It is not hyperbole to say, the world is a mess.
China has fired up its military. Iran has fired on its people. North Korea has fired ICBMs straight over Japan. Russia has set fire to Ukraine.
Meantime, deadly violence between Israelis and Palestinians keeps flaring up and with Israel’s most right-wing government ever, that is likely to grow, not wane, while the prospect of any long-term solution for peace is likely to wane, not grow.
Between war and drought, people in African nations like Ethiopia and Sudan are starving (there is a ceasefire in the two-year-long civil war in Ethiopia, but food has been slow to make its way in). The Taliban in Afghanistan have dropped the pretense of granting even the slimmest of rights to women, and the world’s condemnations haven’t changed a thing. Myanmar is still hanging dissidents, sometimes even beheading them, and the world’s condemnations haven’t changed anything there either. Terrorists worldwide might currently be quiet but they have not been tamed. Economies from Sri Lanka to Lebanon are in a state of collapse. Refugees abound from oppressive places like Afghanistan and Venezuela, Somalia and El Salvador. And, of course, Ukraine.
Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor summed it up in a single sentence when he wrote a week ago about “a world buckling under a never-ending cascade of calamity— war, climate catastrophe, energy price chaos, inflation, epidemics of hunger and disease, political instability and widening economic inequity.“
In an editorial earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal offered only a shimmer of silver lining: “The contours of a new era are slowly taking shape, set against a landscape of volatility and unpredictability in virtually every realm: from energy to technology, geopolitics to local politics, and markets to the global economy. As a result, the probability of previously unthinkable events— good and bad— appears higher than it has been in many years.”
Maybe we can focus on the good.
But that doesn’t change the fact that right now, the world is a mess. It’s not clear who or what can clean it up.
In China, at last October’s conclave of the Communist Party, President Xi Jinping promised the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and the cornerstone of that promise was for the Chinese military, the “People’s Liberation Army,” to “safeguard China’s dignity and core interests.”
In fact, he cited “national security” 26 times in his speech. China already has the largest navy on earth and the world’s second biggest military budget, second only to ours. And despite China’s self-inflicted economic downturn, the war machine continues to grow. Everything from aircraft carriers to next-generation Stealth bombers to nuclear missiles.
It is no secret who Xi is preparing, if need be, to confront. He has long openly resented America’s presence in what he considers China’s sphere of influence. He has turned Hong Kong into little more than another Chinese province, and has threatened that a democratic Taiwan could be next. He sent missiles flying on trajectories directly over Taiwan after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit there last August.
Xi told his Communist conference, “The next five years will be crucial.” Which makes those five years just as crucial for the United States.
In Iran, the protests against the harsh religious rule of the ayatollahs continue, and so do the executions. In a chilling memory of massacres I witnessed during the revolution there more than 40 years ago, unarmed schoolgirls shout “Woman, life, freedom,” and whether with live ammunition or teargas, soldiers from the Revolutionary Guards don’t shout back, they shoot back.
In case there’s any hope that the political wing of the government will moderate the military wing, the current Speaker of Iran’s parliament is a former commander of those same Revolutionary Guards. With the Arab Spring a dozen years ago as the most graphic example, the Middle East is replete with repressive regimes crushing grassroots crusades for reform.
At the same time, Iran is somewhere on the spectrum of not just nuclear power but nuclear weapons. For decades, as a menacing countermeasure in its regional rivalry with Saudi Arabia (which is run by Sunni Muslims), Iran (run by Shiites) has had ambitions to be a nuclear power. Diplomacy for a time put brakes on those ambitions, but diplomacy has all but fallen apart.
That’s a mess no one has solved.
With North Korea, it looked for a short time during the Trump presidency like it might be ready to make peace. Trump had three summits with its Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, after which the American president said, “We fell in love.”
But in his book “The Trump Tapes,” journalist Bob Woodward says peace would have been a lucky accident. He asked Trump during an interview whether his threats about having a “much bigger” nuclear button had been meant to force the North Korean dictator to negotiate. Trump’s answer was nightmarish: “It was designed… who knows? Instinctively. Let’s talk instinct, okay? Because it’s really about you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
But we do know what did happen: the friendship was fruitless, Kim became even more bellicose. Last year he launched 23 ballistic missiles— the most ever in his decade-long leadership of the hermit kingdom— including an ICBM that traveled more than 2,800 miles.
No one knows how to clean up that mess.
Then there’s Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Having done stories in Russia and the Soviet Union over the years, friends have asked me, “Why can’t someone just take out Putin?” My answer has been, in effect, more easily said than done. In dictatorial countries on different continents, I’ve seen leaders surrounded by security forces consisting of soldiers plucked from poverty and enriched by perks— nice homes, disproportionate salaries, college tuition for their children, life insurance policies for their spouses— and their only debt in return is to lay down their lives, if it comes to that, for the leader who gave them positions of prominence and power. Men like that protect President Putin.
Inside Ukraine itself, as its tenacious troops receive new western weaponry to push back against the Russians, the head of the CIA just made another visit to Kyiv and reportedly warned President Zelensky that the Russians, with their advantage in manpower, have their own plans for a new thrust. As The Hill reported, “Intelligence analysts and researchers largely agree there is an offensive brewing in Moscow, likely to come sometime in the winter or early spring.” The U.S. Director of National Intelligence told the World Economic Forum at Davos last week, the war is “not a stalemate but really a grinding conflict.”
So, consistent with the axiom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” that brings us back to China, Iran, and North Korea. From missiles to drones to cyber technology, it has been evident that Iran and North Korea have contributed to Russia’s campaign to crush Ukraine. In fact the U.S. has just declassified photos of Russian railcars traveling between North Korea and Russia, which the U.S. says carried missiles for the war.
China apparently has been more restrained, but until it speaks out against Russia, it is Russia’s de facto friend, which can blunt American influence in the world of diplomacy.
Yes, this world is a mess. But maybe all is not lost. A positive perspective comes from Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Fareed Zakaria, who reported last week in his summary from the Davos conference, “There are lots of problems out there, from Ukraine’s future to inflation to climate change. But the big story is the unity and resolve of the democratic world. Despite a series of severe shocks— covid-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, global energy and food crises, inflation— the West and its partners are stepping up, cooperating and forging a new way forward.”
If there is any hope that the mess can be cleaned up, that’s where to look.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
One hopes the West’s resolve endures.... sobering reflection, Greg
And the mess is not missing in the intensely contentious and vitriolic political scene in the US. Never has it taken on such a base and unhealthy demeanor. Cooperation across the aisle seems to be a dead concept.