There is starting to be a sad, somber repetitiveness to the horror of terror attacks and the world’s reaction to them.
The attacks in Brussels this week brought the familiar ritual: initial shock, local emergency response, global condemnation and solidarity, signs of heroism, and resilience from those most closely affected.
This is the new normal. This is the new world of terrorism.
And there are no quick and easy fixes for the madness of madmen, contrary to what some might have us believe. We can seek to gather multinational coalitions with regional participants to fight the threat (something the Obama administration has been trying to do) and have an aggressive air campaign (which the Obama administration is doing), but the threat will not be easily dislodged. People can be killed, towns can be reduced to rubble, but ideas die slow deaths.
So long as free people live in free societies and increasingly cluster in urban areas, they will be soft and easy targets for those who have apocalyptic dreams of watching the world burn.
Although the terror attacks that have reached Western societies are a particular thing — what the columnist Maajid Nawaz calls a “global jihadist insurgency” — terrorism itself is simply an extension of the tremendous terror rocking some Middle Eastern and African countries.
According to the most recent Global Terrorism Index report published by the Institute for Economics and Peace:
“In 2014 the total number of deaths from terrorism increased by 80 percent when compared to the prior year. This is the largest yearly increase in the last 15 years. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been over a nine-fold increase in the number of deaths from terrorism, rising from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014.”
The report continued:
“Terrorism remains highly concentrated with most of the activity occurring in just five countries — Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria. These countries accounted for 78 percent of the lives lost in 2014. Although highly concentrated, terrorism is spreading to more countries, with the number of countries experiencing more than 500 deaths increasing from five to 11, a 120 percent increase from the previous year. The six new countries with over 500 deaths are Somalia, Ukraine, Yemen, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Cameroon.”
And yet, we have presidential candidates in this country responding to the expansive globalism of this threat with myopic nativism and the threat of torture, things that would likely make America less safe, not more.
This is a serious time in need of serious leaders. This country needs now, more than ever, its most stable and steady hands to lead it through a world that has become incredibly dangerous. Bombast is hollow. Braggadocio is meaningless.
And global terror isn’t the only threat this country and its allies face. There are others, some of which overlap and intersect with terror.
Syria is a failed state, and the overwhelming stream of refugees fleeing that country has put a tremendous strain on Europe.
Afghanistan is experiencing a resurgence of the Taliban.
North Korea, a nuclear state, keeps acting erratically and firing missiles into the ocean, and Iran recently conducted ballistic missile launches that drew an administration rebuke as “provocative and destabilizing.” As The New York Times reported, the statement “all but accused the Iranians of having violated a United Nations Security Council resolution that calls on them to refrain from such acts.”
China is building islands in the contested South China Sea and is deploying missiles to another island in the area. Russia seems nostalgic for its Soviet Union glory days. Libya is a disaster.
And then there is the über threat of global warming, the instability it can cause and the ways it might contribute to conflict. According to a 2014 report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
“Although there is little agreement about direct causality, low per capita incomes, economic contraction, and inconsistent state institutions are associated with the incidence of violence. These factors can be sensitive to climate change and variability.”
This idea of global scarcity of resources, opportunity and employment is not to be taken lightly.
In a 2011 book by Jim Clifton, the chairman and C.E.O. of Gallup, titled “The Coming Jobs War,” he pointed out:
“The primary will of the world is no longer about peace or freedom or even democracy; it is not about having a family, and it is neither about God nor about owning a home or land. The will of the world is first and foremost to have a good job. Everything else comes after that.”
He explained that of the world’s five billion people over 15 years old, three billion said they worked or wanted to work, but there were only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs, and concluded:
“The war for global jobs is like World War II: a war for all the marbles. The global war for jobs determines the leader of the free world.”
All of these weighty issues and more are pressing down as we consider who will be our next president.
We can’t put our fate and the world’s into the hands of leaders with small minds and big mouths. This election and everything the next president will face is “for all the marbles.”
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CHARLES M. BLOW>
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