The first postmodern political assassination

Prone as the internet may be to magnify and manufacture fantasy news, in this case, the truth is plain to see. Karlov’s assassination is not only a shocking demonstration of the world’s fears of the future. It’s also another crack in the foundation of the geopolitical present, eerily echoing cataclysms of the past. The metaphor some analysts and observers immediately reached for was the assassination more than 100 years ago of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a killing that sparked the first World War. It’s a strained comparison, but one that underscores today’s prevailing sense that the existing global order is on borrowed time, one tap away from toppling. Ideological expectations are shaking and blurring. While President Obama has come under attack from the left as well as the right for his restrained approach to Russia, President-elect Trump is the focus of enmity from both sides for taking a more friendly tack. (Trump is even on record supporting Gulen’s extradition to Turkey.) Yet very few Americans are thirsting for deeper U.S. involvement in the Syria debacle, or a cascade toward outright war with Russia. Ignorance, reflexive hatred, and conspiratorial superstitions thrive in the West today. But so does a growing, cross-partisan demand for a more peaceful, predictable world.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Western liberalism finds itself increasingly under attack both abroad and at home. Elites have lost too much trust in their ideals to lead their nations to full-dress war with autocracies. In the U.S., illiberal radicals and reactionaries cry out for a decisive break with American globalism, interventionism, and capitalism. In Europe, where both types of the anti-liberal fringe actually enjoy a long (if bloody) history of viability and control, the focus is on punishing globalism less for its strengths than its weaknesses, epitomized by the EU’s inability to ensure economic growth, cultural coherence, political pride, or basic security. Dark as illiberal life in Russia, Turkey, or China may be, the message many in the West’s democracies will hear from Altintas is this: In a more violent world, you, too, will learn to abandon all hope.