As Branch Rickey said, “Luck is the residue of design”.
6
I remember how, during the years the Marshall Plan was in effect, we were called "Uncle Sucker" by the people whose descendants now make up Trump's "base". They are always with us and now control talk radio and Fox news. The rest of the people are tired, but unless they wake up our future is very glum.
18
Western Democracy has been good to China, especially the American & British models.
2
Think of all the money the "politician-clowns" made off their crazy lies so far!
A minority of Americans chose the perfect political clown and conman to double down and worsen all four climate changes referenced. Our luck and the end of days is a lot sooner than anyone thought possible - less than a generation instead of a few generations.
The Davos crowd are the only one's who can afford to do anything - but they're frantically hording as much of the world's wealth as they possibly can before they die, speeding the quad-climate threat the rest of us cannot possibly afford to deal with, much less survive.
NATO has nothing on the Davos crowd who tells them how much weaponry to buy - needed or not it has to be 2% of GDP this year - benefiting the military industrial complex. Maybe it'll be 3% or 4% next year. Marshall plan the Davos way is all government funding into their pocket for them to invest IN THEMSELVES.
Obscene wealth hording is the fifth climate change wrecking our world and our luck. The spread of hostage governments pretending to be democratic and free markets exclusive for those at the top are "the erosion of the pillars of democracy" one corrupt dollar at a time. The West has long been a kleptocracy.
Europe is AWOL but not America which is actively complicit under trump, after he BROKE the Constitution. Indeed, the common good is dead - extinct! The common good is the worst possible bogeyman for the Republicans - followers of an en-darkened selfish interest.
13
Luck runs out when margins for error shrink to nothing.
4
What good is it to say our luck has run out? Provide an opinion beyond doom.
15
Historically, in periods of political violence, men of intelligence and good will might choose to move to new land or, alternatively, weather the chaos and prepare to pick up the pieces. The United States was populated in part by people who thought it was a fair gamble to travel across the ocean to make a new experiment in living. Of course many others arrived motivated only by greed and yet others bound in slavery. The wise men that Mr. Friedman mentions are mostly pick-up-the-pieces actors.
There is virtual land, the world of loose electronic network affiliations. Something might be done there. There is also the possibility of pushing back - of creating space by disassociation. For instance, the Western States of America : Washington, Oregon, and California as an independent nation with a carve-out for the US Navy on Coronado, a resuscitated Republican Party, a slightly revised constitution that fixes the obvious bugs in the old one, and some mechanisms to limit extremes of poverty and inequality. And then there is the possibility of rebuilding from the wreckage of the Trump catastrophe - to wait it out and then try to return to some semblance of normality. Personally, I find the last option most likely but least interesting, because I see no way without fundamental change to avoid repeating our current failure: cynically partisan media catering to limited and narrowly ideological voters who will elect demagogues and clowns.
5
Friedman claims that the world leaders successfully transitioned the Soviet Union. Yes the satellite countries gained their freedom ,but these leaders failed to successfully change Russia . The Neocons went into Russia did nothing to help the common people and gave all the wealth to the oligarchs. Russia today is not an economic partner but a political adversary. Reagan,Thatcher and company missed a great opportunity to help make Russia less hostile.
6
The founding of our nation involved some incredible luck that brought together a group like Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and others, whom, with all their flaws constructed a government of laws over people.
When that experiment in democracy was most threatened at the time of the Civil War, we lucked out again with a galvanizing figure in Abraham Lincoln, who managed to preserve the union, albeit at great cost in human life, including his own.
Fast forward to the last 20 years, when we had two contested presidential elections, one in 2000 with Bush 2 and the second in 2016 with Trump, in which arguably the forces of rule by individuals won out over rule by law. Of course my opinion is colored by my liberal politics, but I'm convinced that history will show that our luck started to run out and indeed sped up in its descent in those two elections. Especially, from a climate change perspective. Yes, there were cross currents of delay and indecision involving Congress before and after 2000, but we ran out of luck 19 years ago when exactly the wrong players assumed the power and purse strings of national policy in the executive branch.
11
@Andrew Brengle: Failure to nullify the farcical Florida election in 2000 was another lost opportunity to get the system to clean up its act.
8
Luck is an excuse, as anyone knows who has ever enjoyed playing card games or even chess. Really, if it exists at all it exists in the capacity of tools enabling us to focus on the moment we are in as well as tune onto our personal knowledge base of our opponent. I don't believe we as a people, are anyway less focused than we ever were. I am absolutely sure we are far easier to distract though.
When I was busy becoming and being a mother/wife to a young family I must admit I really wasn't paying attention to the picture larger than my immediate responsibilities, that of food, wash, teaching, loving, securing, and gently pushing. That was just for the children and their pets. My then husband told me 12 years after our divorce: "I didn't know your babies would rob me of your attention. I hated them for that." Well, I think that is what the Baby Boomers have been doing and we hold the responsibility for what the world has become.
We were the human response to the horrors of WW2. We took that response and spent a lot of effort on ourselves. We broke things then we moved on. We were, and still are, easily bored.
I recall a PBS program that was running a documentary on Climate Change that I was watching on a hot August afternoon while holding my middle child breastfeeding him, so I can mark that time as 1976. That was the moment I realized battling climate change was not possible. The momentum of the process had no brakes. Most of us thought that. Hello Mad Max!
5
Clearly, perhaps one of the main reasons that this has all unfolded is the American obsession with money and self-interest and a President and government that is more than willing to accomodate those who have no interest at all in other important issues going on in the world.
Why is the E.U. and other western industrialized nations who were "once" reliable partners now A.W.O.L.? Perhaps it has something to do with the "unreliable", petulant child, short attention spanned pathological liar and his cronies sitting in the WH.
10
There are indeed "bogeymen." Trump, Kim Jong-un, Erdogan, Duterte, Putin, and, oh yes, Mitch McConnell.
5
Someone just yelled to the King, "You have no clothes."
2
Can halfway understand the points made here, but..."He broke America out of the Paris climate treaty, without an alternative. He is breaking a set of arms control agreements with Russia, without an alternative. He has broken the Iran nuclear deal" Garbage. The Paris climate treaty was a toothless, useless agreement that NO one was ever really going to follow. Germany, for example, puts out more CO2 than ever and, the fine print in this treaty had the US making guilt payments and "loans" to countries like India and, you guessed it, China, as some kind of penance for our guilt. And Russia has trashed these arms control agreements for years, now, and no-one (especially shuck-and-jive Barry) said anything. The Iran nuclear deal did nothing but guarantee that Israel would be nuked in the future while this generation of do-gooders and "progressives" like John Kerry patted themselves on the back and got nice speaking fees for saving the world. These were ALL dumb deals made by lying, hypocrites. Note that NONE were ever approved by the Congress. Obama just loved the attention. You can fault Trump for NOT having an alternative in place, but not for getting the US out of these feel-good, phony, progressive pinky promises.
3
Be the leader you espouse, Tom Friedman, and run for the Senate.
2
Fearmongering par excellence.
3
I am old and white and as I see it, luck has nothing to do with it. Globalization, advanced technology, and the convergence of it all with climate change as outlined in Friedman's excellent book, "Thank You For Being Late", are underlying forces hyper rapidly changing politics, religions, cultures, and economies. However these stresses have unleashed a more sinister problem, fear of the other. The world's white power structure is crumbling. The rise of China, third world economic breakthroughs, dark immigrants in Europe, and more importantly, the threat of a loss of majority of white control in the most powerful democracy on earth has unleashed a fear. Fear in the boards of banks and corporations, wealthy industrialists, oligarchies, and government power structures. Tribal fear is powerful and destructive. With it comes misinformation and radicalization now aided by greed, hoarding, threat to the rule of law, and all aided by mass communication. We are self destructing because of our own inability to shirk this tribal phenomenon. We will continue to do so until all peoples stand together for equal humanity and the health of the planet.
5
What this moment feels like is too many rats in the cage.
4
The all-important question is whether the Trump regime will be seen retrospectively as an aberration, or instead as the whimpering end of U.S. hegemony, to be replaced by the economic bullies of China, the kleptocrats of Russia, the swarming human tides of India and South Asia -- or no nation or ideology in particular beyond an endemic churning of heretofore normative behaviors that has up to now kept the world from exploding in permanent conflagration.
Since World War II, and despite considerable domestic upheaval, the United States remained an example of largely enlightened self-interest. What was good for the world was good for the American economy and the American consumer. Trump has all but thrown this mantle of reasoned leadership away, and the American electorate will have to come to grips with whether his incoherent braggadocio is worth another four years of chaos and retreat.
If he is re-elected, with a controlling Republican Congress, then our luck, and the world's, will truly have run out.
7
You forgot to add how well our house and senate leadership has been and continues to be. My goodness these “leaders of the free world” are ready, willing and able to do nothing, nothing, nothing. Talk about a dearth of leadership! These collective morons can’t even plan a budget from one year to the next. They have more important issues like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
2
There's a reason that the luck of past "plastic" eras is running out. It resembles the ruination of empires past. It corresponded to runaway wealth dominating masses of different populations. A few individual's command of power without any popular votes is crushing the many peoples around the globe. The face of globalization is real in two ways:
We are required to work across all national boundaries in order to cool the fires of global warming. And the economic goals of the wealthy prohibit any real progress. OK then there is a third face that is too intolerant for global cooperation. It comes down to one word: religions(which inherantly includes race)
All this has going on since the dawn of humankind and its been festering for a very long time. Once only regulated to geographic regions, the 20th century saw the world wars and the aftermath that Mr. Friedman succinctly points out. Those heady postwar days of the true beginnings of the global interconnectedness also gave us the Cold War. That period in retrospect seems too benign these days. The world seemed in balance, tourist travel was a much pursued goal of the ordinary folks. History is alive with how trade and travel brought peace to the infancy of civilizations. It also tells us about vast empires and enormous brutalities.
But the Earth would continue on with or without us. That has now come down to be maybe without us is the only way the planet can sustain the rest of the creatures co-occupying this blue marble.
3
What Friedman describes, is only the symptoms of the problems in our times over the recent decades. It's not that our "luck" runs out. Social media, warts and all, can do just as much evil as the good that people want to believe it can bring, but it's far from a root cause. Even Trump himself is but a symptom, a reflection of the nation's self (almost half of us) see ourselves, that we watch our for self-interests, first and foremost, enlightenment be damn. Trump & Co. is far from alone. Look no further than the far-right movement in Europe. And if anyone thinks this phenom is confined to the West only, think again. Asian countries like China and Japan have been as discriminating - with their ultra-strict immigration policy - for a very very very long time.
So, what gives? I chalk it to the collapse of ideology that has powered the world for the last century. The competing ideology of capitalism vs communism, but communism is DOA when Berlin Wall came down. We know full well now that naked capitalism can wreck just as much havoc. There is also democracy vs autocracy. We know now too that western styled democracy is far messier, producing far more unpredictable results than authoritarian regime like China.
People are losing faith in capitalism and democracy (and the institutions like EU that were established after WWII) because it fails to take care of people. If anything, we should examine ideology and what we truly believe in, instead of lamenting of luck running out.
3
The means to ridding our Nation and the World of the obfuscation that eliminates reason from our decision making is War.
2
With our highly partisan alternative fact political culture things could turn very destructive when a real crisis arises. This flowering of DoubleSpeak is happening during a supposed good economy. Imagine a major downturn. Then the fear and hate spewing from fox/briebart/sinclair could really blossom and create havoc. I fear for the young adults who have to live with the damage of this republican oligarchy.
3
Trump: "Make America Great Again".
Macron: "Make the Planet Great Again".
These concepts are mutually exclusive.
4
Doesn't human nature guarantee our predicament? Great statesmanship leads to faith in public institutions, allowing them to grow and centralize power and thereby laying the foundation for corruption and power mongering. Great scientists and scientific achievements lead to a religious faith in 'science'. This blind faith creates opportunity for profiteers who can easily hide their questionable intentions in the ever advancing complexity of modern science. As always human nature leads the way.
2
I do not recall a world leader ever acting against the best interests of the people. Trump is in a separate league.
3
Friedman has ignored a truly "plastic" moment--2008, when the world teetered on the edge of a capitalist crisis--saved only by gross intervention of the state in the financial system, which continues to this day. This was a moment of enlightenment. And tragedy.
All large institutions are, essentially, constructs of the human imagination. Now that the western world has killed God, we have nothing to fall back on...thus the proliferation of quasi-religious, cultish belief systems. that have fractured the illusions that allow us to live in the dense proximity of the urban jungle.
Each new cult--as we have seen in the US--fractures in the struggle for the high ground of true, orthodox belief. (A perfect example is a headline in today's NYT: "Your Gas Stove Is Bad for You and the Planet." Cooking as a moral failure.)
This will continue. The idea that a modern-day Dean Acheson or even George Marshall can re-define and re-organize the mass illusion is laughable.
Yeats got it right: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
20
"Vladimir Putin’s autocratic kleptocracy," Mr. Freedman?
And how is the state of the US any different?
2
It all comes down to the lowest common denominator, the people. The aforementioned leaders were in place as a result of the people who selected them. Now we have people who think that 'The Apprentice' was reality. Now we have people who think that Donald Trump could actually fire people. Now we have people who think that everything they think is memorable. So it's not just luck, it's stupidity.
1
As usual, Thomas L. Friedman has shown himself
to be one of the best and most incisive abstract thinkers
we have.
I only wish his descriptions of the pro-BREXIT leaders--
essentially calling them lying morons--had not been
so harsh. As misguided as those leaders have been,
I believe that most of them were acting in what they
believed to be the long-term best interests of their country.
Comments like Friedman's can often harden people's positions,
not soften them.
Nevertheless, I would love to see this column widely disseminated
to decision makers in the United States, the UK, and throughout
Europe.
1
"Now we are at another hugely plastic moment —"
And we have an idiot for president. I recognize that this is a harsh assessment, but that's where we are. A great American leader would at least have the opportunity to unite a good part of the world to deal with present and foreseeable crises, but Trump is incapable of seeing past his personal interests and biases. How can Trump save the world when he hates most of its inhabitants? We need to rid ourselves of this charlatan as soon as possible, and no later than Jan. 2021.
1
It's ironic that this piece discusses four "Climate Changes" when I think the challenges we are experiencing are from NOT changing enough. Politically, economically, culturally - as the author mentions - we're still stuck in the past.
It's easy to retreat to old ideas. It's difficult to envision a future scenario where all our problems are solved. This is why it's so important to elect people with real intelligence and creativity so they have the - ability - to solve these deep problems.
1
The US has been a rogue state since the aforesaid end of WWII. It has done all in its power to abnegate the promise and mandate of the United Nations. Its external economy continues to be based on military manufacturing and its internal culture dominated by guns and incarceration.
No need to lump in the transient faults of the best of the West, who established social democracy, when the US has been running a moral and economic cartel for generations.
2
I do not think that what happened after WW2 involved "luck." I think it involved the ethic of Love your neighbor as yourself. What helped was a powerful worldwide enemy who put the fear of God into the US.
Before Pearl Harbor most of the US did not want to stand with Britain and fight Hitler. Now without a Hitler or a Communist menace much of the US has reverted to type, even though it is clear that Putin would like to revive the USSR.
Enlightened self interest is still self interest, which is me first. If that is our policy, this is how it will end, Donald J. Trump.
4
Right on!
Mr. Friedman’s opening question “Has Our Luck Run Out?” and closing “It just feels like our luck is running out” are spurious on their face. The world is not a casino of impartially spun roulette wheels. We human beings make our “luck” and can change it with our will to act. Whether it’s acting to spend on the necessity of reviving the American will to educate all its citizens to make reasoned and educated decisions or the sense that it has been our diversity that made us globally innovative leaders, from economics to technology to government, we still have those means.
Can we build the technologies to counter the technologically-based disorder-creating fascisms of the Facebooks of the world? Well, I don’t know. Did MIT, Cal Tech et al stop building computing scientists? Are market economies unable to create the forces to counter the carbon pollution that could destroy the world? Now why would anyone with any real entrepreneurial, much less business, vision foolishly get in the way of the growing market advantages and technical competencies of renewables?
Can anything stop the trafficking-in-ignorance races to the bottom of the McConnells, Trumps of the U.S. political world and our global leadership?
Yes it's us. And it’ll not be luck if we don’t use the gifts for stopping it that we've been willed. It will be our failing to put ourselves on the political, social, technological, and yes, physical lines with the bravery of those who fought to create those gifts for us.
3
@Max from Mass
I may have wrong, but "Luck" that Mr. Friedman is refering to is that at the crucial moment in the history of civilization, the right people happened to be in just the exact same moment. They also luckily for us, had the power to make sure that the overall plan would be implemented.
