New Year or new world?!

The year 2016 came to an end, and people got busy with wishes and resolutions, while others checked horoscopes and predicted events and changes, some of which might prove right, while others will prove them wrong, as is the nature of everything. However, 2017 might mark new aspects and headlines of a new era in human history.

Towards the end of the 1980s and after the Soviet Union broke apart and 15 new states resulted from the process and by the end of the Cold War, strategic experts expected a new era with the end of a bipolar system to form a new unipolar international one led by the US, which was immediately tested during the Desert Storm or Kuwait Liberation War in 1991. One of the main aspects of this new system was then known as ‘humanitarian intervention’, by using power to serve rights.

This did not last long, though. The promised new system failed in ‘Operation Restore Hope’ in 1994 in Somalia. Ever since, much water has run under bridges. The sure thing is that the so-called new system was nothing but a mirage, where the Soviet Union was substituted with global war on terrorism and we are still up to our necks in it and the tragic consequences witnessed everywhere worldwide might be a result thereof. Another symbolic result was the drowning of hundreds of thousands in various oceans while trying to flee devastating and brutal wars that are more like results than they are causes.

Total statistics so far push us back to be nostalgic, call for nationalism and have popular leaders go out to political arenas, especially in Western systems that create the world’s balance. What we are currently witnessing in the West is more of a tendency towards extremism, enclosure, rejection and building walls to exclude immigrants. It is very probable that Donald Trump, for instance, will not succeed in building a wall along the 2,000-km-long border with Mexico.

However, what is more important than logistics needed to construct projects like this is that they indicate what is yet to come. If the colonial West is considering detachment and retroversion, what open world are we talking about, then? What is even more important is the mentality behind such projects; one that, if it continues multiplying, we are doomed to witness further destruction, disintegration and marginalization of the human race. Though I believe that an international system based on such factors is doomed to failure, so much drowning, blood, grief and pain for millions might bring the world back to some balances and quests to get humanity out of such a state of loss.

The real problem is that the human race is the only one that annihilates itself without due reason, in most cases.