It’s a chaotic world out there. But we’d better get used to it; this may be the new normal.
The Middle East is in flames, not only Gaza but Syria, Iraq and Libya as well. Russia is massing troops on the border of Ukraine. Central Africa is a mess, as are Afghanistan and Pakistan. Parts of Mexico and Central America are ruled by criminal gangs and drug cartels. And those are merely the crises big enough to command front-page attention.
“This is historically unprecedented,” former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told Foreign Policy magazine recently. “Huge swaths of global territory are dominated by populist unrest, anger and effective loss of state control.”