Three Scenarios for a Leaderless World
This essay concludes The New World Disorder, a series exploring the disintegration of the postwar international system and how countries are adjusting as America steps aside. By now it is clear to most of America and much of the world that America and what it stands for have changed. The dominant face of that change is President Trump and his determined and deliberate efforts to accumulate greater powers than the Constitution apportioned to the president, to create a cult of personality based on grievance and vengeance and to challenge every aspect of the postwar global order, demeaning allies and courting autocrats.
Is that the future of America in the world? An increasingly autocratic, rude and unpredictable superpower guided by populism, rancor and whim? Or will Americans, once Mr. Trump is gone, try to restore the United States as the world’s repository of democratic values and human rights? It is hard to imagine that even a MAGA-minded successor to Mr. Trump (say, Marco Rubio or JD Vance) would be as petulant, inconsistent and vindictive as this president has been. Yet too much has already shifted in the world — beyond anything Mr. Trump has done — to believe that the liberal, rules-based and values-driven order shaped by America and its allies after World War II can ever fully return to what it was.
New realities have come to the fore since the Berlin Wall came down almost four decades ago: the emergence of China as a greater economic and military rival to the United States than the Soviet Union ever was; the re-emergence of Russia as a menacing police state and its starting of a European war; the global retreat of liberal democracy, led by the premier democracy, the United States; fast-evolving technology undertaking tasks once reserved for the human brain. Globalization, once promising a borderless world and worldwide prosperity, has revealed its dark side: mass migration, inequality, cybercrime, polarization. There is no reboot mechanism in history; there is no way back to the conveniently binary world of the last century any more than Mr. Trump can realize the illusions of Make America Great Again. The world is moving on.
What lies ahead? There is no way to know. But we must consider possible scenarios, if only to prepare as best we can. The exercise is especially critical for Americans, because any coherent action against global disarray will have to begin with the return of American democracy, as Charles A. Kupchan argues in his book “Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come.” Though Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, might have articulated a widespread longing at Davos in January when he urged middle powers to join forces and “create a third path,” the power, wealth and traditions of a renewed United States would be critical for any meaningful reversal of illiberal and autocratic trends. The scenarios below, looking a dozen years or so into the future, are drawn from conversations with and the writings of people who professionally gaze into the crystal balls of politics and world affairs, as well as with people who are concerned with what we leave behind. They are meant not to be scientific or comprehensive but to reflect on this critical moment, because, as the great American sage Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
America Makes a Comeback This is our most hopeful scenario. A leader committed to the primacy of law, honest governance and liberal democracy across the globe is back in the White House, and the United States has begun to clamber back to its place as the “shining city on a hill.”Europeans have taken on greater responsibility for their defense and are warily coming to accept the United States as a friend and ally again. Vladimir Puti...
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing