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The
New Old World Order
By Victor Davis Hanson
JewishWorldReview.com
The post-Cold War new world order is
rapidly breaking apart. Nations are returning to the ancient passions, rivalries
and differences of past centuries.
Take Europe. The decades-old vision of
a united pan-continental Europe without borders is dissolving. The
cradle-to-grave welfare dream proved too expensive for Europe's shrinking and
aging population.
Cultural, linguistic and economic
divides between Germany and Greece, or Holland and Bulgaria, remain too wide to
be bridged by fumbling bureaucrats in Brussels. NATO has devolved into a
euphemism for American expeditionary forces.
Nationalism is returning, based on
stronger common ties of language, history, religion and culture. We are even
seeing the return of a two-century-old European "problem": a powerful Germany
that logically seeks greater political influence commensurate with its
undeniable economic superiority.
The tired Israeli-Palestinian fight
over the future of the West Bank is no longer the nexus of Middle East tensions.
The Muslim Arab world is now more terrified by the re-emergence of a bloc of old
familiar non-Arabic, Islamic fundamentalist rivals.
With nuclear weapons, theocratic Iran
wants to offer strategic protection to radical allies such as Syria, Hezbollah
and Hamas, and at the same time restore Persian glory. While diverse, this rogue
bunch shares contempt for the squabbling Sunni Arab world of rich but
defenseless Gulf petro-sheikdoms and geriatric state authoritarians.
Turkey is flipping back to its
pre-20th-century past. Its departure from NATO is not a question of if, but
when. The European Union used to not want Turkey; now Turkey does not want the
shaky EU.
Turkish revisionism now glorifies the
old Ottoman sultanate. Turkey wants to recharge that reactionary model as the
unifier and protector of Islam -- not the modern, vastly reduced secular state
of Kemal Ataturk. Weak neighbors Armenia, Cyprus, Greece and Kurdistan have
historical reasons to tremble.
Japan's economy is still stalled. Its
affluent population is shrinking and aging. Elsewhere in the region, the
Japanese see an expanding China and a lunatic nuclear North Korea. Yet Japan is
not sure whether the inward-looking United States is still credible in its old
promise of protection against any and all enemies.
One of two rather bleak Asian futures
seems likely. Either an ascendant China will dictate the foreign policies of
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, or lots of new freelancing nuclear powers will
appear to deter China since it cannot count on an insolvent U.S. for protection.
Oil-rich Russia -- deprived of its
communist-era empire -- seems to find lost imperial prestige and influence by
being for everything that the U.S. is against. That translates into selling
nuclear expertise and material to Iran, providing weapons to provocative states
such as Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, and bullying neighbors over energy supplies.
Closer to home, Mexico has become a
strange sort of friend. It devolves daily into a more corrupt and violent place
than Iraq or Pakistan. The fossilized leadership in Mexico City shows no
interest in reforming, either by opening its economy or liberalizing its
political institutions.
Instead, Mexico's very survival for
now rests on cynically exporting annually a million of its impoverished and
unhappy citizens to America. More interested in money than its own people, the
Mexican government counts on the more than $20 billion in remittances that
return to the country each year.
But American citizens are tired of
picking up the tab to subsidize nearly 15 million poor illegal aliens. The
growing hostility between the two countries is reminiscent of 19th-century
tensions across the Rio Grande.
How is America reacting to these
back-to-the-future changes?
Politically divided, committed to two
wars, in a deep recession, insolvent and still stunned by the financial meltdown
of 2008, our government seems paralyzed. As European socialism implodes, for
some reason a new statist U.S. government wants to copy failure by taking over
ever more of the economy and borrowing trillions more dollars to provide
additional entitlements.
As panicky old allies look for
American protection, we talk of slashing our defense budget. In apologetic
fashion, we spend more time appeasing confident enemies than buttressing worried
friends.
Instead of finishing our border fence
and closing the southern border, we are suing a state that is trying to enforce
immigration laws that the federal government will not apply. And as sectarianism
spreads abroad, we at home still pursue the failed salad bowl and caricature the
once-successful American melting pot.
But just as old problems return, so do equally old solutions.
Once-stodgy ideas like a free-market economy, strong defense, secure borders and
national unity are suddenly appearing fresh and wise.