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Reflections on an Unforgiving Day
We ate breakfast to the news that an airliner had crashed in Ukraine. We had lunch to the news that Israel had invaded Gaza. An airliner crashing is perhaps more impactful than an invasion. We have all wondered, when we hear of a crash, or even in quiet moments on board an aircraft ourselves, what living our final moments in a plane plunging to earth, knowing that we will die, would be like. An invasion is harder for some of us to empathize with. Most of us have never invaded a country nor been in a country while it was invaded. But it shares this much with a plane crash: Your life is in danger, and your fate is out of your hands.
We don't even know for certain what happened to the plane or how far the invasion will go. But no reasonable person looking at today could argue that we are the masters of our fates. At one point in the afternoon, it was announced that the White House had been placed on lockdown, which meant that a significant security threat had been found. It turned out someone's lost backpack caused the whole episode.
Our job is to find order in the apparent disorder, even if meaning is fleeting. There are two things we can point to. First -- tragedy aside for the moment -- the plane crash had to do with the struggle for Ukraine, between the right of Russia to be secure from the West, the right of the Ukrainians to determine their own fate, either as one country or two, and the right of Western powers to involve themselves in these affairs. Gaza is about the right of Israel to have a nation, the right of the Palestinians to have a nation and the right of Western countries to involve themselves in the matter.
Both issues are matters of competing national rights, not dissimilar from one and other.
Read more »http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical-diary/reflections-unforgiving-day?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20140718&utm_term=article&utm_content=readmore#axzz37miFkw5x
We ate breakfast to the news that an airliner had crashed in Ukraine. We had lunch to the news that Israel had invaded Gaza. An airliner crashing is perhaps more impactful than an invasion. We have all wondered, when we hear of a crash, or even in quiet moments on board an aircraft ourselves, what living our final moments in a plane plunging to earth, knowing that we will die, would be like. An invasion is harder for some of us to empathize with. Most of us have never invaded a country nor been in a country while it was invaded. But it shares this much with a plane crash: Your life is in danger, and your fate is out of your hands.
We don't even know for certain what happened to the plane or how far the invasion will go. But no reasonable person looking at today could argue that we are the masters of our fates. At one point in the afternoon, it was announced that the White House had been placed on lockdown, which meant that a significant security threat had been found. It turned out someone's lost backpack caused the whole episode.
Our job is to find order in the apparent disorder, even if meaning is fleeting. There are two things we can point to. First -- tragedy aside for the moment -- the plane crash had to do with the struggle for Ukraine, between the right of Russia to be secure from the West, the right of the Ukrainians to determine their own fate, either as one country or two, and the right of Western powers to involve themselves in these affairs. Gaza is about the right of Israel to have a nation, the right of the Palestinians to have a nation and the right of Western countries to involve themselves in the matter.
Both issues are matters of competing national rights, not dissimilar from one and other.
Read more »http://www.stratfor.com/geopolitical-diary/reflections-unforgiving-day?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20140718&utm_term=article&utm_content=readmore#axzz37miFkw5x
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