In one of the more memorable riffs of the 2016 election, President Barack Obama recently said “My name may not be on the ballot, but our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration — that’s on the ballot right now!”
I increasingly fear that The West is on the ballot too.
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By “The West” I am mean the big American led project after World War II to build a better and more interdependent world. Inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, the United States along with our European allies chartered a course for the post war world that chose democracy, cooperation, market capitalism and peace over conflict, nationalism and authoritarianism, mercantilism and protectionism.
Arrangements and institutions like the U.N., NATO, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the World Trade Organization were built to advance this vision, and bring more nations and people into this emergent global system. The age of colonization ended. New nations were formed. The world began anew, and even old enemies like Germany and Japan were invited into the system.
Soon after World War II the ideas of the West developed a formidable global adversary — communism. America, along with the U.K. and our European allies and others around the world lead a four-decade cold war against Communism and its global advocates. In the late 1980s, global communism collapsed. The Soviet Union, its most significant global champion, split into 15 separate countries, including a newly-renamed Russia. After decades of global struggle, the Soviet Union/Russia was defeated ideologically and geopolitically. The West prevailed, and much of the story of the world since has the slow assimilation of rest of the world into this single global system imagined by FDR in the dying days of the second world war.
It is important to note that a key reason many rising nations over the past generation have gravitated towards this American-led global system it that it has worked. Colonialism ended. The right of self-determination of all nations no matter how small was enshrined in the founding principles of the U.N. Populations, standards of living, life expectancy have all exploded across the developing world, while rates of poverty and infant mortality have plummeted. The spread of the traditional and mobile Internet has helped spread modernity, technology and knowledge throughout the world, lessening the isolation many poor developing nations had been trapped in for centuries. While the world has seen conflict and war, there have no global conflagrations like the 20 th century World Wars. All in all this global system has helped usher in what is undoubtedly the most broadly prosperous and peaceful time in all of human history.
Designing, advancing and preserving this global system has been a world-altering historic achievement by the United States and leaders of both parties over the past 70 years. No major candidate for president during this period has questioned the project, the values that animate it or America’s leadership of it. Until Donald Trump that is.
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Perhaps it has been obscured by the focus on his temperament and predatory past, but criticism and rejection of the achievements of this global order has been arguably the defining argument of Trump’s campaign this year. He says the system is corrupt, “rigged,” run by “globalists” conspiring against the hard working people of the United States. He has promised to ” rip up” trade arrangements, which would start unraveling the rules-based global trading systems w’ve helped build over decades. He has questioned the efficacy of the global nuclear nonproliferation regime, and has promised to immediately withdraw from the recent Paris climate accords. He has suggested he would default on our debts, endangering a far too fragile global financial system. He has attacked the American military as an ineffective ” disaster,” ridiculed our current campaign against the Islamic State and gone after specific generals by name. He has attacked close allies like Mexico and Japan, committing unprecedented breaches of diplomatic protocol. He has challenged the propriety of NATO, the legitimacy of the EU and cheered Brexit, angering our closest and most important historic allies in Europe. He has even said flippantly that his election would represent an American Brexit — a rejection of the global order itself.
Domestically, he has repeatedly challenged and questioned long held American democratic norms. He has refused to release his tax returns, his health records and has banned news organizations he didn’t like from covering his campaign. He has threatened to reject the outcome of the election that he claims has already been rigged by the media and other elites, threatened to jail his political opponent, encouraged illegal voter intimidation tactics and publicly supported efforts to make it harder for people to vote declared illegal by the courts. He has called for religious tests for current and future immigrants, something that could not be more at odds with the American creed. He has called for a ” deportation force” that would round up millions of people and forcibly remove them from the country. Perhaps most ominously, he has encouraged the intervention of a foreign hostile power against his domestic political opponents, an event without precedent in the modern history of the United States.
Trump has also painted a picture of the current state of America far darker than it is, and argued again and again that the entire system — government, capitalism, the media — is illegitimate and rigged. His speech at the Republican National Convention lacked the usual celebrations of America’s past successes and achievements, and was stunningly dark and deeply critical of America and its democracy. It is possible that no candidate for president in American history has so directly questioned the virtue of the American system, for years routinely described as “exceptional” by leaders of his own party.
While he is running against Hillary Clinton, Trump also seems to be running hard against what America has become and the world it has built. Given his promises — ripping up trade agreements and restoring Smoot-Hawley-style tariffs, devaluing NATO, withdrawing from the Paris climate accords, unraveling NAFTA and furthering anti-democratic policies here at home — it would be reasonable to expect a President Trump to rapidly withdraw America from its leadership role of our current global system, bringing what will likely be a gradual end to the great western project begun 70 years ago. For if its founder and greatest champion no longer believes in it, it is unlikely to thrive and prosper in the years ahead.
What is perhaps most remarkable about Trump’s radical worldview is that it has no obvious set of adherents in the Democratic or Republican Parties here in the United States, or in most capitals of the world. Whatever the faults of today’s Pax Americana, there isn’t a coherent, organized ideological alternative being advanced by the nations of the world. Trump is virtually alone in his questioning of the propriety of the global system today.
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But of course Trump is not totally alone. For Trump’s vision does have one very prominent champion — an authoritarian leader in Moscow waging a depressingly effective ideological and political insurgency against “the West” and the global order that it has built. In recent years Russian President Vladimir Putin has allied himself with and nurtured the nationalist, anti-globalization, anti-EU sentiment gaining strength in Europe today. This nascent movement just had a significant victory with Brexit, a rejection of the European political project by America’s closest regional ally. Having an American presidential candidate so closely identify with this politics has already been an enormous win for Putin’s campaign against the West. Having him then win the White House, and begin questioning and weakening the institutions of Western power, would be a geopolitical achievement of historical significance. Which is one reason you are seeing Putin’s proxy, Wikileaks, fight with such ferocity against the Democrats in these closing months. The stakes are very high, and a huge victory against an old enemy may be within Putin’s grasp.
So, yes, President Obama is right. There is a great deal on the ballot next Tuesday. I fear that it includes the idea of the West and all that it means. May we choose wisely my fellow Americans. For Trump could bring true change to America, change that few today understand or would want for themselves or their children.
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