So now cocaine is legal in Oregon, but straws aren’t. That must be frustrating.
What happens when ideological signals are finally recognized as empty and without virtue?
By James Freeman
This column has lamented the modern evolution of the New York Times from left-leaning journalism to edgy content for progressives—“a juicy collection of great narratives,” in the words of the Times’s former media columnist. Having decided to cater to a limited and fiercely ideological slice of the public with its flagship newspaper, the New York Times Co. then opted to look for growth in entertainment products with broader appeal. But the reaction to a New York Times column this week raises the exciting possibility that even the newspaper’s readers have consumed about all the juicy progressive narratives they can stand. It’s unclear whether this is a precise reading of liberal sentiment, but one dares to hope that the entire Democratic Party might finally be ready to evolve out of its era of radical excess. The timing could be perfect as a warning from one influential leftist suggests that many of the party’s voters still don’t realize how much their ideas will cost them.
Last week this column noted the Boston Globe’s reporting on Boston University’s inquiry into possible mismanagement at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research, a prominent institution of racial resentment. Mr. Kendi has been celebrated for years by the media and academic left for his wholesale denunciations of American society. Now columnist Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times that “it’s important to understand that the center’s apparent implosion is more the result of a failed funding model than a failed ideology. It exemplifies the lamentable tendency among left-leaning donors to chase fads and celebrities rather than build sustainable institutions.”
Times readers may struggle to recall a time when the newspaper was dismissing Mr. Kendi’s claims of systemic racism as a celebrity-driven fad. Still, one might have expected the paper’s customers to share Ms. Goldberg’s reluctance to blame his ideology. But numerous Times readers were having none of it, and took to the comments section to critique Mr. Kendi’s work. One Times reader commented:
no, Michelle, it’s not simply a failed funding model. It’s a failing set of ideas, and maybe the realization that the religious model (a set of unprovable beliefs, evildoers, victims, martyrs, etc) is not a great foundation for an academic center. Liberals and moderates have had a few years now to take a look at all of this and formulate a reasonable reply, and it is mostly, “NO.”
In a similar vein, another commented:
The problem is that a University should not build research centers around ideologies, failed or otherwise. Centers like this are not trying to understand what is or why in an objective manner. They are trying to promote a social and political agenda. Efforts like this have no place on campus.
To Ms. Goldberg’s credit her column included some additional disturbing news on this developing story:
“Once the center was established under the near-total control of a single individual, there were many conscientious, talented, dedicated people who came there because they recognized it as a site of power,” Spencer Piston, a Boston University professor who until recently served as faculty lead in the Center for Antiracist Research’s policy office, told me. (He says he hasn’t been able to get a straight answer about whether he’s been fired.) “Tens of millions of dollars were flowing in, and there was lots of prestige, and they thought this would be a chance to do some good.”
Piston remains proud of some of the center’s work, particularly research projects done in concert with local organizations like Family Matters First, which helps families caught up in the child welfare system. “It’s absolutely true that many of the center’s most high-profile projects have been failures,” he said. But there were also successes, despite what he called “the many pathologies at the center.”
Last week, however, Family Matters First found out that its contract with the center had been terminated ahead of schedule, meaning the group won’t receive $10,000 it was counting on.
Expensive and expansive promises that are never fulfilled is the story of the progressive left. But do its adherents understand just how expensive? Marxist Fredrik deBoer has spent at least several years trying to explain to his fellow leftists that American voters are just not that into the ideas of Sen. Bernie Sanders (socialist, Vt.).
Given how much President Joe Biden has embraced Sanders spending preferences—and how unpopular Mr. Biden is now—it’s hard to argue the point. This suggests an opportunity to revisit the party’s embrace of the Sandernistas.
In reviewing Mr. deBoer’s “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement” last month, the Journal’s Barton Swaim noted that the book is a useful source for understanding “the Democratic Party’s slow transformation from a coalition of working-class whites, racial minorities and disaffected hippies into a party of hypereducated urbanites, well-paid activists and expert-class virtue-signalers”. Mr. Swaim wrote:
Mr. deBoer describes the “elite capture” of the American left as a “drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic.” As he writes in a nice summation of his complaint, “if you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.”
