David Rothkopf
By David Rothkopf
There are no failed states. There is only a failure of our international system. Yet we persist in speaking of institutional and economic collapse, social discord and the turmoil associated with dwindling resources as though they existed somehow separate from the world, as though calamity somewhere were not of consequence everywhere.
This is old think. Very old think: Westphalian nation-state nonsense that evokes a 17th-century mentality in which words like “foreign,” “border,” “us” and “them” meant something very different. But as we have seen during this 350-year nation-state experiment, this old think doesn’t simply divvy up the world into manageable chunks — it also endows countries with the profound and fundamental right to be selfish.
It is true that within each country’s borders, different views exist of the obligations of individual citizens to one another, of provinces and cities to their neighbours, of the large and small private entities in the polity — corporations, churches and other institutions — to society as a whole. Some countries elevate and value community. Some serve the state to the detriment of individual people. And some, like the US, celebrate individuality to a fault. At least some Americans do, seeing the responsibilities manifest in the actions, sinews, laws and regulations of government as overreach, an encroachment.
Americans celebrate this independent spirit. Their market ideology is more Charles Darwin than Adam Smith, suggesting somehow that if we value the survival of the fittest, then the casualties of the weak are merely part of nature’s grand equation. Sure, Americans went off and fought two world wars. The US has intervened throughout the past century in every corner of the globe and has put troops on every habitable continent at one time or another.
The system’s institutions by design are weak, toothless and possessed of only limited resources. This approach has clearly failed. Today the greatest problems we face are almost universally the global calamities that demand strong international mechanisms and a global sense of community that do not exist and are anathema to the selfish spirit that was the great contribution of the Peace of Westphalia: Global warming, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the cancer of failed and failing states that destabilise their neighbours, spreading refugees and unrest across borders.
In each instance, we see that the greatest problems facing failed states and more pernicious, pervasive international failures are not somehow endemic to isolated places on the globe. For example, global warming and nuclear weapons proliferation have clear global consequences.
The problem is made measurably worse by the US, which used to, at least periodically, reach out and flex its muscles and extend its generosity despite its historical isolationism, but which today seems much less inclined to do so. While book clubs across America debate whether working moms should lean in, nationally the country seems to have made the decision to lean away. Getting involved has had its costs. It has been bungled and abused. And so Americans are washing their hands of it and retreating behind the country’s walls.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By David Rothkopf
There are no failed states. There is only a failure of our international system. Yet we persist in speaking of institutional and economic collapse, social discord and the turmoil associated with dwindling resources as though they existed somehow separate from the world, as though calamity somewhere were not of consequence everywhere.
This is old think. Very old think: Westphalian nation-state nonsense that evokes a 17th-century mentality in which words like “foreign,” “border,” “us” and “them” meant something very different. But as we have seen during this 350-year nation-state experiment, this old think doesn’t simply divvy up the world into manageable chunks — it also endows countries with the profound and fundamental right to be selfish.
It is true that within each country’s borders, different views exist of the obligations of individual citizens to one another, of provinces and cities to their neighbours, of the large and small private entities in the polity — corporations, churches and other institutions — to society as a whole. Some countries elevate and value community. Some serve the state to the detriment of individual people. And some, like the US, celebrate individuality to a fault. At least some Americans do, seeing the responsibilities manifest in the actions, sinews, laws and regulations of government as overreach, an encroachment.
Americans celebrate this independent spirit. Their market ideology is more Charles Darwin than Adam Smith, suggesting somehow that if we value the survival of the fittest, then the casualties of the weak are merely part of nature’s grand equation. Sure, Americans went off and fought two world wars. The US has intervened throughout the past century in every corner of the globe and has put troops on every habitable continent at one time or another.
The system’s institutions by design are weak, toothless and possessed of only limited resources. This approach has clearly failed. Today the greatest problems we face are almost universally the global calamities that demand strong international mechanisms and a global sense of community that do not exist and are anathema to the selfish spirit that was the great contribution of the Peace of Westphalia: Global warming, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the cancer of failed and failing states that destabilise their neighbours, spreading refugees and unrest across borders.
In each instance, we see that the greatest problems facing failed states and more pernicious, pervasive international failures are not somehow endemic to isolated places on the globe. For example, global warming and nuclear weapons proliferation have clear global consequences.
The problem is made measurably worse by the US, which used to, at least periodically, reach out and flex its muscles and extend its generosity despite its historical isolationism, but which today seems much less inclined to do so. While book clubs across America debate whether working moms should lean in, nationally the country seems to have made the decision to lean away. Getting involved has had its costs. It has been bungled and abused. And so Americans are washing their hands of it and retreating behind the country’s walls.
WP-BLOOMBERG
