了杀掉吸食鸦片者，否则无法令其戒除恶习。
二、鸦片贸易在中国的兴起
17世纪末，康熙皇帝恩准外国人在广州经商，附加了八项严苛的限制条件。其中之一就是必须经户部批准的“公行”方得以从事对外贸易，它成为官方特许的商行，于是就有了腐败的门户。广东的地方官员和具有官家背景的人通过贿赂获得特许，户部官员则获得贿赂。整个18世纪中外贸易在发展之中，英国人逐渐取代了葡萄牙人、荷兰人成为中国对外贸易的主角，贸易的范围十分广泛:茶叶、糖、蚕丝、瓷器、纸张、珍珠母、樟脑、肉桂、铜、明矾、金银、丝制品、漆器、植物油、竹器、大黄等商品换回欧洲人带来的棉花、羊毛及制品、铁、铅锌、钻石、辣椒、钟表、珊瑚、琥珀、鱼翅、鱼、米等商品，鸦片也跻身其中。
贸易的发展导致西方文化、宗教、道德观念等意识形态也渗入中国，朝廷担心这会严重冲击中国的传统文化，从而动摇朝廷的统治；民间也对于西方传教士带来的宗教与文化产生抵触，于是必须加以限制。迂腐的皇室认定西方货物包含着诱惑，限制的措施一方面严格控制外国商人仅限边远的广东；另一方面禁止以货易货的实施。于是官员们随心所欲地认可允许进口的货物，且规定出口必须换回金银。由于中方市场有限，严重的出超使英国为主的商人难乎为继，此外，以英国商人为主的外商，更垂涎三尺于中国内地广阔的市场。
由于中国的茶叶同样使英国人上瘾，商人们必须用现银购买茶叶导致巨额逆差，而内地市场严禁外商涉足，有限的贸易额不足以弥补这个逆差。为了弥补这种逆差的商人们很快发现，只有两种商品官员们从不禁止进口:棉花和鸦片。棉花主要产出于埃及和印度，埃及的运输成本导致无利可图；即使印度的棉花也获利菲薄；而产于印度的鸦片却有暴利可图，官员们特别需要它来发财。中国虽然已经盛产罂粟，但鸦片质量却不是印度鸦片可以比拟的，何况国产鸦片远不能满足需求。
鸦片导致不良后果的证明在于:雍正皇帝1729年曾下令禁止鸦片贸易。处罚包括100军棍、三个月戴枷囚禁、流放新疆直至处死。但对于吸食鸦片者免罚，也没有限制鸦片进口的任何规定。对种植和生产鸦片的严处，无异于鼓励鸦片进口贸易，仅禁令颁布当年，就合法进口鸦片200余箱。到1767年增加到1000箱，到1790年便达4000箱。不可思议的措施只能以朝廷的昏庸来解释。而且另一个原因显然是，进口鸦片要支付给朝廷执照税，朝廷珍惜这笔收入。这个税一直到1796年还在征收。
一个苦涩的故事是，1793年英国首任外交公使马戛尔尼(Ma Cartney)率七百余人的庞大使团携各种礼品抵达北京。使团的规模与礼品之丰厚表明了英王的重视程度。在英皇乔治三世给他的授权书里，不仅有自主做出让步决定的权力，而且还有必要时同意禁止东印度公司把鸦片输往中国的英王允诺，以符合中国的鸦片禁令。英国特使谋求中国开放内地市场。但马戛尔尼拒绝了必须对乾隆皇帝行跪拜礼的要求，于是被视一切外国均为夷、礼品必是贡品的清朝认定为大逆不道，清廷遂限期逐其出国门。
而他所赠送的大批先进的科学仪器和机器都被安装于皇宫当做玩物，所提议的建立中英两国外交与商业联系，亦未讨论即被拒绝。英王促进英中正常贸易全面开展的企图寿终正寝。非但如此，马戛尔尼却通过与满清官员的接触得出结论:“清王朝已经腐败衰弱，不堪一击。”称之为“破烂不堪的头等战舰”，他提议英王注意清王朝的垮台，以便得到“比任何其他国家得到更多的好处。”1816年，英王又派阿美士德使团来华，以继续马戛尔尼未完成的使命。结果在跪拜礼问题上又僵持住了，这回清廷干脆连对话也不考虑，直接把他们遣送出境。
