By Dee Smith
After WWII, the US originated and enforced an international order based on rules. It worked in terms of avoiding nuclear war. However, many Americans are ready to ditch it because they do not see that it worked in terms of making their lives better.
They are also ready to unwind globalization.
This is very significant, because the whole world is now linked through globalization, so American unwinding will affect everyone. As globalization is unwound—through rising trade barriers, tariffs, and other protectionist measures—people in more and more countries are likely to turn against it as not being beneficial to them. De-globalization can become a self-reinforcing cycle. Even if globalization merely changes its shape, it will be much altered.
Perhaps even more significant, much of the US population wants the US to quit being “policeman of the world” and guarantor of the security of the international order.
Ten years ago, the admiral of the U.S. Pacific Fleet observed to me that the U.S. military and their families were already exhausted. And what has the succeeding 10 years brought?
Americans see that more than $8 trillion was expended in Middle East wars, and ask: for what? Iraq is a mess, Iran is stronger, Afghanistan is back under Taliban control (the result of a deal negotiated by the Trump I administration and implemented by the Biden administration), Israel and its neighbors are at war, and the Middle East is a seething cauldron.
The failure of 20 years of war—pursued by both U.S. political parties—further eroded trust in U.S. leadership and in the global position of America. Russia put its plan to attack and take Ukraine into effect after it saw the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan (on the heels of not much American reaction against previous Russian action in Georgia and Crimea).
As the U.S. pulls back, players like China and Russia—and smaller “middle” powers like Iran—will take advantage of American absence and become more aggressive. This is the single greatest potential source of immediate and near-term major conflict.
Parties in the U.S. also want to undo being banker to the world: Americans increasingly don’t see why defending the dollar as a global reserve currency is important to their lives.
There is even a detectable desire to back off American global moral leadership —democracy promotion, anti-corruption, keeping various countries “in line” by creating policy conditions that have to be followed if you want U.S. money (which many Americans believe should not be meted out anyway). The U.S. is being out-competed by the Chinese, who provide (lend) money and don’t make autocrats give up coercive techniques or corruption—in fact, they sometimes aid these.
The modern West—the U.S.-centered set of ideas, concepts, rules, and alliances, based conceptually on democracy, free trade, and engendering rising living standards around the world—is at significant risk of being discarded by Americans themselves.
Within, the U.S. is unraveling as a country with a set of shared ideals. Americans are largely tired of being a “beacon” and a refuge. They don’t believe, themselves, that it has worked. They don’t want the openness towards immigration that is expressed by Emma Lazarus’s famous poem on Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
The erosion of internal American cohesion and resolve, and loss of self-esteem and self-confidence, together with the palpable fear of the future, has created a backlash against immigration of enormous breadth and power. For a nation built by immigrants, this shift in fundamental American attitudes is striking.
Isolationist sentiment is not just American. Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union, recently said:
The European Project [the EU] was built against the idea of power. Europeans . . . were fighting against [each] other for centuries. We . . . finally we decided to stop doing it and make peace. And the European project was founded on the idea of peace, exchange, cooperation, interdependency, vanishing borders, sharing the same currency. But today, this situation has become untenable.
Why is this? Because we have realized that economic interdependency in which our project was based is being captured by political and geostrategic rivalries.
We used to believe that trade will be in itself a source of security . . . trading among people will prevent them from making war . . . But then every interdependency became a weapon, and it obliged us to think differently.
Many Europeans want true borders again between their countries. They do not want the Schengen system of open travel and migration within the EU.
What went largely unrealized in setting up aspects of the globalized system was that, once it reaches a certain scale, immigration changes the culture and demographic composition of a nation in a way that no one bargained for or expected. People are not equipped to handle this, particularly given the inequality in outcomes of economic globalization and financialization, and the disorientation and fear from technological development.
But immigration is about to become much more pronounced, as climate change works its inexorable effects in making regions less and less habitable. Today, there are about 120 million forcibly displaced persons worldwide, doubling from around 60 million 10 years ago.
There will be many, many more. Global forced displacement is projected by IEP, an international think-tank, to rise to 1.2 billion in 25 years, as far from now as the year 2000 is in the past. Think of more than the entire population of North America and South America on the move! This is almost incomprehensible in its scope and effects. Combined with rising anti-immigration sentiment worldwide, it brings to mind the ancient paradox of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.