Blurred Vision - Warnings From the Ukraine Crisis

Narcism and posturing was as much to blame for the missteps that led to The Great War as anything. It is even more prevalent today. m/r

"Not being George W. Bush is not a foreign policy. Not invading countries is not a foreign policy. Wishing to demonstrate your sophistication by announcing you are unencumbered by the false historical narratives of the past is not a foreign policy. Assuming the world will be nice if we're not militarist is not a foreign policy.
What is our foreign policy? Disliking global warming?"

Peggy Noonan: Warnings From the Ukraine Crisis - WSJ.com

Updated March 14, 2014  

A new century's dangers begin to come into focus.

What has been happening in Ukraine is not a wake-up call precisely but a tugging at the attention, a demand to focus.

There's a sense that in some new way we are watching the 21st century take its shape and express its central realities. Exactly 100 years ago, in August 1914, the facts that would shape the 20th century gathered and emerged in the Great War. History doesn't repeat itself; you can't, as they say, step into the same stream twice. But it does have an unseen circularity.

Sept. 11 started the century and brought forward the face of terrorism. It is still there and will continue to cause grave disruptions. Since then we have seen we are living in a time of uprisings, from the Mideast to Africa to the streets of Kiev. We are learning that history isn't over in Europe, that East-West tensions can simmer and boil over, that the 20th century didn't resolve as much as many had hoped.

A Mideast dictator last year used poison gas on his own population and strengthened his position. He's winning. What does that tell the other dictators? What does it suggest about our future?

I keep thinking of two things that for me capture the moment and our trajectory. The first is a sentence from Don DeLillo's prophetic 1991 novel, " Mao II ": "The future belongs to crowds." Movements will be massive. The street will rise and push. The street in Cairo, say, is full of young men who are jobless and unformed. They channel their energy into politics and street passions. If they had jobs they'd develop the habits of work—self-discipline, patience, a sense of building and belonging—that are so crucial to maintaining human society. But they don't, so they won't.

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