进口鸦片导致国库银两剧减，1799年嘉庆皇帝颁布了禁鸦片令，禁止进口、销售鸦片和种植罂粟。这使原来就依靠种植和加工本国发财的清国皇室及官僚很伤脑筋。他们阳奉阴违，一方面隐秘地继续罂粟的种植与加工；另一方面借着禁止进口而加入走私，因为走私连税也不必交。1800年，至少西南各省自产鸦片就超过进口。到1830年代，浙江、福建、广东等省官僚与皇室都掩护罂粟种植与加工，产量大大增加。而进口鸦片被禁又使鸦片价格剧增，走私则使皇帝的禁烟令成为一张废纸，朝廷原来收取的税银全部落入官员和买办的腰包。他们与外国――主要是英国――鸦片商互相勾结，走私鸦片如入无人之境。
魏源追述:广东水师巡船“每月受规银三万六千两，放私入口”；水师副将韩肇庆专门护送走私，走私鸦片干脆由水师包办运输，每万箱抽数百箱报功，韩竟因此“保擢总兵，赏戴孔雀翎”。福建水师居然全靠协办走私鸦片为业，甚至“夷船之鸦片一时不能进口，往往寄顿于炮台附近”。浙江官军也不甘落后，英国政府蓝皮书称:“在过去二十年中，中国高级官吏与政府人员，对于鸦片走私公开地默许，前任和现任巡抚都从中取利，听说北京的军机处也暗中允许。”“他们纵容烟贩从外国船上取走鸦片，有时甚至将官船借以转运。”马克思也在美国报纸上发表评论:“那些纵容鸦片走私、聚敛私财的官吏的贪污行为，都逐渐腐蚀着这个家长制的权力，腐蚀着这个广大的国家机器的各部分间的唯一精神联系。”
鸦片之所以如此炙手可热，原因在于市场有巨大需求。当时人士蒋湘南调查:京官中吸食鸦片者达十之一、二；幕僚吸食者达十之五、六；长随、吏胥不可胜数。林则徐报告:“衙门中吸食者最多，如幕友、宦亲、长随、书办、差役，嗜好者十之八、九。”1831年刑部奏称:“现今直省地方，俱有食鸦片之人，而各衙门尤甚，约计督抚以下，文武衙门上下人等，绝无食鸦片者，甚属寥寥。”皇室内部也是鸦片鬼成群。神机营管理大臣桂祥便是著名的大烟鬼；甚至连慈禧太后本人也是鸦片吸食者。乃至清廷禁烟措施中，不得不把一品以上官员、六十岁以上人士列入禁烟行列之外。就在道光皇帝的心腹大臣中，以军机大臣穆彰阿、重臣琦善、耆英、伊里布等，都是鸦片走私的受益者。
由于清国官府与军官的参与，走私鸦片的数量甚至比禁烟前的进口更甚。英商东印度公司垄断了印度的鸦片，他们运至珠江口的伶仃岛批发给中国有官府背景的走私商，1790年代每年进口约4000箱鸦片，禁烟令以后1810年代达4494箱；1821-1828年扩展到9708箱；1828-1835年增加到18835箱；1835-1839年竟高达30000箱以上。又例如英资怡和洋行的郭士立医生(Dr. Karl Gutzlaff)每年贿赂钦州官员2万美金，鸦片就得以长年累月平安登陆钦州港。走私导致鸦片输入大增，乃至东印度公司急忙扩大印度的罂粟种植，增加鸦片产量，否则就供不应求。据统计，在鸦片战争前四十年里，中国输入鸦片达三亿元以上。
三、英国对鸦片的争论