1
So this deterioration has been building for recent decades but has been given its best push by our dismal failure of a president.
I truly wonder if we can reestablish what has been lost. I certainly know I will never see it. I'm 82.
I want the old comfort level for my offspring and their children.
5
"There are still farsighted, educated, wise and accomplished leaders in the world, but when they find no traction for their proposals because citizens haven’t the maturity or intelligence to support them, [...]"
Two words: Elizabeth Warren!!!
Unfortunately, the "citizens haven’t the maturity or intelligence to support" her. Let's hope Biden is at least farsighted enough to choose her as a running mate, instead of someone who would simply check another diversity box.
3
Our political climate is the reason Trump can break the law, our top law enforcement officer can cover up his crimes and the Republican Senate can act as a backstop when those crimes are uncovered. I don't know if, in our history, we have ever had an entire political party, not only defy the constitution, but work so hard to undermine it's principles. Is it the times we live in or the very character of the Republican party that has ensnared so many people in the nefarious corruption of our American way of life. Why have people who have been, literally, shot at defending our country let that same country crumble for the sake of partisan politics? What were the wars for, the deaths, the wounds, the heartbreak of those left behind? This experiment in self governance may come to an end not because of cowardice on the battlefield but because of a peacetime cowardice that raises the white flag in the face of social media. Our luck isn't running out, our courage is.
167
@Rick Gage
It's not just that our courage has decreased; our selfishness has increased and our ability to compromise to make decisions to accomplish long term objectives no longer exists. Our nation founded on enlightenment age principles, seeking and understanding truths, making decisions based on accurate information has lost all semblance of enlightenment as we listen to the many charlatans who tell us what we need to think
15
@Rick Gage-I believe there are principled people, Republicans, who want to separate from Trump. Now is the time for them to come out of the shadows and to do it publicly. While they have a chance.
14
@Rick Gage
" I don't know if, in our history, we have ever had an entire political party, not only defy the constitution, but work so hard to undermine it's principles."
During the run up to the Civil War, perhaps?
15
"We have never had a greater need for the E.U. and the U.S. to be led by people motivated by enlightened self-interest... But instead, we are saddled with leaders...more adept at breaking...than making things — at going for broke rather than making the best of the bad.
"It just feels like our luck is running out."
So that's it. It's just a question of bad luck.
It would help if we jettisoned the "enlightened self-interest" euphemism. Maybe it makes more sense to say that a greed formerly tempered by a sense of shared human destiny has now simply degenerated into pure selfishness. You can't successfully manage a functional and happy society without some sense of community and shared responsibility, as Trump and his minions demonstrate on a daily basis. We are now at risk of sinking into an era of widespread collapse dominated by ruthless scavengers who will fight tooth and nail over every last scrap.
Friedman is wrong to suggest that Reagan, Bush, Thatcher and other leaders who oversaw the demise of the Soviet Union were on a par with Roosevelt, Truman and Marshall. The Marshall Plan, the UN, the IMF and other financial and institutional structures enabled Europe to recover from WWII. But the Soviet Union was allowed to collapse into a bleak, cruel mafia capitalism, with endless disastrous results.
When a generous idealism fails, the world stage is invaded by a less evolved form of raw ambition. Virtue is overwhelmed and takes flight. Luck has nothing to do with it.
249
Excellent points! I also was agog at his praise for Reagan, etc. There was no plan post-breakup of Soviet Union. IThe repercussions are now everywhere.
46
@woofer
I don't think that Reagan, et. al. had much to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union or its reversion to a kleptocracy, which was an inevitable consequence of its past history. We are unfortunately being led by a collection of ignorant and self-centered leaders freely elected by a population with similar leanings.
17
@woofer-Since Friedman mentions possible repercussions of climate change on vulnerable populations--he should also mention that Trump and his Republican enablers are essentially dismantling effective government before our eyes. The 2017 Republican tax overhaul legalized 60 of the largest U.S. corporations paying nothing in taxes, deepening the revenue shortfall. (Expect more corporations to follow suit.) Trump has to borrow $1.5 trillion to fund the federal budget, and meanwhile is adding $1+trillion to the federal debt each year. He's cut aid to countries and populations hastening further destabilization, and he's put entire industries at risk with tariffs which are a tax on citizens. He'd done nothing to protect the U.S. against the very cybersecurity threats Friedman rails against and he's opened the door for the Chinese to assume world economic domination. What's next?
25
As every gambler knows, luck changes. Our beleaguered citizens are on that cusp where civilization might fail to contain our animal instincts, or the autocratic instincts of "leaders." When people like Trump, Orban, Duterte, Duda, Putin, Kim, (not to mention the monsters of the past), et al ascend to power, "luck" changes.
4
It should be noted that the present dysfunction in leadership in the UK, US and elsewhere isn't happening randomly or in a vacuum. There is a generation of elites who stand to profit - who are hugely profiting already - by sowing discord and dismantling institutions that have generally served to protect the common interest and middle class around the globe.
This is their 'last hurrah', the hedge fund managers, senior law partners, the oligarchs, corporate 'last men standing' who have no higher agenda than winning, and consolidating as much wealth into as few hands as possible, consequences be damned. They will not be here to suffer the inevitable.
339
@Neander
Yup.
The question at these moments of crisis inflection should always be "Who stands to benefit?"
Answer that and you know who to oppose.
42
@Neander
There is a reason for Brexit, The Yellow Vests, Trump, and the rise of right wing politicians. It has to do with the neoliberal, global "world order" that has made a handful of us incredibly wealthy and the rest of us barely treading water. The elites would like to continue the status quo. It's a fight for our future, if we are lucky enough to have one.
35
@Ellen I actually do understand the point. But the Brexiters, etc. are going about it in a completely self defeating manner. What they're doing is more like "I'll show you, I'll hurt me".
29
This administration's theme, echoed by the right wing here and in the EU, is "what's in it for me?" Foreign aid? 'Waste of money because we have poor, seniors, etc., at home who want help.' Yet, foreign aid helps fix problems where they exist, which can diminish people's need to migrate. Foreign aid also buys influence, bolsters the bond with allies and potential allies, and shows the world that American values life and human dignity.
Mr. Trump's bullying style of leadership is, I'm sure, satisfying for him and his supporters. It might even occasionally get a positive result. The price we pay, though, is the price any bully pays - isolation, lack of friends, and little chance that anyone else will trust us or willingly support our initiatives any time soon.
384
“...little chance that anyone will trust us or willingly support us...”
And then there’s the small matter of what happens in a crisis? It’s not a question of “if,” but “when.” That’s when you find out who your friends really are, and Trump’s been busy alienating all of ours world-wide.
8
I think this article largely forgets one of the biggest changes we are witnessing—the shift from a focus on nations to corporations. Wealth dictates power now more than ever before, and individuals and organizations that have it are growing ever more powerful while simultaneously becoming disconnected from national identities in ever increasing ways. Power has shifted from public to private hands. At this point, if any of the problems discussed in this article are to be solved, it’ll unfortunately fall to private solutions.
1
@Upper West
History continually demonstrates the Ayn Rand approach to the private sector solving problems usually just makes things considerably worse not better. All one has to do is look at 1929 and 2008 when the "alleged" problem solvers, out of their greed and avarice, almost destroyed themselves only to be saved by those whose problems they are suppose to solve.
2
I share Mr. Friedmans's concerns, particularly with respect to the quality of leaders. However the incumbent President represents the foibles inherent in the democratic process, especially those exacerbated by the kinds of cultural denigration and exclusion that led to Mr. Trump's election.
Should the economic upswing continue on through next year, it's more vital now then ever that the Democratic Party widen their tent
1
This is a very one-sided perspective, delivered from a very privileged place by a very privileged person - indeed, from a quintessentially white privilege position. The portrayal of history is incredibly skewed in favor of one side and simplified - think of it, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is not even mentioned! Not to mention disasters in many other parts of the world instigated by this very side. It does not help to try to save the world from a perspective best compared to that of an ostrich, and that is a very kind characterization.
3
@Anna
You are obviously referring to the "out of control" power and growth of the American military/industrial complex an issue, when vacating the Presidency, Dwight D.Eisenhower warned everyone about in his speech in 1960. That has all come to pass and let's face it, the military/industrial complex could not exist without being involved in never-ending conflicts around the world draining the public treasury in the process every year and even the Pentagon has "misplaced" 21 TRILLION.
3
Certainly the current bunch of leaders is nothing to write home about, but come on, this has happened before. Just think about the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty, now exactly 100 years old, and the miserable third-raters who met there and drafted that. Plenty of precedent, no?
Though come to think of it, that was a pretty consequential disaster, and not that far down the road, either.
2
There are a range of problems which Friedman raises... and the solutions to all of them might not be the same. For instance, dealing with Russia is a particular topic that the multilateral institutions that Friedman lauds have had a hard time dealing with.
The Russians invaded Ukraine. The Russians monkeyed with our elections. The Russians supported the Syrian president as he massacred the local populations. The Russians have poisoned people in the UK. The Russians actively oppose decency around the world and support dictators and terrorists. Nobody and none of the instituions he mentions has or has had a credible solution to these activities. Obama had no solution to impact any of these things. The UK had no solution. The EU has had no solution. One can hate Trump but still recognize that when the status quo is failing that doing something different is sometimes laudable and might be more effective. So many columnists take pot shots but have no alternative ideas to offer. Pulling out of Russian Arms treaty... what would Friedman propose other than stick with the status quo? In other words, let the Russians continue to violate the agreement with impunity while we continue to have to comply with it? One can hate Trump but still recognize that breaking with the status quo and trying something different might be a good idea sometimes. And when you agree, please, offer us a specific suggestions for a better path rather than general complaints.
1
Climate change had a role in creating the crisis in Syria that the US used as an opportunity for regime change.
In 2012 leaked diplomatic cables showed that the US had been working to destabilize Syria since 2006.
In 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to allow a UN brokered peace plan to proceed because it did not force Assad out.
And then the refugees began to flood Europe, joined by refugees from Afghanistan and Libya, countries also wrecked by the US.
This was not as Friedman writes "a disorder spread by Russia". So much of the disorder in the role is the result of truly mean, stupid and immoral actions by the US to control the world and remain the one and only superpower.
That so revered GHWBush said nothing when Clinton began moving NATO eastward, breaking the promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not move on inch eastward if Gorbachev removed the hundreds of thousands of troops from East Germany and allowed reunification.
With the US continuing to move NATO eastward, the US is at fault in the belligerent relationship with Russia.
Except for Gorbachev and Mandela, the world has not had great leaders for a long time.
Its not luck running out, but US stupidity drowning the world.
"A growing share of people around the world see U.S. power and influence as a “major threat” to their country" https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/14/more-people-around-the-world-see-u-s-power-and-influence-as-a-major-threat-to-their-country/
Work to make the future, which seems wide open yet.
Did you say we peacefully managed the fall of communism? The oligarchs bought everything worth anything. Now they are Putin's henchmen, and they put Trump in power.
Are nation states fracturing under the pressure of climate change, or the devasatation of predatory wars? Are middle east refugees fleeing climate change? Are the hordes coming up from Latin America fearing normal nation states?
"Enlightened self-interest" is the byword of Ayn Rand, the darling of Libertarians. And there is nothing enlightened about it: it is simply an attempt to justify greed.
2
Our luck did not just run out these last few years. It has been squandered for quite some time now, over the last forty. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Gorbachev came to power we (Reagan, HW Bush and Thacher) did not rush in to help the Russian people,we came to scooped up the loose plutonium and the sent the boys from Wall Street to butcher the fat Bear. We helped show them the model of a country run by the Oligarchy, and Kleptocrats that are running Russia now. Putin did not start it at one point he wanted to join NATO, but was locked out because our friends the Poles did not want it. Nope we ran out of luck when we elected Ronald Reagan. He would be pretty happy if give a change to look at America today, the Rich are richer the Poor are poorer and the middle is disapearing fast. He might be surprised how well he likes Putin and Xi Jinping, but as long as Nancy brings him a nice mug of hot cocoa he would sleep just fine.
2
Trump is fulfilling the right wing's agenda of having America turn its back on the rest of the world so that we can profit by their loss. So we build walls to keep the downtrodden (Trump's losers) suffering and dying on the other side. No more assisting other nations to help to improve their standard of living. It's every nation for themselves as we are the richest nation with the most powerful military so we rarely need anyone else's help. If you are amoral with no sense of decency there is no imperative to help anyone. In this regard, Trump is the most anti Christian president in modern history. And of course this approach has a baked in balloon payment due someday. Whether it be catastrophic global warming that could have been prevented or a dirty bomb set off in an American city you can be sure it will have Trump's signature on it.
2
The world is changing. The change is accelerating by the week - facilitated by the technology.
You nicely summed up the past decades. But you hardly mentioned China, which is becoming the biggest challenge to our sole super power status / foreign policy as well.
Not thoughtful enough for a thoughtful article.
When you have self centered people with supposedly big brains and great negotiating skills, driven by greed, with little knowledge of or interest in history and citizens unwilling or unable to separate fact from fiction, who believe everything uttered by their saviors, you end up with this.
4
All humans have a deep-rooted -- a genetic sense of "Lie, Cheat, Steal and Kill",
Once in a while the good guys win but not often
1
Our luck may be running out, and if it is, it's because of the ignorance of our elected leaders. I believe the President of the United States had no idea when he took office that Congress had separate powers. He thought, and still thinks, that he is the only power.
Mr. Burns has seen the world and he knows that the idea of keeping us off balance is not new. It's the method that dictators, e.g., Hitler, destroy confidence in a free and orderly society, and at the same time gain power.
2
Trump is not a leader, he is a wrecker. Leaders have ideas that are solutions to problems that groups can work together to solve, wreckers foment false blame for problems to prevent groups from working together to solve them. Wreckers have zero compassion, empathy or morality, but they have vast egos and poor self images.
Some countries survive horrid leadership, most don't. Our fragile world is frighteningly close to 1913. But we will not send in the calvary for horses to be cut to ribbons on barbed wire and soldiers to asphyxiate on poison gas. Nuclear armageddon is only a few buttons away from the hands of too many egotistical maniacs.
It is time for the common man and woman to face reality.
3
1) We, Americans, have forgot why we exist as a country 2) how we came about 3) become fat and selfish 4) are ignorant of our history 5) and suffer from failure of nerve.
We are in for a rougher time. A first step in right direction would be the disappearance of Trump from our lives voted out or by natural causes.
3
America is the world's reference point whether we like it or agree with that or not. Trump is destroying America. Trump is destroying the world. This is not a joke or an exaggeration. WHAT will be done about this?
3
It's not our luck that's running out as much as the shrinking number of educated voters. Lousy schooling, undemocratic supreme court decisions, corporate lobbying, black money in politics and voter suppression by the GOP has dumbed down America to a point where nearly half the populace supports a WrestleMania president who lies through his teeth, corrupts his office and breaks the law whenever he feels like it. Worse yet, those who brief him on trade, the economy and foreign policy have to do so on a kindergarten level because he has the attention span of a two-year-old.
3
To this baleful assessment I'd add pervasive short-termism. Politician's horizons don't extend beyond the next election, and business leader's focus is the next quarter's earnings. We seem determined to disprove the notion that a characteristic of our species is the ability to plan ahead.
3
How long will it take America to find out that it isn't a democracy. There are no three branch oversight. The Supreme Count is filled with partisans. T%he Executive Branch legislates through executive order. The Judicial branch works at the direction of the president. The harm done is everlasting Say hello to Authoritarianism
1
Putin's Russia is our enemy. They have attacked us through social media and the internet, just as they are attacking bordering countries like Ukraine with troops and weapons. Why did Putin want to install Trump as president? What could be better than your enemy's country being led by a buffoon whose ignorance is only surpassed by his corruption?
Luck has nothing to do with it. The first step in fighting back and protecting our country: remove Trump from office, either by election or impeachment. Then we would have a fighting chance.
3
Luck favors the prepared mind: often credited to Louis Pasteur, who might have had some talent as well. What we have going on is disaster favoring the ignorant mind.
2
“transactional muscular unilateralism,’’ means armed robbery.
3
Happy May Day
"Workers of the world, unite!"
4
This is a brilliant column. It is also a thoroughly depressing one. We are at a crossroads, and I surely hope we choose the right path forward. However, Friedman is speaking to the choir--NYT readers know the pitfalls and perils. Too many others are distracted by an endless stream of trivia that lets them escape dreary lives. This, too, is a crisis of society, but it seems like there is no way out.
