Revolution in a Vacuum

The dangers of America s strategy vacuum and the related penchant for short termism have been mounting for some time. Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter famously raised this concern in a 1996 article in the Harvard Business Review.

Thus, perestroika took place in a void.

The alternative to American leadership is a vacuum and increasing chaos.

Such a regional system cannot be built in a political vacuum.

It also filled a geopolitical vacuum at the heart of the continent, placing a check on Germany and Russia.

One can only hope that the vacuum created by America s withdrawal doesn t implode in violence.

But, in Iraq, flushing out the military and the police merely left the country in a domestic security vacuum.

China and Europe might find common cause in the vacuum left as America s domestic energy revolution weakens its commitment to the region.

Indeed, oil rents eventually weaken state institutions, and this hollowing out of the state often gives rise to growing discontent.

Into this vacuum burst Hamas, with its network of schools, welfare services, community centers, and support organizations.

But a political vacuum in Lebanon only makes violence more likely, which Hezbollah doesn t want.

Politics abhors equilibrium as much as nature abhors a vacuum and undoubtedly, tensions within the coalition, as well as outside it, will surface.

Nothing captures this moral vacuum more vividly than the recent television drama, Wo Ju ( Crowded Spaces ), which has been riveting Chinese audiences.

LONDON The war in Georgia has clearly exposed the security vacuum in the surrounding region, as well as a lot of raw nerves.

War and chaos in the Middle East or just a moral or political vacuum will directly affect and upset the security of the EU and all its member states.

The DPJ s only reason for being, however, is its anti LDP stance, while the SDP has long opposed the Japan US Security Treaty, and the PNP strongly opposes the privatizations of the Koizumi era. That does not amount to a coherent government program, and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama s administration quickly revealed the DPJ s fundamental hollowness.

But in 2006, after more than a decade of striving for acceptance by the West, the moral and political vacuum left by communism was fully exposed.

The intervention has seemingly been driven by a geopolitical imperative to bottle up or eliminate Col. Muammar el Qaddafi so that his regime cannot exploit the political vacuum in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.

When the Ba ath party along with its civic ideology was destroyed by the US occupation, no new civic concept replaced it. In the ensuing political vacuum, sectarianism was the only viable alternative principle of organization.

What is certain is that the vacuum left by Sharon s departure from politics is all the more striking in view of the images of chaos emerging from the Gaza that Israel has vacated, and the collapse of the Palestinian authority before our eyes.

Moreover, George W. Bush seems to be far weaker than any normal lame duck president, creating a global power vacuum that has been filled vigorously by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also the current president of the European Council.

Into this vacuum have stepped tribal gangs including the ethnic Kalenjin Sabaot Land Defence Force and the Luo Taliban, which was named, according to one member, in honor of its Afghan heroes defense of their people and way of life.

Do heady times of struggle always give way to a somewhat deflating taste of victory? Am I merely a veteran wistfully reminiscing about the old days of struggle?