The age of uncertainty

Rupert Cornwell has a fantastic essay on the past decade in today's Indy.

How will the world remember this century's first decade, which is now drawing to an end? For once alliteration works well. The 'decade of disorder' perhaps, reflecting the fragmentation of power into what historians of the present call a multipolar world. Or how about the 'decade of drift', in which huge global problems went untackled?

Or one might describe it as a 'decade of destruction' – not in the sense of annihilation, but as a period of necessary creative destruction, in which many comforting props of the past disappeared in order to permit a new equilibrium. As for the country that not long ago informally ruled the world, another alliteration might apply. For the United States of America, briefly the hub of a unipolar world, this has been a decade of disaster.

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