3
Mr Friedman's thoughtful commentary exaggerates the situation in the European Union. Yes, the right wing is rising, as it is all over the western world, However, the obvious disfunctional chaos of Brexit, and the insecurity created by the United States, have combined to make sure that even the rightest of the right wing politicians have stopped asking for the breakup of the EU. Yes, there is talk about immigration and inequality, but the calls for disolving the union have disappeared. Fortunately.
2
@Helen So, what you're saying is that we have at least done one good thing. Yea!
1
Elizabeth Warren to make the money people heel and reinvigorate the working/middle classes; rebuild unions.
Jay Inslee, as vice president, to focus strictly on his area of expertise: global warming.
Joe Biden, as secretary of state, to repair our friendships, and reinstate international agreements.
7
We are paying for our betrayal of the plastic moment of 1989-1991.
The climax of the crisis of Communism was the overthrow of the USSR by the Russian Army and People in the greatest non-violent Revolution in history ( the description of George F. Kennan, architect of Containment, our Cold War strategy.)
Red stars gone. KGB gone. Private property. Russian Orthodoxy in. Soviet atheism out. Citizen, Mr. in. Comrade out.
Yel'tsin led the construction of a democratic state.
Russia sought to become "a normal country".
Russia reached to us in friendship, asking for a permanent peace.
That is, we got everything for which we asked during half a century.
And then we threw it away.
We fell for a cheap trick, for which we are now paying.
On the day the Hammer and Sickle came down, and the Russian Tricolor unfolded over the Kremlin, Bush I congratulated our country on "winning the Cold War", praising the Vietnam War, etc.
A lie. The end of the Cold War was negotiated between equals: ask the Americans who achieved it.
Kissinger and Brzezinski urged stomping Russia while it was down.
The centerpiece of this policy: push NATO to the Russian border, a la the pushing of Russian power to the US border, setting up the 1962 Missile Crisis.
This violated a solemn agreement not to expand NATO:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
"Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return."
5
The date for the "alternative" is November 3, 2020. Vote like your democracy depends on it!
4
Running out? Donald Trump is our President. Our luck ran out a while ago.
4
Love the photos with this essay.
Trump, today's GOP, the Brexit bunch, and the Le Pens are all serving as fluffers for Putin, facilitated by social media.
4
It appears the U.S. in particular, and the world in general has fallen under the control of crazies, and has run amok.
4
You can't be serious about 1989 and after. The idiotic rush to simply erase the Soviet Union and replace it with a capitalist "utopia" was clearly one of the most hubristicly misguided strategies in recent centuries.
3
Of all the current Democratic candidates, which one has the wisest international perspective?
Could all of our living former Presidents please convene and give us their suggestion?
3
Did you say we peacefully managed the fall of communism? The oligarchs bought everything worth anything. Now they're Putin's henchmen, and they put Trump in power.
Are our nation states fracturing under the pressure of climate change, or the devastation of predatory wars? Are the refugees in the middle east fleeing climate change? Are the hordes coming up from Latin America seeking safety from normal nation states ?
"Enlightened self-interest" is the byword of Ayn Rand, the darling of Libertarians. And there is nothing enlightened about it; it simply attempts to justify greed.
3
"The Russians are using a new kind of warfare that I call “Deep War.’’ Deep War uses cybertools to disrupt Western democracies and elections to discredit them as an alternative to Vladimir Putin’s autocratic kleptocracy and to maintain Russia’s freedom to intervene around its borders. But it operates deep beneath the surface and is not easy to retaliate against or even identify, and it’s very low cost, high impact."
This statement by Friedman is based on a fantasy--that Vladimir Putin somehow can subvert our society and its elections by placing some Facebook ads. I have seen some of those ads (in articles about them), and they are pathetic clickbait that likely did not convince anyone to do anything. Further, about half of them were posted after the 2016 election, about one quarter were never seen by anyone, and there were so few of them (a total ad buy of about $100,000) that they were buried in the billions of ads placed by the political campaigns.
The people pushing this fantasy have agendas of their own. They want to distract us from our own real problems--such as our broken electoral system which is vulnerable to all sorts of home-grown manipulation (gerry-mandering, vote suppression, etc.), and the pathetic "choices" that our two major political parties present to us, along with monopolistic media companies that exclude news of other choices, other possibilities. Perhaps we should address these problems, instead of obsessing about Russia.
5
Break everything and replace them with nothing. That's
how Trump "shakes things up". And about a third of the
country loves it.
4
The dice are loaded. No electoral college. No Trump. Our luck would not have run out. Electoral college will not be repealed. Gerrymandering is still here to stay. The Republican-controlled Senate is gutless and are more culpable than trump because they know better.
Yes, our luck is running out-maybe it hasn’t run out yet.
If the Democrats take the Presidency, control House and pick up several seats in the Senate, our country’s “soul” will heal with time and our place as the world leader in the post WW II world will be saved...with a little luck.
4
It's not that our luck has run out. Our time is running out. We are at the beginning of the end for human domination of this planet. We had our chance.
Watch the TED talk about "breakout species". We are a breakout species. Things never end well for a breakout species.
Our zenith was just before the moment that John Kennedy was shot and killed. It has been downhill from there. This is not about luck, this is just what happens when you destroy the place where you live, and there is nowhere else to go.
5
A pundit, talking to a citizen of Eastern Europe, heard him say, “The Russians don’t need us to trust them. What they want is for us to distrust each other.” Enter, Putin and Trump, masters of division and purveyors of lies....and they thrive on it. Putin runs an oligarch kleptocracy, and Trump runs the GOP Stupefaction Project. Putin wants Americans and Europeans to distrust, even hate, each other, and Trump wants his base to do the same, while showering him with adoration. 2020 will decide the soul of America. Will it be the sound of the real Swamp circling the drain, or will ignorance prevail for 4 more years of even more dangerous narcissism. If Trump wins in 2020, and especially if the GOP retains the Senate, this 70 year old will do a total reevaluation of his relationship to America and what its ideals used to stand for. The Congressional “Blue Wave” gives some measure of hope.
3
The best way to start solving our global problems is to rank the top ones in order to be clear about their importance and the priority with which we must address them. Here is my short list:
1. Global warming
2. Global warming
3. Global warming
4. Global warming
5. Global warming
3
I don’t know that “luck” has had anything to do with it, other than perhaps the good fortune of getting a chemistry between intelligent leaders who recognized the importance of open dialog for mutual respect and benefit. I don’t see anything like that today. Anywhere. No, I would suggest that ironically we have gotten dumber and dumber. Ironic because in this age of the internet we should in theory at least be getting smarter and smarter! Never in the history of the planet has so much information been available to so many people. And yet, out of laziness or ignorance or both we seem to have recoiled from knowledge and just accepted at face value the lies and fear-mongering from people who not that long ago would have been rightly ignored for being, at best, nothing more than tabloid fodder. To say that we can do better is a gross understatement. So, no, luck has nothing to do with it. We are responsible.
2
Without commenting on everything in this article, I would pose a simple question: how is it possible to prescribe a remedy when you can't honestly- and honesty is the key word here- honestly look at the failures of the recent past. The devolution of the Soviet Union was not managed well, it was a disaster. The "big bang" neoliberal doctrine of rapid sell-off of state enterprises resulted in the looting of the country and a disastrous economic collapse that left almost everyone in the former USSR worse off. Lifespans actually declined dramatically! The result was a populist backlash that resulted in fascism and Putinism, the source of far more trouble than Mr. Friedman wants to admit.
2
I cannot agree more with Mr. Friedman—the problems of the twenty-first century are global. This will be the century of autocrats, trillionaires, refugees and immigrants. We need all law to be international at this point. International megatheft by plutocrats and money-launderers is out of control. It's a global Wild West right now. Public murders in airports, English parks, Turkish embassies, German gun companies selling to Mexican drug cartels, HSBC creating special drop boxes just for drug lords, Swiss banks hiding African wealth drained by despots. Cherchez l'argent.
Immigrants and refugees are the results, not the cause. What is the cause. Ask yourself. Poverty. Violence. Economic exploitation, massive accumulation of wealth. This planet needs to right the problems of corruption and oppression, of economic inequality, of global warming. Huge mechanical warfare will cease to matter as much as cyberwarfare, hacking into nuclear plants, grids, banks—and money. The internet causes a shrunken globe and a tsunami of misinformation.
Every international agency—the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the WHO—needs to collaborate and step up.
Cherchez l'argent. Freeze the money. The Magnitsky Act tries to freeze the illegal money Putin drained out of Russia to hide in the West. Freeze the funds of oligarchs, of terrorists. Open Swiss banks, where the dictators of Africa have siphoned off the wealth of that continent. Treat the cause.
6
Tom,
Luck has nothing to do with it. Think of it instead as our national "Golden Goose." It's cooked. So are we.
2
The USA got incredibly lucky because of size, geography, climate, fertile farm lands, water, timing, immigration including rocket scientists from Europe after WW11, etc.
Imagine what we could achieve now if we had a better form of government rather than a Lobbyocracy. Little countries with limited resources are making progress on big issues while we can't even fix healthcare. China and Russia are filling the vacuum we have created.
The next election will be make or break.
1
Oh, Joy!
The Circus is in town!
Unfortunately, all the performers are carrying bubonic plague.
Oh, well, let's not let THAT ruin the show!
1
If Russia is using "cybertools" to destroy the West, why don't we use cybertools to destroy them? It seems that everyone is afraid of Russia these days, even though it's the entire world against them. You'd think we'd be able to handle big, bad Russia by now, no?
@Robert James Russia is one big entity controlled mostly by one man. The rest of the world is segments within segments, with a list of differing viewpoints, budgets and population. The USG is not handling itself right now under the current electoral college president, because he has ceded global power to Russia in return for a Moscow trump hotel.
1
Reagan also started our downward slide toward a mean unforgiving society that punishes the poor and gives to the rich. Inequality leaped under him
3
The world may be too cynical to elect politicians who are lucky and able to work toward a better future. Imagine what a greedy, short sighted public can accomplish in record time.
"Our luck has run out" takes the responsibility off the electorate, and it is they/we who are getting the leaders we want. "Throwing away our capacity to choose good leaders" is more like it. Millions of Brits still want to go forward with the Brexit snake-oil fraud. Millions continue to buy Trump's snake-oil -- and the Neo-con snake oil for that matter. The willful ignorance and denial of lessons of history throughout the publics of the world is the major problem. The wisdom of the post-WWII leaders was driven by the previous three decades teaching the public that stupidity and wishful thinking would lead to disaster. In US I see some smart pols, but I do not see leaders left or right who can lead this nation out of its foolishness.
2
It’s all over for the West Mr. Friedman. The best case scenario is Brazil, the worst is civil war.
1
We may have got this backwards...
What if humanity is the problem and climate change is the solution?
3
Perhaps each generation thinks theirs is the worst, looking back over the great statesmen (persons) of the past. Perhaps it is just my age (68) showing as I read about disappearing arctic ice, coral reefs, rain forrests. Creating an old age angst over the fate of the planet as my own eyes fade.
Then again, if predictions hold, we should see some real fights over resources, especially water. Imagine when the glaciers in the Himalaya mountains are almost gone and India and China fight over the remaining water! Both nuclear powers with billions of excess population to sacrifice.
Notice there is no mention here of global cooperation; because, I don't think it will exist at that point. Good luck humans.
2
In order to have leaders who think globally, a nation must have citizens that do so as well. They are educated in, and aware of, the big picture. Neither the citizens who voted to install trump in office, or in favor of Brexit, possess these qualities. They aren't capable of seeing past their own noses, much less appreciate the "interconnectedness" of the world. And unless enough people come together in 2020 to turn the US ship, I'm afraid the cataclysm that's bearing down on us will become almost unavoidable.
4
Very good column. I would say "The Peter Principle" is very much in play in our country right now. People have "risen to their level of incompetence" in the government. I know that is true for Donald Trump. He was promoted from television entertainer to leader of the Western World. Further, Donald Trump has surrounded himself in his administration with others just as incompetent as himself, perhaps a reflection of his inflated ego. We have the incompetent leading the incompetent with a resultant chaotic approach to governing. It would seem that is also true in the U.K. where Teresa May seems unable to cope with the Brexit situation there, and the challenges it presents.
While our leaders in the past have chosen to form strong ties with like-minded Western leaders, Donald Trump has chosen to align the U.S. with Russia, with Jared Kushner seeking to establish a "back channel" with leaders there. Trump has also expressed a love interest in the despot Kin Jung-Un, wooing him with the promise of decreased sanctions. Trump admires ruthlessness, and power grabbing, (which he regularly does through executive order). If he is not removed from office by impeachment or by being voted out, our Republic will be in in its waning twilight, and democracy itself worldwide will flounder as leaders are unable to cope with the challenges presented by technology overload, people fleeing climate change, and people fleeing desperate situations.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned us years ago.
6
Thanks for giving our discouragement with current "leadership?" some framework to help us understand how to confront and correct it. Alas, it is our own fault. We elected a leader who is NOT a servant to The Republic and its citizens, a leader who leads with lies, which undermine the intentions of our founders and destroy the faith a democratic society must have in its government. As a democracy, we are indeed in troubled waters.
3
there's no "we" - I didn't vote for that charlatan and was swept along but the tide of stupidity and profit driven misinformation. the only solace is the ones who voted for Trump tend to be disproportionately affected by his policies.
1
Many of the usual signs of end of empire are evident and have been for a couple decades. There are many. They are represented by debt- local, state, household, and federal - all sectors now meet their constituency's expectations by spending future income or productivity. Lately, lacking any resemblance of what was once "character," we have growing debt, regardless of the economy's health and during a harsh separation of labor from fruits of work. Instead we place premiums and incentives far beyond what capital needs to flourish.
2
The best column I have read in years! And, sadly, Mr. Friedmane is absolutely correct in both his analyses and predictions!
3
In sports it is often said that teams make their own luck. Let's get going on that one.
2
For America 2020 answers your question. World history and world religions are encyclopedic in examples of yin and yang. Do we seek the knowledge of 5th century Athens or the curse of the Vandals, 20th century tyranny of extreme isms or the democratic forces that ended it? Which do we prefer, me first or the Marshall Plan. In hard times enlightened leaders emerge, as do their opposites. We are at that crucible moment - shall the US citizenry be enlightened in its choice and promote a Hellenistic world view and follow the “better angels of our nature” or shall we embrace the Vandals in their 21st century attire.
6
Trump is spending like a gambler all the goodwill accumulated for the USA over the years. Europe's leaders are riding out the vehicles set up for peace and stability without refuelling them. Hard times are upon us, when the capital of the former and the fuel of the latter run out.
6
Our luck ran out when the middle class became the working poor. When greed and avarice of CEOs resulted in salaries and golden parachutes worth billions while the working class can't pay for a $400 emergency. Both Trump and Brexit are the result of despair and the realization that the next generation is doomed to less than the present.
11
That is correct
1
More fodder for the Dems that will not be exploited, as they are incapable of delivering a message even when the opportunity is handed to them on a platter.
It may be early but I am still not hearing why I should vote Democratic vs trump. And where are Chuck and Nancy?
4
@caljn Are you really listening to Dem candidates? They're on tv practically every day giving concrete reasons to vote for them. And last I saw Chuck and Nancy they were making an infrastructure deal.
3
An entire generation is growing up looking at life through cell phones. They have little desire to look further. They have little desire to connect further. Soon they won't even know how.
8
A keen awareness that what Friedman describes is fueled by a combination of modernity and lack of vision and leadership, Trump is not just a bad dream, he is exploiting these trends, fanning the flames, making them worse. With every bogeyman exploited by Trump and the complicit horde there are no prescriptions only excuses, blame casting and the tearing down of the pillars that have made us strong. The next president should be a visionary, a healer, a uniter surrounded by the smartest cabinet committed to apolitically working on the problems.
6
Has our luck run out? On the environmental front it probably has. Our generation and the next hold the fate of the world in our hands and we keep throwing it away.
There’s money to be made destroying Earth’s biosphere; the most destructive often those who profit indirectly. Insurance companies that are “passive investors”. Pension and retirement funds aggressively searching for “ROI”. It’s just numbers to them. They might not set out to be so destructive but turn a blind eye. Some cloak themselves in convenient ignorance, others hide behind corporate opaqueness — shielded by non-disclosure agreements and phalanxes of lawyers who bully, threaten. Should Mother Nature stand between them and their profits Mother will be thrown under the bus. As softly as Money might speak it carries a big stick and always has the last say.