Why, asks this latter-day Bolshevik, did so few significant police reforms emerge from the white-hot revolutionary rage of the George Floyd protests and riots? His answer: Affluent activists and commentators, black and white, co-opted the issue and turned it into a choice between defending the men in blue (bad) and defunding police departments (good). “In statistical terms,” he writes, “the status of Black people in twenty-first-century America stands as a national disgrace,” but the left’s activist class found it impossible to acknowledge some concomitant realities: that the average black American faces little danger of being killed by a cop; that more policing reduces crime; and—I have to quote his words here, so rare are they from the pen of a leftist—that “things are getting better regarding race and racism.”
Now Mr. deBoer is suggesting that Democrats still don’t understand the price they will have to pay for leftist governance. Marc Novicoff in Politico interviews Mr. DeBoer about his book:
Novicoff: The conclusion of the book is that class must be the primary basis upon which the left organizes. Given the fact that the base for America’s leftmost major party is increasingly college-educated people with means, is this feasible, and how would it work?
DeBoer: This is going take a lot of arguing and persuading and careful discussion, but one of the things that people have to understand is you can’t build the kind of society we want to build if you’re defining rich people as only people who make more than like $400,000 a year, ok? You need to start taxing the upper middle class and even the middle class more than you’re taxing them right now. The problem is, as you suggested, that the Democratic Party has a ton of people in what’s considered their base who are making $100,000 to $200,000 who are therefore making dramatically more than the American median household income, but who don’t see themselves as wealthy or affluent, who will tell you that they’re struggling to make ends meet, etc. And they’re all for taxing the rich as long as the rich doesn’t include them.
But if you just look at it structurally, we can’t continue to define the rich so narrowly and expect to be able to tax just them and build the kind of social state that we want.
If heavy tax increases need to be applied much more broadly, one wonders why anyone would want such a state. But Mr. deBoer continues:
At some point, you have to actually demonstrate that you care enough to open up your pocketbook and give a little bit more money to the tax man. And one of the really unfortunate things about the current state of liberal identity politics is it never puts them in that position, right? Twenty-first century identity politics are so relentlessly focused on these absurd cultural trivialities, like racial diversity at the Oscars, that you’re not actually putting well-to-do liberals and leftists in a position where they actually have to decide, “Am I secretly a Republican when it comes time to tax me?”
As if the White House doesn’t have enough 2024 headaches, now they have to worry about secret Republicans?
Maybe it’s time to endorse policies that are openly moderate.
James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”
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THE DARIÉN GAP MASS MIGRATION PIPELINE EXPOSED - CRITICAL INFORMATION FOR ALL AMERICANS
This report exposes key information essential to understanding the US southern border crisis in its entirety.
Muckraker proves that the implosion of the United States' southern border is the intentional result of careful planning and is part of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development aka Agenda 2030.
Muckraker brings you inside the Darién Gap, Panama, where migrants bound for the United States are aided in their journey. The mass migration of people to the US is encouraged and funded by various international organizations that provide care, assistance, and migration instructions.
One cannot understand the US southern border crisis without understanding the situation in the Darién Gap.
Watch and share this critical report with the world!
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Is the Left Happy That They Got Their Wish?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted By Ruth King
America has been in a veritable cultural revolution since the 1960s. Nearly all our major institutions finally became woke—the administrative state, traditional and social media, universities, K-12, the corporate boardroom, entertainment, professional sports, and the foundations.
So the Obama and the Biden administrations finally seemed to have achieved their aims, in what the Obamas once boasted would be the “fundamental transformation” of America into something unrecognizable by its Founders. But what they gave us was nihilism—the destruction of norms, laws, and customs. There is no border, no criminal justice system, no real president any more.
The citizen is a serf, the illegal alien the veritable citizen. The former needs a passport to reenter the country, the latter is waved on through. There is a slob in gym shorts and a hoodie establishing dress codes for the Senate, teen murderers bragging that they won’t spend a day in jail, and a would-be state legislator filming herself doing sexual gymnastics while begging for cash only to be upset over the invasion of her “privacy.” So the Left got what it wanted and gave us our new America.
The curious result, however, is that even the elite Left is now forced to live among, and cannot always escape, the ruination it created—and for the first time is becoming slightly unhappy with what it birthed.
