Yet another peace agreement has been announced in the long running war in the eastern Congo. The Congo War has been responsible for more than five million deaths, created untold numbers of refugees, been responsible for countless atrocities and at various times has sucked in other neighboring countries. This war has many causes. Perhaps its root cause is the chaos that the execrable Belgians (whose colonization of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi was perhaps the ugliest episode in the history of European colonization) left behind. Ethnic hatred between Tutsis and Hutus, enormous mineral resources and a feeble Congolese state which has never been able to manage its huge territory effectively all played their part.

The bitter Hutu-Tutsi struggle is in some ways the key to the current situation. After the genocide in Rwanda, many Hutus fled the Tutsi victory to refugee camps in neighboring Congo, and Hutu fighters continued the struggle. Rwanda had four good reasons for intervening: the Hutu forces in the eastern Congo posed a continuing threat to Rwanda’s Tutsi population, Rwanda’s government was concerned about the safety of Tutsis in the neighboring Congo (international boundaries don’t reflect tribal boundaries and Hutus and Tutsis live mingled together throughout the Great Lakes region), the mineral resources in the region were rich enough so that controlling their extraction could help fund the large military apparatus that Rwanda’s government felt that it needed in a dangerous neighborhood, and the hopeless inadequacy of the shambolic Congolese government both invited intervention through its weakness and demanded intervention because of the government’s inability to maintain order and security in its own territory.

So will the new deal, signed between the Congolese government and rebels belonging to the M23, stick any better than the ones that have unraveled in the past? There are some reasons to hope. Basically, the conflict may be burning itself out. Rwanda’s government might be feeling more secure than in the past. The UN mission, with US backing, is doing more to address Rwanda’s security concerns. The M23 movement, which is largely Tutsi and which many observers feel has been Rwanda’s tool in the Congo, is weaker and less effective than formerly. Humanitarian groups, UN peacekeepers, NGOs and western aid agencies have provided something of the elements of a state in eastern Congo (security and basic services) that the government could never manage.

So though real doubts remain, our fingers are crossed, and if the latest peace deal sticks, we’d suggest that the Nobel Prize committee should give some recognition to the people who have toiled for years to get to this place.

The eastern Congo and the African Great Lakes are remote places, and many people might wonder why Americans or the world at large should care much about what goes on there. The short answer is that the people who live there are made in God’s image as much as anybody else and they are infinitely dear to him, and to remain indifferent to the suffering of people there is to fail in our clear duty to our Creator and to some degree to betray our own humanity.

But beyond that basic moral point, there are a couple of political lessons that should be of practical interest to the rest of the world.

The first should be a warning to us all. While the world’s intelligentsia today spends an endless amount of time “celebrating difference” and singing the praises of diversity (and we join in that chorus), diversity and difference constitute potentially catastrophic political challenges. One thing that seems to happen with modernization is that groups of people start feeling more need to have the state and the laws reflect the values and the priorities of their own ethnic or religious communities. Identity demands to be reflected in politics.

Pre-modern and “primitive” cultures don’t seem to feel this as strongly as more modern ones do, and democracies are sometimes even more chauvinistic than other forms of government as these pressures are felt. It is often populists who lead campaigns for ethnic cleansing or nationalist war. The history of Europe and the Middle East has been shaped by 150 years of sometimes genocidal wars of conquest, revenge, national liberation and religion. Tens of millions have been killed in these wars, multinational states have broken down into ethnic nation states, and millions of refugees have been forced into exile.

These wars continue today; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Syria, the Kurdish struggle for independence, the tensions in the Caucasus. So far, the only way of settling them for good has been to exterminate minorities or to kick hundreds of thousands or even millions of people (Germans from Poland and the Sudentenland after World War II) out to create homogeneity.

