The Collapsing World Order

How the Crisis of Governance Threatens Global Catastrophe

Douglas E. Schoen

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781641770354
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Collapsing World Order takes stock of a volatile and threatening international environment by looking at some of the underlying causes and flashpoints—the principal one being the failure of institutions and elites to respond to their constituencies and address the problems of our age. This is a problem spanning the increased polarization that bred nationalist and populist movements, the continued failure of Western leaders to come up with effective strategies for combating authoritarian rivals like Russia and China, and the ongoing Islamist threat. Schoen makes clear that the indispensable ingredient to any constructive path forward is effective, engaged, and committed American leadership. This is discussed through the lens of the failed models of President Trump's two recent predecessors, which reflected, respectively, an uncritical embrace of American power—lacking in strategic insight and proportion—and an uncritical abandonment of American leadership that suggested an abject view of the U.S. moral example in the world. Instead, Schoen posits Assertive Democratic Idealism—an embrace of U.S. moral leadership around the world but in ways that remain leavened by realism and a guiding understanding of our national interest. Whether President Trump can deliver on such a vision remains to be seen.

PART I

BROKEN STRUCTURES

CHAPTER ONE

THE COLLAPSE OF INSTITUTIONAL LEGITIMACY

“Europe is going through a deep crisis, it is like a sleepwalker heading towards a cliff.”

—GREEK PRIME MINISTER ALEXIS TSIPRAS, SEPTEMBER 2016¹

“We are now observing the inequality of trust around the world. This brings a number of potential consequences including the rise of populist politicians, the blocking of innovation and the onset of protectionism and nativism.”

—RICHARD EDELMAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF EDELMAN RESEARCH²

Never in modern Western history has there been a moment when entrenched institutions are weaker, less trusted, and more subject to volatile public movements than now. What I call the collapse of institutional legitimacy is wholesale and broad-based, and it has run on remarkably parallel tracks in the United States and in Europe. (These will be our focus for this chapter; later chapters will explore the state of things in other parts of the world.)

“Pick an adjective to describe the current political mood—angry, anxious, populist—and one thing about the descriptor is certain: It will fit the atmosphere on both sides of the Atlantic equally well,” wrote Gerald Seib in the Wall Street Journal in January 2016, just as the United States presidential election season was about to begin in earnest. “Political trends in Europe and the U.S. often move in synchronization, and rarely has that been more true than right now. In both places, the political establishment is shaking, fringe actors are moving to center stage, parties are changing face and voters appear to be tearing themselves loose from their traditional moorings.”³

Driving the popular mood, then and now, is contempt for elites. The public has grown increasingly disgusted with elite institutions, especially government but also business and the media. This collapse of institutional trust is a phenomenon of the mass public—the kinds of people who voted for Brexit or for Trump—but not of the elites themselves, who, surveys show, continue to hold government and other leading institutions in high esteem. And why wouldn’t they? They run these institutions. The gap between the general public and its leaders—call them governing elites, the political class, or what you will—is considerable, and it generally reflects an even deeper gap: that between haves and have-nots. In more than two-thirds of the countries surveyed in the 2018 Edelman Trust barometer, the general population did not trust mainstream institutions to do what is right.⁴

“If you’ve got money, you vote in,” a pro-Brexit voter told the Guardian. “If you haven’t got money, you vote out.”⁵ And this attitude extends far beyond Great Britain. “We are now observing the inequality of trust around the world,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman Research, in 2016. “This brings a number of potential consequences including the rise of populist politicians, the blocking of innovation and the onset of protectionism and nativism.”⁶

The United States and Western Europe have always had income inequality; in free societies, massive gaps in income between society’s wealthiest individuals and its poorest are inevitable and, to a certain extent, desirable: they reflect mobility and the opportunity for advancement. But the wealth disparities are wider now, in many places, than they have been in many years; and in those earlier periods, leading institutions were broadly able to maintain the confidence and trust of citizens—even poor citizens. Now such confidence and trust have been shattered, and not just among the poor but across a broad swath of the middle class as well.

