Trump is taking a wrecking ball to international trade and the global economy built around it. That’s alarming. (MAGA types spend a remarkable amount of time decrying globalism on the world wide web - a feat of irony they seem blissfully unaware of.) And of course he's also going after national institutions and norms in ways that are alarming.
The hopeful part? Just within the domain of international progress? After Trump, it seems likely the global economy will restructure itself to be more robust - less dependent on US leadership and more resilient to shifts in the political mood of any single leader or even the majorities of a half dozen countries. We see this, for instance, in the EU's support for Ukraine, something that has always been present but seems stronger now that they realize they cannot depend on the US. Hopefully in the future the US will again take a strong role in the defense and development of Western Europe but all the better when Western Europe's fate is less reliant on the US. (Or any one country, for that matter.) I'm not saying that the US won't always have an influence over other regions during the next generation or so; I am saying that the more resilient are the pro-development policies of any one region with or without the US or the EU or China, the more resilient will be progress.
Alarm and hope both matter. Without them, people tend to settle for inaction. That is not a good option right now.
No comments:
Post a Comment