The Alarm Is Sounding—Is Anyone Listening?
In 1997, President Bill Clinton suggested that great-power territorial politics are a thing of the past. A new era had dawned, he said, in which “enlightened self-interest, as well as shared values, will compel countries to define their greatness in more constructive ways.” But is this an accurate description of the world we see today?
Today Russian President Vladimir Putin is busy taking over former Soviet Union territories, Christians are being systematically slaughtered in the Middle East and a growing wave of anti-Semitism is sweeping the globe. At home, our southern border is in complete disarray.
In his article “Why is the World Becoming Such a Nasty Place?,” Victor Davis Hanson writes,
Glance about—Central America, Venezuela, China, Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, Gaza, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Turkey, etc.—and the world outside the West is mostly a nasty place. The three common denominators in all these catastrophes are the usual demagogic leaders blaming someone else for their people’s own self-inflicted miseries, a comfortable West that shrugs that somehow all these depressing things and mean people will just go away—and a tired global enforcer whose community organizer leader went into retirement ….
Why are we seeing such an alarming escalation in violence and war all around the world? And at the same time, why is everything going so wrong for the United States?
Notice this quote from a New York Times piece entitled “Crises Cascade and Converge, Testing Obama”:
Rarely has a president been confronted with so many seemingly disparate foreign policy crises all at once—in Ukraine, Israel, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere—but making the current upheaval more complicated for Mr. Obama is the seemingly interlocking nature of them all. Developments in one area, like Ukraine, shape his views and choices in a crisis in another area, like the Middle East.
“[C]haos is breaking out simultaneously in many regions—and governments are less capable of meeting those challenges than before,” Doyle McManus wrote in his Los Angeles Times column, “Is global chaos the new normal?,” paraphrasing a former national security adviser. He continued:
The great powers don’t enjoy that kind of military superiority anymore. The United States spent more than a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan but couldn’t fully pacify either country. … At the same time, outside powers like the United States have lost their appetite for fighting long counterinsurgency wars. … The result is what one scholar … has called ‘an age of entropy’— a leaderless world with no superpowers to enforce order.
It’s a different world today than it was just five or ten years ago. How are all of these crises going to be solved? And who will fill the power void? No matter how much we deny our world’s current state of affairs, these problems aren’t just going to go away. Watch today’s program to see where this world is headed.
