When the Wheels Come Off

Storm clouds are gathering. Are we prepared?

Smoke billows during Israeli air strikes in Gaza City on October 12, 2023 as raging battles between Israel and the Hamas movement continue for the sixth consecutive day. (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s been a difficult week for me, as it has been for many others watching events unfold in the Middle East, knowing similarly awful things may await us very soon.

I intended to begin writing this post on Wednesday in the late morning, after I completed another writing project. But first I checked in to what was happening on Twitter/X, as I have been doing even more than usual since last Saturday. I immediately saw an Israeli journalist I follow and trust say more than a dozen drones had entered Israeli airspace at border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, threatens the country. This was followed in quick succession by reports of paragliders in the air, air raid sirens in Haifa and other Israeli cities, and then word that the U.S. was evacuating its embassy in Beirut and advising American citizens to leave the country immediately.

It seemed like we were witnessing the opening of another front in Israel’s war. I texted friends about it. I wrote a frantic message to an email list I belong to that includes several Israelis and Americans with deep ties to the country. Before long, I felt physically ill as I thought about my fellow Jews and kept scrolling, scrolling, scrolling for more information.

That’s when I began to see tweets saying the U.S. embassy in Lebanon was not, in fact, being evacuated. And that the news about sirens in Haifa had been a false alarm. And those residents of Israel in that email group responded to say the alerts coming through on their phones and discussed on the news weren’t adding up to anything conclusive or even making coherent sense.

In the end, it wasn’t even clear the original story about a drone incursion in the north was true. It might have been a computer hack. Or a mistake being covered up by blaming a computer hack. Or maybe jumpy people online misinterpreted an announcement and spread the rumor. Or bots controlled by an adversarial country’s intelligence service decided to take advantage of people on edge by pushing them even closer to the brink.

I’m just glad my worst fears weren’t realized. For now.

Watching the Wheels Come Off

When I’m having a week like this, I don’t respond by fleeing from the news. I respond by immersing myself in it, ever deeper. As a result, I’ve read a lot of informative, stimulating writing over the past few days (along with a pile of junk that rivals Mt. Everest in elevation). But if I had to choose the essay that’s hit hardest and is likely to stick with me longest, I’d have to point to a relatively short post by Damir Marusic titled “Complacency and the Coming Storm” at the Substack he runs with Shadi Hamid called Wisdom of Crowds.

I always read and learn from Marusic’s writing. He’s that rarest of foreign-policy analysts—someone who not only knows a lot (there are plenty of people in Washington’s world of journalism and think tanks who do) but who genuinely possesses wisdom about the world.

The controlling metaphor of Marusic’s essay is this: The wheels are coming off.  

What he means is not that “democracy” is in a twilight struggle against “autocracy” (or authoritarianism or right-wing populism or whatever your preferred term). Rather, order is in the process of collapsing into chaos.

Or, if you prefer, the jungle is growing back. That alternative metaphor, which Marusic also cites, comes from Robert Kagan: “order is a garden to be tended, but the jungle is the norm.” Marusic describes as “moralistic” Kagan’s account of our ongoing transition back to the jungle in terms of “authoritarianism versus democracy,” and I tend to agree, because it tries to smuggle an implicit notion of progress and historical optimism in through the back door of the analysis, as if we can presume the forces of order are on the right side of history, which bends toward justice, and the drift toward disorder somehow defies it and is bound, in the end, for defeat, as long as we do our part in nudging things forward in their proper direction, a little push here, a little pull there.

That’s a lot of clashing metaphors, which is probably inevitable when trying to grasp in thought anything as complex as the vast sweep of international politics. But if you put them all together, we’re left with a dark alternative vision of what’s happening all around us.

Illusions at the End of History