In the past, Tom Friedman writes, the world has faced what he calls "plastic moments." One such moment occurred in the wake of World War II:
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.
Those leaders were able to work in concert to establish a new world order. We now face another plastic moment:
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.
But, rather than working to establish a new order, we are faced on all sides with disorder:
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.
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.
Our luck, Friedman writes, seems to be running out. But he offers a read that puts things in perspective:
“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.
Which raises the question: Have we produced enlightened leaders who are up to the task before us? The jury's still out. But the future does not look enlightened.
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