UK - Are we so sure that, because our lives are likewise modern and often prosperous, that we live in a safe world? We shouldn't be. Hell will be worse with computers and CCTV than it would have been without them. How does all this matter now? I should say it is because too much passion and rage are loose in the world. Shouting, angry demonstrations fill the streets. The desire for sane compromise seems to have left us. Some want perfect, utopian resolutions of things which simply cannot be fixed, like the endless argument about Israel's existence. For that is what it is. Few in the Arab world will ever truly accept the Jewish state's existence, and only the moral and physical support of the free West will persuade them to find a way of living side by side.
Other idealists, especially those in the US, think American power can remake the world. They spent years attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan, before giving up and once again accepting Taliban rule there. They shattered the Middle East trying to create a democracy in Iraq, and have now given that up too, along with their equally doomed attempt to overthrow the Syrian state with the aid of Al Qaeda, and their creation of permanent chaos in Libya.
Next on their list of expensive idealistic failures is Ukraine, now full of graves and ruins. Most of these well-meaning adventures have helped fuel the migration crisis which has made Europe more unstable than at any point in my lifetime. Each has made the world too used to war. Having lived most of my life in a post-war era, I now find myself in what looks unpleasantly like a pre-war age.