The West at Bay

Headline: “Russia planning massive military offensive against Ukraine involving 175,000 troops, U.S. intelligence warns.”
A book by the British economist Barbara Ward, published in 1949, the year in which the Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear weapons test and Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China, was titled The West at Bay. I’ve never read the book, but the title and the concept have long haunted me. To say the least, an update with the same title, would be apt. We’re in grim circumstances, both because of the character and resources of our adversaries and because the West is at bay from within itself. The European Union, post-Brexit, is besieged by fractious forces, and the United States is semi-paralyzed by multiple afflictions, at the heart of which is the moral disintegration of the Republican Party, evidenced most spectacularly by the stance of the vast majority of Republicans, ranging from abject tolerance of, to enthusiastic allegiance to, the sociopathic former president.