Our New World

A brief word about North Korea’s nuclear test. I’m only coming to realize how important this is to all of us in our mundane little lives.

Alice Miles in the Times of London wrote: “And now we have this: a tinpot totalitarian with no economy to speak of, whose people are starving, thumbing his nose at the world. And we look to China to tell us what happens next.”

It’s the last sentence that floored me. I didn’t feel it happen, but the tectonic plate shifted. It really did. Isn’t it scary and extraordinary that the world can’t look to the USA for leadership anymore? This is the first time that we must all look toward China and expect it to take care of an international crisis for us. We need China to protect us. This is friggin’ huge. So huge that I think we can’t quite understand it yet. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live through some big geopolitical shift. Now I know. The world changed on Monday and I didn’t feel any different.

The 20th Century belonged to America and the 21st belongs to China. The starting gun went off on Monday, and now we are in their hands. This is really scary.