My own interest in issues of war and peace began with Robert D. Kaplan’s writings for the Atlantic Monthly. Kaplan’s powerful depictions of life in the Third World demonstrate just how privileged we are to live in America.
Just south of the border, policemen, government officials, and even popular celebrities are murdered with impunity by cartel gunmen, guerrillas target energy resources, and corruption reigns supreme. Mexico, however, is mild compared to the Hobbesian wasteland of the greater Global South.
True terrorism is living with the knowledge that you can be robbed, abused, and killed anytime, by anyone. Those who live in the ever-expanding maze of corrugated-zinc shantytowns across the world know this well, as do the gunmen who prey on them. In our own search for security, we cannot forget our basic fortune to live in a prosperous society where impersonal rule of law is the norm rather than the exception.
The threats we face are paltry compared to the misery and depredation endured on a day-to-day basis by a substantial portion of the world's population. In this context, it is bizarre that so many are taken with the paranoid ravings of those who argue that we are in a new "World War" against all-powerful “Islamofascists” with the power to end life as we know it. Norman Podhoretz’s America is a weak, coddled child in a sea of powerful enemies, a pitiful nation that must be redeemed by purifying violence against foreign adversaries.
That is not an America that most people-of all political persuasions-want to live in. But it is the America that we will have if we continue to reward politicians and opinion-makers who would have us adopt the mentality of a garrison state. As Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek, “To recover its place in the world, the United States should first recover its confidence.” Though the challenges of the new world order are steep, we are a people well-suited to overcome them.
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