A Quote by Bret Stephens
A Trump presidency - neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration - would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.
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The thing that should most concern us is a shift in American foreign policy. We have had a bipartisan belief in American foreign policy based on the post-World War II institutions that believed in democratic global world, which Russia and the Soviet Union was often seen as hostile to. And most Republicans and Democrats have always basically believed in this world order. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and maybe Marine Le Pen do not agree with this basic structure of the world.
Trump will have to take up juggling if he goes ahead and scraps the agreement with Iran and at the same time, seeks to avoid alienating Russia, and quite possibly France and Germany. These European countries are already nervous about what the Trump presidency means with respect to the future of the post-World War II international order that has essentially kept the peace on the continent since 1945. This order is far from perfect, of course, and under pressure from other sources, especially due to the rise of chauvinism and European Trumpism.
We have to recognize that the reason that the global order that we've enjoyed and almost take for granted over the last several years exists is that after World War II, the United States and its allies tried to build an antidote to what they had seen between World War I and World War II. There, they'd seen protectionism, beggar-thy-neighbor trading policies, so they said, we'll build an open international economy. And they did that.
A split between the U.S. and its traditional allies, if it becomes a permanent feature of the new global order, would lead to deeper fragmentation among the world's market-oriented democracies. That will surely shift the long-term balance of power in China's favor, as it moves steadily toward becoming the world's largest economy.
Trade accords had been a staple of the post-World War II world, providing a mechanism for economic growth, development, and association with friends and allies, and a means of reining in would-be adversaries who otherwise would have little incentive to act with restraint.
Donald Trump very clearly said America first. That is a traditional right wing, but also very isolationist. That takes us back to the era of the 1920s, when there were immigration restrictions, and also to the isolationism before World War II.
After World War II, American leaders were, in Dean Acheson's words, 'present at the creation' of a global order. Now at the end of the cold war, we desperately need that same vision, that leadership, that creativity to be applied to the governance of the global marketplace.
Trump is the first post-World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits.
I actually thought that the idea of doing a World War II movie in the guise of a spaghetti western would just be an interesting way to tackle it. Just even the way that the spaghetti westerns tackled the history of the Old West, I thought it could be a neat thing to do that with World War II, but just as opposed to using cowboy iconography, using World War II iconography as kind of the jumping-off point.
America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.
This system, built on free markets, free trade and free peoples and American protection, that's what got us from the end of World War II to the extraordinary events of the end of the Cold War and a system that was one of prosperity and peace for a lot of people, including for the United States.
After World War II great strides were made in modern Japanese architecture, not only in advanced technology, allowing earthquake resistant tall buildings, but expressing and infusing characteristics of traditional Japanese architecture in modern buildings.
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Marine Le Pen seem to have no respect for the institutions that were created after World War II, and they see a potential alliance of populists around the world who would fight Islam and restore a certain semblance of traditional values.
The United States, working closely with the United Kingdom and others, established the liberal world order in the wake of World War II. The goal was to ensure that the conditions that had led to two world wars in 30 years would never again arise.
The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations.
We have a sufficient political class, and the military doesn't have to get involved in high national office. The days of doing that, post-Civil War and post-World War II, are gone.
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