英国的鸦片贸易也并非只针对中国，在当时的世界，鸦片贸易是合法而且正常的，但因中国市场需求导致贸易额巨大，1830年代，鸦片占英国对华贸易总额的一半！唯利是图的英国政府可以获得大额收入。鸦片贸易在英国本土也属于正常贸易，只是没有吸食鸦片的市场。直至1868年英国才制定《毒品药店法案》，这个法案只不过对英国本土的鸦片贸易给予一般性限制而已，真正的禁止鸦片一直到1914年。英国甚至制造相当多鸦片产品，例如一种常见的儿童鸦片糖“巴拉高利”(Balagoli)，直到20世纪20年代还是使婴儿安静的家常药物。而1885年美国才立法禁止美国本土的鸦片贸易，但禁令并不严密。一个典型的事例是，著名的可口可乐饮料直至1903年尚含有微量可卡因，这也是可口可乐饮料的最原始由来。
但这并不意味着没有异议。英国许多有识之士早在1780年代就十分强烈地谴责并呼吁政府取缔鸦片贸易，而且这个呼声一直不断。如沙夫茨伯里伯爵(Shaftesbury)宣布:“我充分相信这个国家怂恿这种罪恶的交易是极坏的，也许比怂恿奴隶贸易更歹毒。”托.阿诺德(T.Arnold)博士称英国允许鸦片贸易“如此邪恶以致它是最大的民族罪孽”；对于第一次鸦片战争，格拉德斯通(Gladstone)说:“就我所知和我所读过的，这是一场非正义的战争，一场使国家蒙受永久耻辱的战争。”处理中英关系的官员乔治.斯当东勋爵(George Staunton)也在国会声明:“我们不否认这个事实，要不是鸦片走私的话，就不会有战争。”就连东印度公司鸦片代理处经理赛蒙(Sam)也写道:“鸦片产品摧垮了人民的健康，使其道德沦丧。哪里种植鸦片，那里的人就吸鸦片，种得越多，吸得越多。” 但多数人不赞成禁止鸦片贸易，一些人属于对鸦片没有正确的认识；另一些人则完全因为鸦片带来的巨大利益。那时英国报纸对反对和拥护鸦片贸易的意见统计大约在1:5，于是英国议会长期通不过禁烟法案。
四、林则徐、义律及其他
更令人啼笑皆非的是，指挥打响第一次鸦片战争的英国政府全权代表查尔斯.义律(Charles Elliont)本人就是一个坚决的鸦片贸易反对者。他原任英属圭亚那医疗舰《奴隶护神》号舰长，前任英中联络官罗宾逊爵士也是鸦片贸易的反对者，他报告英国政府:“无论什么时候，英国政府要我们制止英国船只参与鸦片非法贸易，我们都能够完成。但更确实的办法是禁止英属印度的罂粟种植和鸦片生产。”这个建议导致印度当局的强烈反对，他终于被免职，临时委任义律担当此职。义律一上任就要求英国政府改变在中国的历史航向，敦促政府采取措施制止鸦片走私。他个人认为这种贸易是一种罪行，是大英帝国的耻辱。在给伦敦的报告中，义律写道:鸦片贸易“给打着天主教旗号的国民丢脸。”
林则徐则是中国方面严禁鸦片的代表人物。当道光皇帝发现库银已从7000万两下降到不足1000万两时，启用了林则徐任禁烟钦差大臣。林下令收缴鸦片时，义律未经请示伦敦也没有任何讨价还价就命令英国商人交出所有存货20283箱鸦片，并代表英皇承诺赔偿英商的损失。此举令林则徐都感觉惊讶和满意，却令英国朝野愤怒。只是中国历来的宣传都不提义律个人在收缴鸦片中的决定性作用；而英国则忽略了他在割让香港问题上所起的作用，至今连《英国名人大词典》仍未提及正是义律首先提出割让香港的要求，并且实施占领的。
