World

It’s too big to fail as the global leviathan

A liberal world order consisting of Western Europe and Canada would not be an order but an impotent anachronism. Even as the post-Cold War order fades away and America’s leader boasts about acting purely in self-interest, the US is still called upon to mediate conflicts between India and Pakistan or Cambodia and Thailand or Congo and Rwanda, while it supplies weaponry that protects Taiwan and staves off defeat for Ukraine.

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Should American power retreat fully from that role, there is no liberal successor waiting in the wings. And the concessions made to Trump by NATO members on military spending targets, such as the EU’s trade concessions, reflect an awareness of this reality – in which it’s always better to help prop up the Pax Americana than to seek to build a post-American system.

The other crucial political point is that the crisis of liberalism is general, not specific to the US. It’s not as if liberalism is resilient or thriving in Europe or East Asia while it decays in the US. Populism already rules in Italy and Hungary, it might govern France and Britain soon, it is rising in Germany, and Japan and South Korea have their own forms of post-liberal polarisation. And Western progressivism has its own illiberal features. The tensions of multiculturalism may make the European order more unstable than America’s.

Over the years I have known left-wing and right-wing Americans who have decamped from our country for what seem like more politically congenial situations – escaping wokeness in Eastern Europe, escaping Trumpism in Canada or Britain. My suggestion to these friends has been consistent: Whatever your ideals or fears, whatever your beliefs about the good society, the battles you care about will be won or lost in the US.

The refuges are illusory, the alternatives are compromised or weak, and the future of freedom will be American or it will not be at all.

The New York Times

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