Why is the entire world in such turmoil? In America, students and other campus disrupters make demands that would get them summarily shot or “disappeared” in many nations, some to our south. Nonetheless, these demonstrators embody the decline and marginalization of American international hegemony.

In 1960, OPEC gained Western Hemisphere cooperation in the oil trade; by 1961 the Soviet Union expanded its beachhead in Cuba by co-opting Fidel Castro’s revolution. Then in the 21st century, China’s threat to control the Panama Canal took shape; today Islamic terrorists have amicable relations with nations to our south.

Part of this upheaval is just normal societal change. Some of it, as Chinese Pacific Ocean adventurism shows, flows from force reduction of the U.S. Navy. By mid-1944, deep into World War II, the Pacific Ocean had become a “U.S. Navy lake.” It is now contested territory. Our Navy does not have enough ships (partly its own fault for developing the super-costly, super-sized aircraft carrier); it can barely repair the ships it does have; and there are not enough U.S. shipyards for naval build-up even if Congress would allocate funding.

Other reasons for unrest include a reversion to an “American First” isolationist mind-set among too many politicians; the inept politically opportunistic policy regarding migrants streaming across our southern border; and, as some of the campus demonstrators themselves demonstrate, the incoherence of U.S. Middle East policy.

But it is the deeper undercurrent that tells the story. The post-World War II world order predicated on nations cooperating under the U.N. rubric is collapsing. The Big Five wartime alliance degenerated into warring camps; and the July 1944 Bretton Woods pact central to world free trade and peace is contested.

Conversely, the ancient idea of human rights, developed from Aristotle’s 4th century BCE Virtue Ethics and the centuries earlier Ten Commandments of the ancestral Jewish Bible, may surface as the oil to calm troubled waters.

Paul M. Craig

Northampton