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Kosovo
The world seems to have gone mad
Wolfgang Hansson
This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.
Published 20.54
The world seems to have gone mad.
Nowadays, weapons are brandished as soon as any nation feels that they are not getting everything they want. The worst kind of nationalism is allowed to flow freely.
As the survivors of the Second World War become fewer and fewer, the awareness of the horrors of war disappears.
Increasingly, it seems that strong emotions rather than common sense guide the actions of the world's leaders.
EU försöker gå en balansgång genom att hjälpa det svagare och demokratiska Armenien mot diktaturen i Baku. Problemet är att Europa numera bytt ut sin gasimport från Ryssland mot gas från bland annat Azerbajdzjan.
Putin är nöjd med att ha bidragit till att skapa ännu mer kaos som väst måste hantera.
This after Serbs living in Kosovo attacked a police patrol but in turn got several killed after the Kosovo military fought back.
Only when the US intervened and demanded immediate de-escalation was a significant part of the troops withdrawn. But for a while it looked like a new war between Serbia and Kosovo was on the horizon.
Neither NATO nor the EU had time to intervene before Azerbaijan in less than 48 hours recently took over the Armenian-controlled enclave of Nagorno Karabakh. 100,000 Armenians are on the run and now Armenia fears that Azerbaijan plans to continue taking lands inside Armenia.
The EU tries to strike a balance by helping the weaker and democratic Armenia against the dictatorship in Baku. The problem is that Europe has now replaced its gas imports from Russia with gas from, among others, Azerbaijan.
Putin is happy to have helped create even more chaos for the West to deal with.
According to UN chief Antonio Guterres, the world stands at the precipice after Hamas's horrific attack on civilians inside Israel. He is far from the only one who worries about a wider spread of the war.
Red line
Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon has already begun to heat up by sending both rockets and occasional patrols of fighters into northern Israel. The U.S. claims the group has 130,000 deadly missiles it could fire at Israel if a ground offensive were to launch.
Israel's arch-enemy Iran has declared that if Israel launches a ground offensive, a red line is crossed as Iran must intervene. Unclear exactly how.
- If the Zionist aggression does not stop, all parties in the region have their hands on the trigger, says Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
The US has responded by sending two aircraft carriers and other warships to the Eastern Mediterranean as a signal to Iran and Hezbollah in particular not to intervene in the war on the side of Hamas.
If many Palestinians are killed in a ground offensive, pressure from the Arab street will increase on leaders to intervene to help the Palestinians.
Neither Jordan nor Egypt are interested in being drawn into a war, but neither do they want to risk their own power in the event of major riots at home.
The war in Ukraine has been pushed off the top of the news sites by Hamas' bloody attack but continues unabated.
Putin's invasion has caused the entire Western world to greatly increase its military spending. It is a rearmament the likes of which we have not seen since the days of the Cold War and which steals resources from, among other things, attempts to limit climate change.
Putin's dream of restoring Russia's great power status is accompanied by strong nationalist currents elsewhere.
Traced to Obama
Turkish President Erdogan wants to turn himself into a modern sultan and Turkey into a regional power worthy of the Ottoman Empire. A threat of a Turkish incursion into northern Syria to create a 30 kilometer wide buffer zone against the Kurds is constantly on his agenda.
The civil war in Syria is in many places dormant but definitely not over.
You can partly trace today's development to when Barack Obama began to question the role of the United States as the world's policeman. Some countries took the chance to advance their positions and capture part of the power vacuum voluntarily left behind by the United States.
Obama thought the US needed to lick the wounds after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not have the desired effect against Islamist terrorism, but on the contrary increased hatred towards America.
When Syrian leader Bashir al-Assad used chemical weapons, Obama refrained from a punitive expedition despite saying that the US red line was drawn in the event of a chemical weapons attack.
Donald Trump not only continued on the isolationist line. He literally trumpeted that it was "America first" that applied in all areas. It was Trump's concessions in negotiations with the Taliban that led to the US's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that further tarnished the superpower's image.
Nuclear war
China has bided its time and now sees an opportunity to take over the role of the world's superpower or at least become America's equal.
Xi Jinping has threatened freedom in the former British crown colony of Hong Kong and is now threatening to invade Taiwan if the country does not voluntarily agree to "reunite" with China. His nationalist message of revenge for a humiliated China is constantly drummed into the population.
Nowadays, China is starting to gain the military muscle to back up that threat. It already has more warships in total than the United States and is on the way to multiplying its possession of nuclear weapons.
We already see an unpleasant risk of Russia using nuclear weapons in Ukraine. But since the US has promised to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, the risk of a potential nuclear war feels even greater between the US and China.
For a long time, the horrors of the Second World War were there as a protective barrier against new military adventures. But the years pass and there are no longer many people left who experienced the war and the holocaust themselves.
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