THE BIG PICTURE
THE NEW WORLD DISORDER
If your New Year wish was that we would see the dawn of a new world order with peace and stability taking centre stage, your crystal ball may have misled you. In just one month, the world has seen a litany of events to the contrary – courtesy Mother Nature; and men who are sitting in their ivory towers, and instructing their military men and women along with ‘diplomats’ to carry out the most audacious actions not seen since the end of WWII.
Arguably perhaps, the capture of Venezuela’s sitting president and his wife, while they were reportedly asleep, in Caracas on 6 January has led to geopolitical tremors in more than a few hotpots across Planet Earth.
As this edition of LMD goes into print, the state of dystopia is riddled with questions about where the silver bullet will come from and whether the world’s powers that be have what it takes to ensure that sanity prevails… eventually.
At the top of the list of endangered nations is the Danish territory of Greenland with a population of less than 60,000 inhabitants – which sits in an Arctic region that is growing in geographical importance – which apparently prefers self-rule.
Threatened as it is by Uncle Sam for one reason or the other, it could spark a cold war between the world’s most powerful nation and an influential bloc – the EU – and put the Western world’s supreme alliance between the US and NATO in jeopardy.
There’s also the state of Iran – which harbours nuclear ambitions – which finds itself in the throes of widespread protests and the prospect of regime change; and possibly even more mayhem, irrespective of the supreme powers throwing down the gauntlet on a protesting citizenry or parts thereof.
It goes without saying too that Russia’s war in Ukraine could take a turn for the better or worse… at any time; that the prospect of nuclear threats looming doesn’t augur well, not only for citizens of the European region but the globe as a whole. And lurking in the background to nuclear threats is North Korea, which continues to test its long-range arsenal.
These goings on are shadowed by a spate of other conflicts that dot just about every region of the planet, be it in Yemen, parts of the African continent or in the Taiwan Strait.
Meanwhile, there’s a fragile ceasefire that is being overshadowed by an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, US military action in parts of Syria that are controlled by ISIS, Israel’s intermittent bombardment of designated zones in neighbouring Lebanon, and a state of flux on either side of the border between Thailand and Cambodia – despite a delicate truce.
So will there be a saviour – a man or woman who has what it takes to ‘make the world great again’?
When yours truly posed the question on Facebook, one counter question stood out: “[Is he or she] dead or unborn?”
There’s more than food for thought in that statement.
– Editor-in-Chief