Critical legal theory has now trickled down into most of our large cities. It insists that criminals are not criminals at all, but rather victims of prior racial and class oppressions. Thus their victims should blame society for their injuries, not their predatory victimizers. Critical legal theory is a sort of Marxist redistribution schema—the middle class almost deserves its equal share of violence commensurate with that of the inner city.
As a result, in Chicago and Oakland and hundreds of other cities, prosecutors let out criminals without bail or sometimes even indictments—in part out of spite and hatred of middle- and upper-middle-class America that supposedly deserves a payback for its bourgeois indifference, in part out of sheer ignorance of the unleashing of human nature once all deterrence is removed.
And the result?
Anxious liberal professionals are fleeing our major cities in the greatest out-of-state migrations since the 1930s. Or they simply avoid their own downtowns. Or sometimes they are reduced to putting placards in their parked cars begging criminals not to smash and loot them, or, for the richer, hiring their own security guards, or using apps to warn others against deposits of urban human excrement on downtown sidewalks.
The Left, aside from their desire for new dependent constituents, felt borders were anachronistic constructs that unfairly denied the inherent and universal human right of the poor and oppressed to go anywhere they pleased, without legality or permission of their targeted hosts. So they erased the southern border. Some 7-8 million illegal entries followed since January 2021.
And the result?
African-Americans in Chicago are demonstrating against mass influxes of illegal aliens into their cities who bury entitlements and social services. The Left used to calls such protests “xenophobia.”
Leftwing New York Mayor Eric Adams has gone from calling those racists who opposed illegal immigration to becoming a veritable nativist. He is now screaming that illegal aliens are “destroying” his city, damning the Biden administration, and warning of bankruptcy. Adams too is unhappy that leftists like himself finally got what they wanted.
Progressives recalibrated a tiny sliver of the population—well less than 1 percent—experiencing historically documented biological “sexual dysphoria” and announced that transgenderism was now both commonplace and an existential civil rights crisis involving anywhere from 5 to 20 percent of American youth and up to 40 percent on college campuses that appeal to the elite leftwing rich kids.
The Left demanded official recognition of multiple genders, the green-lighting of biological males competing in women’s sports, the mainstreaming of risqué drag queen shows often before audiences of minors, and the preemptive smearing of anyone who believed that sexuality is biologically determined rather than fluidly socially constructed.
And the result?
Corporate pile-ons and trendy transgendered advocacies have ruined Bud Light, once American’s premier beer brand. The once beloved but now woke and arrogant Disney Corporation is bleeding audiences, customers, and subscribers. Due to its provocative arrogance, Disney managed to become all but despised by half the nation. Ditto other woke major corporations from Target to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Parents—many of them doctrinaire liberals—of gifted female athletes whose careers are derailed by transgender males, of teenage girls who must use locker rooms with biological males, of small children who witness in-your-face drag queen exhibitions—now feel bushwhacked by their own prior advocacy.
The Left has waged a war on fossil fuels for decades. But once in power it has cancelled critical pipelines, restricted federal oil and gas leases, hectored oil and gas lenders, shut down entire oil fields, and issued arbitrary deadlines when internal combustion engines are to be banned, and clean burning natural gas appliances to be phased out.
And the result of turning the nation “green”?
Gasoline prices spiked to all-time highs, hurting most the poor and minorities, the supposed political base of the Democratic Party. When elections near, only then does a panicked Left begin draining the strategic petroleum reserve, while begging illiberal regimes abroad to pump more oil that they we will not—in a desperate effort to lower gas and diesel prices, at least temporarily until elections are over.
Bicoastal wealthy elites lecture down to Americans about the existential crisis of “climate change” and the radical revolutions necessary to “transition” (a favorite, multipurpose woke word) to solar, wind, and battery power.
And the result? Those who can least afford high energy prices now pay over $5 a gallon for gas and more for diesel in our wealthiest coastal blue states—on the directive of their affluent utopian advocates.
Leftwing rich liberals for a half century have virtue signaled their support for affirmative action and de facto racial quotas. The unspoken presumption was that they would always have the wherewithal to navigate around such systemic discrimination to ensure their own still went to the “right” colleges and universities and onto prestigious jobs and positions.
