A Look at Today's World Through the Lense of History

Ninety years ago, the Russian government spent huge efforts to destabilize all the governments in the world. The backlash against communist agitation in Germany brought the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and its Feurer Adolph Hitler to power in five years. The mess in France caused by communist agitation reduced the political climate to chaos, such that when war with Germany came the war effort was sabotaged from within. In the United Kingdom, appeasement became the primary foreign policy, allowing the Nazis to gain enough advantage to bring the world to the brink of destruction. In the United States, the isolationist movement became all powerful with the phrase, “America first!” All this came about in part as a result of the machinations of the Russian propaganda machine, and this without access to the internet.

Today, we not only have the destabilizing effect of Russian propaganda disguised as “fake news,” we have various other factions who push their own misinformation to undermine our society. The end result of this rot is going to be what it has always led to in the past: American withdrawal from the world stage and the world starting a war that will drag us back into it. The idea that history repeats itself is not exactly accurate. History runs in cycles. The period of the cycle is not exact, but every century it leads the world to the brink of destruction. The last two times this happened, WWI and WWII, the only thing that saved the whole world from death and oppression was the intervention of the United States of America, first with our industry, then with our blood.

This time there are many potential combatants with nuclear weapons and little moral or ethical compunction to forbear their use. There is only one nation on Earth that has used atomic weapons in war, and never denied a willingness to do so again if necessary, the United States of America. But no one in the world actually believes that the U. S. will use them again in the future. These people, like the Nazis and the Japanese militarist in the 1940s, tell themselves that the resolve of the American people is weak, Americans won’t fight. Then they get into a fight with us and make us angry. That’s when they crystallize the resolve of the very people they called weak.

The only way to avoid the world conflagration is to avoid the perception that America is weak. How to do that without compromising our values is the debate thinking people in the military and diplomatic services have chewed over for the past hundred years. We had better solve this puzzle soon. The end is fast approaching.

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