Something is happening in the world. Actually, a lot of things are happening at once. And that’s the trouble. It’s too much for any one person — any one intelligence agency — any one superpower — to track.

Here’s a brief catalog: Iraq is not pacified, and it’s not a democracy, yet. Afghanistan remains unsettled. Famine continues in Darfur. Japan and China are glaring at each other across the Sea of Japan. There’s a new restiveness between China and Taiwan. Two respected American magazines are speculating in their current issues about a naval war between China and the United States. Increasing numbers of jobs are flowing to India. Russia is looking nostalgically at the old Soviet days. Iran and North Korea are emerging as menacing nuclear powers without the restraints that held back the Cold Warriors of old. Al-Qaida is quiet, but perhaps quietly planning and plotting. A Pentagon report expresses concern about the ability of the United States to respond to any more crises.

That’s a lot. But even that grim catalog doesn’t include reports about terrorist groups known only to themselves, rebellions brewing in parts unknown, major power resentments about currency and export policies, the weak world economy, the high price of energy, the resurgence of polio in the Islamic world or simmering tensions between Arabs and Jews.

Situation isn’t unique

There have been such periods before. In the early part of the century there was an Anglo-German naval arms race, tension in the Balkans, revolutionary agitation in Russia. We can take no comfort in any of that; the results were World War I, the Soviet revolution, an economic crisis and the destruction of three empires which, while morally corrupt and geopolitically nonsensical, nonetheless kept the world in a crude sense of order.

Then there were the 1930s. The industrial economy was in the gutter, farm prices were in collapse, dictators were in power in three European nations, intolerance was on the rise even in the most tolerant of nations, the borders of Europe were under challenge, Japan and China were in constant conflict, Italy sought glory and colonial empire in Africa, international institutions fell out of respect, Soviet Russia became isolated and then cloaked in mystery and conspiracy, and the democracies lost their will. That didn’t turn out very well, either: a disastrous war in Europe and the Pacific, genocide in the most civilized parts of the world, the development of the most deadly weapons known to humankind and a debilitating Cold War.

Pages not blank

Now you know why Carlisle and Keats are both credited with a thought that will not die — that mankind’s happiest days are written on the blank pages of history.

Today’s pages are full, which is why we are living in a period of unusual peril. The Bush administration is striving mightily to tamp down concerns about North Korea’s nuclear intentions, but there is no happy face to put on reports that Pyongyang, which just came out of the nuclear closet, also just engaged in a missile test. Iran’s nuclear program is of concern not only to Israel but also to other nations in the Middle East — and to the United States.

The Bush years began with grave concern over China; indeed, the first foreign-policy crisis of the new millennium involved a now-forgotten contretemps about the collision of a Chinese fighter plane, an American surveillance plane and the capture of two dozen Navy personnel. That seems so long ago.

Seven months later, on Sept. 11, 2001, the new century truly began with the new threat to American security. That threat had been there for years, to be sure, but it was recognized, with tragic swiftness, by 10 a.m. EDT that day.

Since then, the United States has been focused on terrorists, their threat to American interests, their ability to strike at home. The symbol of this is the emergence of a word seldom heard in the United States and, until recently, applied mostly by Americans to their forebears’ lands of origin or to Jews and Palestinians about their national yearnings: homeland.

But now we see that the threat is not only from al-Qaida, though one of the threats inherent in the new perspective is the danger that we might lose sight of the threat from al-Qaida. The threats are here, and there, and everywhere. And just this month, the very portrait of Washington sobriety, Gen. Richard B. Myers — he is senior military adviser to both the president and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — issued a report with the chilling caveat that any new American combat responsibilities could result in “significantly extended campaign timelines, and achieving campaign objectives may result in higher casualties and collateral damage.”The good ol’ Cold War

It’s enough to make one pine for the old days, when the Soviet Union and the United States kept the world in an awkward, fright-filled kind of order.

It would be comforting to think that that was what prompted Russian President Vladimir Putin to make the most startling remark of the spring, that the demise of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

But it wasn’t nostalgia for the 1970s that motivated Putin, it was an echo of the 1930s — of the nationalism and greed that focused the Nazis on the Sudentenland and on Austria and Poland and so much more. Putin was speaking about how millions of “our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”

(The Russian president, apparently tone-deaf to the sensibilities of modern Europe, also described the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which preceded the 1939 partition of Poland, as a boon to Russia’s security. Monday’s 60th anniversary of Soviet Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany can’t be over soon enough.)

It’s impossible to know which one of the manifold threats to world peace and American security will fade away and which, if any, will metastasize into a full-blown world cancer. But we know this: The history of our time is no blank page, and that’s a tragedy.

— David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.