Happy New Year? Not if 2023 was any guide.

The world enters 2024 amid widening war, a divided leader and a busted economic engine.

And so, we say goodbye with no small amount of irony to 2023. It was a year that further exposed Washington’s intolerance of economic or geopolitical rivals and led the world more deeply into a new Cold War. Proxy wars are raging in Eastern Europe and the Middle East—and the Pacific is on the brink. All led by a nation itself so divided that the front-r…