But then the woke revolution redefined affirmative action as “reparatory” admissions and hiring. That radical expansion of racial quotas meant elite universities like Stanford and Princeton soon bragged in racist fashion that they would only admit so-called whites as 20-30 percent of their incoming classes, despite their traditional proportional representation of 65-70 percent of the general population.
Soon such progressive discriminatory policies meant that after athletes, so-called legacies, the children of faculty and administrators, and the offspring of multimillionaire donors were accommodated, the new tiny white quotas were completely exhausted—even for the anointed children of the bicoastal left.
High-paid suburban and progressive professionals whose privileged, and high achieving sons and daughters with 4.0-plus grade point averages and near perfect SAT scores, with an array of “community service” blue-ribbon resumés—were summarily rejected en mass from America’s most prestigious schools.
Prior SAT camps, prep schools, tutors, “extracurricular” enrichment summer excisions, and prestigious internships and apprenticeships went all for naught under the new racism.
And the result of the war on meritocracy? Elite liberals were shocked, shocked!
Such reverse-discrimination had traditionally targeted solely the children of deplorables, irredeemables, and clingers, the meritocratic lower white working classes, who were usually preposterously written off as white privileged and supremacists and thus usually summarily rejected. Yet the architects of affirmative action never dreamed that their Frankensteinian creation would devolve into a quota monster devouring its parent.
As far as the professors, who opportunistically applauded the new -studies therapeutic courses, the DEI-apparat, the reparatory admissions, as well as the end of SAT and ACT scores and of the comparative ranking of high-school GPAs?
For those who taught real disciplines—languages, traditional history and literature, science, math, and engineering—they faced three dilemmas under the new nonmeritocratic admissions: 1) inflate their grades, 2) reduce class requirements, or 3) maintain grading and course standards and thus be targeted by DEI commissars should their grading reveal a “systemic” pattern of “racism.”
After spending their careers damning administrative “bloat,” and the siphoning of university resources from teaching to fund administrative fiefdoms, suddenly faculty were forced to agree that they needed thousands of DEI supervisors and commissars, who were even more superfluous but also far more intrusive into faculty autonomy than the old-boy functionaries of the past. The result? Is it now “All administrators are bad, but some are not as bad as others?”
These examples of liberal utopianism backfiring on its godfathers are becoming endless as the Jacobin revolution known as woke destroys meritocracy, the ancient laws of human nature, pragmatism, and common sense. Will the revolution then finally wither away once it continues to gulp down its own privileged woke sacred cows?
Perhaps, but perhaps not.
Woke is a religion, not an empirically based revolution. It requires blind faith and ideological zealotry that ignores data, smears apostates as blasphemers, and is fueled by a climate of fear as it uses public shaming, cancel culture, doxing, shadow banning, ostracism, and career destruction to bulldoze ahead.
That it is now mowing down its originators may not matter much, even if for the short term the current boomeranging should be teaching leftists that their ideology is unworkable and ultimately destructive of civilization. History, after all, is replete with misguided zealots who even to the very first shot of their own firing squads still believed in the catastrophic cultural and political upheavals they had unleashed on others.
Partly woke continues, then, because its privileged creators still cling to the belief, “What I create for others, certainly will not apply to me and mine.” And when it does, as it is beginning to now, they stay long in denial and continue their woke advocacy because they still hope their progressive piety and fides will someday earn them heaven on earth
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IDF continues to strike Hamas targets in Gaza
The IDF struck a military post belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip
A short while ago, an IDF UAV struck a military post belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization. The post was located near the area from which today (Monday), assailants carried out a shooting toward IDF soldiers during a violent riot that took place in the Karni area.
Additionally, IDF soldiers responded with live fire toward an assailant who fired shots at the soldiers and hit him. No IDF injuries were reported.
Furthermore, earlier today (Monday), IDF soldiers identified two suspects that attempted to cross the security area from the southern Gaza Strip into Israeli territory. IDF soldiers apprehended the suspects and they were transferred to security forces for further questioning.
Over the last few hours, tens of rioters have gathered adjacent to the security fence in the Gaza Strip. IDF soldiers were dispatched to the scene and operated against the violent riot using riot dispersal means and precise live fire. A number of hits were identified.
