Post PAX-Americana

The Fearful New World

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. It can allow us to look at our past and the world we never knew and believe times were so easy, life was good, and we had everything figured out. Nostalgia is potent when thinking about relationships that have run their course, our youth, and loved ones who have passed away. Yet it can also be hazardous when people spend their present obsessing about the past, so much so that they cannot see the perils life throws at them in the present.

American foreign policy is very much a grift built on nostalgia for a time lost. A fever dream from the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War when it seemed like the end of history.

The recent global conflicts over the last few years: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; the Mexican drug war; terrorists invading Israel; militant uprisings in Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Niger have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and growing instability around the globe.

Yet it underscores the significant instability emerging, the withering of the West.

Israel was caught flat-footed in the worst attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. France has pulled out of its former colony, and billions of dollars in equipment have not resulted in Ukraine pushing Russian troops out of their territory.