After one Trump presidency and on the eve of another, it is now clear that a once mighty global superpower is allowing its gaze to turn inward, to feed off resentment more than idealism, to think smaller.
Public sentiment – not just the political class – feels threatened by the flow of migrants once regarded as the country’s lifeblood. Global trade, once an article of faith for free marketeers and architects of the postwar Pax Americana, is now a cancer eating away at US prosperity – its own foreign invasion.
Military alliances and foreign policy no longer command the cross-party consensus of the cold war era, when politics could be relied upon to “stop at the water’s edge”, in the famous formulation of the Truman-era senator Arthur Vandenberg.
Now the politics don’t stop at all, for any reason. And alliances are for chumps.
I’m sorry, but that’s an absolute fantasy.
When have you seen anything like that level of international co-operation?
And have you stopped to think that there are a lot of rich and powerful people with a strong vested interest in keeping things going the way they are.
yes. and these powerful people are mostly located in the us.
collapse away, please.
Mostly.
Think the world would be all sunshine and friendship if the Saudi princes had the US arsenal? Putin? The people at the top didn’t get there because they played nice and shared their toys.
Be careful what you wish for.