The idea that the mere appearance of disorder encourages a deeper form of disorder cuts against the conventional wisdom that crime is a function of "root causes." Yet municipalities that adopted policing techniques based on the broken-windows theory — techniques that emphasised policing by foot patrols and the strict enforcing of laws against petty crimes and "social incivilities" — tended to register sharp drops in crime and improvements in the overall quality of life.

And that, Stephens argues, explains why things unravelled so quickly in the Obama years: "One window breaks, then all the others," as "rules are invoked but not enforced," and "principles are idealised but not defended." The result? "The moment the world [began] to notice that rules won't be enforced, the rules [began] to be flouted" — as indeed they have been by a cast of dangerous nasties that includes Vladimir Putin, Ali Khameini, Assad, Hugo Chávez and his downmarket successor Nicolás Maduro, the brothers Castro, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Kim Jong-un, and the Communist mandarins in Beijing.

Moreover, the broken-windows theory, on Stephens's account, offers a strategic model for US foreign policy — and indeed for the West's engagement with world politics — for the future: "The most urgent goal of US foreign policy over the next decade should be to arrest the continued slide into a broken-windows world of international disorder." How? By putting the equivalent of cops on the beat, i.e. by using the U.S. military, and allied armed forces, to stop the gangsters, reinforce norms of international behaviour, and protect the responsible locals being threatened by the gangsters. The strategic goal, in other words, is to deter aggression by "keeping neighbourhoods" — which in this case means volatile world regions — "from becoming places that entice criminal behaviour".

As for tactics to implement that vision, Stephens recommends raising US defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP (it's now at 3.5 per cent) to pay for and equip a force with lots of usable and easily replaceable weaponry, not multi-billion-dollar wonder-weapons. Those troops and weapons would be deployed to "sharply punish violations of geopolitical norms, such as the use of chemical weapons, by swiftly and precisely targeting the perpetrators of the attacks (assuming those perpetrators can be found)", while keeping the focus on "short, mission-specific, punitive police actions, not on open-ended occupations with the goal of redeeming broken societies".

Thus Stephens tries to navigate a course between Obama's scuttle, on the one hand, and what he regards as George W. Bush's failed efforts at nation-building abroad, on the other. His broken-windows strategy would "discriminate between core issues and allies and peripheral ones," with a sharp focus on the borders of today's free world: "the borders that divide the free countries of Asia from China and North Korea; the free countries of central Europe from Russia; and allies such as Israel and Jordan from any of their neighbors." Such border-patrolling will require strategic judgment of a high calibre, as it "wouldn't try to run every bad guy out of town" nor would it demand that "the US put out  every geopolitical fire. But it would require American statesmen "to figure out which of those fires risks burning down the entire neighbourhood, as the war in Syria threatens to do, and which will probably burn themselves out, as is likely the case of South Sudan."

Bret Stephens understands that implementing his strategic prescription for a post-Obama US foreign policy will require a change in attitude and perception on the part of the American people, who were happy to have won the Cold War (although that victory was never celebrated as such by either President George H.W. Bush or President Bill Clinton); who were happily anticipating a "peace dividend" when the attacks of 9/11 occurred and President George W. Bush took the country into two wars of which Americans eventually grew weary (in part because the second President Bush did not adequately explain the necessity for a long, twilight struggle against jihadism); and who do not, the Euro-Left's fantasies notwithstanding, have imperial aspirations for the future.