2022’s Four Strategic Challenges

As 2022 begins, four strategic challenges to the post-World War II international order generate the psychological ambiguity—meaning plain old human fear—that fosters ethnic and sectarian slaughter and seeds the kind of bloody “proxy” wars that escalate into major regional wars. Warning to everyone who cares about Planet Earth: When major regional wars entangle Great Powers (examples: United States, China) you bet your life and the lives of a billion others that world war is a panicked button push away. Here are the four challenges, and they are not in order: Challenge No. 1: Imperialist powers hellbent on recovering lost empires…