The New Whirled Order
Parroting Putin. Telling lies about allies. Blaming democracies for invasions by murderous dictatorships. Dumping global aid and efforts at building soft power. The world order being (perhaps irrevocably) altered by a guy with his own mug shot framed on the Oval Office wall. History can change in the blink of an eye and it may have just done so. Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The End of the Postwar World. "For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else. The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end." And this: "Perhaps we might also someday find out who or what, exactly, changed his mind, why he chose to follow a policy that seems designed to encourage not just Russia but Russia’s allies in China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, and Venezuela. But now is not the moment to speculate, or to imagine alternate storylines. Now is the moment to recognize the scale of the seismic change unfolding, and to find new ways to live in the world that a very different kind of America is beginning to create."
+ George Packer in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Trump World Order.
+ "It is a striking turn for Republicans, who for decades defined themselves as the party of a strong defense and argued that the United States had a pivotal role to play as a beacon of freedom and defender of democracies around the globe." NYT (Gift Article): As Trump Turns Toward Russia and Against Ukraine, Republicans Are Mum. (Laurence Tribe: "These cowardly puppets would’ve stayed mute if their guy had blamed Poland for Germany’s 1939 invasion — something not even Adolf Hitler dared to do.")
+ None of this is happening in a vacuum. It's happening at a time when European liberal democracy needs defending and strengthening. Bloomberg (Gift Article): Far-Right Pushes Germany’s Political System to the Breaking Point. "The nationalist party would close borders, unwind European integration and steer Germany away from western principles of open societies and closer to authoritarian regimes, especially Russia." |
