Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
Reports of Global Disorder Have Been Greatly Exaggerated | RAND
"The world is more dangerous than it was a few years ago, and the mounting chaos in the Middle East has fed wider, more exaggerated anxieties. Many observers feel that the pace of technological change is quickening, that the international order is disintegrating, that power is shifting from national governments to individuals and nonstate actors, and that America's capacity to lead is waning.
Oftentimes, however, these portents of disaster and decline are overstated.
Certainly, computers and the Internet are driving rapid change, but the pace is not more rapid or revolutionary than that following the introduction of the steam engine, electricity, radio, telephones, internal combustion engines, airplanes, and the atomic bomb. The Chinese economy has grown compared to the United States, but the United States has, for many years, been growing faster than most of Europe, Russia, and much of East Asia. Russia is misbehaving, but nothing on the scale of the former Soviet Union. The Middle East is in turmoil, but even taking into account the chaos in that region, inter- and intrastate conflicts continue to decline (as revealed in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature), as do the casualties and destruction they produce. States are being challenged by terrorists and insurgent groups in the Middle East, as they once were in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Balkans. Twenty years ago this month, Christian insurgents executed in cold blood more than 7,000 Muslim prisoners in Srebrenica, matching in scale and ferocity the horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State today. "
rest at link
So chillax.
"The world is more dangerous than it was a few years ago, and the mounting chaos in the Middle East has fed wider, more exaggerated anxieties. Many observers feel that the pace of technological change is quickening, that the international order is disintegrating, that power is shifting from national governments to individuals and nonstate actors, and that America's capacity to lead is waning.
Oftentimes, however, these portents of disaster and decline are overstated.
Certainly, computers and the Internet are driving rapid change, but the pace is not more rapid or revolutionary than that following the introduction of the steam engine, electricity, radio, telephones, internal combustion engines, airplanes, and the atomic bomb. The Chinese economy has grown compared to the United States, but the United States has, for many years, been growing faster than most of Europe, Russia, and much of East Asia. Russia is misbehaving, but nothing on the scale of the former Soviet Union. The Middle East is in turmoil, but even taking into account the chaos in that region, inter- and intrastate conflicts continue to decline (as revealed in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature), as do the casualties and destruction they produce. States are being challenged by terrorists and insurgent groups in the Middle East, as they once were in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Balkans. Twenty years ago this month, Christian insurgents executed in cold blood more than 7,000 Muslim prisoners in Srebrenica, matching in scale and ferocity the horrors perpetrated by the Islamic State today. "
rest at link
So chillax.