Where did this collapse in institutional legitimacy originate? It is ultimately the result of two decades of elite decision-making—in economics, finance, politics, and war and peace—that have failed, and failed repeatedly, to deliver positive results for the vast majority. In the mid-1990s, for example, the United States, Mexico, and Canada entered into the North American Free Trade Agreement. Critics and economists still say that NAFTA has brought substantial benefits, especially to the United States, but today the average American middle-class worker doesn’t feel that way. A quarter-century after its adoption, NAFTA has become one of the most detested trade agreements in history. Contempt for NAFTA colored public views of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which President Obama championed in vain—Congress refused to authorize it and President Trump formally killed it during his first week in office.

It wasn’t just anti-free-trade sentiment that sunk TPP: it was also public anger at elite arrogance. The deal was negotiated behind closed doors; officials would not publicly disclose its terms. President Obama expected to sign a complicated deal, get Congress to pass it, and get Americans to live by it—all without ever telling them what was in it. Some remembered then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s infamous line, before the passage of Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that we can learn what’s in it.” Not this time, the public said. Not again.

Public dissatisfaction extends far beyond trade deals. The 2008 financial crisis was precipitated by elites: policies devised in Washington and London and supported on Wall Street and in European financial capitals led to the worst financial panic since the 1930s. Government came to the rescue—of elites, not ordinary people. Huge financial-sector bailouts rescued elite leaders like the CEOs of financial services companies; only the general public paid any real price, and it is still paying. In 2015, six years into an economic recovery, 64 percent of Americans told pollsters that they felt like the Great Recession was still going on.⁷ The financial crisis has eroded confidence in institutions across the globe. It damaged confidence in economists for not predicting the crash, banks and financial firms for helping cause it, and politicians for bailing out the banks while Main Street suffered. Above all, the crisis eroded the credibility of experts—and of expertise itself.

In Europe, ordinary citizens see elites protecting themselves at every turn. The Greek debt crisis could have been put to rest years ago, with short-term pain but much less far-reaching suffering, had the government permitted defaults on private bank debt. Instead, the banks, with their government enablers, engineered a bailout paid for by the public. Greek taxpayers have borne the primary burden. Though there have been encouraging signs in recent years, and the country was cleared by its eurozone partners to exit its bailout terms in 2018, default remains a possibility; even without default, EU creditors hold most Greek debt, and they will demand austerity reforms.

And even as the global economy has recovered substantially from the worst of the financial crisis, for millions in the United States and Europe, the recovery seems thin or nonexistent. While the U.S. economy is now thriving, economic growth in Europe has been tepid, jobs are scarce, and the income gap continues to grow across Western societies. Making people still angrier is that elites in government, business, and media still don’t seem to understand the public mood. Thus, events like Brexit, and especially the Trump candidacy and Trump victory, left them bewildered—and worse, contemptuous of the “masses” for responding in this way.

In a sense, the schism between elites and the general public operates in a kind of feedback loop: elites make decisions that cause hardship; the public pushes back; elites don’t listen and continue pursuing policies that the public detests; the public responds by making populist or radical political choices; elites, disgusted by the public’s lack of gratitude for their wise leadership, mock and denigrate ordinary people, calling them “deplorables” among other things; and the divide grows. Or, as the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins wrote on Facebook, “The elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”⁸

Accompanying financial and economic woes are national security fears, especially fears of Islamist terrorism. These fears are exacerbated by a powerful sense among citizens in multiple countries that they are losing their national culture and identity to outsiders, even being colonized. The main fear here concerns Muslims, and these fears have grown over a generation of extremely liberal European immigration policies but also, more recently, during the Syrian refugee crisis. Two of the attackers behind the 2015 Paris attacks posed as Syrian refugees to gain entry into Europe. After the recent string of terror attacks and other incidents involving migrants, the tensions continue to deepen. In the United States, the Obama administration’s plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees sparked intense opposition from the public and from Republican officials—and Trump used the issue, among others, to rally support to his “America first” campaign.