Because Money controls our legal and political systems it’s almost impossible to effectively mobilize either to defend the environment, in no small part because it can’t vote. And Money shamelessly packs legislatures, courts and regulatory agency staffs with ideologically-driven apparatchiks and shills. The least ethical, most profit-driven terrorize environmental activists and muzzle the free media.
A public that has the most to lose is inert, misled and thoroughly distracted by bread & circuses. By sports, entertainment, the ceaseless barrage of advertising enticing it to spend while ignoring the consequences of that spending. And led around by the nose.
7
Trump leads his Radical movement to overturn Roe v Wade - with no alternative; to destroy Affordable Care Act - with no alternative. I'm sure there's more.
2
We had that leader in Obama, but thanks to Republican obstruction that opportunity was lost and now we are circling the drain. The increasing toxicity of the Republican Party and it's members and billionaire donors over the last few decades have put us in a precarious position that we may not be able to get out of.
It's time to take out the trash and fumigate before we use up the little luck we have left.
6
@Morgan, but in this time of crisis, if Obama was really so great he would be speaking up, taking on a world leadership role. He could speak about all these problems that tom has articulated. he could add the one Tom overlooked: the scary rise of fundamentalist religions. If we (USA) are really worried about our southern border, then we should be working with those countries to get their catholic and evangelical churches minimized and the spread of contraception and abortion maximized. Other western secular leaders must do the same in the countries THEY fear. We must not let our politicians be held hostage by organized religion here in the USA. Dems, if elected---- remove their tax exemption, get the voter rights and voting systems fixed-- and the power of the churches will maybe, maybe be minimized enough that we can carry on.
When Trump's "Make America Great Again" comes together with "The Project for the New American Century" advocated by Bolton, you have the perfect storm. The concept of American dominance overwhelms the concept of planetary co-operation. Until this changes there is little hope.
3
Our luck could be running out. Nevertheless, there are leaders out there who could turn the tide. It’s time for all of us to smarten up and elect them.
5
One could take the contrarian view that the manner in which those leaders handled those plastic moments in 20th century history has led us, at least in part, inexorably to where we are now. So we might ponder that irony for a moment before we laud the brilliance of past leaders and institutions and draw too many firm lessons.
5
I believe the US constitution and the idea of federalism are stronger than Trump. The US will overcome.
4
Our luck has run out. Our best days are behind us. If Trump should get reelected, we are finished.
7
It's not so much that luck has run out as that we've run out of space on this planet. Too Much Humanity. Victims of our own "success" - our unique capability to plunder the planet.
The only bright light I see is the possibility of an overwhelming grass-roots movement led by our youth, like the Extinction Rebellion mentioned in another article today.
5
There is still room for optimism. There are about 200 countries, and years ago, only a handful were democratic, outside the USA, Europe and their affiliates. Now over 100 countries are democratic. Peace is expensive. And yes, I agree that the world institutions put in place have helped countries acheive democracy. There are a lot of dangerous inept people. Humans are flawed.
Yes I agree we do seem at some sort of tipping point. Democracy seems to be the best way to govern that we know of today. Dictatorships have the appearance of being fairly miserable for most people. At least thats my opinion after talking to Chineese or Russian ex-pats. My idea is that all cultures can change. So far democracy is the best thing we have come up with.
Lastly, I wish we had started working on global warming in the 1970s when we could see the effects. Its still not to late for that either, but some aspects we might not be able to reverse and we will need to accept a warmer world. Overall there are some reasons to be cautiously optimistic. And I agree the 200 countries will need to work on global warming together.
3
Having read all of Mr. Friedman's books, and most of his columns, I was always bouyed by his honest, realistic, but usually optimistic view: the state of the world is challenging, tribalism is inherent and needs to be managed, but the leaders of our rich and diverse cultures could try to come together for the greater good. This column leave me sad and mostly hopeless. Where and how do we go from here? There are no heroes anymore.
3
Well, let's hope there's a Lincoln waiting in the wings to save our country from the disasters wrought by Buchanan/Trump; or a Roosevelt waiting in the wings to save the world from the disasters wrought by Hoover/Trump.
6
Just as WW2 required a global response, climate change requires the same and we have been wasting too much time. Now the situation is dire and the time is short and we are left with incompetent leaders at a most critical time. My only consolation is my age which will see me miss the worst of it all but then there is my son and what to do about that?
5
Yes, our “luck is running out”. But if that is the case, then the design of our global institutions really was less a function of leadership and enlightenment as it was circumstance. One critical circumstance was the historically unparalleled concentration of power and wealth in one country after WWII. The second circumstance, as Graham Allison reminds us was: no Soviet Union, no Marshall plan.
Inevitably, these circumstances would change as competitors evolved and caught up and the ability of this country to absorb systemic costs would diminish. So, what or who will replace this country as the provider of global public goods? History tells us that in the absence of a dominant global power which promotes its interests through a blend of coercion and cooperation, as Pax Americana did, leaders and luck will be in short supply.
1
The problem with current US policy, be it climate, democracy, global economy, or human rights, is that having abdicated leadership we are left with two poor choices: follow or get out of the way. Since the US does not know how to follow, the only question remaining is in whose way are we?
5
Another way to read history is that since the 1960s the elites have let Western society rot from the inside out, caring only about their profits and prestige while throwing the working class under the bus. Now we are experiencing the birth pangs of a new working class-oriented politics on both the Right and Left that calls into question the wisdom of their policies and status. Will this be good? Bad? Who knows. But it will certainly be different (and very, very messy).
4
The distinction is simple. Democrats/liberals care for the greater good and think long term. Republicans/conservatives care only for their own welfare and rarely think past tomorrow as long as they benefit today.
6
Dean Acheson was such a visionary he was a strong advocate for increasing U.S. military buildup in Vietnam.
5
The nation state is done, stick a fork in it. It had a good run but is being overcome by a cocktail of technology, environmental stress, and human expectations. It's now a pathetic conceit to think that a government will be able to "reign in" or "punish" those entities we used to call Corporations. They are immeasurably powerful, mobile, amoral and unaccountable. Everyone's life needs and comforts depend on them and they increasingly call the shots; governments cannot compete. The only remaining step is for these entities to arrogate to themselves state-like powers and create armies to quash what feeble objections may be raised by a frightened populous and to bestow citizenship upon the select. Our future is the Corporate Wars of The Space Merchants (Poul). Then Soylent Green.
6
I see four major pressures developing in our world:
1. Global warming and climate change
2. Human population increasing
3. The end of cheap oil and natural gas
4. Scarcity of clean fresh water
I see all of these pressures becoming acute in the next half-century.
I see climate change shrinking the acreage of arable land at the same time that our human population is increasing. I see the cost of oil rising as the readily-extractable reserves run out, and I see the cost of fertilizer rising because our synthetic nitrogen fertilizer depends on oil and natural gas. I see clean fresh water in decline as aquifers are depleted, glaciers melt, and rainfall swings from drought to flood and back.
I see a perfect storm of pressures that are likely to disrupt civilization as we know it. And I see a materialistic society that is more concerned with quarterly returns than with the welfare of its grandchildren and their grandchildren.
So, yes. I'd say our luck has run out.
9
No, dear boy, the problem is globalization with only one set of stakeholders - international financial institutions and multinational corporations. The problem is rapacious capitalism.
6
It seems that the stability we had before was not based on luck, but on good old fashioned diplomacy and the hard work of collaborating for a greater good and a greater peace. We have a man in the oval office who likes to go it alone. He thinks he is bigger and better than all of what has come before him. These dangerous times for democracy around the world and our government is being led by somebody who does not embrace democratic ideals. He thinks he alone can " fix " things. Congress needs to act before it is too late.
2
The plastic moments in the history of our civilizations often lacked the longer term perspective and created newer problems for the future generations - the artificial state boundaries created for narrow self interest of winners of world wars, the biased structure of world institutions to perpetuate the Western hegemony and ignoring the aspirations of Russia and Iran are the causes of today’s plastic moment. It is futile to find a Western solution to this problem - Asian economy has become too big and dominating. New ideas came- institutions and infrastructure, supply chain and nodes of that interconnected world, states sovereignty become less important than the governance. How big powers negotiate in this turbo charged technology and globalization environment - not by military, not by diplomacy, but by using soft power of interdependence, cultural connectedness, accommodating meaningless differences, and flexibility. This is not the work of a single individual, it is the work of masses - citizen movements. I do not agree that towering personalities will show up in the world scene and take the world in to a brighter future - it will be mass movements like Arab springs, Velvet Revolutions, Tienmien Square, Blue weave ... that will show the directions in today’s world. And there will a strong counter forces to this change like Brexit, Trumpism, ISIS, Anti-schematism, ... - this has to faced and overcome.
@K Basu
The aspirations of Russia/USSR and Iran???
Let's take the big daddy - Russia/USSR - the were the ones who stood up at the UN and said "We will crush you". They were the ones who took over Eastern Europe and made what of it? When the Berlin Wall fell, some of these countries looked like they were frozen in time at the end of WW II. The USSR and Russian economies were, what' the word I'm looking for - non-existent.
Iran - are you talking about before or after we installed the criminal Shah? Let's take after when Khomeni took over. Literally from the very beginning of his reign, he did almost nothing to improve the lives of his "subjects". He brought in ideas from a thousand years ago and built his Islamic Empire. I'm OK with that as long as you don't try to export the parts of Islam which are not peaceful. They clearly stated they wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and started to build nuclear weapons to threaten their neighbors and send a message to Israel.
Please explain your concepts of us "ignoring Russian and Iranian aggression".
I just wish you did not write the last sentence as it makes the earlier statesman who achieved the difficult task to make nations cohere for their mutual benefit. This period as Friedman notes is not unusual; from the end of WWII through the 1989 fall of communism as it was then, events were held and managed by the men whose human qualities matched their intellectual ones. Trump's failures at home are matched by his failures globally but for the economy which cannot stand for all that is lacked in the USA today due to our corrosive and contradictory president. Climate change seems to make much of other arguments rather secondary. Refugees everywhere is part of an overall scenario that requires even more wisdom and integrity, patience and eduction than prior situations, but the great world wars were certainly challenges. We need more than luck although that is your point. Thank you again.
3
I find myself with multiple impressions here. I disagree that we're at a particularly MORE worrisome time in human history - things have frequently been considerably more fraught. The widespread international public disdain that's lead to Brexit and Mr. Trump is unfortunate and untimely, but internationally things seem considerably better than they did 4-5 years back. For example, Mr. Friedman spends time ruing our relations with places like N Korea - but it was inside gurus like himself who lauded the "Arab Spring" and ill-advised military intervention in Libya that led us to where we are - to wit, NK will NEVER give up all the nuclear weapons, being as they are rational, intelligent, and don't want to get shot in a sewer pipe like Gaddafi down the road. That's the lesson they've taken from cooperation with the West. And the US has resolved rather than multiplied our foreign interventions - rather to our benefit, I'd say. There's also an over-attention to nomenclature that makes the article too clever by half, and leads me to feel like Mr. Friedman is reinventing relevance for himself - well at least a little bit (a la "Deep War" etc). All-in-all, while I understand that there are big challenges coupled with leadership that doesn't seem to be temperamentally or intellectually suited to global action, it seems to me that there's a media-fanned perspective that the sky is falling, while I'm really not even sure if we have bad weather.
7
The evolving bilateral trade deal with China, may also imply outsiders fall-in step, without consensus. If this becomes a 'really big deal' in % of impacted GDP, will it and Trump's Federal Reserve move us closer to the next global financial crisis?
1
Many Comments place blame on Trump's election and rule, with understandable reason. However, is it possible our "luck" and its run have more to do with the U.S. grappling with its super-powers having run its course? Two world wars followed by Korea and Vietnam and other global conflicts have demonstrated that we are all interconnected now -- but that America is in a decreasing position to dictate other countries' policies and politics.
Thomas Piketty's "Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century" lays out an expansive analysis of the economic risks of the hyper-wealthy in the U.S. and Europe vs the less privileged, with notable impact on each nation itself. The book offers detailed, if difficult solutions. The economic climate that we live in now is unsustainable.
Nationalist pride is globalist fear, with people in part fearing the loss of tradition and custom. But it's dangerously real, with an interconnected world having no solid historical model to look to..
Going forward, we have no heroes, no role models, no real leaders, no mythic figures to guide us -- we have public and covert billionaires and oligarchs with the power to shape and take our future, unless we as a people pressure them to change our country, and the world, for the benefit of all. And that means more than a switch to another party -- it's a ground-up change of our social-economic paradigm.
7
I will pass on Mr Friedman’s paean to the leaders of 1989, but he is absolutely correct about George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman, Jean Monnet, and Konrad Adenauer, and we could add a few more, like the first two UN Secretaries General, Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjöld. But what distinguished them was that the peoples of their respective states respected knowledge and expertise, experience and wisdom, integrity and good will, patience and dedication. All these leaders would have had a much more difficult — perhaps impossible — task in the current climate, where ignorant and fearful citizens are hoodwinked by charlatans whose ignorance is matched only by their mendacity. There are still farsighted, educated, wise and accomplished leaders in the world, but when they find no traction for their proposals because citizens haven’t the maturity or intelligence to support them, then the real fault is not a leadership vacuum, but a failure of ordinary humans who in all periods are the foundation of society.
355
@Ockham9 -- Being pretty far left myself, I do have to give credit to the people he listed for the 1989 case. Baker, Schultz, HW, and a few others were statesmen. I didn't always agree with their politics, but I respected them as public servants. They're all gone now, at least on the right.
37
@Stevenz
Ah, those bygone good ol' days -- if we could only turn the clock back, says Stevenz (and some others in this string). But in fact there were no "good old days."
What happened is that by degrees the New Dealers, New Frontiersen, and now New Greenies have decided that they were smarter and nobler than the Founding Fathers, and they could come up with a superior system of governance by administrative and judicial decree. They told us they would overhaul the system to make it better. But they couldn't; not the way they went about it, and they didn't. All they did was debase American politics, drive good people out of government and generally screw things up by raising political deceit and invective to an art form .
Now we face Parkinson's second law which says that it's easier to get into things than out of them.
9
I remember a time, not long ago, when the world loved America as a symbole of boldness, fresh ideas and a sense of untethered freedom symbolized by its grand scale. From 1976 when I first arrived in America to 2016 I would bring back to my former home country in Europe TShirts emblazoned with the American flag that my nieces and nephews would proudly wear. But now, under the thuggish Trump administration, I know that it would be almost impossible for anyone walking in the streets of any city in Europe or Asia or South America or Canada or Australian to be confortable wearing a T Shirt printed with the American Flag.
What a dizzying and fast change of perspective.
280
@Pascale Luse, I recently returned from a long work assignment in central Michigan, a place plastered everywhere with the U.S. flag. Frankly, even as an American citizen, I couldn't wait to return home in Europe where I don't have to see flag. It's a bankrupt brand. Your nieces and nephews (and everyone else) should quit wearing it.
22
@Pascale Luse: If we can dump him in 2020 and start repairing the damage that he and the GW Bush created, the world might sit up and say "America really does work. They took a wrong turn, but they self-corrected and repaired their system."
If we reelect Trump, or if we have a weak or disorderly transition to Democratic management, it could take decades to repair our stature, if we ever can.
30
@Pascale Luse - When my guitar and I hitch-hiked around Europe in 1970 there were a lot of young Americans wearing Canadian flags because, they said, they got more rides and were more welcomed than if they flew the American flag... so America's shiny halo was slipping even before 1989.
15
Of the four challenges listed in the article, three are amenable to policy and diplomacy; they are basically tweaks to get things operating harmoniously. The fourth item, actual climate change, is dramatically different since climate change is deeply intertwined with the fossil fuel based economy we have been living in the last 200 years. It is also an existential problem while the others would have elements of turmoil, none of them I would opine to be an existential threat to humanity.
If we are to believe the IPCC report of 2018 (which I do), we have maybe a dozen years to cut fossil fuel use in half, and another 20 years to go to near zero use of fossil fuels. That is a dramatic shift to how the entire world lives and our fundamental economy. The impact of this cannot be overstated. Making such changes goes beyond what can be done with policies and agreements, it requires something of humanity that has never happened - we put aside our differences and all believe we need to solve it, that we can solve it, and then we do what is necessary. The level of changes needed cannot be rammed down people's throats, it has to be accepted by all or the whole effort will fail.
The other three issues are indeed important but I believe pale in comparison to climate change.
211
@Scott Werden
And the thing is, there are economic opportunities, many of which we can't even foresee, in taking these actions. We can do this (or die trying), but the obstacle is that those whose current wealth is based on fossil fuels and pollution won't tolerate the challenge to the status quo. Energy and economic reforms and innovation could also help address inequality by dislodging hoarded wealth and getting it into circulation—investment in new technologies and systems, new jobs, support industries (both manufacturing and service).
