Here’s another challenging brief article by Walter Russell Mead.

My takeaway: What’s wrong today can be traced, in large measure, to really irresponsible decisions made in the 1990s — the kind of decisions associated with thinking attuned to “the end of history” or “the victory of globalism” or even the easy-maintenance “new world order.” The Nineties turned out, of course, to be a kind of feckless vacation from history, at least as self-indulgent as the one the president sometimes seems to be taking now.

What’s happened to the United States — a rapid decline in global respect and deference, not to mention self-confidence and fiscal solvency — can be traced to a kind of smug overconfidence that led to unguided and too-rapid deregulation, producing a kind of state-of-nature competitive environment (abetted, to be sure, by risk-faciliating government policy from Fannie and Freddie and such) that culminated in the collapse of 2007. What kind of country, the world asks, would allow that to happen? The same sort of irresponsible overconfidence drove our policy toward Russia, where, it turns out, the kind of spontaneous order we can believe in did not develop. What order there was came through the ruthless practice of what Hobbes calls the virtues of a world without effective government — force and fraud.

In my view, if you want blame the dream team or high-I.Q. sleaze team that was Clinton and Gingrich, this is your article. And, of course, Bush the elder did his share of squandering opportunities too. Blame away, remembering that’s there always plenty of that to go around.

Too much blaming — too much anger, studies show, is bad for your health and bad for your soul. Compensatory therapy here includes, of course, blaming Bush the young and Obama less. It might even allow you to feel the president’s pain, just a bit.

Mead reasonably adds that the failure of self-indulgent and self-satisfied leadership should not be a reason for abandoning our faith in liberal institutions or the benefits of high-tech economic growth. The fault is neither in the stars nor in our machines.

Still, we can agree with Solzhenitsyn that our general inability to harness technological progress with worthy human purposes became more pronounced after the Cold War.