History can teach us once again. The question is which of its lessons will we learn.
That is assuming that in this Instagram and 24/7 cable news cycle and barely-take-time-to-read -a-book age that we can still learn the lessons of the last century — or even the last two decades.
But after the Iranian drone and missile strike on Israel, the failure of the world’s leaders to speak with clarity and vision about co-existence in the volatile Middle East region and the nearly defunct capability of the United Nations as a peacekeeping entity, it seems evident to anyone who paid attention in high school that we may well be on the brink of a world war.
Part of the problem is that we are a world which is filled with great powers who have for the most part chosen to abandon even the pretense of seeking peace as a status quo for their continued existence and success as nation-states.
And this is largely a function of the misplaced belief that the ending of the rivalries which made up the daily grist we called the “Cold War” have been replaced by vaguer, but perhaps more dangerous, great power rivalries and competition.
These rivalries are not the stuff of the old competing ideologies which proclaimed their own superiority if ever they achieved their worldly utopia goals; they are instead the remnants of those same great powers which are now plagued with their own internal failures and nation-state breakdowns and corruption.
The decline and breakup of the Soviet Union and its old communist empire has now reanimated itself as a dictator-led “gangster-ocracy” — a nation which has as its model of achievement and success the power of the criminal over its public life — exemplified by Putinesque warlords we call “oligarchs.”
And in its inevitable foreign policy outgrowth, Russia has exhibited a cancerous disregard of the rules of international law and the concomitant need to trample domestic human dignity and rights.
China has, in its rush to assimilate the machinery of capital production, wholly disregarded all of capitalism’s underlying principles of economic and human liberty — using authoritarianism as the iron glove inside the economic pretext for global trade.
Thus, its own human rights record prevents China from setting an example for moving forward toward democratic ideals and the norms which might allow it to play a constructive role in bringing about stability in its own region.
The United States, while still a world leader and superpower, is preoccupied with an internal struggle about the future of democracy as a working political economy — including whether it is still strong enough and resilient enough to withstand assaults upon its fundamental institutions such as voting and the rule of law.
The United States is plagued by such issues as gerrymandering, the filibuster, efforts to politicize the courts and an increasing widening of inequality in economic opportunity that have inevitably led to large numbers of Americans questioning the validity or legitimacy of the very idea of democracy and the legitimacy of the rule of law.
History teaches that these kinds of continued inequalities — in economics and political privilege — are the breeding ground for political demagogues to exploit disaffection and to drive social divisions even deeper.
Now, without clear evidence of the needed leadership on the world stage to assuage these efforts to impose a politics by “the rule of the strongest,” the globe may stand at the brink of collapse in even a pretense of international law and of a course toward peaceful resolution of conflict — and of peaceful coexistence.
What history shows us is that each of two previous so-called world wars was hatched during a period of unprecedented global change — periods of change which lacked the institutional tools or know-how to bring the instability to heel before war could overtake the world.
The global change wrought by our recent social and economic upheaval commonly called the “World Wide Web” and the ability of 21st century militaries to fight remote-control wars, combined with the subsidence of state-based governing ideologies, is leading us toward global conflict unchecked by ideological restraints.
Just as the West failed to see that its treatment of World War I’s defeated enemies would lay the groundwork for more resentments and global conflict, the globalization of new technology and the exacerbation of wealth inequality is paving the way for demagoguery to emerge and democracy to diminish.
And if history can teach us any one simple lesson, it is that demagogues are likely never content.
After World War II, this nation and the rest of the world made an effort to establish a regime of international law and a forum for seeking peace. But, it took years of effort and commitment.
Now, in a world of remote-control conflict lacking a new paradigm for peace and the resolution of conflict, one can easily imagine that there will be demagogues who are readily tempted to cry “havoc.”
Once again, the real danger will be in pretending we cannot hear them barking at our doors.
Goins lives in White Bear Lake.