The only thing stopping us is a lack of vision from our leaders and a lack of will among us all. But if a critical mass of people could accomplish the shameless feat of getting a Know Nothing like Trump elected president, why can't the rest of us unify behind leadership to go after this? Where is that leadership?
12
Excellent point. Climate change trumps every other political issue we so passionately argue about in elections. Healthcare, Infrastructure, abortion, gay marriage, student debt, immigration, religious freedom, gerrymandering, etc., etc., do not threaten our very existence. Unless we stop global warming everything else pales in comparison.
11
@Scott Werden Agree. But we actually don't need to get our fossil fuel use to zero. All we need to do is keep it at a level that can be absorbed by the Earth's mechanisms -- CO2 absorbing vegetation. So planting and nurturing some more trees wouldn't hurt either.
6
It was called the Marshall Plan. Trump has no plan. He's an improviser and always has been. Fine when you're a birther, great when you're a white collar criminal - any situation where lies and drama count as valid moves. But lousy when you're a president and the fate of your people is at stake. How many more blatant examples of presidential incompetence do we need before congress does its job?
365
@S Jones
Congress-- at least the House of Representatives-- is desperately trying to do its job. Trump-- in fact the entire Republican party-- is doing everything it can to block any and every attempt to find out what is going on. Members of the administration are simply ignoring congressional subpoenas as if they were junk mail. And any attempt to pass meaningful legislation is blocked by Mitch McConnell in the Senate. don't blame the House of Representatives for the actions of Trump, Barr, and McConnell. (If you want to blame the Republican senators for not standing up for the constitution, certainly go right ahead!)
49
@S Jones-
No, Trump has a plan. It’s to get as rich as he possibly can any way that he possibly can. He’s a performer after all, and all the world’s his stage. And American foreign and domestic policy for sale to the highest bidder.
Get as rich as he possibly can any way that he possibly can and just pardon all his troubles away. Pardon himself, his children, his closest associates (except those whom he no longer needs, many conveniently locked up in federal prison). His plan is to be the ace com-man who pulls off his greatest caper.
“He who has the most toys wins”, inscribed on a little brass plaque on many businessmen’s desk. And that’s the plan.
7
@S Jones
The Senate will not take action against the wishes of the far-right, and until they are removed in 2020 the best we can hope for is to obstruct any republican action to the best of our ability. Liberals have a very good road map to follow, just learn the lessons taught by Mr. McConnell.
6
Has our luck run out? Looking at how Donald trump is using every available tool in his litigious playbook to block Congress from getting the information they're requesting by subpoena, his tendency to idolize and mimic every strongman and dictator he's come into contact with, his increasing tendencies to alienate and isolate this country on the world stage with his tweets and behavior, and remembering Michael Cohen's dire warning that if he loses the 2020 election, there' won't be a "peaceful transition" -- I'd say the answer is YES.
9
Democratic government was a major element in our "luck." But beginning especially with Reagan and Thatcher in the 80s, government became the ideological equivalent of leg irons and manacles. Reagan and Thatcher promoted free markets as the ultimate form of democracy, then demonized and downsized government.
Today, we face epic challenges only governments can begin to address, including climate change, vast expanses of waste in our oceans, polluted air and water, and dangerous trends toward a nationalistic isolationism. Meanwhile, those who aren't waiting for market solutions are busy dismantling democratic institutions.
Yes, if our luck hasn't yet run out, our intelligence appears to have. What's left to lead are the likes of Donald Trump, Brexiters, and self-styled libertarian profiteers. Unfortunately, too many people are ready to follow.
461
@Eric Caine: I'd also add the greed-driven approach to war, exemplified by Iraq. A war, I'll note, that was heartily endorsed by Mr. Friedman.
60
@Eric Caine
Exactly.
And that has led us to a post-truth reality, and Trump.
If it weren’t for our government by corruption, Mitch McConnell would be held accountable for his betrayal for personal gain.
There us no accountability for those who are destroying the country.
57
@Grove-Yup. Worth repeating: McConnell is complicit in Trump's criminality on many levels. He sat on his hands during the shutdown and is a hard-line opponent of campaign finance and election reforms, which makes sense given the money he's received from Russia; the lion share of $7.35 million offered up to GOP campaigns by oligarchs linked to Putin.
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/12/15/putins-proxies-helped-funnel-millions-gop-campaigns
Kentucky is Second Most Dependent State on Federal Money http://www.wkyufm.org/post/kentucky-second-most-dependent-state-federal-money#stream/0
45
We are fooling ourselves to think our country's behavior has been 'enlightened'. Rather, it always been about self-interest.
1.) We were late to WWII and then only reluctantly.
2.) The refugee crisis was largely the result of us supporting dictatorships in the Middle East and then going to war with Iraq over bogus accusations.
3.) We are the leading cause of climate change between our rampant consumerism, over-reliance on cars, and our oil companies misleading the public.
4.) We meddle in elections as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html
5.) Our own companies created the social media quagmire and were rewarded handsomely for creating the perfect mechanisms to amplify social discord, disinformation, and the spread of extremism.
Trump is this latest incarnation of self-interest on steroids but we didn't get here overnight. We all need to look in the mirror and understand that hubris is the leading cause of downfall.
11
"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 . . . we would benefit most from the stability and the commerce those would generate."
The same goes for the wealthy. The shift came with the election of Ronald Reagan and the GOP's dispicable shift toward the "Winner Take All" society. Racism and Shaming were in: "Welfare Queens Are Taking All Our Money! Greed is Good! Ayn Rand & John Galt! You betcha!" But any form of sacrifice for the great good like taxes, public service or political compromise, meant losing.
The GOP focused on winning short term battles and forgot that the long-term war would be won by taking care of the most vulnerable, who would then become strong elements of the society as a whole.
We made a huge error when the Berlin Wall fell and we spent the next few years crowing over the fall of Communism, when we should have been reaching out to the Russian people with a New Marshall Plan, forging bridges and helping our old enemy make the transition to democracy. Now we are reaping the bitter harvest of that colossal error.
Yes, there is widespread, underlying despair that our luck has run out.
It is at just such a time that dictators arise. God help us.
8
Interesting read until the statement: "he broke America out of the Paris climate agreement". This "agreement" was an empty, unenforceable pledge, with as much reasonableness as the Green New deal. The real climate fixes will come from innovation and ingenuity, not a worthless boy scout pledge.
4
@dave
I can recall a time when 30+ mpg in an auto was considered to be an unreachable fantasy. The innovation and ingenuity followed the pledge, not the other way around.
4
@Bruce Meyers. Sure, sometimes that works, but if history is our guide, I'm betting on an American problem solver like Lincoln, Gates, Salk or Edison to forge a breakthrough, and be the catalyst.
1
@dave
Yeah, but change starts with a commitment to change. Now, even that commitment is gone.
Democracy depends on an electorate that knows the score. If our voters are making decisions based on sound bites and do not have the patience for complexity, we are vulnerable to Great Leaders who offer simple solutions. While TV and the internet have no apparent budget worries, our schools are underfunded, militarized, and fragmenting. Every person can provide a degree of leadership, and should not wait for The One to arise. Citizenship is participatory.
14
We will have to exist in a world in which the idea of ‘honor’ will no longer apply to the concept of America. Trump with his synchophants, various political opportunists and cowards (as in the entire Republican Party) have dishonored America, its essence and leadership for generations to come. With respect to the immanent tragedy of global warming, we are now confronted with America as a force for global malevolence, mendacity and profound ignorance.
Special thanks to James Baker, who gave the election to W., and Mitch McConnell, who has foresworn his oath and manipulated an otherwise reflective system into a perversion of the ideals of liberty and fairness.
Turning ‘a blind eye’ is the ultimate act of cowardice.
13
With the possible exception of Biden, nobody on the Dem side seems interested in engaging the world either. Harris is especially disappointing because of her foreign roots.
3
Yes, problems are "global in nature" and not to be ignored. Yet, a third of the US electorate is lost in a dogma created over decades by the Republican party. The GOP's 'free market', 'unfettered capitalism' drivel amounts to nothing less than sheer anarchy right along with an overreaching greed that continues to transfer the nation's wealth upward.
Trump is a symptom, not the cause. He cannot be mistaken as a 'normal president'. But, his ignorance and self absorption feeds the willfully ignorant masses to the tune of 35% of our electorate. History will condemn us for allowing this to flourish if, in fact, historians are allowed to disclose it.
Recovery will take time and a constant fight to reinstall a democracy that worked most of the time. If the GOP continues to self-immolate we can see a horizon that is clear of the madness.
13
Keep the faith, Tom. You, of all people, must keep the faith that we can end this Trumpian nightmare and restore sanity before it is too late. I often despair of the willingness of the leaders of this nation to step up when the chips are down. They always have, and I want to believe (call me naive, or not) that they can and will once again. But we need to to keep that faith that we can and that it will happen.
I understand the logic in informing and warning us of the dangers of not acting, and that we may not have the wherewithal to accomplish what must be done. But people listen to you Tom. While others in your profession chase the latest “bright light,” and beat it to death, you stay the course. If you give up on our ability to overcome the “bad luck” of one idiotic electoral mistake to salvage our nation, then we all may as well throw in the proverbial towel.
Never have you not put forth your discourses of major issues with less than positivism. We need a source of positivism, and as far as I am concerned, you, Tom, must be that source. Please help us keep the faith.
4
This moment in history is like the moment you cut your index finger. You're overwhelmed with a sense of loathing looking at the injury, knowing that you're going to be in a lot of pain while it heals. All the ills you address, from misuse of the internet to Trump clowning with foreign policy, will be healed. The level heads will prevail and, little by little, this mess will be addressed and fixed–to a global benefit. The real alarm is the need to begin addressing global warming immediately with a sense of urgency and drastic solutions.
5
God I hope you're right.
1
America, I would suggest, is to blame for much of the world's demise during this, as yet, short century. Bush completely destablized the Middle East, starting a completely unjust war, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis. He perpetuated the myth that climate change was not real. He presided over the largest financial fraud in the history of the world, destablilizing markets and impoverishing millions of people. The Obama years were marked by a somewhat impressive rebound of the economy, but at the expense of trillions of dollars in national debt that will imperil any progressive agenda for generations.
We have seen technology companies making obscene fortunes at the expense of the foundations of our very democracy and our supposed right to privacy - Zuckerberg et al taking anyone's money, regardless if it is Russian, in pursuit of tipping an election to a fascist psychopath is just the tip of the iceberg. Twitter is mostly the exploitation of self-aggrandizement. America, already the pigs of the planet in terms of per capita carbon emissions, saw a 4 percent rise in those deadly gases last year. These days the pursuit of greed and vanity is all that seems to matter in this once great nation.
I see no great spiritual awakening occurring in America that might have the hope of changing the world. History has shown that the shock of unspeakable tragedy and suffering sometimes is the only thing that spurs positive change. Sadly, I see darker days ahead.
9
Reading this is a little like reading a Cliff Notes version of modern world history while watching a 1950s TV show of an "ideal" family.
Enough over-generalizations and white-washing our past.
And enough exaggerating the changes and challenges we are facing.
Other than global warming, the challenges listed are extensions of those we have been confronting for a long time -- and are part of the normal business of social and economic evolutionary changes.
What we are seeing that is truly problematic at the human level of our situation is the magnification of democracy, call it populism or whatever, along with a dumbing down of our public discourse -- based on ignorance stroked with lies and deception.
Luck has nothing to do with our past or our present.
We have work to do -- clarifying the truth, educating each other, and marginalizing the liars and misleaders.
We still have strong institutions. We need strong individuals capable of wielding these and bringing the rest of us along, as we confront our challenges.
Vote in true representatives of the peoples' interests and examples of our better angels. Get rid of the Lindsey Grahams, McConnells, Cornyns, and Collins. We citizens have our job to do. This is not luck, it is democratic politics. Vote, and vote based on knowledge.
6
Tom must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed when he wrote this. He is falling into the Dem trap of saying that the sky is falling due to Trump. Fortunately there is an election in the US coming up next year. While Trump will surely run unless he somehow shoots himself in the foot before November 2020. So the election will be a major opportunity (and a major test) for the Dems to get their act together and nominate someone who can beat the Donald. And that someone definitely will not be from the Progressive Wing of the party (which eliminates most of the announced candidates except Old Joe). Let's see if the Dems can pull it off. Maybe Ms Pelosi can keep the progressives in line and support Old Joe so that the Dems don't shoot themselves in the food again and nominate someone like Bernie, Beto, the lovely Kamala or the odious Warren - all of whom would almost surely lose to Donnie Boy.
As for Brexit, let's hope some sanity appears and the UK gets its act together and does not withdraw from the EU. Brexit was a really stupid idea and Tom correctly points out that those politicians who supported it had no plan for a future without the UK in the EU.
1
BTW, in 1989 no one played a more important role than the Pope. How did you miss him? Too much time in the echo chamber?
It’s not luck, good or bad, that put humanity in this pickle. It’s WILLFUL IGNORANCE. We have become intellectually lazy. We tear one another apart and our leader encourages this disgusting behavior. There is nothing that can save us, we have passed the tipping point. In 100 years, give or take a few, life will be apocalyptic. Yes it’s depressing but the truth often is.
7
Our luck has run out? It would be more accurate to say that we've been [insert synonym for urination here]-ing it away since January 20, 1981.
5
Trump is a metaphor for what the US has become, and, we get the government we deserve. Right now we are headed down into an abyss which may have no discernible bottom
6
Looking back, the canary in the mine should have his ham-fisted treatment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership during his campaign and at the outset of his tenure as President. He virtually gave the SE Asian and Asian markets to China, getting nothing in return. And, so it goes.
2
Mr. Friedman, I would suggest that you differentiate the Russian government from the Russian people, just like you differentiate the Trump government from the American people. Just as America is not monolithic in its expression and belief in current policy, so are other countries’ activists fighting for opposing viewpoints. By portraying other countries as single agglomerates, you are furthering their propagandist government ideals and oversimplifying the main issues. Do yourself and your readers a favor and show nuance in your treatment of others as much as you show nuance in domestic politics.
2
Transactional muscular unilateralism. It sounds like an upper level political science seminar topic when he, Putin, Dutarte, Sissi, and the other modern tin-pot dictator wannabes studied together at the Sorbonne where they practiced by pulling the wings off of flies and watching Game of Thrones reruns ad nauseum. There's no school of thought in this, or any thought at all. Why legitimize "I wanna be king" with a fancy name? It would be pathetic if it weren't so dangerous. The people of the world have moved past this - only the so-called leaders haven't.
3
Russia & China. The power they have in the 21st century is incredible. Using cyberspace to change elections at a fraction the cost of going to war. Putin, the most powerful person in the world right now. And Trump wished he could be him... What a far cry from the 80's.
3
"The Russians are using a new kind of warfare that I call “Deep War.’’ Deep War uses cybertools to disrupt Western democracies ..."
It goes further. Putin's Deep War also contributes to Chaos in countries already with horrible dictators. Just yesterday, Pompeo recognized the Maduro stayed in Venezuela because of Putin. Sometimes is not beneath the surface, and it is not cybernetic. It is on our face.
3
Deep War meets shallow leadership aka Trump and the GOP. It serves Trump to not name Putin/Russia as a hostile enemy engaged in a very real digital war. That alone should lead to Trump's removal for offering "comfort to the enemy".
Mueller served in a "hot" war. We need people who understand an ice cold digital assault with boundaries and vagaries beyond conventional behind the times legal rules.
We are most unfortunate to have this president in this moment, where everything starts to fray.
4
Serious questions: 1- is there any chance DJT would actually read this article 2- if he did read it, do we believe he would actually understand it, like any of it. I think the answers are probably not, and definitely not
3
Big Diplomacy got big results as Mr. Friedman catalogs. The end of WWII and the fall of communism did both require and permit a mostly favorable reshuffling of the international deck.
But Big Diplomacy also got us into this trouble in the first place. The Sykes-Picot agreement after the first world war which arbitrarily divided up the Levant into spheres of influence for Britain and France precipitated and hardened populations without regard for ground truth. The Kurds were marginalized and scattered between Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, losing both claim and ability for any semblance of self-governance.
Then the discovery of oil led to a mad dash for profit, enriching the formerly nomadic peoples and enabling the support and export of Wahhabist fundamentalism into many lands.
At the same time, our CIA decided Iran should not elect a popular leader, Mossadeq, preferring instead the Pavlavis and the Shah who inevitably fell to the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors.
The forces of disruption and disorder are also supported by those who claim only to be working on our behalf on the diplomatic stage. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.