第一次鸦片战争第一阶段后，义律在提交《穿鼻条约》时，又未经伦敦批准。这个条约的主要要求是:a，将香港让与英国；b，赔款六百万元(这是琦善主张的数目)；c，英中官员平等相待；d，限于(1841年)春节后十日内恢复广州贸易。该条约琦善仅以割让香港须皇帝批准，其他照准。而英国政府并不满意，他们认为更重要的是打开中国的贸易封锁，获得在中国全境自由贸易的权利。1841年8月，义律被免职，璞鼎查(Henry Pottinger)接任。维多利亚女王称义律为:“一位完全不遵守指令而努力争取最短任期的人”。义律被调往北美得克萨斯任英国代办，就算是与林则徐被充军新疆扯平吧。
说鸦片战争的导火索是鸦片，这原本不错。但这次战争的本质却并非鸦片。鸦片是显示剂，它把中国专制统治的腐败暴露无遗；鸦片又是腐蚀剂，使这个本来就已经腐败不堪的体制更加腐败。恰如马克思所说:“浸透了天朝的整个官僚体系和破坏了宗法制度支柱的营私舞弊行为，同鸦片烟箱一起从停泊在黄埔的英国趸船上偷偷运进了天朝。”以林则徐为代表的忠勇之士忧患于国家与民族的命运，尽管范文澜尊林则徐为“开眼看世界的第一人”，但以他们的能量而言，无力回天。
林则徐于1839年5月18日收缴鸦片完毕；6月3日开始销毁。此时英国只有二十余艘商船由唯一一艘小型护卫舰《英王拉尼》(HMS Larne)号保护。林则徐没有坚持让这些鸦片商人签署契约保证停止鸦片贸易；当义律命令商人按照中国官方要求缴出全部鸦片时便满足了。而英商马地臣、查顿则向英国政府状告义律，因为中国官员有人偷偷告诉他们:只需缴“六七千箱足矣。”
销毁鸦片时，林则徐邀请一位美国商人金(C.W.King)、一位美国传教士埃利加.布里奇曼(Elijah Bridgman)到场观看。金告诉林则徐，英国正应那些商人请求，派出的蒸汽炮舰已在途中。林则徐对这个情报显然没有足够的重视，没有意识到他销毁的只是鸦片，并没有销毁中国巨大的鸦片市场，更没有销毁鸦片商们对暴利的渴望。他也没有采取足够措施，使正当贸易的商人与鸦片走私商分开。直到7月7日，一伙英国水手划船到九龙尖沙嘴的小酒馆酗酒，捣毁了村民一座神龛，引发斗殴。结果村民林维喜伤重不治。林则徐要求按大清律将水手中一人偿命；义律则同意赔偿死者家属，惩办所有参与此事的水手，但拒绝只以其中一人被判极刑顶罪。大清律与英国法律在此冲突，它也是后来治外法权的由来。
双方僵持不下，林则徐向所有“海外夷人”发布通告，命令他们顺从天朝。8月15日，林下令禁止一切贸易，封锁外国在广州的全部企业，并派兵开进澳门。义律则命令香港、澳门的英国商人及其家属登船，驶离海岸；林进一步命令严禁村民供应英船任何日用品，并且派战船封锁英船，一旦发现上岸的外国人，一律就地正法。9月5日，义律派英商郭士立作为特使，交给林的信件之一，要求解除对英国船只的封锁，恢复正常贸易关系；之二则要求制止村民在英船取得淡水处投放污垢物甚至毒物。林拒绝了。下午两点，义律发出最后通牒，得到的是置之不理。3点，英国军舰向封锁的中国战船开火，以图突破封锁。《时代周刊》称之为鸦片战争第一枪。其实这顶多只是一场局部的武装冲突，称不上任何战争。
五、鸦片战争始末
冲突结束之后，无论正常贸易仰或鸦片走私，在整个过程中一天也没有停止过，区别仅在规模缩小了许多。销毁鸦片的一个“副产品”就是鸦片价格飚升，铤而走险的大有人在。双方僵持数月却没有积极的解决不能不是林则徐的一个失误，这种僵持除了导致英国军舰陆续到达以增强实力之外，还被英国那些反对禁止鸦片贸易的势力利用，致使武力解决问题的主张逐渐占上风。11月4日，英国军舰与中国水师在穿鼻、官涌海面开始武装冲突，至13日，此类冲突共发生六次，双方各有损失。连同9月5日那一次冲突在内，林则徐报告朝廷称之为“七战七捷”。道光皇帝大喜，在朝廷昏官的一片赞扬声中，道光皇帝12月下令禁止广东口岸的全部对外贸易。林则徐于1840年初奉命正式封港，断绝中外之间全部贸易往来。
