The Headmaster Is Absent

The world, it seems, is falling apart. Oh, of course there's the looming concerns relating to Climate Change demonstrated by unusual weather patterns, warming oceans, catastrophic floods and rainfalls, explosive wind events, monumental earthquakes and volcanic eruptions warning an apprehensive world community that all of these events taken together do manifest in some great upheaval that currently has great deleterious effect on the world we inhabit.

This is, presumably, Nature informing us that we humans are in store for greater disturbances than those that already consume our interests and fearful anticipation. But really, it's the other things that populations engage in, the conflicts that they are carried away upon, as countries so long in a mood of quiescence, seem to suddenly awake to their more natural proclivities that clan and tribalism, and religious sectarianism motivate us toward brutishness.

From Sudan to Somalia, Ethiopia to Nigeria, Yemen to Rwanda, Kenya to Democratic Republic of Congo, and others among them, brutality and slaughter reign supreme. The collapsed cultures of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Egypt along with those of Afghanistan and Pakistan have resulted in no-holds-barred conflicts where psychopathic religious zealots have embraced violence to an unimaginable degree of atrocity-filled bestiality.

And there are countries like Russia, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran that revel in all of the vicious chaos, speaking of their commitment to peace and rationality and covertly supporting terrorism and ubiquitous mass slaughters that leave the earth red with blood and stinking with decaying corpses. The international community looks on with horror at the Cambodias and the Rwandas, the Darfurs and the Bosnias. And the dissolute Syria.

These are horrendous blights on the body of the world, fertilizing the soil with human blood, following on earlier genocides that offered more than their share of horrified pledges that never again would the world look on and do nothing to avert those calamitous representations of inhumanity. There are large standing armies and coalitions of nations that could assemble and use military force to restrain the oppressors and the war-mongers and the mass murderers with counter-conflicts that would add to the death toll.

Invariably,the world swivels its collective head to observe the reactions of the United States of America to world disorder cropping up across the globe. America once enjoyed the reputation, sought or not, of representing the world's premier conflict resolution arbiter. It used its vast financial resources to not only build the largest standing army in the world, but also to equip it with the cutting-edge technological war machines to give that army clout.

But the United States has now departed that place in time and history, for a 'diplomatic' course of action where it expresses dismay and finds comforting utility in utilizing the pressure of admonishing errant regimes that better it expected of them, exerting the cudgel of financial sanctions to harm their economies. And while that protocol once came accompanied with the final decision to use force of arms to intervene and bring conflict to an end, it no longer does.

The result is as though the tough schoolmaster has left the classroom and the unruly pupils become berserk and violent with the release of pent-up energy, wreaking physical damage on their school and their peers alike. "We have been very clear to the Assad regime [in Syria], but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized", warned President Barack Obama.


"Every single aspect of his foreign policy is affected by [the experience of] being spooked by Iraq. And so now [his[ foreign policy consists of 'reassuring' people", said Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic, referring to the neo-isolationism of his country as "withdrawalism", referring to Japan/China, Ukraine/Russia, Middle East/Iran.

Viewing President Obama as "a centralizing liberal who believes that the right technique can solve all sorts of problems; [that] there [exists] a spontaneously realizable and benign balance of power that is set to assert itself in the world if the United States lowers its international profile."

"The entire world order is based on the presumption of American willingness to use force. But Obama doesn't like the use of force. And this [fact] also prevents [the United States] from taking steps short of using force -- because adversaries don't see a slippery slope. If the United States imposes sanctions, a message has to be sent that force comes next. Otherwise, the country will just weather the sanctions", according to Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution.

Given its size, its wealth, its powerful reputation, and past performances on the world stage, the United States is not just any country; it remains yet -- but who knows for how long yet -- the most influential, powerful, feared country on the planet. And, as such it has a moral obligation to the world at large. One which it has seen fit at present to set aside and pay little mind to its actual obligations.