SEOUL – Watching Donald Trump skulking behind Hillary Clinton on the debate stage Sunday night, muttering about locking her up if he wins, was a reminder that we are drifting toward a kind of bullyboy-world, where power is everything.
You see this coarsening climate of relations around the globe in the debasement of the norms that make civilized life possible. Dictators push the limits of power in new ways almost daily: China brazenly builds military bases on disputed rocks and sand in the South China Sea and dares anyone to stop them; Russia pillages America’s political system and baldly denies it.
David IgnatiusThe leading bullyboy in this part of the world is North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un. His regime is a calculated act of defiance. He terrorizes his population, shoots his relatives and governs his nation as if by whim. Yet this crackpot dictator is about to become a full-fledged nuclear power.
Historians will have to decide whether Barack Obama’s presidency encouraged this fraying of limits. For all his decency, Obama conveyed a sense that you could defy America and its cherished “rules-based order” and get away with it. His slowly unfolding but decisive use of power against the Islamic State may partially reverse that reputation.
Even if Obama had been as implacable as President Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, the probing and testing of America that always accompanies our transitions of power would already have begun. That’s part of what we’re seeing now – the bullies giving America a shove – and the process will increase as we move toward Inauguration Day and after.