We Are Not the World

From Brexit to Trump to the rise of nationalist parties across Europe, the old division between left and right is giving way to a battle between self-styled patriots and confounded globalists

 Supporters of these disparate movements are protesting not just globalization—the process whereby goods, capital and people move ever more freely across borders—but globalism, the mind-set that globalization is natural and good, that global governance should expand as national sovereignty contracts.

The new nationalist surge has startled establishment parties in part because they don’t see globalism as an ideology. How could it be, when it is shared across the traditional left-right spectrum by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and David Cameron ?

.. In the 1930s, nationalists were also expansionists who coveted other countries’ territory. Today, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies mostly want to reassert control over their own countries. Their targets are such global structures as the EU, the World Trade Organization, NATO, the U.N. and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

.. Little unites the new nationalists other than their shared antipathy toward globalism. Mr. Trump’s economic program is as far to the right as Ms. Le Pen’s is to the left. Nor do they have credible plans for replacing the institutions of globalization that they want to tear dow

.. In 1957, six European countries signed the Treaty of Rome, creating what would become the EU, hoping that economic and political integration would make war unthinkable.

.. Between 1987 and 2008, total U.S. wages adjusted for inflation rose by 53%, while the profits that U.S. companies earned abroad soared by 347%.

.. President Bill Clinton signed Nafta in 1993 in part to embed a pro-American government in Mexico

.. The late political scientist Samuel Huntington applied the caustic label “Davos man” to those who see “national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing.” For globalists, this was a badge of honor, symbolizing not just an outlook but a lifestyle of first-class departure lounges, smartphones and stock options.

.. In 2000, Mr. Clinton blessed China’s entry into the WTO. Echoing Truman, he predicted China’s membership was “likely to have a profound impact on human rights and political liberty.”

It didn’t. China adhered to the letter of its WTO obligations while systematically violating their spirit with discrimination against foreign investors and products and an artificially cheap currency.

.. Economists warned that Italy, Spain and Greece couldn’t compete with Germany without the safety valve of letting national currencies periodically devalue to offset their faster-rising costs. Sure enough, their trade deficits ballooned, but low-cost euro loans at first made them easy to finance. The loans proved unsustainable, and the resulting crisis has still not run its course.

.. Chinese and German trade surpluses could wreak havoc thanks to expanding cross-border finance. To globalists, its growth was as inexorable as that of trade. In early 2008, President George W. Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, put out a report arguing that globalization had made much of U.S. financial regulation obsolete. The priority was to maintain “American preeminence in the global capital markets.

.. Globalists were blind to the nationalist backlash in part because their world—entrepreneurial, university-educated, ethnically diverse, urban and coastal—has thrived as whiter, less-educated hinterlands have stagnated.

.. Many globalists now assume that the discontent is largely driven by stagnant wages and inequality. If people are upset about immigration, they reason, it is largely because they fear competition with low-wage workers.

In fact, much of the backlash against immigration (and globalism) is not economic but cultural

.. in the 1980s, economic issues such as taxes and welfare became less important than noneconomic issues such as immigration, terrorism, abortion and gay rights.

..  voters were bothered less by competition from immigrants than by their perceived effect on the country’s linguistic, religious and cultural norms.

.. Europeans’ opposition to immigration was driven less by pocketbook concerns than by worries about how changes to “the composition of the local population” would affect “their neighborhoods, schools and workplaces.”

.. Yet the new nationalism often thrives on xenophobia. Mr. Trump has been criticizing free trade since the 1980s, but his candidacy took off when he started attacking Mexican immigrants and Muslims. American Jewish groups heard unsettling echoes of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when Mr. Trump accused Mrs. Clinton of meeting “in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”

.. In short, there is ample reason for skepticism about whether the new nationalists can prove themselves a genuinely secular, democratic alternative to globalism.

.. That globalization’s winners can compensate its losers makes impeccable economic logic, but it rings hollow among those too old to retrain or move.

.. globalists should not equate concern for cultural norms and national borders with xenophobia. Large majorities of Americans, for example, welcome immigrants so long as they

  • adopt American values,
  • learn English,
  • bring useful skills and
  • wait their turn.

