from the WSJ-  Niall Ferguson: America’s Global Retreat:

Excerpt:

The scale of the strategic U.S. failure is best seen in the statistics for total fatalities in the region the Bush administration called the “Greater Middle East”—essentially the swath of mainly Muslim countries stretching from Morocco to Pakistan. In 2013, according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, more than 75,000 people died as a result of armed conflict in this region or as a result of terrorism originating there, the highest number since the IISS Armed Conflict database began in 1998. Back then, the Greater Middle East accounted for 38% of conflict-related deaths in the world; last year it was 78%.

Mr. Obama’s supporters like nothing better than to portray him as the peacemaker to George W. Bush’s warmonger. But it is now almost certain that more people have died violent deaths in the Greater Middle East during this presidency than during the last one.

As Nixon-era Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued more than half a century ago in his book “A World Restored,” balance is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. “The balance of power only limits the scope of aggression but does not prevent it,” Dr. Kissinger wrote. “The balance of power is the classic expression of the lesson of history that no order is safe without physical safeguards against aggression.”

What that implied in the 19th century was that Britain was the “balancer”—the superpower that retained the option to intervene in Europe to preserve balance. The problem with the current U.S. geopolitical taper is that President Obama is not willing to play that role in the Middle East today. In his ignominious call to inaction on Syria in September, he explicitly said it: “America is not the world’s policeman.”

But balance without an enforcer is almost inconceivable. Iran remains a revolutionary power; it has no serious intention of giving up its nuclear-arms program; the talks in Vienna are a sham. Both sides in the escalating regional “Clash of Sects”—Shiite and Sunni—have an incentive to increase their aggression because they see hegemony in a post-American Middle East as an attainable goal.

 

Shedding Light on the Minimum Wage

HKO –  No matter where you dictate the minimum wage to be from Mt Olympus, it is always zero- that is the wage of the unemployed.  Their sense of control is a destructive illusion.

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