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Threat Inflation and Short Memories

Previous decades have had as many or more "upheavals and crises" as we have today.
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Philip Stephens repeats a bit of silly conventional wisdom:

At a conference in New York organised by the US branch of the Ditchley Foundation I heard a distinguished American elder statesman remark that he has never known a period when the world had been simultaneously buffeted by so many upheavals and crises [bold mine-DL].

The idea that we are living through some uniquely unstable and chaotic period is a popular one nowadays, but it just shows what short memories and how little perspective many analysts and even “elder statesmen” have. Previous decades have had as many or more “upheavals and crises” as we have today, but they are now forgotten or only dimly remembered because they are now over or because the people making outlandish claims about the present never paid any attention to these crises back then. Fifteen years ago, central Africa was in the middle of a huge international war with forces from over a half dozen states and their proxies fighting in Congo, and millions of people perished in the greatest loss of life in a conflict since WWII. By any reasonable measure, that represented far more upheaval and violence than anything we see today, but probably because it was in sub-Saharan Africa it is all but forgotten. The ’90s had plenty of “upheavals and crises,” including the dissolution of the USSR, the Balkan wars, the Karabakh war, the Kargil war, the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Gulf War, and the Rwandan genocide, and those are just some of the most obvious ones. It is very doubtful that the world is experiencing more “upheavals and crises” than it has over the last several decades, so the “elder statesman” Stephens cites is either being forgetful or tendentious.

If the world is not demonstrably more unstable and chaotic than it has been in previous decades, why are there so many people claiming that it is? Like most kinds of alarmism, this one seems aimed at frightening people into accepting dubious policies. The general goal seems to be to get the U.S. and their allies to be as meddlesome overseas as possible. As we saw in Rasmussen’s op-ed yesterday, the people that are exaggerating the extent of global upheaval want the U.S. to be actively involved in “restoring order.” In practice, that means more interference in other countries’ affairs and deeper involvement in ongoing conflicts. Order isn’t likely to be restored in the process, but the point is to keep the U.S. as entangled as possible so that there’s never an opportunity to assess whether it makes sense for the U.S. to be as activist as it is. So when you hear someone assert that the world is suffering from an extraordinary number of “upheavals and crises,” remember that it isn’t true and the person making the claim is almost certainly trying to sell you on a more ambitious and aggressive foreign policy.

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