 

Tony Blair Says the Left Has Lost Its Way

Blair, the onetime wunderkind of British politics who led the Labour Party and the country for 10 years from 1997 to 2007 preaching a Clintonian centrism he called the “Third Way” only to see his tenure end amid recriminations over his support for Republican George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, still punches hardest when he’s hitting to his left. In our conversation, he bashed today’s liberal leaders in both countries for “solutions that look back to the ‘60s or ‘70s” and for preaching a form of feel-good “identity politics” that will flop as an answer to Trumpism.

.. “You can go for what are very good-sounding things like, we’re going to abolish tuition fees, or we’re going to give you this for free, or that for free,” he says, calling out both America’s Democrats and Britain’s Labourites. “In today’s world, and in particular, in the absence of a vigorous change-making center, that’s very attractive. But I don’t think it’s answer, and I’m not sure it would win an election. Maybe it would, but even if it did, it would worry me. Because in the end, I think a lot of these solutions aren’t really progressive. And they don’t correspond to what the problem of the modern world is.”

But it’s Blair’s comments about Trump as much as his disdain for Sanders and Corbyn that are likely to infuriate many U.S liberals.

Just a few months ago, Blair stirred outrage when he told his former communications chief Alastair Campbell in a British GQ interview that Democrats “just go mental with you” at even the suggestion of working with Trump and that the divisive U.S. president who has spoken of the mainstream press as “enemies of the people” may have a point about his “polarized and partisan” media coverage.

Blair did not back away from that in our interview, saying it’s a mistake “just to go in flat-out opposition” to Trump, that the president may well end up as a traditional Republican at least on foreign policy and arguing Trump has “actually been helpful” in the Middle East, where Blair has served as a mediator for the quartet of Western powers trying to achieve a long-elusive peace settlement.

.. When we talk, Blair claims to be unfazed by the flap, blaming the fury on “right-wing media in the U.K. that’s controlled” by a bunch of “old men who are in favor of Brexit” and choosing to ignore the fact that the left is none too happy with him either. “Nowadays,” he says, “if you step out at all into any area of public controversy, you’re going to get a bucket of something unpleasant poured over you, so you get used to that.”

.. But it’s almost impossible to overstate the extent to which Blair is excoriated across the British political spectrum these days—“his reputational currency has fallen as his bank account has swelled” over the past decade, says his old colleague Campbell, acknowledging not just Blair’s political unpopularity but the opprobrium he’s gotten for what’s perceived as buck-raking from advising autocrats from the Persian Gulf to Kazakhstan.

Even those who don’t outright condemn Blair see him as a man without a party, tilting at Brexit without being able to propose a realistic scenario by which it could be overturned, given that neither Labour nor the ruling Conservative Party is willing to officially campaign on undoing it. “Brits hate him. They really hate him,” says one American who spent the better part of two decades living in London. “His international stature, even now, masks how low is the esteem in which he is held back home.”

.. Blair has remained well regarded here, and tends to get positive notices from centrist-minded American commentators who see him as a rare liberal willing to take a moment away from Trump-bashing and Brexit-bemoaning to trash the rising populism and “riding the politics of fear,” as he put it to me, that is now increasingly seen as the only acceptable response to angry voting publics in both countries.

.. Blair acknowledges that he and others in the Clintonian middle opened the way for this challenge—they became “complacent” in power, he says, entitled “managers of the status quo”—though as with Clinton there are many critics who feel he is hardly introspective enough about his own role in the current mess.

.. Blair somewhat testily rejected the premise of my question, reminding me that he had one of modern Britain’s longest winning streaks before going on to blame much of his current plight on the political polarization of the British media. “One should never exaggerate this,” he says. “I mean, I did win three elections in the U.K.”

.. there’s no doubt that Blair’s re-emergence as among the most outspoken anti-populist leaders on either side of the Atlantic is a striking contrast to the two American presidents with whom he partnered so closely over his decade as prime minister.

The Boys of Brexit: Tony Blair and Nigel Farage

The veteran pols on either
side of the vituperative,
vertiginous Brexit debate spar.

Nigel Farage, the Brexit ringleader, has blamed Blair, in part, for throwing open the borders to “rub our noses in diversity.”

.. Did Blair ever think he would see a time when the royal family would keep calm and carry on as the queen’s grandson moved toward marrying an American TV actress who is divorced and half black?

.. Blair has plunged back into the fray as a leading advocate for overturning Brexit.

