Luke 22:36 NKJV
Then He said to them, "But now, he who has a money bag, let him
take it, and likewise a knapsack; and he who has no sword, let him sell his
garment and buy one.
War
Clouds on the Horizon? | National Review Online Victor
Davis-Hansen http://j.mp/0WarCloudsVDH or http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393896/war-clouds-horizon-victor-davis-hanson
December 4, 2014 12:00 AM
War Clouds on the Horizon? A large war is
looming absent preventive American vigilance.
U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors (Photo: Senior
Master Sergeant Thomas Meneguin)
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.
Page 2
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.
There once was a time when the United States
encouraged the Latin American transition to free-market constitutional
government, away from right-wing dictatorships. Now, America seems uninterested
in making a similar case that left-wing dictatorships are just as threatening
to the idea of freedom and human rights.
In the late 1930s, it was pathetic that
countries with strong militaries such as France and Britain appeased Fascist
leader Benito Mussolini and allowed his far weaker Italian forces to do as they
pleased by invading Ethiopia. Similarly, Iranian negotiators are attempting to
dictate terms of a weak Iran to a strong United States in talks about Iran’s supposedly
inherent right to produce weapons-grade uranium — a process that Iran had
earlier bragged would lead to the production of a bomb.
The ancient ingredients of war are all on the
horizon. An old postwar order crumbles amid American indifference. Hopes for
true democracy in post-Soviet Russia, newly capitalist China, or ascendant
Turkey long ago were dashed. Tribalism, fundamentalism, and terrorism are the
norms in the Middle East as the nation-state disappears.
Under such conditions, history’s wars usually
start when some opportunistic — but often relatively weaker — power does
something unwise on the gamble that the perceived benefits outweigh the risks.
That belligerence is only prevented when more powerful countries collectively
make it clear to the aggressor that it would be suicidal to start a war that
would end in the aggressor’s sure defeat.
What is scary in these unstable times is that a
powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past
oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.
A large war is looming, one that will be far
more costly than the preventive vigilance that might have stopped it.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and
historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most
recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing [email
protected]. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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