Victor Davis Hanson:
The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before.
In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored.
The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power shifted, decline for some nations seemed like opportunity for others.
The same was true in 1939. The tragedy of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 was not that it had been too harsh. In fact, it was far milder than the terms Germany had imposed on a defeated Russia in 1918 or the requirements it had planned for France in 1914.
Instead, Versailles combined the worst of both worlds: harsh language without any means of enforcement.
The subsequent appeasement of Britain and France, the isolationism of the United States, and the collaboration of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany green-lighted Hitler’s aggression — and another world war.
We are entering a similarly dangerous interlude. Collapsing oil prices — a good thing for most of the world — will make troublemakers like oil-exporting Iran and Russia take even more risks.
Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State feel that conventional military power has no effect on their agendas. The West is seen as a tired culture of Black Friday shoppers and maxed-out credit-card holders.
NATO is underfunded and without strong American leadership. It can only hope that Vladimir Putin does not invade a NATO country such as Estonia, rather than prepare for the likelihood that he will, and soon.
The United States has slashed its defense budget to historic lows. It sends the message abroad that friendship with America brings few rewards while hostility toward the U.S. has even fewer consequences.
The bedrock American relationships with staunch allies such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, and Israel are fading. Instead, we court new belligerents that don’t like the United States, such as Turkey and Iran.
No one has any idea of how to convince a rising China that its turn toward military aggression will only end in disaster, in much the same fashion that a confident westernizing Imperial Japan overreached in World War II. Lecturing loudly and self-righteously while carrying a tiny stick did not work with Japanese warlords of the1930s. It won’t work with the Communist Chinese either.
Radical Islam is spreading in the same sort of way that postwar Communism once swamped post-colonial Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But this time there are only weak responses from the democratic, free-market West. Westerners despair over which is worse — theocratic Iran, the Islamic State, or Bashar Assad’s Syria — and seem paralyzed over where exactly the violence will spread next and when it will reach them.
Much of what Victor Davis Hanson wrote in his essay will likely come to pass. The ingredients of war, as he puts it, is all there. Under this presidency, we have created a power vacuum that endangers the peace. Yes, there were the brush fires of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korea. We fought to the threshold of victory in each of those places only to step back in pursuit of that imaginary “political solution”. What do we show for the blood of young men on the battlefield? A much more dangerous world.
Rand Paul, like his father, would like to believe the world is much better place to leave dictators in power. That, too, is a dangerous notion because the dictators believe failing to challenge them is a tacit, or explicit, stamp of approval. And, acting upon it, dictators miscalculate the situation before them. It doesn’t mean we, as a nation, go around saving remote, unheard of countries. It means we act upon our national interests, and to use our influence to create opportunities.
Hopefully we can learn the lessons of the past. If we don’t we’ll stumble into the blind alley of another large-scale war.
I despair of the lessons being learned. We can hope that the fuse, or fuses, will burn slowly and that we will have some time (and an administration with a clue) to begin turning the tide in the other direction. (In that regard, we can hope Strauss and Howe’s “Generations” theories are correct enough to get us to 2020 at least.) We can hope that some of the action will be the various violent Islamic sects turning on each other out of religious orthodoxy. Unfortunately, it would never occur to anyone who believes in make diplomacy not war, or that saying “This is not how nations behave in the 21st century,” to read commentators like Curt or Victor Davis Hanson, much less to give any kind of consideration to what they have to say. Seatbelt fastened …
China surpasses the US in GDP. We are at our lowest labor participation rate in 36 years.
Asshat-in-Chief wants to sanction Israel for building HOUSING in East Jerusalem…but opposes sanctions against Iran – a known state sponsor of muslim terrorism for over 35 years – for building NUCLEAR BOMBS.
Obama is the most despicable traitor in US history. The effects of WW III will be on his head, and those progressive cultists who have supported the collectivist dystopia.
Yet inversely, while our military was being down-sized and demoralized by this administration, law enforcement departments have been militarized and made beholden by weapon system gifts to the Federal government. even so far as to arm Federal agecies who previously had little need of firearms. Clearly to Obama (who put this program on steroids,) , the only potential enemy he forsaw were those citizens of this nation “clinging to their bibles and guns”. Yet, Obama only decides to have his Attorney General get involved when a few black thugs get killed, totally ignoring those cases where innocent people have been killed and injured after having been “SWATed”. I guess those killed by overly agressive and wrongly used SWAT teams were not the right color.