Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Broken Window World

Being the "world's policemen" has been a controversial and often confusing role for the United States for nearly a century. And the idea of "broken window's policing," while seemingly logical and supported by evidence, is also a difficult conversation because of disparity and biases. Bret Stephens of the New York Times takes an interesting look at both ideas in "Broken Window's World": 


We now live in a broken-windows world. I would argue that it began a decade ago, when Barack Obama called on Americans to turn a chapter on a decade of war and “focus on nation-building here at home,” which became a theme of his re-election campaign.

It looked like a good bet at the time. Osama bin Laden had just been killed. The surge in Iraq had stabilized the country and decimated Al Qaeda there. The Taliban were on the defensive. Relations with Russia had been “reset.” China was still under the technocratic leadership of Hu Jintao. The Arab Spring, eagerly embraced by Obama as “a chance to pursue the world as it should be,” seemed to many to portend a more hopeful future for the Middle East (though some of us were less sanguine).

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