Countering the Present Disorder
Raging wars, faltering economies, and fragmenting societies fuel the perception. Israel’s June 13 Operation Rising Lion, attacking the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missiles programs, and the United States’ June 22 Operation Midnight Hammer, dealing devasting blows to Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, are the latest battles in the long-standing war that Tehran’s theocrats have been waging against Israel, America, and the West. Russia’s protracted war of conquest against Ukraine has destabilized Europe and strained relations among NATO countries. The wars in the Middle East and Europe complicate the great-power-competition calculations – not least surrounding the future of Taiwan – of the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. Tensions between nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India may reignite at any moment. Meanwhile, terrorists enjoy growing access to increasingly affordable weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, biological, chemical, and cyber. War and the accompanying supply chain disruptions endanger the global economy. Growing debt burdens both rich and poor countries. Meanwhile, in the West’s liberal democracies, distrust and resentment roil relations between highly credentialed managerial elites and middle- and working-class men and women, eroding citizens’ sense that they are engaged in a common civic enterprise.
Then again, civilization has always been fragile. Natural disasters and human error, weakness, and turpitude have constantly imperiled the moral and political order that human beings manage to impose on themselves, and their families, communities, and nations. The threat of violent death at the hands of other human beings – from intra-family and intra-tribe enmities to wars among peoples and nations – has marked human civilization from time immemorial. And until the rise of capitalism, scarcity and material want belonged to the common condition of humanity.
Moreover, enabled in no small part by revolutions in industrialization, communications, and transportation, the last century featured three globe-spanning conflicts and an economic crisis that put civilizations to a severe test. World War I, resulting from a tinder box of European interests and alliances, brought about the deaths of more than 15 million people. The Great Depression inflicted massive hardship not only on the United States but also, because of the interconnectedness of countries’ economies, on peoples and nations around the globe. World War II, undertaken by Hitler and the Nazis with the subsidiary aim of exterminating the Jewish people and the ultimate aim of subjecting the world to German rule, caused the deaths of approximately 60 million people. In their efforts in the 20th century to spread and enforce the doctrines of Karl Marx, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party, and fellow communists killed almost 100 million people. And fueled by the Soviet Union’s military conquest of Eastern Europe and Moscow’s quest for global hegemony, the Cold War drove the world to the brink of nuclear conflagration, most dramatically but not only in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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