I hope people in the White House and State Department pause to take in Victor Davis Hanson's recital of the historical and current role the United States plays in keeping the world stable and relatively peaceful. He titles his piece "Obama's World Disorder." We in America generally have no idea how utterly strategic America has been and remains in protecting nations, keeping aggressors at bay, and shaping world history for good. Millions and millions of people depend on us. Panic and fear now grip nations because their trust and reliance on American protection now looks misplaced and tenuous. I prayBarack Obama reads Hanson's piece. Obama's policies are creating world chaos that will doom many small nations and invite the destruction and enslaving of billions of people. We live in a time of grave historical ignorance and miscalculation.
Hanson's piece treats of Europe, Russia, China and the East and the stability the United States has fostered. The following short excerpt does not begin to do justice to the full piece..
The United States offered resistance to illiberal and autocratic regional powers that have at time challenged the protocols of the postwar order. And that pushback has allowed weaker nations—such as Poland or the Baltic States—to escape the orbit of post-Soviet Russia, while in the Pacific ensuring that an Australia, New Zealand, or the Philippines is not bullied into subservience by China
This strange postwar world ushered in the greatest advancement in prosperity amid the general absence of a cataclysmic world conflagration or continental war since the dawn of civilization. For the first time since the rise of the Greek city-state, most nations have been able both to prosper and to assume that their boundaries were inviolate and their populations mostly free from attack. A system of international communications, travel, commerce, and trade is predicated on the assumption that pirates cannot seize cargo ships, terrorists cannot hijack planes, and rogue nations cannot let off atomic bombs without a U.S. led coalition to stop them from threatening the international order.
For the U.S. to continue this exceptional role of preserving the postwar system in times of economic weakness and spiritual exhaustion, it is critical for the Obama administration to articulate to the American people exactly what the United States has accomplished, how the postwar order arose, and what precisely are the benefits that justify such enormous sacrifices in blood and treasure. . .
Hanson notes at the end of his piece the following:
The Obama administration declares climate change the chief global threat. That new inanimate target is welcome news to aggressive nations that had once feared that their own reckless behavior might have been so singled out.
Americans did not fully appreciate the costly postwar global order that the United States had established over the last seventy years. Maybe they will start to as they witness it vanish.