The blind Greek poet Homer implied that man's two greatest urges and defining characteristics are creation and destruction.
Even children have this urge: Build a structure from blocks with your small child or grandchild, and watch him quickly and gleefully knock it down. Works every time.
My dad used to say that people watch NASCAR to see flaming car wrecks. And many of us do get emotionally involved in boxing, wrestling, and cage fights. Even the highfalutin Olympics were designed to keep young men fit and ready for war, a human archetypal behavior.
As long as we have this, for lack of a better term, death instinct, we will never lift ourselves very high out of the vicious circle we're in: one step forward, one back.
Ethical and moral progress is temporary or repressed by the powers-that-be, who themselves often become depraved. We're in a snake pit with no exit. The insane are running the asylum.
Our slow-motion implosion is not happening because we used up all our luck, nor because of the collapse of a secret benign alliance. Our arrogance, as the most successful invasive species to date, made our collapse inevitable. The technological, scientific, economic, and political systems, , which are the tools and rationales we constructed to justify our arrogant "eco-side" , are lies we tell ourselves. It seems our arrogance has not run out.
Until it does, "luck" explains only our faiilure of insight. We destroyed the eco-system to over-populate the planet, and we destroyed our own niche, along with countless other species. Human intelligence did not evolve to "know"
what is true, it evolved to know what we need to know to survive, prosper, and eventually, it was "successful" enough to let us cannibilize our world. When our collective arrogance collapses, and we bite the bullet of humility, lady luck may give us another kiss.
1
Everything material will eventually break. All we can ever do is have the foresight to realize this and attempt to build better and stronger replacements. We only have one planet: Mars isn’t an option! Almost everything happening in our world today is because our moral compass broken. So–Who’s to blame? All of us! This is what happens without true leadership. Is Donald Trump the cause of all of this? NO. He’s the symptom. Talk about the blind leading the blind! Over 10,000 Falsehoods and out right Lies and he’s still in office? AYFKM???
2020 will be an opportunity for All Americans to take a test to see just how much they want American, and for that matter, the rest of the world to survive.
2
IMHO Trump’s rampage on the world stage has two simple and painfully obvious motivations. First, he despises Obama and everything Obama processes that he does not...intelligence, oratory skill, a stable marriage and family and the respect and gratitude of most Americans. Trump is systematically undoing Obama’s legacy for spite and revenge for having been mocked at the WHCD some years back. Yes, he is that transparent and insecure. Second, Trump is motivated by a need to monetize his time in office. He will be shown eventually to be highly leveraged to some very unsavory characters and nowhere close to being the self-made billionaire that underpins his image to the world. Yes, Trump’s motives are petty and vengeful but well, as they say, that is just Trump being Trump. Pathetic.
4
He tiptoes around the biggest change of all and relies on the big-man/not-big-enough-man theory of change.
“President Trump approaches global problems through ‘transactional muscular unilateralism’ …”
Trump lacks the capacity to do any better at this point. He will not change. Some of his advisors do what they can to try to mitigate the damage, while others wholly take advantage of the situation for their own personal gain.
Any remaining chance that Trump had for even an iota of positive character development was terminally arrested in the bottomless pit of self-obsessed greed and loathing that consumed America in the 1980s and 1990s.
Russia controls Trump. Putin has him backed into a corner, owning him financially. China smells Trump’s primal fear. Xi plays the long game. North Korea will take advantage of Trump’s simplistic stupidity. Kim is a master manipulator. Iran will resume development of nuclear weapons. Why not?
The world knows that Trump is consumed with the Mueller investigation and the upcoming election. He is a wounded animal. Leaders wait for Trump at the end of the runway, and not because they expect to see a successful landing.
Americans: no one is coming to save us. We must save ourselves. Next year will likely be our final tipping point. Will we choose to rejoin the rest of humanity, and to pull our weight, or will we forever be left behind?
It is not a matter of luck. The decision rests with us.
2
Who is " our" ?
The one and only biological DNA genetic evolutionary fit human race species began in Africa 300, 000+ years ago.
By nature and nurture human beings are destined and designed to crave fat, salt. sugar, habitat, water, kin and sex by any means necessary. Including conflict and cooperation.
The bony fish and the birds were the evolutionary fit major vertebrate survivors of the last major mass extinction 65 million years ago.
Only time will tell if human beings are as smart and wise and evolutionary fit as fish and birds.
2
People such as Marshall MacLuhan and Alvin Toffler told us that our world would go through a phase like this.
I am not sure why we are wringing our hands about it.
Progressives, anxious to return to the Good Ole Days of 1968...are actually REgressive....with a singular united effort to NOT change a single thing....still painting a picture of the USA as it looked back in the Sixties.
During the 80s, we scared ourselves with the spectre of Nuclear Winter....in which through a US -USSR nuclear exchange we would cover the planet in nuclear dust and shut off the sun's warming rays. Through a large effort that so-called "progressives" refuse to acknowledge...the USA has made tremendous strides in cleaning up the air and the water.
What happened? Global Warming happened. Just as thea corollary to Nuclear Winter Theory would predict!!
Wanna solve Global Warming? A little more smokestack pollution and a small nuclear exchange should do the trick.
Within the U.S. we could solve some of our problems by doing one simple thing . Getting rid of the Electoral College. No more illegitimate Presidents. In the UK, the question of Brexit should be put to the voters again. They will opt in this time. We have the Global leaders, including here, that we have because of all of the lies that Leaders tell the voters. They have played on people's fears and have had their way for now.
I am putting my money here in the States on the investigations by the House of Trump and his criminality and the 2020 Election to set things right.
I am putting my money on the voters in the UK that they will set things right.
"You can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool all of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time" as Lincoln said.
1
@Jean I’m with you, Jean! 2 fairly simple ideas & we make it so difficult! Shame on us!
1
Mr. Friedman, there are big thinking leaders in this world. And they are successfully diminishing the West and our form of democracy to elevate themselves and their way of life. Without the enlightened self-interest you describe the 80% of the world that is hungry will look upon the 20% who have gotten fat in our narcissism, corruption and hubris as in the way rather than leaders they can partner with to a better life.
Moping on a scale I'd have expected to be signed, David Brooks, except if he were to drop Adenauer's name, he'd not have identified him. Call it the scruple of self-enlightened unilateralism. Here, at least, we get neologisms like Deep War, for subversion, with footnotes and copyrights trailing behind.
Where is China in all this equation?
1
“ transactional muscular unilateralism “. Wow, very elegant description of a bully and a thug. Just like any extreme addict or alcoholic, maybe WE had to hit rock bottom. After decades of dumbing down, we “ elected “ a verifiable, and certifiable, Clown. Not the kid friendly version, but a Stephen King masterpiece of horror AND human nature. And Trumps nature can always be reduced to the lowest common denominator: Vanity, Power, Obsequiousness and unquenchable Greed.
Period.
1
Ah yes, the Aren't We Lucky to Have Great Men theory of history.
Luck, or maybe we live in the time of The Not-So-Wise-Men
It turns out you make your own luck.
America has been manufacturing cultured stupidity and bad luck ever since Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi chanting 'states rights' to a sea of White Wonder Bread Society members.
It's been all IQ collapse, forced birthing, religious thinking, and unlimited winner-take-all American greed ever since.
America can't lead the world when it's busy collapsing its own IQ, infrastructure and democracy.
After decades of the right-wing eating away at American ethics, our country has been reduced to a Republican clown show that has all the character, heart and soul of a stolen dollar bill.
American oligarchy now resembles Russian oligarchy.
Republican politics now resembles Russian politics.
Greed and the 0.1% paymasters behind Greed Over People have driven America into a moral sewer.
America can still lead on the climate, on education, on modernity, on pluralism, on contraception, on peace, on diplomacy...but it can't lead with the current lying President and his intellectually-morally-economically bankrupt Administration and Republican Senate that's in it for the cash only.
Who would ever follow Trump's lead in anything except for a crowd of Worldwide Wrestling Federation fans cheering for a chair being smashed over their favorite bogeyman ?
Leadership requires adulthood, adult decisions and an adult education.
America's IQ and morality have run out.
Education and ethics are available.
9
Yes, our luck has run out.
We are living through the crescendo of humanity.
Runaway climate change is already wreaking havoc, one only has to follow the science chronicled almost daily. We’ve let the genie out of the bottle.
The fascist, oligarchic kakistocracy, while awful, pales in comparison to the biosphere’s breakdown and civilization’s ability to perpetuate itself.
Collective inaction over the latter half of the 20th Century leaves the two unattractive options of revolution or collapse.
Think I’ve gone too far?
A recent article from MIT’s Technology Review
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613343/lessons-from-a-genocide-can-prepare-humanity-for-climate-apocalypse/
2
Unfortunately, I happen to know an awful lot about Brexit (I dearly wish I did not have to) and Friedman's two-paragraph summary of Brexit is absolutely spot-on.
Putin is probably one of the richest people in the world (which tells you something about the fact he isn't really just a politician but more a mafia boss). What is it that he would want to destabilize the rest of the world? He has a good thing going on in his part of the world. Or does he think he can rule the world once the rest of us fall apart?
There is a fair amount of cynicism about the whole Western Alliance idea. If you are of such a mind, let me pose a thought experiment:
It's 1980. I am holding your daughter ransom in order for you to make one decision: You can live in either East Germany or West Germany. Choose.
1
As long as the US is led by those that believe in US domination over co-operation, the entire world will suffer.
This guy hit the nail on the head.
1
Who was it who said: "We must all hang together, or we'll all hang separately?"
1
We are lucky that Clinton lost. I don't want to imagine where we would be today if she won. I am not a fatalist and it seems Tom is ready to throw in the towel. Hopefully we will all be around to read him in 2021 to see just how lucky we are if a dem happens to win in 2020.
If 2019 will be remembered as the year the luck ran out for US foreign policy, the US stock markets have apparently not heard of Mr. Friedman's worries:
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-hit-record-high-history-says-they-are-headed-higher-2019-4-1028135907
https://blog.en.erste-am.com/earnings-season-us-stock-markets-climb-to-record-levels-after-unexpectedly-good-figures/
In some quarters there is optimism for 2019.
1
Yes, our "luck" has run out. The luck that made possible the exploitation of the whole world for decades thanks to our efforts, the "luck" we traded for screens in front of every face.
It's time to accept that our so called democracy is a financial sham, our public a bunch of ignorant, lazy drug addicts and that our so called diversity the breeding grounds for never actually doing anything but whine.
Poor country, it was so great for some time.
Trump is only the symptom of the problem. He does not exist without the entire Republican leadership cultivating the ground for him, directing him, supporting him, lying with and for him, iand protecting him. With or without Trump republicans were determined to destroy the system. This is where blinding hatred of Obama and Clinton leads —to embracing Vladimir Putin.
This essay is a mess. Some truths, some errors, some confusion...all in a confusing swirl.
There was one period where the West got it right. It was FDR and Truman and Marshall.
How risible to put Reagan and Baker and Thatcher in that company! Where we are today is the direct result of their mistakes, thinking capitalism had "won" and we didn't need a new Marshall Plan to help Eastern Europe and Russia become democracies.
The closest thing to someone with that wisdom is George Soros, who devoted hundreds of millions of dollars of his fortune to help Eastern Europe and Russia become democracies.
But the US under Reagan, Baker, and Bush Sr. did nothing to contribute. They gloated, and helped create the resentment that fuels Russian determination to destroy our democratic institutions and make us a kakistocracy and oligarch just like theirs.
The only way to have avoided that would have been to helped Russia avoid that fate. We failed abysmally in 1989.
If you want to see a sickening example of self-congratulation and total lack of self-awareness of the consequences, see the section of the Berlin wall on the campus of Rice University, the school now funded and dominated by the Baker family. (FWIW: Jim Baker was massaging Bush Sr.'s feet the day he died...seen in Houston as proof of his sainthood.)
1
Mr Friedman, I read your analysis. You've described the main sea-changes well.
But the argument is neither so simplistic nor so one sided, as in West is 'still' in charge. Europe & USA are NO more in-charge of this world, Russia & China, more so now.
The first call came in early 1900s with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, first time perpetrators turned the lens towards themselves & realized... we as a civilized society can't do this. Just because you are the other and different, I can't just come into your country & tell you what to do. In 20th century West did make this same blunder again & again, and to what end, look at Vietnam, Afghanistan, Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Syria, Yemen... disaster & mayhem. Russians or US forces, no one has been able to take down those backwater fighters in Afghanistan; history did warn us.
However, this coming generation of kids are well connected, adjusted to racial diversity (majority at least), colour, creed or religion, there is NO comparison to past generations.
I think, people like Trump, Orban, Alt right in Spain, Italy, OBL, Baghdadi- all are a last cry, dying breed of extremist wings of this century!
There will have to be a new world order, places connected but international laws, free world trade... no one can at this point in history stand on their high horse of morality & say, We know what is right-- because no one does!
But, these next 100 years or so are going to be Hades on earth, until we get there... I am hoping we do.
1
@Ash, you write, "There will have to be a new world order, places connected but international laws, free world trade" -- but then you continue, "No one can at this point in history stand on their high horse of morality & say, We know what is right-- because no one does!"
So who's standing on a high horse of morality? Don't you see the contradiction?
With thanks to Mr. Friedman and lead Commenter, Mr. Hurt,
I wish to add an agreement that “President” Trump is, too often,
“Treated as if he is a ‘normal president’”. I continue to contend
that Trump is Not functioning as “normal”. Choosing to include
His prolific Lying, his chronic grandiosity and ubiquitous occupation of the Public’s Center Of Attention, he functions, at least Like a classic Sociopathic Personality Disorder. Indeed,
Mr, Trump chooses to “do it alone”....as he directs and Controls
His Center Stage as his chosen Audience applauds on the Left.
1
Thank you - most people think that the Brexit, in Britain as well as the US, is nothing but archaic and nostalgic, and also boring. You now understand the non-views of Trump and the liars and fools who want Brexit - and the chaos of the world. Few think in Britain nowadays after reading bad newspapers - that the EU can be a force to create ideas for the world. Perhaps better parties in Europe. Britain, with nothing but the slogan of Brexit but saying 'meaning' it, as crowds and mountebank like Nigel Farage, it will have no traction throughout the world. Think of the real chaos of the US. How many Americans how many understand the danger of Trump? Friedman understands this globally. Also look at the same crazy people who wants to see the chaos of Europe - in Italy., France, also Germany and the Netherlands. I want to see people like Thomas Friedman create a conservative liberalism looking the dangers. Wake up, please! Lose what you have! Real institutions that work!
Idiocracy actually is here.
1
And just how does the US face these challenges? By installing a disgusting con-artist as president. It deserves whatever happens to it.
Want rule by the rich? Be careful what you wish for.
We need a Trump alternative.
Global leaders today say: "Q'ils mangent de la brioche!" Translation: "Let the eat cake!"
A very bloody revolution followed the last time those in charge took that attitude.
Capitalism in the US (and probably elsewhere) is severely broken. Failure to fix it will lead to its demise. It will not be pretty. Hopefully I will no longer be around when it happens.
1
I suggest watching 'Idiocracy'; as prophetic a piece of work as any...
“It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value “ - Steven Hawking
2
Mr. Friedman's commentary is based on the assumption that history flows as a continuum, imperceptively rising and falling based on one common direction of human evolution....
Another viewpoint might hold that history has a quantum nature to it. That once certain boundary conditions are met and a tipping point is met......everything changes. The old rules no longer apply.
People like Mr. Friedman, people with Mr. Friedman's worldview....have been in charge of the world since WW2.
They see themselves as always in charge, that the same conditions that drove AMerican Led Prosperity ever since that carnage....will continue to lead the world into and beyond the 21st Century.
But despite all his glorious talk about flat earths and global economies, Mr. Friedman has yet to acknowledge that the rules have changed.
There is no longer a positive result achieved by "containing communism"(substitute russia, terrorism, drugs, refugees, etc), what purpose is the UN actually serving?, "free" trade?(for whom?)....it should be obvious by now...but 95% of the world REJECTS american values. What purpose does the EU serve other than to mimic the USA? Why do we create "tax havens"?
The Internet, nurtured as public domain....American Frontier Style.........has become a chaotic impediment to progress.....much as RR tracks gone wild ripped apart america with despotism at the same time it created fabulous wealth. The Internet has made everything that Mr. Friedman knows.....Wrong.