这种全面的禁止一切贸易一直持续了四个多月，矛盾的焦点已经不再是鸦片的问题，而是闭关锁国与自由贸易的冲突。腐败僵化的清政府与实行炮舰政策的英国政府已经到了非战争不能解决分歧的地步。
但林则徐与义律之间的函件往来并没有中断，义律提出了运输、贸易以及限制鸦片的各种方案。不过林则徐坚持除林维喜案的要求外，其他一概不予理会。僵持至1840年5月，抵达珠江口的英国军舰已达48艘，大炮540门，军队25000人。英军反向封锁珠江口。5月9日夜，林则徐派火舟10艘主动出击，焚毁英国办艇11只；义律并不在防备森严的广州还击，率舰40艘北上，攻厦门、陷定海，于7月12日抵大沽口讹诈清廷。道光皇帝眼瞧英舰威胁京畿，连忙派大学士署直隶总督琦善赴天津大沽议和，皇帝诏曰:“禁烟措置失当，大皇帝早有所闻，必当逐细查明，重治其罪。现已派钦差大臣，定能代伸冤抑。著即返棹南还，听候办理可也。”
琦善明确对义律表示只要英舰返还广州，朝廷一定查办林则徐、邓艇桢等。英国军舰于是南下。8月道光委任琦善为钦差，9月28日免林则徐、邓廷桢职，11月29日琦善抵达广州。义律提出赔偿战费及没收商品包括鸦片损失费；重开商埠；给予英商专用码头；规定税则；改革行商制度以及治外法权的14点要求。
琦善答复赔偿六百万元；除广州外另开一处商埠。英方坚持在福建、浙江、江苏另选两处商埠。琦善报告道光皇帝后，道光皇帝大怒，他原本以为革林则徐职、重开贸易即可解决问题，如今英国人决心打开中国自由贸易的大门，这是绝无可能的。于是，1841年1月20日，皇帝以最紧急件命令琦善，立即停止谈判，调湘、川、黔诸省兵援广州，准备一战；同时命令两江总督伊里布，见英船即开炮，痛加剿洗。
1月6日，义律获知中国将拒绝英方要求，马上照会琦善，一切待战后再商。并命令英国军舰挂红旗。琦善复照义律，警告英国勿轻举妄动，否则一切已答应之要求将化为乌有。7日英舰20只、兵员1500余人，进攻沙角、大角两处炮台。清军二千人不敌，两处炮台均陷落。20日，义律停止作战并通过澳门当局致琦善《穿鼻条约》草案，要求割让香港。琦善于正月初三签订该条约，但保留待上奏批准后方有效的尾巴，道光皇帝得奏后嗤之以鼻，谓为“一片呓语”。26日，英军不等皇帝批复，即遣《硫磺号》军舰登陆香港，并发文告称香港居民为英国子民。广东巡抚怡良2月10日报告朝廷，其实道光皇帝已经于1月27日诏告中外，义正词严地对英国宣战了。此时再闻报，即授喻内阁:“琦善擅与香港，辜恩误国，著即革职锁拿，押解来京严讯，所有家产查抄入官。”
道光皇帝对英国宣战，军事冲突升级为战争。义律立即于2月26日进攻虎门；27日进攻乌涌。至3月3日，英军已经兵临广州城下。腐败的清朝政府，公开宣战之后一个多月，非但没有战争准备，就连委派接任的官员亦未到任。3月5日，接替琦善的大臣之一杨芳始抵广州；18日，义律委托美国领事提议调停，杨芳同意，双方于20日结束战事恢复贸易。杨芳与广东巡抚怡良奏报:“虎门既已失守，近省猎德、大黄滘等处亦被闯入，省城别无屏障可以控御。陆续调到之官兵虽有八千，但皆不习水战。旬月以来，英军所以没有攻打广州，实恋通商。英货船有九只满载洋米九万担，粤东产米无多，可见英人并非包藏祸心，莫如权作变通，允许英商到广州贸易。”道光皇帝答复:“若贸易了事，又何必将帅兵卒如此征调？又何必逮问琦善？”4月18日将杨芳、怡良革职交部严处。没几天，23日，又谕革职留任。
