Fifty years ago this month, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace as president of the United States, before likely being impeached in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The corruption at the highest level of the American government contributed to a nascent loss of trust by a significant portion of the populace in their elected leaders, a societal affliction that represents a core underpinning of our current political paralysis.  

At the same time in 1974, Washington was in the final stages of this nation’s ignominious withdrawal from the battlefields of Southeast Asia, a conflict that lasted over a decade, resulted in 58,000 U.S. war dead and utterly devastated Vietnam. In the process, our tragic involvement in the jungles of Indochina degraded our standing in the world, hollowed out our military power for over a decade and further eroded public confidence in our nation’s leaders.

A decade later, in 1984, it was ostensibly Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America.” However, from a foreign policy standpoint, the year provided a dangerous prelude to some of America’s most-vexing international challenges over the next 40 years. Specifically, the White House unceremoniously withdrew U.S. Marines from Beirut in February of 1984 following a deployment that resulted in the death of over 240 of America’s finest, killed in a terrorist attack by Hezbollah, the same group that is one of the main protagonists in the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

The deployment, bloodshed and subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces would sadly presage repeated American adventures in the region, including Somalia in 1993, Iraq in 2003, Syria in 2014 and our current conflicted efforts to avoid a wider war while loyally supporting our allies in Israel. 

Fast forward to 1994. The Cold War’s denouement offered the hope of an end to major power conflict as Russia embarked on a rocky and ultimately unsuccessful path to democracy. Storm clouds were already appearing on the horizon, however, as Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent the Red Army into Chechnya late in the year to quell an independence movement by the local population. The resulting conflict, the first Chechen War, would claim upwards of 80,000 civilian casualties, and proved without a doubt that the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions had not gone to the grave with the demise of the Soviet Union.

In the same year, 4,500 miles south of Chechnya, a tragedy of immense proportions played out in Rwanda, as ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis resulted in upwards of 800,000 civilian deaths. The Clinton administration, bruised by its experience in Somalia, sat out the conflagration, to the long-term detriment of this country’s image in sub-Saharan Africa. While not on our myopic radar, the consequences of the genocide continue to roil the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, with rebel groups and national forces from surrounding nations engaged in nihilistic combat in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

A decade later, in 2004, as a result of the Bush administration’s “global war on terror,” the United States was prosecuting two major wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – and countless other kinetic, counter-terrorism operations around the globe. To this day, Washington is trying to recover from the cumulative effects of this strategic “every problem requires a hammer” foreign policy, which overstretched the U.S. military, strained our relations with allies and substantively degraded our global soft power.  

Needless to say, Bush’s casus belli for the war in Iraq, the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, reinforced our citizenry’s lack of faith in our leaders, helping to pave the way for mainstreaming more isolationist and extremist political movements. 

Ten years ago, Russia burst back onto the world stage in all of its revanchist, domineering glory.  In response to the “Maidan Uprising” early in 2014 in Kyiv, the Kremlin invaded and occupied Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, later in the year ratcheting up the pressure on its former Slavic brethren by becoming directly involved in the conflict in the country’s Donbas region in the east, on the border with Russia. Hindsight is 20/20, but one might logically ask if Vladimir Putin would have launched the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine had the United States and the West more resolutely responded to his 2014 aggression.

While the Russian Bear was starting to feast on Ukraine, 2014 also saw China expanding its influence across Central Asia into Africa and South America through Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure and development program. As Washington was bogged down by the GWOT in nearly every corner of the globe, the Middle Kingdom was investing in long-term relationships, in the process securing access to critical natural resources essential to the global electric economy of the future. 

Now, in 2024, the international chess board is marked by two dangerous, seemingly intractable conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, either of which could morph into much wider, more-destructive bloodshed at a moment’s notice. They are being fought against the backdrop of a growing division globally between a liberal-democratic West and a consortium of autocratic states that include China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. This split has the potential to become a new Cold War on steroids, with unforeseen consequences for the world at large. 

Lacking a geopolitical crystal ball to foretell the future, we can only hope that 10 years hence in 2034, the next iteration of years ending in four, better prospects for global peace and prosperity will be in store. 

Robert Beck of Peterborough served for 30 years overseas with the United States government in embassies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He now teaches foreign policy classes at Keene State College’s Cheshire Academy for Lifelong Learning.