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We are all proud of our cousin, Sam Grundwerg. 3rd on left:
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50 Influential Jews: Pillars of Zion - No. 26
The heads of Israel's national institutions Keren Kayemet LeIsrael, World Zionist Organization, and Keren Hayesod wield profound influence, backed by tens of billions of shekels.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Jerusalem Post Influencers 50 Most Influential Jews
Keren Hayesod world chairman Sam Grundwerg, World Zionist Organization chairman Yaakov Hagoel, and KKL chairperson Ifat Ovadia Luski. (photo credit: Alex Kolomoisky, Courtesy)
The Likud Party isn’t only the strongest political entity in the Knesset, but it is also one of the most central forces in Israel’s four national institutions: Keren Kayemet LeIsrael (KKL-JNF); the Jewish Agency; the World Zionist Organization (WZO); and Keren Hayesod. The senior positions of all four of these institutions, as well as other influence of tens of billions of shekels, is determined by the results of the World Zionist Congress that takes place every five years.
Two chairpersons of these organizations represent the Likud: Yaakov Hagoel, chairman of WZO; and Ifat Ovadia Luski, chairwoman of KKL-JNF. Both are part of MK Danny Danon’s group in World Likud, and their influence in recent years has become enormous.
Hagoel has brought WZO and the Zionist movement in general to a more central stage of the Jewish world and Israeli society. He’s been instrumental in creating traditions to Israelis such as the National Zionism quiz, which is broadcast annually on national television. In addition, he brought forward an initiative that was adopted by the government this year that will focus on commemoration of Jews in the Diaspora who were killed in antisemitic terrorist attacks. Some of the initiatives include the establishment of a memorial site for Diaspora Jews and an accessible database with information on the victims.
In December 2022, a significant milestone was marked when 42-year-old Ovadia-Luski was selected as the chairwoman of KKL-JNF by its board of directors, making her the first woman to hold this prestigious position.
Her commitment to the Hebrew language and its culture is evident from her leadership in WZO’s Department of Hebrew Language and Culture. Her upbringing was deeply rooted in the values of the Betar Movement, and throughout her professional journey she has displayed unwavering commitment to the Jewish community and Israel.
She was instrumental in promoting a number of financial agreements that have enabled KKL-JNF to act in a more responsible way, such as with the Israeli government, with the employees of the organization, and a renewed discussion with JNF-USA about cooperating together again after a two-decade hiatus.
Both Hagoel and Ovadia-Luski have been able to do something that most Israeli leaders have not managed to do in the past year: conduct in-depth conversations and discussions with Jews from all sides of the political and religious map, from Israel and around the globe. In both KKL-JNF and WZO, there are directors or executives from Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews, including haredi Jews from Israel and the Diaspora.
Sam Grundwerg (Keren Haysod)
Growing up in Miami Beach, Florida, and making aliyah at 17 and serving as a lone soldier in the armored corps, Sam Grundwerg never dreamed he would serve as an Israeli diplomat and be in leadership roles in some of the Jewish people’s most influential national organizations. Before diplomacy and the Jewish organizational world, He had a promising business career. He held positions in law and finance in the US and Israel, including in the prestigious Greenberg Traurig law firm.
For the past five years, Grundwerg, world chairman of Keren Hayesod-UIA (United Israel Appeal), has worked with Steven Lowy, chairman of the World Board of Trustees, in leading the iconic Zionist fundraising arm and national institution. Together, they have led monumental changes re-energizing Keren Hayesod, enormously impacting Jewish Diaspora communities outside of the US. The recent financial results of the organization include nearly a $200 million fundraising campaign supporting Israeli society and a massive $22 million (NIS 75.3 m) fundraising efforts of Keren Hayesod for the emergency aliyah from Ukraine and Russia campaign.
In his strategic efforts to modernize and keep the organization relevant to new donors and supporters, Grundwerg has been able to establish and strengthen relationships with Christian leaders across the world, including communities like Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and even South Korea, an effort with enormous strategic importance for Israel and the organization.
In this sensitive year, Grundwerg and Lowy have the complicated task of navigating through complex political issues with pressure from both sides of the aisle to take a stand. They have conveyed to the leadership in Israel the effects of the situation in the country today on the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora, and on the 103-year-old organization seeking to lead another successful year raising funds for Israel.
