We’re a nation all too ripe for another shock

Editor’s Note: 

Robert Kagan writes that we have weakened the fabric of the international order that we created after World War II and that served us and others well through innumerable crises. Will America get lucky and avoid a foreign policy crisis while in the midst of a health and economic crisis? This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.

We’ve got a health crisis and an economic crisis. The only thing missing is a foreign policy crisis. So far, this may just be good luck. It happens occasionally in history that natural and man-made catastrophes converge to create even bigger disasters.

The 1918 influenza pandemic came as Europe was still reeling from four years of war. Societies were ravaged, governments were dysfunctional, millions were displaced, hungry, without shelter, on the move. Who knows how much worse the pandemic was because of the conditions created by the war? And who knows how much more difficult it was to recover from the war, psychologically and politically, as well as physically, because of the pandemic?

A more striking example of converging catastrophes came in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The U.S. stock market crashed in October 1929. Eight months later, as the market continued to fall, much of the country was hit by the worst drought in North America in a thousand years. Droughts struck again three times in the 1930s, displacing a half-million Americans and deepening the Great Depression.

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Πηγή: brookings.edu