4月14日，接任琦善的靖逆将军奕山、参赞大臣隆文抵广州，经过一番谋划，从5月10日起开始进攻英军，至21日夜，烧毁英船两只，英军退守南岸。杨芳与义律经营的停战、恢复贸易局面亦不复存在。已经停下来的战争进一步升级。22日英军开始反攻，清军伤亡惨重，至24日上午，广州城郊各据点系数被英军占领，广州完全暴露于英军火力之下。尽管三元里等地百姓自发参战，并杀伤英军若干，终究难挽颓势。27日签署《广州和约》，缴纳“赎城费”六百万元、赔偿英商损失三十万元，清军撤离广州六十里，英军亦退返海上。
但英国政府对于其全权代表义律的举动并不满意，5月3日林则徐离开广东流放新疆，随后，义律也被免职。接任义律的璞鼎查，按照英国政府的要求下指挥英国军舰北上，要一鼓作气彻底打开中国大门，在厦门、宁波、定海、镇海、吴淞、上海、宝山、镇江等地连续打败清军，1842年8月，英军兵临南京城下；29日，清政府被迫与英国签订了被称为中国近代史开篇第一个不平等条约:《中英南京条约》。这个条约规定:一，中国赔款两千一百万银元；二，割让香港；三，开放广州、厦门、福州、宁波、上海为通商口岸；四，协定关税，即英国进出中国海关货物之税率，要由两国共同议定；五，中、英两国商人可以自由贸易。无可否认，这个条约远比《穿鼻条约》、《广州条约》苛刻得多。
《南京条约》尚不是鸦片战争的全部结局，1843年7月的《五口通商章程》及10月的《虎门条约》，作为《南京条约》的补充，又增加了领事裁判权和片面最惠国待遇。
六、后鸦片战争时代
我们纵观整个鸦片战争的前因、过程及后果，不难看出，鸦片并非战争的全部。鸦片并不是英国人带来中国的，它早就在中国存在巨大市场。不是鸦片导致腐败，而是腐败已经造就了鸦片市场；反过来，鸦片又进一步促进腐败。如果寻找一点安慰，那么清朝政府是世界上最早意识到鸦片的危害，并且最早颁布禁止鸦片令的政府。
在那个年代，人类对鸦片的认识远不同于今日。世界各国，包括英国本土在内，都没有对鸦片设立限制。问题在于，只有中国社会吸食鸦片泛滥成灾，乃至于形成巨大的暴利市场。
英国商人如同猎狗，逐利而来。如果没有中国官员的配合，英国鸦片商跟本无法从事走私鸦片的任何活动。西方从那时起将近百余年的“黄祸” 说，换言之，也是让人看不起之“东亚病夫”的由来。透过现象看本质，有时候这些根本不是我们现在某些人所想象的、尤其是有了不正视现实的历史观以后，如，无法面对成吉思汗那样的野蛮入侵，莫斯科也有“鸦片”之祸害说。
