A wider view needed

When the U.S. looks inward, the rest of the world invariably becomes a little less safe. Many allies and friends of the U.S. are fond of grumbling about that nation’s often heavy handed and oversimplified responses to a complex web of tensions percolating around the world. But when America looks away and instead focuses its collective attention on domestic challenges, irritation among friends turns to fear.

This is because, in the absence of U.S. influence, tyrants become emboldened. Strongmen see an opportunity to make gains. It is time to settle long-simmering disputes. Or chart a course toward a new world order.

Washington held a lavish celebration this week marking the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term as President. Beyond Mrs. Obama’s current hairstyle, that nation seems consumed these days by fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, jobs, medicare, immigration and gun control. And when they tire of those issues, the talking heads wring their hands worrying about whether their government is a broken institution.

As important as these issues are, and they are important (save for the hairstyle), the U.S and the world have even bigger worries that need their attention.

Try this as a thought exercise: draw a line between Mali, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Throw the Kurds in there too—for they would dearly love to carve out a nation of their own from this mix. Across the top of Africa, through the Middle East down to the subcontinent— each of these governments is potentially or imminently combustible. Each is becoming more volatile—not less. Each is taking a harder line in terms of either its security or propelling its ambitions.
Few in the U.S., I fear, are taking notice of the bitter battle currently under way in Mali, which is under attack by extreme Islamists— keen to spread their oppressive regime across the whole of northern Africa. Nor were many Americans paying much notice to the hostage taking at a refinery in Algeria last week. Syria’s decay into civil war doesn’t make headlines in the U.S. anymore—even as the death toll in this conflict rises to more than 60,000 lives lost.

Even in Israel, views are hardening. This week the right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected, but his victory was upstaged by the rise of Naftali Bennett, an even further far-right candidate, who argues that a Palestinian state would be suicide for Israel.

It does not strain the imagination to see the tensions in any one of these corners igniting a much larger regional conflagration. Once this wildfire gets out of control—there will be nothing France, Belgium or Canada can do to slow it down. Remember too that at least two of the nations amid this fray, perhaps more, possess nuclear weapons in their arsenal.

In 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidential election in a landslide. The U.S. had endured the grinding hardship of the Great Depression for six years already. FDR’s New Deal offered hope and optimism to a nation in short supply of both.

Focused on matters at home, the U.S. paid little attention to the troubles fermenting overseas— in Europe, north Africa, the Middle East and Pacific Asia. Not, that is, until the Second World War arrived on U.S. soil at Pearl Harbour.

By 1964 the U.S. had once again turned inward. The nation was still recovering from the assassination of its President. Battles over race and colour were tearing away at the fabric of the nation. Lyndon Johnson became President that year and signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, which began to change the vector of race relations in that nation. But it would be a war, half a world a way, that would define his presidency. Johnson concluded, once he became president, that the U.S. had to escalate a fight in Vietnam that had been simmering for a decade. He sent more than half a million troops into a war that had already been lost.

By the time the U.S. was chased out of Saigon in 1975, two million civilians had lost their lives. More than 60,000 U.S. servicemen had died. Three hundred thousand more had been wounded.

This isn’t an argument for U.S. militarism—but rather for its attention. Like it or not the U.S. remains the strongest and most important defender of democratic freedom in the world today.

With the growing influence and prosperity of China, strongmen in weak regions see a model of oppression and totalitarianism they can mimic. Eager for resources, the middle nation is keen to exploit the opportunity—and to fill an ideological space on the world stage that the U.S. has largely vacated.

We live in a dangerous and volatile time. History speaks plainly about nations that ignore the warning signs.

Yet the U.S. seems content, for now, to focus on its challenges at home. That is, it seems, until the brutality exercised daily in Africa, the Middle East and Asia cannot be ignored any longer, or is brought to its shores once more. By then, I fear, for many it will be much too late.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca