Daniel Henninger paints a very dismal, but realistic picture of the world today.
"As the year turns, the subject becoming impossible to duck is growing global disorder. The days before the New Year brought two suicide bombings in Russia and a major political assassination in Lebanon. Throw a dart randomly at a map of the Middle East or Southeast Asia and it will hit trouble....
Whether the world in 2014 will tip from containment to chaos or war is not the subject here. The subject is rediscovering the antidote to war, which is strong global leadership. The world we inhabit now doesn't have enough of it. Or any of it for that matter.
Russia's Vladimir Putin runs Russia with soft Stalinism while he intimidates nations on the Russian periphery to bend under his control. Some are resisting the Russian heavy. President Xi Jinping governs a China that is rediscovering Maoist nationalism internally and challenges neighbors from Japan to the South China Sea. They, too, are resisting.
In the Middle East, the flowers have fallen from the Arab Spring. Egypt is run by a de facto military junta, Syria by a war criminal, and Iran by a Cheshire cat named Rouhani. The Saudis, after downgrading their alliance with the U.S., promised this week to send $3 billion in military aid to Lebanon as leverage against Iran's ally, Hezbollah."
However, I agree with Betsy's summation:
This leads Henninger to call for presidential leadership in our next president since he's given up hope for leadership to come from Barack Obama. That's all well and good to say, but it would help to learn what that leadership will lead us all into doing. I'm afraid that too many of the problems today are truly insoluble no matter how much leadership a president might be willing to expend.
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