Our "luck" started to run out when Trump was taken seriously. It ran out when he was installed in the oval office. The electoral college could have found a spine and blocked him; it didn't. That's not bad luck - that's bad use of a system designed to prevent such a fiasco. Jeff Flake could have stopped the toppling of the Supreme Court. That's not bad luck; that's voluntary blindness. Mitch McConnell stonewalls anything except what Trump wants. That's not bad luck; that's traitorous anti-constitutional behavior. Barr is Trump's law lackey. That's not bad luck: that's another traitor to his oath of office. No, our luck ran out three years ago; only a stress and cracking dam of Democrats is holding back the flood, and they'll hurt themselves in the circular firing squad of a primary and nominate Biden or someone with enough baggage that Trump and his cadre of liars will pave him over. We'll have run out of luck; that's the end of America as we know it.
1
Mr. Friedman is looking for a few Good White Men to lead the rest of us out of the looming catastrophes. If this is a global crisis look globally for leaders.
"The Russians are using a new kind of warfare that I call “Deep War.’’ Deep War uses cybertools to disrupt Western democracies and elections to discredit them as an alternative to Vladimir Putin’s autocratic kleptocracy and to maintain Russia’s freedom to intervene around its borders. But it operates deep beneath the surface and is not easy to retaliate against or even identify, and it’s very low cost, high impact.
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 VENEZUELA. Please oh please—someone is finally talking about the role Russia is playing in my home country only you neglected to mention the role Russia has had in the destruction of my country.
To be sure, they were fronted by Cuba. But the rhetoric, tactics, and methods were 100% Russia made. I remember reading that Russia was sending 10,000 Uzis to Venezuela in the early oughts and wondering why. If you trace the fall of Venezuela, you will see that the dark hand of Putin has been there all along. Venezuelans know this—why are the American media unable to address this in writing??
As we speak, the Venezuelan oil industry is about to fall totally into Russian hands. WHERE IS THE NEWS ON THAT?
Please use your influence to amplify this issue.
Super cheerful, thanks for the pick me up.
2
Tom Friedman rightly points to the far-sighted postwar leadership that not only rebuilt democratic institutions and economies but created a new world order. Today, the poverty of such leadership, not just in the U.S. but all over the world, is glaring. Here, we have allowed rank partisanship to shred the social and political fabric necessary for problem solving. Both political parties are at fault. The Republicans, fearful of losing white male and corporate privilege, have become insular and intransigent. The Democrats, riven by discord, are perpetually defensive and perplexed. For 2020, we need candidates from both parties who will articulate realistic ways to move the nation forward on multiple fronts. They must also be able to listen - respectfully - to the other side.
United, we thrive. Divided, we perish.
Short sighted, egotistical approaches will never, and have never, succeeded long term.
5
The West was aligned after WW II:defeat communism anywhere in the world. This alignment allowed the leaders cited in this article to succeed. It also spawned mistakes like Vietnam and took us to the edge of nuclear war. Now the West, and especially the USA and UK, lack a unifying vision and clear purpose for our democracies. This is allowing Russia, China, terrorist organizations, and the radical propagandists among us to fracture our traditional alliances and undermine our core beliefs. The resultant chaos elected Trump.
The problem with Trump and every Democratic candidate Is their total focus on their personal agendas, philosophies, and biases. There must be a Roosevelt or Lincoln or Washington among us who can lift us up, align the electorate on a unifying goal, and restore a government for the people. Let’s find him or her before we “run out of luck”.
3
Unfortunately, the current administration is committed to playing checkers instead of chess while it can't even become semi-proficient at the latter. Thus we muddle aimlessly and could continue this path to the destruction of our democracy for at least another five years. 'America First' has become to mean 'America Last' throughout the rest of the world. You can't make your own luck until you first earn it. We're currently unable to accomplish either.
Vote.
3
It failed January 21, 2009, when Mitch McConnell vowed to oppose any and all of President Obama's initiatives, regardless of whether they were good for the nation or bad for it, solely to prevent Obama having a "win".
It failed when McConnell and Boehner proposed legislation, but when President Obama endorsed it, they immediately reversed themselves and now opposed it.
It failed when McConnell's strategy worked and the GOP recaptured the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.
It failed in 2016 when the Obama Administration was afraid to warn the nation just how much Russia was attacking our election for fear of looking biased, counting on Clinton winning easily.
It failed in 2000, 2016, and 2018 when illegal and unconstitutional denial of citizens' right to vote changed election results in Florida, Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina, giving the GOP 2 Presidents, several governors, senators, and countless representatives, all of whom should have lost.
It failed when McConnell successfully gagged Sen. Warren for legitimately questioning the qualifications of the nominee for Attorney General of the United States on the grounds that she was speaking ill of a fellow senator.
It fails when tens of millions cheer and applaud as their democracy and liberty dies.
It fails when it seems every day some angry young man walks into a house of worship, or a school or a public place and starts murdering people he doesn't even know.
It fails because our leaders are less than our past ones.
7
Artificial Intelligence (AI) gets the blame for a lot of today's ills, but it is precisely AI that will save the planet. For centuries, humans have suffered the tyranny of confusion, deception, and ignorance caused by our system of beliefs. If the species is to survive much longer, there will need to be a paradigm shift in global human thought.
In the near future, we will program the human mind in the computer based on a "survival" algorithm, which will provide irrefutable proof as to how we trick the mind with our ridiculous beliefs about what is supposed to survive - producing minds programmed de facto for destruction. These minds see the survival of a particular belief as more important than the survival of us all. When we understand all this, we will begin the long trek back to reason and sanity.
See RevolutionOfReason.com
2
When we learn to practice comprehensive democracy, we will overcome the fracturing of this world. But we need to get beyond our limited and limiting notions of what democracy is and how it works. Once we get there, all the technology will be more effectively within our control. Dictators need ignorance to succeed, democracy simply needs effective learning support. Our learning support systems are anything but democratic.
1
No our luck hasn't run out. It's just that hysteria sells. An anthropologist/activist in today's nytimes says the people are "terrified" of how the world will be when they get old. What getting old isn't terrifying enough? Ever notice "climate scientist" never write these pieces. Scientist are often quoted and I'll quote "I don't want to use the phrase tipping point it gives the impression nothing can be done." but the opinion columnist uses it at least a dozen times in the same piece. Last night on the news the Asteroid expert laughingly says we're good for a hundred years but the reporter wants it now.
Do we want to the Smollett fakery to be used as proof of climate change. It could happen, it didn't, but since it could that's just as good, so it did. Bee's, frogs and bat's were facing extinction because of climate change.They're still here. The Antarctic ice shelf could slide into the ocean all million square miles of it. And of course, 12 years from now.
California, Texas and Iowa are going big on renewable energy. China is too. They also produced a million battery powered Vespa like scooters. Honda and NASA might have a break through battery. The so called Social Democrat won't be able to take full credit for the solutions. We need experts in agriculture and engineering to get through climate change and not Social Psychologist, Anthropologist and reporters promoting hysterics. The response to climate change is happening but it not be according to their playbook.
Ok let's elect some better luck.
164
@James
Thank you. I'm tired of all the hand wringing. In the democratic party alone there are hordes of people who could get things done, from mayor Pete to uncle Joe. We may be in a moment to change the world. If of course we let democracy do its job.
9
@Deborah
Firmly agree, except for the passive voice. We don’t let democracy do things. It may be an awkward sentence, but in fact we “do democracy.” Democracy’s not simply a structure that does things to us, or protects us, or prevents bad things from happening. It’s something we do. It’s an act and we need to do it.
I suspect you agree.
7
@James - IMHO, it is not "better luck" that we need to somehow acquire, but a better electorate (e.g. a better informed and less ideologically-driven electorate). We are in the mess we're in now because over the last 20 years or so an ideologically extreme, Right-wing minority (check the polls) has seized the Senate & the White House and previously the House to change the rules for voting (gerrymandering) so as to make permanent their control of these institutions, regardless of how the popular vote goes.
3
I'm no fan of his, but Bannon described both political parties pre-Trump as "parties of Davos." It is clear from Reagan to Obama, we deindustrialized much of the country, and those who have lost those jobs voted to blow up Washington. Of course Trump isn't doing a darn thing for his followers, but they don'tr seem to understand that.
Nobody has a plan to deal with robotic manufacturing and AI, and until we effectively deal with the problem, there will always be a large group that just wants to throw hand grenades at the system.
3
It is not the "Paris climate treaty." It is "The Paris Agreement." Had it been a treaty, two thirds of the Senators would have ratified it and it could not have been broken out of so easily. Same with Iran nuclear deal.
If it is not a treaty it is nothing. That's how the system works.
3
If Trump is re-elected it might be the the end of the world. Not literally, as far as I am aware there is still no chance that the greenhouse gases could start a runaway global warming such as happened on Venus (average temperature 872 F). But he might well leave enough destruction of the international order and discord in what remains that no one ever can pull it together.
But if nothing is done in the next twenty years it will be too late. Desertification (a real problem in China already), floods, rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, and a host of other problems, will lead to mass starvation, migrations, and war such as the world has never
seen.
The only ray of hope is that the top 1% should be OK. They will ultimately solve the problem with tax cuts.
5
@Charles Vekert Yes Charles, even if we do everything we should right now, we will experience extreme weather events for the next fifty years - at least. Love the last sentence!
"We have never had a greater need for the E.U. and the U.S. to be led by people motivated by enlightened self-interest, who appreciate that virtually every problem destabilizing the world in this plastic moment is global in nature and can be confronted only with a coalition that is global. But instead, we are saddled with leaders who are much more adept at breaking things than making things — at going for broke rather than making the best of the bad...It just feels like our luck is running out."
I agree 100%, except for the expression "saddled with" regarding our so-called leaders. We have saddled ourselves with them. We knowingly and with much malice aforethought ELECTED these people to do exactly what they are doing, and many of us share the blame for it, having voted for them directly out of anger, stayed home out of spite or laziness, or conscience-voted for nonsense candidates.
9
I agree with this article except it may be overly pessimistic . It may be better to focus on all of the good and decent people working behind the scenes to make sure things don't fall apart while the world has a temper tantrum. There are very competent people in the US House that will help keep checks and balances alive, there will be another election. Even people in the WH were trying to make sure Trump didn't follow through with his bad ideas. I'm sure the same is going on in Britain, there are many working behind the scenes. We all must remember that we don't exist alone, we need all of our friends in times like these.
2
The generation that led us after WWII was quite remarkable. Europe was a shambles. Asia was a shambles. The world could easily have slipped into a dark age.
The world we have now works fairly well. Why are we tearing it down - institution by institution, relationship by relationship, community by community? These institutions and relationships and communities have been critical to dealing with common problems, and will be necessary if we are to deal with climate change.
As we see in Venezuela and Syria, once things come apart enough, civilization collapses. In the course they have chosen, our politicians are tempting disaster. And none of these politicians are the kind of leaders who rebuilt the world after WWII. They aren't going to be leading us out of the smoking ruin they are creating.
10
I would add a fifth one to the four climactic shifts Mr. Friedman lists. A distrust and even rejection of fundamental institutional structures that make open and free society possible especially in the West. It seems to me the general populace is no longer willing to support separation of church and state, separation of powers, expansion and defense of the individual and rights; it is group-think and competition across identities that shapes debate. It seems to be ok, if elected once, the executive authority may operate without checks and balances as long as policies have some transient popularity.
3
As a former public servant, steeped in the experiences of public bureaucracy, and political winds; the only good news, for those who see government from the outside, is that policy change takes a very long time; particularly when new leadership walks in the door, and has no idea how government functions. Betsy Devos believes waving her magic wand will automatically privatize tax dollars for private schools. Trump will end the refugee crisis with new barriers and simple edicts. Pompeo will stop Iran with threats to other nations about oil. I have never seen so much hubris, ignorance, and incompetence in one administration. I know staffs are ignoring these risky pronouncements. They have their own work to finish. Government employees, like the IRS, have been downsized for years, and have no time, or authorization, to follow radical policies without very knowledgable and capable leaders as guides. Most of Trump's managerial positions; political appointees; are still vacant. If the President does not care about implementation, why should they? Any government change, in particular, requires everyone to roll up their sleeves, including leadership, to get the job done; and that's without new edicts and fly by night orders. Competent government requires more than political luck. So far, the United States is holding our own, but only due to the extraordinary work of every single, government employee, at every level.
19
I would prefer to think that we have a bit of a chance left to negotiate a real, financed war on global warming. Unfortunately, just as we realize we need great cooperation, along come the Trumpists who want to hide behind their own borders and instigate distrust and conflict, even among allies,
2020 is another transformative (or not) election, the fast with its desparate need to make America great (as it was years ago) again or to see the economic and climate issues that are already affecting us and plan accordingly,
1
Trumpy has no plans, unilateral or multilateral. He's simply flailing all over the place. Still, his poll numbers seem to rise.
7
Trumpy has no plans, unilateral or multilateral. He's simply flailing all over the place. Still, his poll numbers seem to rise.
3
Social change is disorienting and disruptive. We are changing at a geometrically faster rate. We are changing faster than we can adapt to change.
If we could just adopt the positive benefits of new technologies and reject the negative impact, we could maintain societal health.
Likewise, if we had the commitment to enforce our laws and limit challenges to enforcement, we might be able to deal with the consequences of rapid social change.
2
Our luck ran out when Trump was elected. Who among us believes that Trump can even understand, let alone solve, the problems discussed in this article?
32
At the risk of sounding like old guy that I am, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our sense of shared sacrifice has eroded the further away we get from the leaders who emerged from WW II. It’s sad, tragic actually, that we need to have some sort of cataclysmic event kick sense into us. I fear for what we are leaving to our children.
26
Friedman is right that we are at a crisis point, but I disagree with his "great man" view of history. Our challenge is that the very economic system that has given billions around the world an unprecedentedly high quality of life is now destroying us. The system's negative byproducts are overwhelming its positive products. The modern economic system is based on technological innovation and mass production. These two forces allow the production of incredible wealth but have two serious downsides:
First, the specialization of labour associated with mass production has made most individuals completely dependent for survival on a job and the steady income a reliable job brings. But with modern technology, jobs have become far less secure. It's not just automation that threatens stable jobs, it's also the dynamism and globalization of the economic system enabled by innovation. For individuals this means rising financial insecurity. For communities (traditionally centred around a means of production) it means instability and impermanence.
Second, technology and mass scale have created an environmental crisis that includes not just climate change, but the proliferation of toxic chemicals and non-biodegradable waste, the destruction of natural ecosystems, the degradation of soil, air, and water, a mass extinction, and unsustainable population growth.
Friedman is right that we need a global coalition to solve these problems. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that's humanly possible.
18
I'm sorry to say that I agree with everything you wrote, Mr. Friedman. I've written to my representative to say that Trump is dangerous, for all the reasons you give, and that he must be impeached, and in a hurry. In the meantime, we must all stay vigilant and engaged. The world would be better off if everyone gave up Facebook, What'sApp, Instagram, etc and cause Facebook to go out of business because they are failing to keep Russian bots off the Internet and with an election coming up, our democracy is at stake. Maybe our luck has run out but maybe the state of things has more to do with our choices, from using social media to voting for a crazy man. Until we make better collective choices we won't get better than what we've got. Each one of us is responsible and should act and vote as if our democracy and the welfare of the world rests with only us, because it does.
18
The U.S. was not "lucky" in 1989. Hindsight is 20-20, but if George H.W. Bush and remembered his history, a New Marshall Plan might have prevented Russia from becoming the 'Deep War' election-meddling kleptocracy it is today.
16
@Cary O'Reilly
Your point is well taken. However, I have to say that
the U.S. was in one sense amazingly lucky in the 1980s, by having Mikhael Gorbachev leading Russia and actively reaching out to us for peace. (For some reason he is missing from Mr. Friedman's list of great leaders.) Mr. Gorbachev seemed to be truly envisioning Russia as a functioning member of the world community. George H.W. Bush made appealing proclamations praising Mr. Gorbachev, but his words were hollow. In truth he had no interest at all in such a peace, or in negotiating with a leader who outshined him on the world stage. This was our bad luck at the time: that GHWB tossed our "good luck" into the trash.
Maybe our luck is running out because there are too many of us and we are wealthier than the masses of people during the golden ages you describe.
2
There was little mention of China in this column, despite the fact that China has become the world's manufacturer. Yes, they have facial recognition software. But they don't have the electoral gridlock or illegal migration problems that plague the U.S., UK, and EU these days. All the signs point to China to become the world power of the 21st century.
7
@joe "illegal migration problems that plague the U.S., UK, and EU these days." people generally migrate to democracies
Hopefully there is some “ luck” and “hope” among the new young faces elected to the House of Representatives. Perhaps their thinking is not yet jaded. The “ Marshall Plan “ after all was a pretty radical idea in its time. The “Green New Deal” may seem radical to some today. However, these forward thinkers of the past and present have much in common. Hopefully they won’t be shouted down by the purveyors of greed and self interest. Forward thinkers like those referenced in this article created a Marshall Plan for Europe. Now we need one for America. Hopefully the visionaries will prevail.
