After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order.
The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled.
The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of "The End of History." Savants trilled about the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism.
Yet, in 2012, sectarianism, tribalism and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding.
Syria is sinking into a war of all against all that may end with a breakup of the nation along ethno-sectarian lines—Arab, Druze, Kurd, Sunni, Shia and Christian. Iraq descends along the same path.
A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran's northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran's Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan's largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia.
The Middle and Near East seem to be descending into a Muslim Thirty Years' War of Sunni vs. Shia. Out of it may come new nations whose names and borders were not written in drawing rooms by 19th and 20th century European cartographers, but in blood.
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