TONY BLAIR’S LESSON FOR TRUMP
It’s too bad Democrats wouldn’t enlist a foreigner to deliver their rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s address to Congress. They could have just replayed the speech given 11 days earlier by Tony Blair, the former British prime minister. It was a passionate appeal to his country to reject its version of Trumpism. Blair said the U.K. must reconsider Brexit, the narrowly won 2016 vote to withdraw from the European Union.
It is a speech worth reading because the parallels between Brexit and Trumpism are profound. At their core, both seek to undermine the big systems that have stabilized the globe and spread prosperity, security, rule of law, democracy and openness after two world wars: the European Union, the global trading system, NAFTA, NATO, the United Nations and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Brexit and Trumpism argue for abandoning or diminishing all of those in favor of an economic nationalism that will — supposedly painlessly — make Britain and America better off.
Playing with those big systems is dangerous, not because they don’t need improving — they do — but because many of the prescriptions — let’s just put up a wall or exit — will make things so much worse for so many more people. The critics are great at pointing out the flaws of those systems, but they always forget to mention the hundreds of millions of people they lifted from poverty to prosperity and the extraordinary 70 years of peace they maintained since the end of World War II.
In their place, the Brexiters and Trumpsters want to return us to a globe of everyone-for-themselves nationalisms that helped to foster two world wars.
It’s dangerous nonsense. In the Cold War era, the world was glued together by those global institutions and by the fear and the discipline of two superpowers. In the post-Cold War era the world was glued together by those big global systems and a U.S. hegemon. We’re now in the post-post Cold War world, when U.S. leadership and the glue of those big global systems are needed more than ever — because the simultaneous accelerations in technology, globalization and climate change are weakening states everywhere, creating vast zones of disorder.
If we choose at this time to diminish America’s global leadership and those big stabilizing systems — and just put America first, thereby prompting every other country to put its own economic nationalism first — we will be making the gravest mistake we possibly could make.
That was a big part of Blair’s speech. Blair is unpopular in the U.K. — but that’s precisely what liberated him to say what many in British politics know to be true but won’t say: Brexit was a stupid idea, based on an old political fantasy of a minority of conservatives; it was sold with bogus data; and following through on it will make Britain poorer, weaker and more isolated — and Europe more unstable.
The way Blair described Prime Minister Theresa May’s commitment to executing Brexit — no matter what — sounded just like GOP leaders’ support for Trump’s ideas after they had denounced them as utterly crackpot during the presidential campaign. “Nine months ago,” Blair said of May, “she was telling us that leaving would be bad for the country, its economy, its security and its place in the world. Today, it is apparently a ‘once-in-a-generation opportunity’ for greatness.”
Blair added: “May says that she wants Britain to be a great, open trading nation. Our first step in this endeavor? To leave the largest free-trade bloc in the world. She wants Britain to be a bridge between the EU and the U.S. Is having no foothold in Europe really the way to do that?
As Blair said of the EU: “In the long term, this is essentially an alliance of values: liberty, democracy and the rule of law. As the world changes and opens up across boundaries of nation and culture, which values will govern the 21st century? Today, for the first time in my adult life, it is not clear that the resolution of this question will be benign. Britain, because of its history, alliances and character, has a unique role to play in ensuring that it is.”
So does America. But the spread of those values doesn’t animate Trump. The world is a win-lose real estate market for him. In the short term, he may rack up some wins. But America became as prosperous and secure as it is today by building a world in our image — not just a world where we’re the only winners.