PrintSeptember 21, 2011
The World After Obama
In 1992, Francis Fukuyama predicted the End of History. What we have instead is the return of history, with a vengeance. President Obama will leave in his wake a weakened America, confronting an unstable and dangerous world.
While the West's attention is turned inward at its troubled economies, out there among the other 85% of the global population, a lot of chickens are coming home to roost. American chickens.
Voters could benefit from a different focus. In Present at the Creation, his memoir of his years as U.S. secretary of state from 1949-1953, Dean Acheson wrote as follows concerning the challenges facing American statesmen after the Allied victory in World War II: "Only slowly did it dawn on us that the whole world structure and order that we had inherited...was gone[.]"
We may be at such a world-historical moment again, akin to the Versailles Conference, the Congress of Vienna, the Congress of Berlin, and the end of the Second World War. It's more...(Read Full Article)
