Taking a News-Out

Illustration by Tom Bachtell.

In the Green Mountains of southern Vermont, where I spent last week enjoying the fresh air, the world seemed like a quiet and peaceful place. I enjoyed some time with my family, swam in crystal-clear lakes, walked by a house where Norman Rockwell once lived, and tried to tune out the alarming news that streamed into my phone on the rare occasions when the signal was strong enough to pick it up.

Alas, it didn't really work. With heavily armed goons blowing civilian airliners out of the air in Ukraine; fanatical Islamists killing their co-religionists by the score in Iraq and Syria; and a democratically elected government in Israel bombing children in their beds, among other locations, in response to rocket attacks from other Islamists—with all this happening, it wasn't Rockwell's uplifting scenes of small-town life that came to mind, but the canvases of Edvard Munch or Hieronymus Bosch. On the way back down to the city, we stopped off at the vacation rental of a friend who was engaged in evasive action. No Internet, no newspapers, and no television. She was, she explained, taking a "news-out."

It is important not to exaggerate the significance of individual tragedies, however horrific, or to conflate them. The shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 appears to have been a case of disgruntled separatists using Russian-supplied missiles to hit the wrong target. Iraq has been a disaster zone ever since the American-led invasion. And Israel's decision to bomb heavily populated areas of Gaza and follow up with a limited ground invasion, which has already killed hundreds of Palestinians and a couple dozen Israelis, has surprised hardly anybody, least of all the leaders of Hamas, who, evidently, were trying to goad Benjamin Netanyahu's government into overreacting, which it did in characteristic fashion.

We also need to guard against the amplifying effects of the Internet and other modes of communication, which convey disastrous happenings in all their gory granularity. The details—Dutch AIDS researchers on their way to an international conference; small Palestinian boys kicking a soccer ball on the beach—make the story salient, grab our attention, and, sometimes, distort our perspective.

If you are willing to take a cosmic view, it isn't necessarily the case that things are going to hell in a SAM missile launcher. In his 2011 book, "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Stephen Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, pointed out that the number of people killed in wars, relative to the world's population, has fallen precipitously over the past few centuries; the number of democracies has increased; and the incidence of genocide has fallen. "As we get smarter, we try to think up better ways of getting everyone to turn their swords into plowshares at the same time," Pinker told the Huffington Post. "Human life has become more precious than it used to be."

Taking as a reference point the slave-based societies of antiquity, or even the homicidal decades of the early to mid-twentieth century, Pinker is undoubtedly right. But what comfort is that? A generation ago, George H.W. Bush talked about establishing a "new world order," and Francis Fukuyama, who served in the State Departments of Ronald Reagan and the elder Bush, received a serious hearing for his thesis that the triumph of liberal democracy marked the end of history understood as an ideological struggle. If people made such arguments today, they would be jeered off the global stage as hopeless idealists.

The alarming developments in Ukraine, Iraq-Syria, and Israel-Palestine each stand on their own. But there is also a commonality to them that goes beyond the fact that they are so depressing. In a world that has never felt so interconnected, the spectre of disorder, destabilization, and brutalism, is, once again, upon us. The Middle East is in chaos. Europe seems to be heading for a mini-Cold War. Tensions are rising in Asia. For now, at least, the hopeful teachings of John Locke, which underpin much of Fukuyama's argument, are in abeyance. This is a Thomas Hobbes moment, and it has been for quite a while.

Vladimir Putin, with his might-is-right approach to international relations, is a classic Hobbesian, and so, with their security fence and their Iron Dome missile shield, are an increasing number of Israelis. Faced with threats, real and illusory, the Hobbesian state's reaction is to seek to impose its will by using force, even where that involves flouting international norms and laws. As non-state actors, the jihadis of ISIS and other extremist Islamic groups are obviously different. From a post-Enlightenment perspective, their catastrophist ideology is distinctive, but their fanaticism and violence certainly give support to those who take a Hobbesian view of things, as does the seeming inability of the international community, if there is such a thing, to forge coherent responses to any of these developments.

That, perhaps, is what is most depressing. Does anybody really think that the United Nations, the European Union, or anybody else will seize upon the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner to fashion a peaceful settlement in Ukraine, or to isolate Putin's supporters from the Western markets and access they crave, while also offering a less belligerent Russia the prospect of genuine integration with the rest of Europe? Does anyone think that the United States, the one country capable of influencing Israel's actions, will go beyond calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, which President Obama did on Monday, and put real pressure on the Israeli government to halt the settlement-building and reach a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians? And does anyone think that the jihadis, now that they have seen how effective SAM missiles can be when directed at civilian aircraft, won't be scouring the remnants of the Soviet empire for serviceable air-defense systems that they can plunder and put to use?

If you can answer any of these questions in the affirmative, you are a more optimistic person than I am. With a feeling of hopelessness spreading, many Americans are adopting the traditional response to chaos overseas: tune it out and leave ’em to it. Confirming the findings of other recent surveys, a new poll from Politico shows that the American public, by significant majorities, now opposes U.S. military involvement in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine. "The picture that emerges from the survey is consistent across issues of foreign policy and national security: Americans are profoundly wary of getting entangled overseas and seem to be skeptical of the value of projecting U.S. power on foreign conflicts," Politico's Alexander Burns writes.

After the disastrous U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a period of drawing back and introspection was inevitable, and it is to be welcomed. But only up to a point. Ultimately, the idea that the United States can stand aside from global developments is as illusory as the notion, common among neocons and paleo-cons, that it could use military force to reshape the world to its design. With demons on the rise, our shrunken world needs the United States, however tattered its image, to stand up for the values and norms it claims to represent. News-outs are refreshing, but they don't change the news.