Has our luck run out?
Most big problems today are global in nature and can be addressed only by global coalitions
In foreign policy, 2019 might well be remembered as the year our luck ran out. How so? The period after World War II was one of those incredibly plastic moments in history, and we were incredibly lucky that a group of leaders appeared who understood that this moment of Western and U.S. dominance would not necessarily last. It was vital, therefore, to lock in our democratic values and interests in a set of global institutions and alliances that would perpetuate them.
They were leaders like George Marshall and Dean Acheson and Harry Truman in America, and Jean Monnet, a founder of the European Union, and Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first postwar chancellor, in Europe.
In 1989, we saw another plastic moment, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Again, we were lucky that a group of leaders came together who peacefully managed the fall of communism, the reunification of Germany and the rise of a quasicapitalist China. They were Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand and James Baker.
Now we are at another hugely plastic moment — a moment when the world is experiencing four climate changes at once.
• There’s been a change in the climate of the climate — the hots are getting hotter, the wets wetter, the droughts drier, the forest fires fiercer.
• There’s been a change in the climate of globalization — we are going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one.
• There’s been a change in the climate of work — machines can think, reason and manipulate as fast, and increasingly better, than human beings.
• And there’s been a change in the climate of communications. Smartphones connected to the cloud are super-empowering good people to be reporters, photographers, filmmakers, innovators and entrepreneurs, and they’re super-empowering bad guys to be cybercriminals and totalitarian overseers.
Disorder spreads
These four climate changes are creating a whole new set of governing challenges. They are not the obvious challenges of communism and economic dislocation — as occurred after World War II — when building a NATO, a Marshall Plan and a European Union were obvious antidotes. And they are not the obvious challenges and opportunities of spreading democracy and free markets into the vacuum created by the end of communism in 1989. It is the less obvious challenge of stemming the erosion of the pillars of democracy and order built in the previous two eras — but without a single big, obvious bogeyman or falling wall to galvanize us.
Nation states are fracturing under the pressure of these climate changes and spilling out masses of refugees, triggering populist, nationalist backlashes all across the West.
Meanwhile, the Russians are waging a new kind of “Deep War,” using cybertools to disrupt Western democracies and elections. The aim is to discredit them as an alternative to Vladimir Putin’s autocratic kleptocracy and to maintain Russia’s freedom to intervene around its borders. But it operates deep beneath the surface and is not easy to retaliate against or even identify, and it’s very low cost, high impact.
Further disorder will come from more and more extreme ideas spread by social networks. This poison helps fuel the kind of violence we’ve seen in Sri Lanka, San Diego and New Zealand, and it erodes the truth needed to govern. Meanwhile, autocrats can now crush freedom much more efficiently with cybertools, such as facial recognition and big data.
It feels like our luck is running out.
Lesser leaders
The countries and leaders we counted upon in the past to build a global strategic adaptation to such challenges — the United States of America and the United States of Europe, i.e., the European Union — are AWOL. And so is their secret sauce.
And what was that? It is beautifully described in a valuable new book, “The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal,’’ by William J. Burns, who retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year diplomatic career. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker called Mr. Burns “one of the finest U.S. diplomats of the last half century.’’
Mr. Burns’ argument is that what made American (and EU) leadership effective in the first two plastic moments was a spirit of “enlightened self-interest’’ — meaning that we sometimes assumed greater economic or leadership burdens to build a coalition or buttress allies because, in the long run, as the world’s biggest economy, we would benefit most from the stability and the commerce those would generate. It advanced both our values and our interests.
Unenlightened
President Donald Trump focuses only on “self-interest’’ and dismisses “enlightened,” notes Mr. Burns. Mr. Trump’s approach, he adds, is “transactional muscular unilateralism.’’ But its viability is yet to be proven anywhere.
As for the EU, it is fracturing — thanks to a new generation of leaders who are not building big systems but instead are playing with them. A bunch of Conservative politician-clowns in the U.K., for instance, thought they could push to exit the EU without any preparation and by lying that it would be easy and profitable to do so.
But since “Brexit’’ won a slim majority, those who advocated this foolishness — disconnecting in a connected world — have become paralyzed: They can’t go forward or backward, because economically they see they can’t afford to leave the EU and politically they can’t afford to stay and expose all their dishonest promises.
Mr. Trump, too, plays with big alliances. He almost broke Obamacare, without an alternative. He broke America out of the Paris climate treaty, without an alternative. He is breaking arms control agreements with Russia, without alternatives. He has broken the Iran nuclear deal, with an untested alternative of broad oil sanctions while implicitly pushing for regime change.
Mr. Trump lavished flattery on North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, suspended large-scale military exercises and canceled tougher sanctions, believing all this would get Mr. Kim to surrender his nuclear weapons. It has not. Now what’s Mr. Trump’s alternative?
We have never had a greater need for the EU and the U.S. to be led by people motivated by enlightened self-interest, people who appreciate that virtually every problem destabilizing the world in this plastic moment is global in nature and can be confronted only with a global coalition. Instead, we are saddled with leaders who are much more adept at breaking things than making things — at going for broke rather than making the best of the bad.
It feels as though our luck is running out.