Victor Davis Hanson: Our Unstable World Points To Large War Looming On Horizon

From IBD:

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we've seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-100-year European peace that followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. 

Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. 

Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power shifted, decline for some nations seemed like opportunity for others. The same was true in 1939. The tragedy of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 was not that it had been too harsh. 

In fact, it was far milder than the terms Germany had imposed on a defeated Russia in 1918 or the requirements it had planned for France in 1914. 

Instead, Versailles combined the worst of both worlds: harsh language without any means of enforcement. The subsequent appeasement of Britain and France, the isolationism of the U.S. and the collaboration of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany green-lighted Hitler's aggression — and another world war. 

We are entering a similarly dangerous interlude. Collapsing oil prices — a good thing for most of the world — will make troublemakers like oil-exporting Iran and Russia take even more risks. Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State feel that conventional military power has no effect on their agendas. 

The West is seen as a tired culture of Black Friday shoppers and maxed-out credit card holders. NATO is underfunded and without strong American leadership. It can only hope that Vladimir Putin does not invade a NATO country like Estonia, rather than prepare for the likelihood that he will, and soon. 

The U.S. has slashed its defense budget to historic lows. It sends the message abroad that friendship with America brings few rewards, while hostility toward the U.S. has even fewer consequences. 

The bedrock American relationships with staunch allies such as Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan and Israel are fading. Instead, we court new belligerents that don't like the U.S., such as Turkey and Iran. 

No one has any idea how to convince a rising China that its turn toward military aggression will only end in disaster, in much the same fashion that a confident westernizing Imperial Japan overreached in World War II. Lecturing loudly and self-righteously while carrying a tiny stick did not work with Japanese warlords of the 1930s. It won't work with the communist Chinese either.

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