The Scramble for Everything

World News Roundup, Part 3

Peak China, by way of Our World in Data.

This is the last segment of my roundup of a lot of big things that have been happening around the word, before I turn back to some pressing domestic news. (Such as the new ruling this morning denying Donald Trump’s claims of total immunity from prosecution for crimes committed in office. Imagine that.)

The recurring theme of this roundup is that America has been in a period of withdrawal from global affairs, which is causing a lot of the world’s most malicious actors to sense opportunity and test how much they can get away with. What makes it worse is that they all start testing this at once, which means that it will be a lot more work for us to re-establish deterrence and regain momentum for liberty than it would have been simply to maintain it.

This tends to be the usual pattern in a democratic society. The American public doesn’t want to spend much time thinking about the rest of the world and will grow impatient if asked to do so—until something big happens, like 9/11, that forces them pay attention for a while. The cycle was summed up on Threads by Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois: “American public opinion about foreign policy is an endless cycle between, ‘Not our problem, what are we even doing there?’ and, ‘How could you let that happen?’”

Hence my insistence on these occasional World News Roundups, which are meant to help you find the answers to both of those questions.

The full cycle actually looks something like this: