[PJmedia] We are witnessing another world order in the making. Russia, Iran, China, and ISIS are all carving out spheres of regional influence. Europe and Japan are unsure of their own security. NATO is ossified. The United States at home is distracted by all sorts of ginned-up racial, gender, and class tensions, as it seeks to shed it past postwar role and somehow achieve a respite by forfeiting its obligations as global protector of the West.
As these essays attempt to demonstrate, the common denominator is the Obama administration's belief in a therapeutic view of human nature, and a strange half-educated notion that the United States since World War II was not responsible for the greatest era of affluence, freedom, and security in the history of civilization.
Finally, the Obama administration proves wearisome, as if it is replaying a tired script of a strong power whose anxieties prompt naivetas in lieu of deterrence, and render it paralyzed before weaker but aggressive enemies. We have learned nothing from the paralyzed Carter administration. Its outreach to communists in Central America, theocrats in Iran, and geriatric Soviets ended in a chaotic world from Kabul to Teheran to Managua. The European appeasement in the 1930s of an ascendant Third Reich is the locus classicus for any historical analogy with the present American recessional: a public weary from war, record debt and economic uncertainty, apologies and euphemisms for the aggressive behavior of violent regimes, an impotent world council of nations, indifference to the victims of fascist violence, cutbacks in military readiness, and invective and charges of war-mongering leveled toward any that question such appeasement. And we know how this ends: either in a costly 11th-hour recalibration to restore deterrence--or war as violent as it was avoidable.
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