A stark look at the gaping vacuum of a post-American world

Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal has a fasten-your-seatbelt-for-2016-type article that lays out the current juncture, both domestically and internationally, pretty comprehensively.

His assessment will not put a spring in your step. Catastrophic attacks, major aggressions by hostile powers, a terrible person getting elected US president.

He takes up the recent sequence of events from the starting point of post-America dithering on sanctions in response to the October and November missile tests by Iran. Since then:

 . . . the Iranian navy test-fired unguided rockets within 1,500 yards of the aircraft carrier USS Truman as it was transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Riyadh executed a radical Shiite cleric and put an end to John Kerry’s fantasies of diplomatic settlement for Syria after it severed diplomatic ties with Tehran. China landed a plane on an artificial island built illegally in the South China Sea in an area claimed by Vietnam.

Each of these acts is an expression of contempt for Mr. Obama. Contempt is the father of lawlessness and the grandfather of violence. What happens when the next Iranian live-fire exercise lands a shell within 1,000 yards of a U.S. ship? Or 500?

Stephens sees no letup in the momentum this year:

Expect 2016 to be rich in such incidents and worse—the inevitable result of Mr. Obama’s deliberate abandonment of Pax Americana as the organizing principle in international relations. Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other allies will freelance foreign policies in ways over which we have little say, even as we are embroiled in the consequences. Moscow, Beijing and Tehran will continue to take hammers to the soft plaster of U.S. resolve as they seek regional dominance. The nuclear deal will become a dead letter even as Mr. Obama insists on fulfilling our end of the bargain. China will continue to build islands while buying us off in the paper currency of climate agreements and other liberal hobbyhorses. Russia will seek to test and humiliate NATO.

And there will be mass-casualty terror attacks on the scale of Paris. If you’re reading this column on a major metropolitan commuter network, look up from your paper. 

He points to some precedents - years in which the state of the world was quite precarious, but the American people had the good sense to electorally right the ship.

Alas, the nation's spiritual rot has so clouded its sense of what it really needs to survive and revive that we are far more likely to get a charlatan than a principled, courageous leader:

Will that happen again in 2016? Not if either of the two current presidential front-runners wins the office. Not if we think that the central metrics of foreign policy are the size of our carbon footprint or the height of our wall with Mexico. Not if the bipartisan tilt toward economic protectionism and quasi-isolationism becomes the new national dogma. Not if we suppose that turning our back on the world’s great convulsions (or bombing them till they glow) is the best way of escaping them.

It is very late in the day.