The president, unmoved by history, ignorant of facts and guided by sycophants, has not been forced to grapple with the real world nor to hear views that don’t coincide with his twisted worldview, in which allies are ripping us off and aggressive strongmen are to be admired and accommodated.
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The People’s Liberation Army Air Force of China and its sister branch, the PLA Naval Air Force, operate a huge fleet of around 1,700 combat aircraft—defined here as fighters, bombers and attack planes. This force is exceeded only by the 3,400 active combat aircraft of the U.S. military. Moreover, China operates a lot of different aircraft types that are not well known in the West.
In many ways, Russia’s current defiant geopolitical stance can be traced to a decisive moment in recent history: the belief that the West broke its promises not to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization eastwards. But experts argue over what exactly was promised, NATO itself calls the story of the broken promise a “myth,” and the former Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who is critical of NATO expansion, has said the West kept all its binding commitments following from the reunification of Germany.
The climate change talks in Bonn have now wrapped up with little firm action. Next year they move to Poland. But whatever is discussed or agreed in European cities over the coming years, the answers to climate change will not come from the west (beyond a few technological tweaks), but Asia.
The global financial crisis, which began ten years ago this month, showed that the Western-led rules-based international order’s long-term survival is not inevitable. It is often assumed that if and when the United States loses its place as the global hegemon in that system, China will be the country to lead the world. But what would a Chinese-led order look like?
U.S. President Donald Trump just sought to redefine the West. In a speech to cheering crowds in Warsaw on Thursday, Trump described the West’s values in terms of religion and culture and called for the defense of its civilization against radical Islam. It amounted to a manifesto for his foreign-policy vision. The address included repeated invocations of God, faith, tradition, national sovereignty and family. It made only passing reference to what are usually cited as core Western values: the rule of law, democracy and freedom of speech. Religious tolerance did not get a mention.
The notion of a “Muslim world” is not a result of Islamic “theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety,” Aydin writes. It is a product of the West’s historical “imperial racialisation of Muslimness,” on the one hand, and of “Muslim resistance to this racialised identity,” on the other. This process of exchange, concentrated in the 19th and 20th centuries, made meaningful the idea of a Muslim world for those beyond and within it.
Americans are serial amnesiacs. And today, after more than 70 years of great-power peace and a quarter-century of unrivalled global supremacy, Americans have lost their sense of tragedy. The U.S.-led international order has been so successful, for so long, that Americans have come to take it for granted. They have forgotten what that order is meant to prevent in the first place: the sort of utter breakdown of the international system, the descent into violence and great-power war, that has been all too common throughout human history.
Lone wolves are an old problem, but in recent decades, the number of attacks by them has grown. And it won’t fall anytime soon: ISIS has embraced the tactic, and recent successes may well inspire copycats. And although lone wolves usually kill few people, they have an outsize political impact. In both the United States and Europe, they are fuelling Islamophobia, isolating Muslim communities, and empowering populist demagogues.
Foreign-policy realists define great-power status in terms of a country’s self-perception or material capacities. For China, however, status is conceived in the context of its relationship with the established authority, namely the West.
