I don’t mean the ‘new normal’. I mean normal. The half insane, scary as heck, what are they thinking behavior of not just Russia and China but the entire international community is the real normal.
Those of you who can’t remember the Cold War have lived in the weird times. America was the big scary thing so everyone loved/hated it – including some Americans. Europe was preoccupied with becoming something never quite defined. Elites worldwide were convinced – or pretending to be – that the sky was literally falling so we need to suffocate all the plants. Russia was selling gas to anyone who would buy it and conquering the occasional border state. China was the world’s factory and what every nation-state wanted to be when it grew up.
Then reality came crashing in. We all let the inmates run the asylum just a bit too long. A big, movie scary but otherwise fairly safe world started making less and less sense. We were told to worship a science that could no longer define the word woman. We would have been okay with just that level of insanity, but the inmates decided that they needed to rule the world. In the name of disease control we let disease run rampant and locked up people. We shut down whole economies. We let people suffer and ever die supposedly to protect them.
We really screwed up.
But that is kinda what happens when the world is safe. We turn our attention to other more enjoyable matters and forget all that foreign relations and civil liberties stuff. We can trust our governments, right?
Wrong. Government only comes in size people. People just like you who despite their best intentions do stupid stuff. People just like you who have done things they deeply regret – and hope no one ever finds out about. People just like you who have too much power and are surrounded by too many grifters and start believing the pretty lies until they find themselves doing what they never thought they would. People just like you – human.
If anything, we have to be more vigilant when the world is at peace – or a reasonable facsimile thereof. When we have a common goal – like not letting the world end in a big fireball – it’s much easier to keep the team focused. When the game seems to be over, that’s when we take our eyes off the ball. That’s when things go hilariously and hideously wrong.
So, here we are. Right back where we started from but in a world unfamiliar to those who grew up in times of such incredible security. Russia is threatening nuclear strikes against a smaller nation state that they are trying to take over. China had a royal hissy fit because an 80 year old lady had a stopover in Taiwan. Welcome to the 1980’s but with less common sense.
See, nation-states are just big groups of people. People have wants and needs and quirks and good stuff and bad stuff. Sometimes they just mess up because they do something stupid while trying to do something good. Sometimes they convince themselves they are doing something good that they know full well is actually something bad. Sometimes they don’t bother convincing themselves they just do what they want.
The United States has been the world’s policeman, peacemaker, kindergarten teacher, round up cowboy, and occasional village idiot for 80 years. In the last thirty the US lost its focus and started arguing about who gets to use the girl’s bathroom. The world is full of nation-states that don’t like the current world order – mostly because they want to be in the US’ seat or worse, take over in a much more serious way. Little wonder with the US distracted and doing stupid stuff the most powerful of those nation-states thought their chance had come.
They were wrong.
Being fair, outside looking in, the US is insane at the best of times. I hear young people talking about civil war and it’s hard not to laugh at them. We’re not the most divided we’ve ever been – we’re not even close. The Sixties were much worse than this. If our own kids can’t understand just how normal crazy is in US domestic affairs, we can hardly expect the neighbors to figure it out.
The US has an incredible tolerance for chaos. The normal fussing and feuding that is American politics would cause many nation-states to collapse. We forget just how resilient we are to the insanity of real public discourse. We can explain and let others observe, but it’s just too alien to most other nation-states. They can’t get a good read on us.
We’ve proven ourselves repeatedly. That’s why our allies trust us. It’s certainly not because they think we’re sane.
Our enemies have it worse. We’re happy to let them see under the hood – and a little disappointed that they don’t appreciate our super turbo charged V12 with overhead cams and rocket assist. It makes perfect sense to us that this bizarre contraption works. But to our enemies, it’s incomprehensible. The thing should not work and no one sane would ever want to ride in it, let alone use it daily. They can’t make sense of us.
The real difference is that authoritarian systems have little to no tolerance for chaos. US politics are almost literally chaos on a stick. Being charitable, we’re frightening to any nation-state that prefers order. Being less charitable, we are a direct threat to any nation-state that thinks order is more important than its people.
Whether it’s Democracy v Communism, Security v Terrorism or Liberty v Totalitarianism, the US stands for and fights for, those values that authoritarians despise. In a world that seems mostly at peace, it’s easy to lose sight of just how fundamentally different the nations of the world can be. Well, that lovely dream is a fading memory. The world is waking up to the reality that some value systems really are better than others and that freedom really isn’t free.
It’s okay. It’s a little disorienting at first but you don’t have to be scared. The world hasn’t changed – it’s just acting its normal self for the first time in a few decades.
Don’t worry. The good guys will win.
