From the military juntas that ruled Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s to Joseph Stalin’s iron-fisted regime in the Soviet Union, dictatorships have a long history of making their detractors “disappear.” Today, this sinister practice seems to be making a comeback.
Even barring worst-case scenarios, the West will be facing a new world with new aspirants making new demands about the future. So it would be a fateful mistake to abandon the ideas and institutions that delivered prosperity and stability in previous decades.
The most ominous threats in 2018 — nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula and a spiralling confrontation pitting the United States and its allies against Iran — could both be aggravated by Trump’s actions, inactions, and idiosyncrasies. U.S. demands (in the North Korean case, denuclearisation; in Iran’s, unilateral renegotiation of the nuclear deal or Tehran’s regional retreat) are unrealistic without serious diplomatic engagement or reciprocal concessions.
Helmut Kohl (b. 1930) oversaw the reunification of Germany…Kohl’s tenure as chancellor—second in length only to that of Otto von Bismarck—ended in 1998 when the Social Democratic Party defeated the CDU. When Kohl passed, he was given an “EU state funeral,” a testament to his commitment not just to a united Germany, but to a united Europe as well.
As Donald Trump’s White House spirals deeper into crisis, the rest of the world seems to be giving up on America’s new president. A survey by Pew Research Centre showed that respondents in 22 out of 36 countries trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin more than Trump when it comes to handling global affairs. And that includes American allies like Germany, France and Japan. (Donald Trump edged out Putin in the UK, India and Israel.)
The past decade has witnessed significant changes in the global economy as many nations around the world have struggled with the Great Recession and its aftereffects. While the United States and other relatively wealthy Western nations have slowly bounced back from the crisis, economic growth rates have been low compared with those of China, India and other emerging economies. Still, the prevailing view among publics around the world is that the U.S. is the top global economic power.
At a time when media headlines point to a spike in global intolerance, here’s some good news: most people around the world don’t say they believe any single race, religion or culture is better than another.
As Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres. The supercontinent is becoming one fluid, comprehensible unit of trade and conflict, as the Westphalian system of states weakens and older, imperial legacies – Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Turkish – become paramount. Every crisis from Central Europe to the ethnic-Han Chinese heartland is now interlinked. There is one singular battlespace.
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The post-Cold War international system is coming to an end, and with it easy assumptions about the character of U.S. strategy toward the world’s great powers. After a period in which a dominant, U.S.-led Western coalition largely set and enforced the rules of the international order — and in which other major powers, such as Russia and China, largely acquiesced to U.S. leadership of that order — the global system is returning to a state of sharper and more explicit great-power competition.
Next week, Chinese President Xi Jinping will travel to the United States to meet Donald Trump for the first time. But according to Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, power is flowing in the opposite direction.