大致在1820年代，广东、福建沿海华工(苦力)便以一定规模开始输往海外，俗称“卖.仔”。他们中约95%属于契约劳工，待遇是非人的，在遭受层层盘剥之余，他们还必须偿还国内“蛇头”的欠款。于是为了解除烦恼，带去了吸食鸦片的恶习。在东南亚一带吸食鸦片不是华人首创，却因大批华人抵达而扩大了这种嗜好。华人占95%以上的新加坡，三分之一男人鸦片上瘾；菲律宾有190余家鸦片馆，只为华人服务；在澳大利亚的华人社区内，鸦片成了广泛的消遣方式，乃至于白人排斥华人甚至包括那些亲近华人的白人妇女。1888年一艘叫“阿富汗”的船只抵达墨尔本，当地居民自发组织纠察队不许船上250名华人下船，理由仅为抵制鸦片侵入墨尔本；在美国因为南北战争大量使用鸦片作为医治伤员的药物，鸦片已经被广泛使用。华工到来使之更趋严重。凡中国社区必有中国人开的鸦片烟馆，它使华工收入的几乎一半消费在鸦片烟里。1885年一项调查显示，仅旧金山唐人街便有26家鸦片烟馆，每馆可以同时容纳24人吸食。不止吸食鸦片，赌博、卖淫、高利贷都在这些烟馆里蔓延开来；在秘鲁，鸦片与华工同时输入，那些发现暴利唾手可得的中国商人很快就构筑了一条把中国鸦片经美国运到秘鲁的黄金途径。
鸦片战争的一个结果是中国从单纯的鸦片输入国变成输出国，与中国苦力同时输出。随后便发展到这些国家。例如1888年澳洲的鸦片输入便达17684磅，到1890年4月，仅维多利亚一个州，欧洲裔鸦片吸食者便达700余名； 1875年《旧金山晚邮报》统计，全美共计有12万鸦片的“瘾君子”。该报特别声明:此数据尚不包括华裔在内。1885年输入美国的鸦片达208152磅。美国的排华法案，鸦片是根本原因。
对此，美国参议院牧师纽曼博士(J.P.Newman)1874年的演说具有代表性:“中国人作为家仆、洗衣工、体力劳动者、矿工等大批到来。我们尽我们所能使他们文明和基督化(我们给他们学习的学校和宗教的殿堂)。但他们到来时都已经虚弱不堪，鸦片使他们浑身无力。我们需要他们做体力劳动者；我们需要他们做仆人；我们需要他们做市民。因为从密苏里到金门的广阔土地上，只有不到100万白种居民。我们欢迎他们，但如果他们是鸦片吸食者，我们无法欢迎他们。”
也许鸦片的祸害恰是全球化的先声，毒品对全人类都是一视同仁的，它不会只伤害一个民族或一个人种。1898年美国打败西班牙获得菲律宾的统治权，那里的鸦片泛滥使美国占领者头疼，于是一个委员会于1903年成立，采取了取缔烟馆、禁止输入鸦片的强制性政策。美国认识到如果没有全世界的共同行动，鸦片是禁不住的。1906年这个委员会的布伦特主教致函罗斯福总统，美国正式开始号召全世界起来反对鸦片走私及其他毒品。1909年2月，人类首次禁毒的国际会议在上海召开，13个国家参加这次国际鸦片委员会会议。略有讽刺意味的是:因为清朝政府是世界上最早意识到鸦片的危害，并且最早颁布禁止鸦片令的政府，而这个会议因清朝政府的慈禧太后驾崩，为表示尊重而延期一个月，可没有想到慈禧也是一个鸦片鬼。当然，这次会议虽然没有实质上的制约能力，但它毕竟是人类首次国际意义上共同讨伐毒品的宣战:“国际鸦片委员会渴望能力促各国政府在自己的领土内采取措施，控制吗啡及其他或能带来相似结果的鸦片衍生物的生产、出售和分销。”
1924年出版的英国女作家艾伦.拉.莫特(Allen La Mott)《鸦片民族》一书，她强烈谴责了殖民国家对待毒品的态度之后，又预言:“假设鸦片是为了东方而生产，可是多余的产出必然会回流到欧洲和美洲。”后来的毒品历史证实了她当年的预言，这是否证实了这样一个哲理:任何针对部分人类的歧视与伤害，都是对全人类的伤害？或者用简单的中国俗话表述:害人终害己。这个毒品之害，延续至今也为祸不浅，成了全人类文明的恒久之痛。
