By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, July 14, 2016
Here is a sampling of some recent news abroad:
A Russian guard attacked a U.S. diplomatic official at
the door to the American Embassy in Moscow, even as NATO leaders met to
galvanize against the next act of Russian aggression.
The Islamic State continued its global terrorist rampage
with horrific attacks in Baghdad and Istanbul.
Iran rebuffed United Nations warnings and defiantly
boasted that it will continue testing ballistic missiles. German intelligence
believes that Iran, empowered by the release of $100 billion in impounded cash,
is violating its recent American-led nonproliferation deal in an effort to
import nuclear bomb-making technology.
North Korea conducted a test (unsuccessful, apparently)
of a submarine-based guided missile.
There are various ways of interpreting these ominous
events.
They could represent just more empty chest-thumping by
our enemies.
Or, because this is an election year in the U.S., enemies
are posturing in order to advance their agendas, as they often do in times of
uncertainty about who will be the next president.
Or, Obama is perceived as an exceptionally lame lame-duck
president who is hoping to wind down his tenure in passivity, without a major
incident abroad that might imperil his presidential legacy.
Or, after the explosive rise of ISIS, the disaster in
Benghazi, the failed reset with Russia, the unchecked Chinese aggression in the
South China Sea, the concessions in the Iran deal, the veritable implosion of
the Middle East, and the president’s counterproductive sermonizing about
Brexit, enemies sense that the U.S. is directionless. These enemies may be
unsure whether America still wishes to — or even can — exercise its traditional
leadership of the free world and remain the custodian of the post-war
international order.
But perhaps there is yet another catalyst prompting such
events.
The United States appears to be entering another era of
dangerous internal instability similar to the one it endured in the
1960s-1970s.
After the attacks by radical Islamists in San Bernardino
and Orlando, Americans did not rally together as they had after 9/11. Instead,
almost immediately, the country was torn further apart. About half the nation
saw the terrorist killings as a reason for stricter gun control rather than a
reason to fear the continuing spread of radical Islamic terrorism. The other
half worried that political correctness and the president’s refusal to even
mention radical Islamic terrorism are eroding the ability to deter it.
America’s enemies draw their own conclusions.
After the Orlando attack, al-Qaeda urged lone-wolf
terrorists in the U.S. to focus exclusively on white targets. The
organization’s leaders apparently worry that if terrorists again hit minority
communities, it will prompt a bickering America to blame itself rather than
give full credit to the attackers.
After the recent deaths of two black men in
confrontations with police (in Minnesota and Louisiana), followed by national
Black Lives Matter protests and the killing of five law-enforcement officers in
Dallas, it might appear to our enemies abroad that the American superpower is
internally unwinding into tribalism in the fashion of the Balkans, Iraq, or
Lebanon.
As in the case of Islamic terrorism, America seems to
have no answers to racial tensions. Half the country believes African Americans
are inordinately targeted by police and that inner-city violence can be
attributed to a long history of racism, national neglect, and economic
stagnation. The other half blame disastrous social-welfare and big-government
policies for creating dangerous dependencies and a dearth of jobs in America’s
inner cities, as well as a popular culture that glorifies rather than
discourages the excesses of many young black males.
One America believes that the Obama administration
genuinely tried, but so far has failed, to resolve the tensions between
inner-city residents and police. The other America thinks Obama sought to
leverage those tensions for political reasons.
Either way, most of America privately thinks that Islamic
terrorist acts and racial tensions are going to get far worse — a perception
that is probably shared overseas as well.
Our enemies increasingly may gamble that provocations
won’t elicit a U.S. reaction. Or that even if America did respond, the
resulting domestic divisions and turmoil would diminish the effectiveness of
the response.
Add to the equation record debt and vast cuts in the
defense budget, and our enemies may conclude that we are Rome of AD 500,
Britain of the late 1940s, or Russia of the 1980s.
To be blunt, America’s vulnerable post-war global order
may already seem to those abroad to be bloated carrion ready to be picked apart
by opportunistic vultures.
No comments:
Post a Comment