..  “The idea that the handful of right-wing media proprietors here are some ordinary Joes from the street, I mean, it’s ridiculous. There are elites on both sides.”

.. I’ve always thought Blair was one of a handful of people who could have stopped the Iraq war, and I was fierce in my criticisms of him.

.. Even though he stiffened, I asked why he helped W. switch 9/11 villains from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.

“What I would say is that our anxiety, particularly straight after 9/11, was that you would end up in a situation where these unstable dictatorships, you know, which combined with terrorism to cause mass destruction,” he said. “One of the things I’ve learned about this issue is that there’s no point in me trying to relitigate it with people.”

.. Blair knows Jared Kushner — he has not met Trump — so I asked what he thought of the son-in-law’s epic task of making Middle East peace.

“The fact that someone’s not got a long institutional experience of these issues isn’t necessarily a disadvantage,” Blair said.

.. But Blair said he has struggled to understand the forces that led to Brexit and Donald Trump: “Making sense of it is very hard. I feel like a student of politics again.” Odd, he added, since “I spent most of my political life in a state of reasonable certainty.”

.. The central question, he said, is whether politicians can change the status quo enough to steer people through this period when they feel they’ve lost control.

“I don’t think you can adopt a politics that essentially says that those grievances are unjustified or irrelevant,” he explained, “or say, ‘I’m just going to focus on something else because that’s really more important than your grievance.’”

He could have been describing What Happened with Hillary’s campaign, when she and President Barack Obama sniffed at the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders

The anger that buoyed Trump, he said, “is not unjustified. You can’t sit there and essentially blame the people.”

That approach can lead to the rise of strongmen, or what he called “the Putinist model.” “The strongman form of government says, ‘I’m just going to bust through the systems not delivering for you and I’m going to deliver,’” he said. “It’s got an appeal.” He concluded: “I think the threat to what I would call traditional democracy is bigger than we think.”

.. He now believes that Brexit can never be undone “unless we have an immigration policy that makes sense of the fact that people do worry about pressure on services and wages that can come from large accumulations of migrant labor and frankly, anxieties people have about whether there’s a cultural divide from migrants, particularly if they come from a majority of Muslim countries.

.. The Daily Express lead editorial, headlined “Tony Blair Is the Reason That We Are Leaving the EU,”

.. But even those who like Trump, he said, wonder “why he’s picking a battle on so many fronts simultaneously” — especially with his own party. You know you’re in trouble when Nigel Farage thinks you’re picking too many battles.

.. “The hard left has made my life a complete misery over the last four or five years,” Farage said. “I’ve had to live with 24/7 security. I’ve had threats, physical assaults against me, my family. And this is all from people who are in organizations that profess themselves to be about love and hope and optimism, all right?”

Donald Trump’s Insult to History

Europe’s dismay could only have deepened when Congress seemed to cheer Mr. Trump on. Republicans, who once prided themselves as stewards of national security, have shown little concern about the way Mr. Trump treated NATO members or the links between Mr. Trump’s aides and Russia. In a statement, Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gushed over Mr. Trump’s trip to Europe and the Middle East, saying it was “executed to near perfection.”

.. These new stresses in the alliance come at a bad time.

  • Europe has been battered by the Greek financial crisis;
  • the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey, Hungary and Poland;
  • Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union;
  • and the flow of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa.

Mr. Putin, always eager to expand Russian influence, has exploited every weakness and crisis, along with instigating a few of his own.

  • Russia invaded Ukraine and has
  • interfered in electoral campaigns in the United States, France and Germany.
  • Mr. Putin has meddled in the Baltic States,
  • cultivated far-right-wing allies in Hungary and
  • wooed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on NATO’s eastern flank.
  • He is now courting Italy with a savvy ambassador to Rome and financing for anti-establishment parties.

There are some bright spots.

  • One is that Ms. Merkel seems committed to playing a lead role as the United States pulls back; another is
  • France’s election of President Emmanuel Macron, who has demonstrated a willingness to work in partnership with Ms. Merkel. The two won’t always see eye-to-eye, but
  • Germany needs France and Mr. Macron is a good fit.

.. Mr. Macron gave Mr. Putin full honors but did not mince words on Russia’s destructive role in the Syrian conflict, in Ukraine and in its dissemination of fake news.