The New New World Order

Georgie Ann Geyer, one of the few columnists who specializes in one subject (global politics) and then writes about it, sees an administration that wants to change the world order, lies to get where they want to go, and can't finish what they started. Read this:

The struggle this week between Washington and France, Germany and Belgium has not, however, been only about differences over Iraq. It is more about the intention of the neo-conservatives around the White House and Pentagon to break off the United States from old allies. The new configuration would be a nexus no longer of the Atlantic alliance, but now of an aggressive alliance roughly composed of the U.S., a "democratized" Iraq, Turkey, possibly India, the formerly communist Eastern European countries now in NATO, and Israel as the West's predominant proconsul in the Middle East.

Then we have Charles Krauthammer the gloomy dyspeptic psychologist who knows just enough to be dangerous but not enough to be correct. Problems in the world? It's Clinton's fault.

You don't get to a place like this overnight. It takes at least, oh, a decade. We are now paying the wages of the 1990s, our holiday from history. During that decade, every major challenge to America was deferred. The chief aim of the Clinton administration was to make sure that nothing terrible happened on its watch. Accordingly, every can was kicked down the road

[snip...]

There is no avoiding the danger any longer. Last year President Bush's axis-of-evil speech was met with eye-rolling disdain by the sophisticates. One year later the warning has been vindicated in all its parts. Even the United Nations says Iraq must be disarmed. The International Atomic Energy Agency has just (politely) declared North Korea a nuclear outlaw. Iran has announced plans to mine uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel; we have recently discovered two secret Iranian nuclear complexes.

It's like Krauthammer never heard of the Cold War. There have always been rogue states and there have been weapons of mass destruction since 1945. But there have also been cool-headed governments that knew how to use diplomacy to keep things from getting out of control. Until a little over two years ago we didn't have a belligerent President stomping around the world like a slow-witted three year-old threatening and pouting and claiming he was "getting tired" of it all.

The world is a hornet's nest and we now have the profound bad luck to be living in it under a child armed with a big stick while a bunch of his friends "double-dog dare" him to just do it and see what happens.