The refugee crisis is another instance not just of bad policy judgment on the part of elites but also of their lack of responsiveness to public concerns. “Our ruling elites are globalists,” wrote Guy Randolph, an American, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal. “They have abandoned the idea that they belong to a country. They are detached from the man on the street.”⁹ Millions of Europeans voice similar sentiments about their national governments and the EU.

Electorates in the United States and the United Kingdom also remember the Iraq war, how their governments took them into a conflict that proved bloody, staggeringly costly, and globally destabilizing—and they remember how it was the sons and daughters of families of modest means who were called upon to fight it, not the sons and daughters of elite parents. Then they saw continued damaging judgments from the Obama administration, whose foreign policy failures show that disaster can come equally from recklessness or passivity: its withdrawal from Iraq left a vacuum filled by the rise of ISIS, and its refusal to assert itself in Syria led to more bloodshed in that country’s savage civil war and allowed Russia’s Vladimir Putin to attain power-broker status in the Middle East; meanwhile, its foolhardy adventuring in Libya helped create another radical Islamist stronghold in North Africa.

Again and again, we see failures of governance, with ordinary people paying the price.

Nor does the media, supposedly the interpreters of the public mood, have a handle on the situation. So deeply embedded, by now, in their own hardened assumptions about the world and about ordinary people, they can do little more than parrot elite talking points. Thus they were blindsided by Brexit and by Trump, as well as by developments on the European continent, where anti-EU sentiment is rising and anti-systemic, populist parties are gaining momentum. As John Harris wrote of Brexit, in the Guardian, “Most of the media … failed to see this coming.… The alienation of the people charged with documenting the national mood from the people who actually define it is one of the ruptures that has led to this moment.”¹⁰ More and more, citizens see the media not as information sources or interpreters of news events but as part and parcel of the same elite apparatus that they despise. Yes, it was undignified and undiplomatic when Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, told the media to “shut up” and described them as “the opposition party”—but millions of Americans cheered.

This rejection of media, however justified, is also a destabilizing force, as it raises the question of whether any common narratives can be accepted anymore. People don’t believe what they’re told for good reason: they have been poorly served, at best, and outright lied to, at worst. For years, from governing administration to governing administration, by media and by politicians, in country after country, elite, established institutions have been losing all credibility. Their authority has collapsed—as I warned was happening five years ago, in my book The End of Authority.

This chapter will examine the collapse of institutions in the United States and Europe and why we can’t understand our present moment without an understanding of this wholesale erosion of authority in the West.

FAILURES OF GOVERNANCE IN THE WEST

If there is an original cause for these woes, it is the failure of governance across the board—to solve problems, to honor commitments, and to perform with anything resembling competence. At the core of the issue in the United States for many years has been economic stress, stagnation, and dislocation—a broad sense of malaise about economic growth, wage levels, and growing inequality. In 2016, fed-up American voters bucked the prognostications—and mockery—of nearly the entire mainstream media and put Donald Trump in the White House. Trump would not be president if a broad base of the American people hadn’t become convinced that the institutions of their government were broken and that there was no other alternative. Trump’s first year in office saw a more rapidly growing economy and more robust job growth—in part due to his administration’s business-friendly regulatory, tax, and trade policies—but the underlying tensions that run underneath the U.S. economy, and those of most advanced nations, remain largely in place.

In the United States

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost,” Trump said on January 20, 2017, in his inaugural address. “Washington flourished—but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered—but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country.” He went on: “Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”¹¹

A poll shortly thereafter showed that 53 percent of Americans rated the speech “excellent” or “good” and just 20 percent called it “poor” or “terrible.”¹² No doubt they were responding, in part, to the economic message. Barack Obama was the first modern president not to have a single year of even 3 percent economic growth. By traditional indicators, Obama could claim success: the unemployment rate reached a peak of 10 percent during his first year in office; when he left, unemployment had plummeted to 4.9 percent. But many observers no longer find such traditional figures meaningful, pointing out that millions had simply stopped looking for work and were thus not accounted for in the totals. The labor-fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction When the World Knew
• Part I: Broken Structures
• Part II: Escalating Threats
• Part III: A Way Forward
• Notes
• Index