A Lesson from Purim

After the Tower of Babel, Hashem divided the world among seventy nations, each with its defined boundaries. Yet most of subsequent human history has been a record of unceasing warfare, as each leader tried to seize whatever he could once he adjudged himself to be stronger than his neighbor. The rule was enunciated by the Athenian ambassador to the Island of Melos: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

With the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history,” and the end of the era of major power conflict threatening nuclear destruction. But alas, that was not to be. Vladimir Putin, intent on restoring the former Russian empire, has plunged the world back into the state described by the Athenian ambassador. To some extent, he did so when he invaded Georgia in 2008 and grabbed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, meeting little sustained opposition from the West. But Ukraine is by far his most ambitious venture yet.

And the world has become a far scarier place as a consequence. Peter Savodnik, who came of age around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, put it well this week at Bari Weiss’s Common Sense site:

By the time Biden delivered the State of the Union, the Russians had been rampaging through Ukraine for nearly a week, and it had become impossible to deny that old order [i.e., the post-1989 order] was over. We’d just witnessed the death of a world many people have never lived outside of: the world of alliances and markets orbiting around the American solar plexus, the world in which everyone more or less agreed on the fundamentals and all that was left to be done was to oversee, tinker, ensure the perpetual flow of goods and services and human cogs through this transnational… network of perfectly calibrated arteries and hyperlinks. The fantasy of the early 1990s of my post-adolescence — that was dead. Just as important: It was never coming back. And no one… knew what came next.