Out of Order

We’re gonna lead today with the war. No, not the war taking place in a small sliver of the world but that has dominated headlines and discourse. No, not that other war over a much bigger piece of land being run by a murderous mob boss on a quest to expand his power and his national land mass. This other war is one we don’t see much coverage of. But it’s not just the media. The American government isn’t covering it much either. It’s a war that is devastating in terms of the number of those directly impacted (“About 14 million people have been displaced by years of fighting, more than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Some 4 million of them have fled across borders, many to arid, impoverished places—Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan—where there are few resources to support them. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict, but that’s likely a significant undercounting … But no statistics can express the sense of pointlessness, of meaninglessness, that the war has left behind alongside the physical destruction.”). It’s also a war that increasingly represents a broader trend: The end of the American led liberal world order. Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article) on how we got here and what’s filling the vacuum. The Most Nihilistic Conflict on Earth. “On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits. But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.”