One of the biggest questions of the 21st century is whether this destructive dynamic can be contained, or whether the demand for ethnic, cultural and/or religious homogeneity will continue to convulse world politics, drive new generations of conflict, and create millions more victims. The Congo conflict is a disturbing piece of evidence suggesting that, in Africa at least, there is potential for this kind of conflict. The Congo war (and the long Hutu-Tutsi conflict in neighboring countries) is not, unfortunately alone. The secession of South Sudan from Sudan proper, the wars in what remains of that unhappy country, the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia and the rise of Christian-Muslim tension right across Africa (where religious conflict often is fed by and intensifies “tribal”—in Europe we would say “ethnic” or “national”—conflicts) are strong indications that the potential for huge and destructive conflict across Africa is very real.

But one must look beyond Africa. The Middle East of course is aflame in religious and ethnic conflict. The old British Raj including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka offers countless examples of ethnic and religious conflict that sometimes is contained, and sometimes boils to the surface in horrendous acts of violence.

Beyond that, rival nationalisms in East and Southeast Asia are keeping the world awake at night.

The Congo war should be a reminder to us all that the foundations of our world are dynamite, and that the potential for new conflicts on the scale of the horrific wars of the 20th century is very much with us today.

The second lesson from this conflict stems from the realization of how much patience and commitment from the international community (which in this case included the Atlantic democracies and a coalition of African states working as individual countries and through various international institutions) it has taken to get this far towards peace. Particularly at a time when many Americans want the US to turn inwards, there are people who make the argument that it is really none of America’s business to invest time and energy in the often thankless task of solving these conflicts.

That might be an ugly but defensible position if we didn’t live in such a tinderbox world. Someone could rationally say, yes, it’s terrible that a million plus people are being killed overseas in a horrific conflict, but the war is really very far away and America has urgent needs at home and we should husband the resources we have available for foreign policy on things that have more power to affect us directly.

The problem is that these wars spread. They may start in places that we don’t care much about (most Americans didn’t give a rat’s patootie about whether Germany controlled the Sudetenland in 1938 or Danzig in 1939) but they tend to spread to places that we do care very much about. This can be because a revisionist great power like Germany in 1938-39 needs to overturn the balance of power in Europe to achieve its goals, or it can be because instability in a very remote place triggers problems in places that we care about very much. Out of Afghanistan in 2001 came both 9/11 and the waves of insurgency and instability that threaten to rip nuclear-armed Pakistan apart or trigger wider conflict with India. Out of the mess in Syria a witches’ brew of terrorism and religious conflict looks set to complicate the security of our allies in Europe and the Middle East and even the security of the oil supply on which the world economy so profoundly depends.

Africa, and the potential for upheaval there, is of more importance to American security than many people may understand. The line between Africa and the Middle East is a soft one. The weak states that straddle the southern approaches of the Sahara are ideal petri dishes for Al Qaeda type groups to form and attract local support. There are networks of funding and religious contact that give groups in these countries potential access to funds, fighters, training and weapons from the Middle East. A war in the eastern Congo might not directly trigger these other conflicts, but it helps to create the swirling underworld of arms trading, money transfers, illegal commerce and the rise of a generation of young men who become experienced fighters—and know no other way to make a living. It destabilizes the environment for neighboring states (like Uganda and Kenya) that play much more direct role in potential crises of greater concern to us.

This is why the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations (representing three very different kinds of American politics) have all been engaged in efforts like the peace keeping effort in the Congo. It is why, despite our budget problems at home and despite our often justifiable impatience with the complexities of dealing with international coalitions and the inadequacies of international institutions, we need to continue the slow and painstaking work that makes agreements like this one possible.

The world we live in is an explosive one. There are all kinds of things that can go horribly wrong, and what happens in one corner of the world doesn’t necessarily stay there. Reducing the danger requires an active, global American foreign policy whether we like it or not. The potential for new communal and religious wars that kill millions of people and endanger American security and world peace is very real. The world seems safer than the world of the 1930s and 1940s in part because the United States and many of our friends and allies are working quietly around the world to contain outbreaks of violence, address the issues that exacerbate hatred and distrust, and in the last analysis are willing to provide the security guarantees and deterrents that prevent mass mayhem.

Let us hope that the next generation of Americans will remember these important facts, and support the kind of diplomacy and engagement that offers our best hope of building a different and better world in the century ahead.