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The Rules-Based International Order Is Quietly Disintegrating
It hasn’t been this threatened since the 1930s.
By Walter Russell Mead
The most important fact in world politics is that 19 months after Vladimir Putin challenged the so-called rules-based international order head-on by invading Ukraine, the defense of that order is not going well. The world is less stable today than in February 2022, the enemies of the order hammer away, the institutional foundations of the order look increasingly shaky, and Western leaders don’t yet seem to grasp the immensity of the task before them.
This isn’t just about the military threats to the international system in such places as Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait. Even as the global geopolitical crisis becomes more acute, the core institutions and initiatives of the American-led world order and the governments that back them are growing progressively weaker and less relevant.
The United Nations was supposed to be the crown jewel of the rules-based order, but lately the power and prestige of this perennial underperformer has sunk to new lows. Among the leaders of the five permanent members of the Security Council, only Joe Biden bothered to show up for the General Assembly last week. Emmanuel Macron was too busy welcoming King Charles III on an entirely ceremonial state visit to Paris. Apparently neither the British king nor the French president thought the U.N. important enough to affect his plans. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak blew off a letter from the heads of more than 100 international-development nongovernmental organizations urging him to attend, the first prime minister in a decade to skip the annual meeting.
Mr. Putin and China’s Xi Jinping also ditched the U.N. meeting, but they weren’t staying at home and washing their hair. Both ostentatiously demonstrated their contempt for Western norms by inviting international pariahs for high-profile visits. Just before the U.N. meeting, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un headed to a Russian space-launch site, where Mr. Putin courted him and both leaders bragged about their deepening relations. And during the General Assembly, Mr. Xi welcomed Syria’s beleaguered Bashar al-Assad to Hangzhou.
There was a time when people would have cared what the U.N. had to say about international crises ranging from the string of coups across Africa and the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict to the alleged Indian involvement in the assassination of a Khalistan activist in Canada. Nobody today thinks that the deadlocked Security Council or the farcical General Assembly has a constructive role to play in these matters.
It isn’t only the United Nations. Messrs. Xi and Putin also ditched this month’s Group of 20 summit in New Delhi. Meantime, China was busy demonstrating its utter contempt for the World Court ruling against its “Nine-Dash line” territorial claims in the South China Sea. Beijing continues to develop military facilities on Mischief Reef, part of the internationally recognized Exclusive Economic Zone belonging to the Philippines, and increasingly polices its claimed maritime boundaries in defiance of Western protests.
The World Trade Organization is a shadow of its former self. As protectionist sentiment intensifies around the world, the WTO is largely toothless and voiceless. The Doha Round of trade talks collapsed years ago, and there is no prospect of a revival of the free-trade agenda that was an integral element of the rules-based order from the Bretton Woods negotiations during World War II on.
Arms-control and disarmament negotiations, another pillar of the rules-based order, are off the agenda. China has launched a massive nuclear buildup. Russia seems more interested in threatening the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine than in disarmament. As Iran nears the nuclear threshold, the early signs of a proliferation cascade are visible in the Middle East. Mr. Kim’s trip to Russia signals the final collapse of U.S. attempts to constrain North Korea’s nuclear program through U.N. sanctions. South Korea, where a majority of voters favor developing nuclear weapons, is paying attention. The development of hypersonic missiles, cyber attacks and biological weapons persists, with no meaningful attempt to address these problems through multilateral institutions, arms talks or anything else this side of the law of the jungle.
States are imploding and the rule of law is disappearing across large parts of the world. In Latin America, narco-trafficking crime organizations have infiltrated or supplanted weak states. Something similar is happening in the Sahel, with jihadist groups and bandits openly defying the authority of shambolic governments. Russia, China and Iran are happily fishing in these troubled waters, with few signs of effective Western responses to a growing security threat. The ignominious collapse of French power across Africa has been more dramatic, but the palsied incompetence of American responses to the erosion of civil order among our own neighbors is at least equally disgraceful, and equally grave.
Threatened by powerful and relentless adversaries from without, undermined by political decadence and institutional decay from within, the rules-based international order has not been this imperiled since the 1930s.
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