From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri Jan 08 2010 - 00:01:39 EST
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjBiMjMzNGUwMDI3OTMxMDM5NzM0M2M3NzExNGMyOTI=
Our Year of Decision
A year of destiny?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Sometimes long-festering problems collide — and explode — in a single
memorable year. We can go as far back as the fifth century B.C. to see this
phenomenon — and we may see it again in 2010.
In 480 B.C., a decade of Aegean tension culminated in the Persian invasion
of Greece. Nothing seemed able to stop the onslaught of King Xerxes as he
broke through the pass of Thermopylae — until the Greeks under
Themistocles rallied at the sea battle of Salamis and saved the West.
In A.D. 69, the Roman Empire was tottering on its very foundations. Rome
had been rocked by decades of corruption, assassinations, coups, and
military revolts. By the end of 69, Vespasian — the fourth emperor that
year! — had put an end to over a century of erratic Julio-Claudian rule
when he brought sanity back to Roman government.
Fast-forward to the modern era. The rise of fascism erupted into war and
conquest in 1939. That year, Franco’s Nationalists won the civil war in
Spain. The Soviet Union fought Japan in a border war — during which it
signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Germany.
Weeks later, the Nazi invasion of Poland marked the start of the Second
World War.
Events in 1939 alone did not cause the outbreak of the global conflict.
Rather, it followed from years of bad ideas such as serial appeasement of
Hitler, near-disarmament of Western democracies, and flirtation with
pacifism. This behavior had inadvertently sent a global message: Britain,
France, and the United States were unwilling and unable to meet the
challenge of totalitarianism. And so dictators called their bluff in 1939
and began to move.
Closer to the present, 1979 was another climactic year. Jimmy Carter’s
prior years of sermonizing about American bad habits had convinced many of
the world’s bad actors that it was time to press forward their regional
agendas without fear of American reaction.
Once theater aggression began, there was little way to stop it. President
Carter’s whiny “crisis of confidence” speech, in which he confessed
to a collective American malaise, only made things worse.
What a year 1979 proved to be! Daniel Ortega’s Sandinistas took control
of Nicaragua. The Iranian Revolution triggered an oil panic. A global
energy crisis followed. Islamic terrorists took American hostages at the
U.S. embassy in Tehran. About seven weeks later, the Soviet Union’s Red
Army entered Afghanistan. Earlier in the year, China had invaded Vietnam.
2010 may turn out to be a similar year of destiny. In 2009, the United
States gave Iran at least four deadlines to stop its nuclear program. All
were ignored. Does an emboldened theocracy believe this now is the year to
become nuclear and change the entire strategic makeup of the Middle East?
For much of 2009, the Obama administration boasted that it would shut down
the Guantanamo Bay terrorist-detention facility, despite having no final
idea of what to do with all the detainees — many from terror-infested
Yemen.
We renounced prior notions of a “war on terror.” We reiterated that the
now-quiet Iraq War had been a mistake. We apologized to the Islamic world
for purported past American sins, while inflating Muslim achievements.
After months of hesitation, in Janus fashion we both announced we were
sending more troops to Afghanistan and promised to start soon bringing them
home. We reached out to Putin’s Russia at the expense of our democratic
Eastern European allies.
All of this has not been lost on Islamists. In general, al-Qaeda interprets
our outreach as a sign of moral weakness. Since 9/11, more than one-third
of all terrorism-related incidents in the United States occurred in 2009
alone. Maj. Nidal Hasan’s murderous rampage at Ford Hood, and
al-Qaeda’s foiled Christmas Day effort to blow up a jet over Detroit, are
just precursors of what to expect this year.
Meanwhile, the cash-flush Chinese have not been idle. This year they will
continue to use their vast budget surpluses to expand their armed forces
— as skyrocketing debts in the years ahead force us to curtail our own.
With America engaged in two wars, and drowning in trillions in debt, our
Asian allies are already starting to take their respective measures of
Barack Obama and the Communist cadre in Beijing. Expect allies like Japan,
the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan to begin to make regional
accommodations with a rising China — while distancing themselves from a
floundering and confused U.S.
In 2010, our year of decision, events may come to a head and overwhelm the
existing American-led global order unless President Obama can galvanize
Western allies to meet the mounting danger.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a
recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. © 2009 Tribune Media
Services, Inc.
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