The late, last godly power

Six little months; half a year of war and rumors of war.

 

Three acts of war on the United States, crippling cyberattacks on the economic infrastructure, without consequence to the attackers. Something like 50 attacks on Americans in Iraq, one by drone. War anew in Iraq and Syria. War also in Israel and Gaza, after the Abraham Accords and the greatest peace in the Mideast since the founding of Israel in '48. A third of Afghanistan is reclaimed by the Taliban. In Haiti the president is assassinated. And South Africa descends into low-grade civil war with corpses "lining the roads".

Offensive mobilization of China against Taiwan, and Russia against Ukraine; diplomatic coordination between China and Russia, against the United States; and a warning from Japan that China and Russia are coordinating also militarily, and that it would behoove the United States to be watchful for a second Pearl Harbor.

What it all comes to, this half-year of war and rumors of war, in my reckoning, is that the world America has borne on its shoulders, is crashing down around us: America is not America, not in 2021, and in 2021 America is collapsed, past-tense; America was the last godly power on earth, but as of 2021 America is not godly and neither is it a power.