The World's On Fire
A decade defined by revanchism, irredentism, and suffering
I got some bad news that I wanna share
Our planet's on its last legs and we ain't got a spare
If there's a way to fix it I am not aware
We reached the point of no return, we ain't got a prayer
They're blowin' up each other out in God knows where
God don't care, He moved on to other planets long ago
Left on the low, figured we're no longer worth his trouble
He'll come back when humans kill each other and the Earth is rubble
He's better off startin' from scratch
Better off pouring gasoline and sparkin' a match
Better off leavin' Earth to the rest of the animals
Probably thinking we would be the best of the animals
Probably thought that we would love each other 'til we're old and wise
Never figured that we would precipitate our own demise
Didn't think we'd be a bunch of bloodthirsty lunatics
Thought we'd evolve past the stupidness, never did
I was born in The End Of History, spent my childhood navigating the Global War on Terror, and now find myself living in the shadow of the 1930’s.
Global instability is reaching a fever pitch. For those keeping score, this decade has brought us:
Two Azeri wars of aggression waged against Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh
A full-throated Russian invasion of Ukraine
Serbian irregular warfare against Kosovo
A Mongolesque rampage through southern Israel orchestrated by Iran & Hamas
Seven African coups in three years
Civil Wars in Sudan and Ethiopia
Guerilla warfare in West Papau
Civil War in Myanmar sparked by a military junta
An active Salafi-jihadist insurgency in the Maghreb
The Taliban re-conquest of Afghanistan
And this is just the list I could think of off the top of my head. There’s a mind-numbing amount of conflict raging across the globe, and simply trying to keep up can be emotionally exhausting. Unfortunately, it only seems like more suffering is on the horizon as the “rules-based international order” completely collapses before our eyes.
I vividly recall three years ago, wildly gesticulating on my back porch with a cigarette lodged between my index and middle finger as I assured an old friend that we were living in the most peaceful time—historically speaking. State-on-state violence was at an all time low, I passionately argued. You were less likely to die as the result of imperial conquest than ever before. Needless to say this argument aged like a bottle of Soviet milk sitting unrefrigerated in a Moscow shop window.
There’s a stunning amount of irredentism fomenting across the world, and in this unpredictable moment I dread bad actors are primed and ready to take advantage of America’s increasingly narrow attention span.
The gas-fueled dictatorship in Baku, emboldened by the successful military campaigns in 2020 and 2023, clearly has designs on internationally recognized Armenian territory. Ilham Aliyev has made no mystery of his plans to forcibly create the so-called “Zangezur corridor” to connect Azerbaijan proper to its exclave Nakhichevan. Turkish drones and European gas export dollars have allowed Baku to significantly outpace Yerevan’s military capability and any future conflict would likely tilt heavily in Aliyev’s favor judging by the recent past.
Speaking of the Turkic world, two days ago Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took the opportunity to make irredentist claims on former Ottoman territories:
As the Greeks know, this kind of inflammatory and irresponsible rhetoric is nothing new from Ankara but is still cause for alarm. Erdoğan has no problem projecting Turkish military might in the region; One of the most under-reported aspects of the Syrian civil war has been Turkey’s unrelenting bombardment of Kurds in the region.
Shifting focus to Eastern Europe, last year international press clocked Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban sporting a scarf with a depiction of Greater Hungary. Much like Turkey, this is another untenable example of a NATO “ally” signaling a desire for their security partners’ territories. The likelihood of these claims resulting in actual military action is incredibly low, but NATO should nonetheless issue strong rebukes of Erdoğan and Orban’s recklessness.
I mentioned at the top today’s world stage has echoes of the 1930’s. Apart from the frenzied world tension and active conflict, Jews worldwide are experiencing the biggest surge of open antisemitism in generations:
Yesterday there was an honest-to-god attempted pogrom in Dagestan; Hundreds of people decided to do some good old fashioned Jew hunting in 2023. The endless stream of horrific images and videos from the October 7 Hamas terror attack should make any decent human’s stomach turn. The last month has made it painfully clear that there are a significant amount of people on this planet who if they had their druthers would hunt down and slaughter every single one of us.
I know that my fellow countrymen are weary from two decades of war in the Middle East and have little appetite for American involvement in any of the burgeoning conflicts I’ve detailed above. But the forces of evil are once again coalescing in a modern day Axis that would destroy everything we hold dear.
We can sit by idly watching this decade become defined by warfare and tragedy, or we can embrace our historic role as the muscular arsenal of democracy and fight back against the destabilizing dictatorships that have been calling the shots for three years now.