The world is reverting back to empires with narrow parochial interests and a willingness to resort to naked brutality
The Post-WW II era was an historical anomaly...
"Europe's decline after World War II was immediately followed the era of American liberal internationalism.
With NATO and Japan as junior partners, the United States underwrote a variety of global institutions (mostly of its own making), maintained a vast array of military bases, waged and won a Cold War, and sought-with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success-to spread core "Western" values and institutions to different parts of the world. (Stephen M. Walt - End of the World as We Know it)
We kicked countries' asses and then invited them into the global family of interlocking economic, banking and security organizations. That fabric is now coming unraveled, with nations like Russia, Turkey, Brazil and China picking at the loose threads.
The collective will to hold these international institutions together is waning. Too many actors on the world stage see going solo as their shot at stardom. Walt concludes:
If this analysis is even partly correct, then we are going to need some serious rethinking of grand strategy in both Europe and the United States. Hard choices will have to be made, and traditional world-views and familiar platitudes won't help us very much.
Foreign policy expert Walter Russell Meade agrees:
[T]he world economy is evolving in ways that undermine the ability of international institutions to manage it.
In the future, American diplomacy will work better if we cut to the chase. Rather than chasing liberal internationalist mirages, we should focus on what we want and need, think about how we can get as much of it as possible at the best price — and go for it in the most efficient way possible. (Walter Russell Mead)
Learn to Let it Burn
As the Wilsonian World Order crumbles, both men point to international organizations being supplanted by regional ones. Some will be no better than crime syndicates, but most will simply be nations banding together for self-preservation. Individual treaties and pacts will replace UN resolutions, GATT agreements and IMF deals.
We Were The World...
Perhaps we've been ranging too far abroad. Do you think leaving Afghanistan and Pakistan will cause us problems? Nothing like the hell it will cause Russia and China, and they don't have the luxury of leaving like we do. They live there.
Closer to Home
Perhaps it's time for us to mend fences at home and leave the rest of the world to the idiots who are determined to burn it down. Hemispheric isolationism is not the evil that liberal internationalists portray it as. I've been up and down North and South America; our hemisphere is richly blessed. If you can't get it here, it ain't worth gettin', and making nice with Mexicans is way preferable to messing with Muslims. Just ask a European.
