THOMAS FRIEDMAN. Has Our Luck Run Out? (New York Times)

May 15, 2019

Most crucial problems today are global in nature and can be dealt with only by a global coalition.

The year 2019 will be remembered for a lot of things, but in foreign policy it may 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 founding father of the European Union, and Konrad Adenaur, Germany’s first postwar chancellor, across the Atlantic.

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 quasi-capitalist, 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 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 — with a global reach — and they’re super-empowering bad guys to be cybercriminals and breakers with a global reach.

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 an E.U. were the obvious antidotes. And it is not the obvious challenge and opportunity of spreading democracy and free markets into the vacuum created by the end of communism in 1989. It’s 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.

I’m talking about disorder that comes from nation states fracturing under the pressure of these climate changes and spilling out masses of refugees, triggering populist, nationalist backlashes all across the West. I’m talking about disorder spread by a Russia that wants to keep the West in turmoil.

The Russians are using a new kind of warfare that I call “Deep War.’’ Deep War uses cybertools to disrupt Western democracies and elections 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.

I’m talking about the disorder that 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. And I am talking about the crushing of freedom that autocrats can now do so much more efficiently with cybertools, like facial recognition and big data, that favor centralized systems.

But this time it feels like our luck is running out.

The countries and leaders we counted upon in the past to build a global, systematic, strategic adaptation to these 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 that included serving as ambassador to Jordan and Russia and Deputy Secretary of State. Jim Baker called Burns “one of the finest U.S. diplomats of the last half century.’’

Burns’s argument is that what made American (and E.U.) leadership effective in the first two plastic moments was a spirit of “enlightened self-interest’’ — meaning that sometimes we 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.

Trump has gotten rid of most of the “enlightened’’ part of “enlightened self-interest’’ and focuses only on the “self-interest,’’ notes Burns. Trump’s approach, he adds, is more “transactional muscular unilateralism.’’ But its viability is yet to be proven anywhere.

And the E.U. is fracturing—thanks to a new generation of leaders who are not building big systems but just playing with them, like the British breaking the E.U. A bunch of Conservative politician-clowns in the U.K. thought that they could push for exiting the European Union — without any preparation and by lying that it would be easy and profitable to do so.

This article was published by the New York Times on the 30th of April 2019. 

Thomas L. Friedman became the paper’s foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist in 1995. He joined the paper in 1981, after which he served as the Beirut bureau chief in 1982, Jerusalem bureau chief in 1984, and then in Washington as the diplomatic correspondent in 1989, and later the White House correspondent and economic correspondent.

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