New Year, Old Problems
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — The past and its problems weigh like a hangover on this new year. The euro crisis is back, with a dicey Greek election this month and debt problems in Italy and France; Britain votes in May with European Union membership at stake; Russia continues to behave like a revisionist power; the Middle East remains in chaos with Syria broken, Iran's nuclear program unresolved and Israel in its own bitter election campaign; Chinese and Japanese nationalisms are ascendant, perhaps more dangerous than even North Korea’s pique over a goofy satirical movie. To all these various problems, the United States, with its own political and ideological warfare, seems to have few answers. Allied confidence in American leadership is low, even as more Americans say they want a less active global role. Like empires, world orders grow old, fissiparous, complacent and grumpy — despite the Champagne, the thrill is gone. The European order created at the Congress of Vienna lasted nearly a century; the post-World War I order lasted barely 20 years. The post-World War II order seemed to some perfected with the collapse of the Cold War and the apparent spread of liberal democracies. But those assumptions can seem hollow now. In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Richard N. Haass, a former American diplomat and president of the Council on Foreign Relations, described what he called “The Unraveling,” a “disordered world” of instability, economic stagnation and increasing inequality. The hegemony of the United States, which Hubert Védrine, a former French foreign minister, liked to call the world’s “hyperpower,” is increasingly questioned, even ignored. The post-Soviet order is under direct fire in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, but revisionist challengers to the world as we knew it also include authoritarian autocracies like Russia and China, oddball North Korea and a more nationalist Japan. The United Nations Security Council seems ever more ineffective, incapable of creating peace in the most dangerous places — including Syria, Gaza, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Ukraine. The European Union, too, seems to be cracking. Having widened without deepening and having put a common currency ahead of the institutions required to sustain it, the Union is losing its attractiveness as a model. The bloc is heading into another year of troubles, with Greece and the euro creating a familiar set of confusions that Germany, the “reluctant hegemon,” seems incapable of solving. While NATO is slowly bestirring itself to reassure the Baltic states, the very idea of an autonomous European defense capacity seems ever more distant. The European Union’s concept of shared sovereignty can seem an idea of the last century whose time has passed. Everywhere in Europe, populism and nativism are on the rise, in the guise of a revolt against “austerity” and “globalization.” Syriza is leading in Greece, with “Grexit” again a possibility. France’s National Front may win more votes in the next presidential election than the Socialist Party. And Britain is heading for elections, too, with no obvious winner and one obvious spoiler — the English nationalist U.K. Independence Party. There is little respect for any political leader, with both main parties promising little except differing depths of budget cuts and limits to immigration. While the Arab world burns, creating refugees, religious radicalism and military counterrevolution in what many have compared to the Thirty Years’ War, in Israel, too, elections this spring will be important, if not existential. The hope, likely to be disappointed, is that the vote will give clear direction to the so-called peace process. Will Israel continue to be a quietly expansionist state, slowly undermining a viable, independent Palestine, or will it begin to put an end to settlement by stealth? Conversely, will the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, should he survive the year, find the courage to make the difficult internal choices necessary for a two-state solution? “The question,” as Mr. Haass put it, “is not whether the world will continue to unravel, but how fast and how far.” |