6
To be sure, we need global action on the problems Mr. Friedman outlines. But the problem is that even during some periods Friedman praises, the fall of communism and so on, western governments persisted in acting against the interests of their own citizens, most damagingly on climate. Their focus on economic growth to the exclusion of growing income inequality, their tendency to deny science when it was convenient, their elevation of corporate influence over democratic processes revealed a failure to govern broadly and humanely. We are paying the price, and trying to gloss over the failures of those times will not help us get to where we need to be now.
16
"They are not the obvious challenges of communism and economic dislocation"
Sure they are. Economic dislocation is exactly what is roiling things, and "communism" has merely been modified by China and Russia but remains top-down control by and for the state by its self appointed dictators. Like communism, it is appealing to too many other nations run by strongmen who'd like to remain in power but with a lot more wealth.
"And it is not the obvious challenge and opportunity of spreading democracy and free markets"
The challenges now are just as obvious. Green New Deal lists making economic opportunity out of the need to change our energy supply. It lists overcoming the economic inequality highlighted by Thomas Piketty and applying to the whole world as re-made by neo-liberalism. We know the challenges, they are obvious.
"The Russians are using a new kind of warfare that I call “Deep War.’’"
That is just the Russian version of the ten years of Color Revolutions of which the US was so proud.
"He is breaking a set of arms control agreements with Russia, without an alternative."
Dubya broke the first one. It was the ABM Treaty. The rest are being broken by Dubya's men like Bolton, re-hired. It is a problem of arrogant hawks, not just Trump.
"we are saddled with leaders who are much more adept at breaking things than making things"
That is exactly what Cheney said about Iraq -- "creative destruction" and "making facts."
11
Yesterday I heard Ken Griffin (head of Citadel hedgefund- Baire) asked about the problems that globalization has caused for US workers. He said basically these problems were theirs to solve, and that they had to figure out how to fix them (as if they caused them.) It was a basically a "let them eat cake " response.
The goal of helping the less fortunate is what we have lost in the last 35 years (since Reagon,) and why we are at the cross roads that Friedman often writes about.
12
@david s
"what we have lost in the last 35 years (since Reagan)"
It's our dark side, our Shadow, our Mr. Hyde showing up. We're always fighting our worst urges as we strive for civilization. Can anyone, or any society, ever fully repress our inner barbarism?
@david s It seems in times past, for whatever reasons, that elites in the US had a greater interest in ensuring the general welfare through their power and influence, even as they ensured they got their cake.
The "Deep War" tactics aren't only used by Russia. They're used by dictators around the world to disrupt and divide their countries and consolidate power. Trump's twitter feed is a perfect example.
Bad people will use whatever tools are available to do bad things. When they hold positions of power, they're even more dangerous. We have Putin, Trump, Erdogan, Duterte, Netanyahu, etc. that use fear and division to stay in power.
I fear that Mr. Friedman is right...our luck is running out.
4
Politics is a noble and demanding profession in democracies. Of late we seemingly have promoted to leadership the second rate and inexperienced. Compare the list of people in 1989 and those of today. Today only Angela Merkel is in the first class in The West.
The Romans had their cursus honorum by which they trained sons of Senators to take on the roles of leadership in both the Republic and Empire. We live in a different age but we might want to think that relevant training and experience was a pre requirement for the top jobs. Politics is seemingly, and especially in the US, the only profession where tyros can achieve high office. Madness!
Kennedy at least recognized this. When trying to recruit the highly experienced and qualified auto executive McNamara as Secretary of Defense the latter asked him what made him think that he was qualified for the job. Kennedy responded by asking what made him, Kennedy, qualified for the job of President. Quite so.
We believe that "calleth the time calleth the man" with Lincoln and Churchill the prime exhibits but we miss the real lesson here. It was the mediocrities before 1860 and 1940 that created the crises in the first place.
5
@wjth
Er, oddly or ironically, Herbert Hoover was always the smartest guy in the room, and the most humble.
There isn't even room for great leaders to emerge, at least not in the U.S. All the advice given to candidates is to focus on "kitchen sink" issues. That is to say, to acknowledge that people's concerns seldom rise above "what's in it for me?" and worse, that they shouldn't.
The "what's in it for me?" crowd isn't going to be stirred by a larger vision, and has apparently lost any interest in collective action to realize a vision.
17
The conditions after WW that allowed Europe and the U.S to work together, are nothing like that now. Two very powerful countries had been destroyed and defeated. It took a ruthless determination to win. The Tokyo firestorm from an incendiary bombing killed at least 100,00 Japanese. Two to three hundred thousand died as a result of two atomic bombs. The Doolittle raid was the first of what was called as terror bombing. The raid on Dresden, when the end of the war was certain and came three months later, killed 135,000. At the end of the war. the time and conditions were right to rebuild and the defeated countries had no veto power. From that time on, our major wars have not offered the opportunity to accomplish much. The war in Korea has never been officially ended and look what we have now. There was no plan to win the war in Vietnam, and we didn’t. Today’s wars don’t end the same way and the battle grounds include places like Paris, the Twin Towers and San Bernardino. In Syria between 35000o to 570,000 have died. Five million refugees have fled the country, and the war goes on. A terrible price was paid for the opportunity given to those Mr. Friedman honors today. A chance to rebuild working together. Those opportunities have long passed and probably will not return even if those people suddenly reappeared.
9
@Ron. Sadly your comment touches reality. Problem is that we do not have the relevant people like Putin, Khamenei, Kim Jong Un, Bashar Assad, Erdogan, Xi Jinping, etc., giving LIKES to Thomas Friedman. They rather abused the liberal progressive aspirations and turned them against the West instead of opening their societies to Western values in exchange. Obama, Merkel, Holland/Macron and Co., might not be pleased if they evaluate the results. What happened in the West during the last two three years is the consequence and the natural reaction to the liberal lunacy. Progressive liberals will not succeed if those who are on the other extreme of the scale of values ( and they still are the majority ) have an unchallenged free-pass to penetrate unidirectionally their societies.
A brilliant assessment. Whether our luck has run out, or whether luck is involved at all, is an open question, though indications certainly present the risk of it occurring. It is not coincidental, however, that politicians around the world have come to the fore by, outwardly at least, establishing themselves as far more insular and independent of other nations than have past leaders. To many, it seems like a logical and natural response.
The rise of interconnectedness itself is what has eroded a sense of controlled destiny, and a new generation of leaders appears poised to establish themselves as bulwarks against the seeming dissipation of effective self-rule that has resulted. There is also a newfound development of aggressiveness that increasingly seeks to impose the will of strong, isolationist leaders on others.
What is missing is a sense of imagination which harnesses the new while allowing each country to envision its own manifest destiny. There is a certain scrambling surrounding the invasiveness of and instability prompted by advances in technology which, for now at least, is resisting the consequential interdependence and replacing it with nascent movements toward isolation and independence.
As the late Rodney King, in somewhat different circumstances famously said, "Can't we just all get along?" Maybe, and maybe not.
3
Very well put. We can see how interconnected/interdependent we are: political dynamics around the world are happening in real time, not decades, these days. Real, positive change can happen, but real damage can happen just as quickly. Now, world leaders weigh in on Twitter. It does feel out of control. It is frightening.
10
Mr. Friedman is partial to diagrams and concepts that neatly encompass the events of the world around us. Three plastic moments, the third consisting of four climate changes at once, etc., describes how the world evolved and is evolving now. It all sounds so... rational. So grounded in cause-effect. As if the world behaves in accordance with his diagrams and neat concepts...
And then he marks it all down to good luck (in the past) and bad luck (in the present).
I don't think Mr. Friedman can have it both ways. Donald Trump wasn't the result of bad luck. He was the result of several factors that were created by human decisions. He is the perfect political storm.
12
Yes, it very much feels like a turning point in human history. But I agree with other commenters who say that it isn't that our luck has run out. This is the ultimate consequence of innate human frailty and flaw - raw, unbridled greed and selfishness in the face of global over-population and climate disruption. And what do "we" do? Elect strictly "Me" leaders. We need to brace ourselves, because we haven't seen anything yet.
27
A fine article. No group of humans can control the world, but some take their fleeting moments of power to be beyond challenge. As for Brexit: "economically they see they can’t really afford to leave the E.U. and politically they can’t afford to stay and expose all their dishonest promises." That misses the obvious--the commitment of the governments of the UK and the Irish Republic to the status of Northern Ireland and the right of its people to determine their own future. Now, the people of England, always the top dogs of the UK, have decided a different future for Northern Ireland--although they didn't know they were doing so. They voted to go down the up escalator, and are stuck, running in place.
10
If you feel "our luck is running out now", wait till the 2020 election
As of today anyway, the Dems appear to be too fractured to provide a coherent challenge to Trump. Despite the media's documentation of his 10,000 lies, Trump has never been more "popular" with his constituents. All he needs in 2020 is but a small fraction of Independents to put him back in office. I dare say, if the election were held today, he'd have around 52%.
America seems to be on the brink of attaining Its' lowest common denominator.
16
The leaders mentioned here were ones that understood the consequences of WW2. That by creating enlightened self interest alliances, in the long run, everyone will benefit from peace. Of course, a lot of this alliances did not count on the rise of a diverse population that was colonized, brown and wanting to buy in the promises of the American dream and the peace of the EU. This created a tension that neede an adaptation of the enlightened self interest, but did not happened, because while more cosmopolitanism was engaged to include the marginalized, the ones included in the conversations felt excluded, because the new reality was not part of the old discourse from WW2. It expanded and many did not like it. Yes, we need enlightened leaders, leaders that are able to understand both sides of the discussion.
3
To be sure, our leaders today are not up to the challenges of the four-pronged climate change. Comparatively, global leadership is at a nadir on many metrics. But the truth is our leaders have failed over decades, particularly since 9/11, to prepare for these eminately foreseeable tsunamis. In the lack of political or policy courage to address inevitable and massive societal shifts, a toxic climate of fear and resentment for those who perceive they’re being left behind made today’s crop of junior varsity demagogues possible. That’s not luck, and it didn’t just run out. That’s a slouch towards Bethlehem that’s played out since the late 1980s.
9
@J. Berman .. Reaganism anyone?
The only part of this article I do not agree with is, “Trump almost broke Obamacare, without an alternative.” Trump has broken Obamacare. Obamacare may appear to still be there, but it is barely on life support.
15
Something we need to look at is why the British public fell for the "Right-wing clowns" and their fake promise of more money and prosperity from leaving the EU, when the truth is precisely the opposite.
Consumer psychology lies at the root of this weak-mindedness. In the consumer economy the consumer is turned into a "desire machine". Advertising and marketing -- and now the secret weapon of finely-tuned personalized advertising based on Big Data -- relentlessly direct the consumer´s attention to one thing: WHAT I WANT. That's OK for a baby, but in adults it produces big babies endlessly trying to satisfy their wants.
Yet an adult is also made of the capacity to forego or defer "what I want". And with disciplines like yoga you might also learn to appreciate things that are subtle, like silence, or the wind blowing through the trees, or water lapping at a shore. And your soul also responds to these things. And that balances out that yen for the new car.
So there is a Middle Way (this is the Buddhist term), where the individual can hold himself or herself aloof from desire; and also to some extent or selectively or meaningfully, satisfy desire. And also desire subtle, ennobling, things. But in any case not be manipulated into desiring, as the main economic dynamic affecting that individual. So here is a view of an excess of capitalism that calls for further consideration.
16
@pedroshaio .. if the middle-class & poorer Americans ever catch onto this, the big corporations are gonna go bust. Plus those non-shopping Americans would also be far abler to live on their salaries (that rarely keep up with the constantly climbing cost-of-living).
1
@pedroshaio
There's another reason "the British public fell for the Right-wing clowns". Everyone should watch this TED Talk by British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. After watching it you'll see the similarities in the interference in our 206 election:
https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy
1
Yes, yes, yes. All of the commenters are describing the complex results of a small few, and I mean small in more than one sense of the word, stealing from the majority the right to elect our leader.
Without this essential act none of the crimes described by the writer or the commenters would be in focus.
It is easy to correct the problem: Vote and then correct the election system, back to what the founders indented.
Notice that the other semi-democracies have lost this essential feature of majority rule, even though the corrupt leaders attempt the charade of majority rule.
6
An entire column about coalitions and not a word about imposition...about the US imposing its military will from 800 bases scattered across the globe. About the militarization of the US economy. About the ill-will our military adventures have fostered. About the burden US taxpayers are expected to carry to support a world army...all the time being lectured by Beltway savants, European intellectuals and Bronx socialists that we're not spending enough on social programs. Understand why there's division among us?
29
Fox News is the single biggest culprit in America’s demise. It dumbed people down via its right wing propaganda masquerading as “fair and balanced” news. It destroyed the concept of the third estate. It’s impact has been pernicious and ruinous. We will rue the day that this fundamentally un-American entity came into existence.
121
@Dan
Do not forget Sinclair!
6
@Terri Ferrari
of course you don't mean upton.
“But its viability is yet to be proven anywhere.” This is the most chilling line. We have one party that governs by belief, not reality, no matter the issue: trade, immigration, taxes, guns, health care (and on and on). They must be voted out top to bottom.
19
Thomas,
Maybe this will work out? For example, in the post WW II Hegemony of the US, we invaded Korea for trumped up reasons, we invaded Vietnam for trumped up reasons, we invaded an entire country, Afghanistan, for no reason other than no bid contracts to Haliburton, then, we invaded Iraq to extend those no bid contracts into infinity, and now we have also placed troops in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
So, maybe US Hegemony was not quite as burnished and golden as you have represented here? Maybe we killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people primarily for military contractor profits? I mean, Playboy got off the ground because the US Army itself subscribed during Vietnam.
Maybe instead of these so called "climate changes" you refer to, the recent diaspora from the Middle East was caused solely by the US Invasion of the region? A completely unjustified invasion.
Maybe the US stepping aside in leadership, either on purpose or because of incompetence will lead to better outcomes?
After all, China is pursuing its own interests without continuous war and killing of locals. Yes? Maybe that approach, building infrastructure as a method of building the future makes more sense than invasion and killing, which, has always been the USA way.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this proposal: Let's allow the US to move on from leadership and let other countries step up. They will anyway.
17
The globalist impulse, while not wrong, is incomplete. Many problems do require the leverage that only global actors can apply, but many also require the traction that only local actors can provide. The crucial negotiation, then, must be to find the balance between these two that is appropriate to the problem at hand. It's clear that we face unprecedented challenges, with the global, instantaneous flows of information, money, power, pollution, and people combining to create wholly new problems of coordination. In the face of these, the crucial conversations have to be about which tools to apply to which tasks. Global tools when a solution is a big lift, local as required for complexity and detailed considerations. Conservative tools when shared values will knit a community together, progressive tools when new values and ways of being will broaden a coalition. Any leader who paints themselves into an ideological corner will fail themselves and those they aspire to lead.
2
@kjj
In EU policy debates, what you describe is called “subsidiarity “.
I couldn’t agree with you more.
2
It is time for the emergence of one world government. You think this unrealistic? A ridiculous proposition? So, too, was the idea of an amalgam of immigrant peoples coming together as one and calling themselves the United States. It can be done. America is the proof to the proposition.
And as was stated by Thomas Friedman ours is an ever increasingly interrelated world. One seamlessly woven together by all our advanced technology. It makes uniting under a single guiding principle an almost inevitable imperative.
We have to stop thinking tribal, and start thinking as one species. One which lives on a very small rock that is warmed and circles a fusion bonfire. It is the only way forward. It is the only way we survive. And if we wish to exist for as long as the dinosaurs it's what we must do.
John~
American Net'Zen
3
Have you thought this through? What form of government, what language, citizenship etc. The United States was formed from whole cloth and could design it's system. With so many "operating systems" to use a computer term, integration would be difficult
1
Nice piece. The Burn's book is also valuable for reminding us how much we rely for our security and well being on people working tirelessly on our behalf, who are rarely mentioned.Mr Friedman could have made a reference also to the passing of Richard Lugar the epitome of the the type of bipartisan scholar/senator gentleman we now so sorely lacking.
4
"Luck is the residue of absolute design."
And it started running out with Vietnam war... well, actually, more so, when we entered the fray of Afghan-Russian war.
Nothing has gone right since then, has it?
I don't think we ever had real enlightenment, it was all personal agenda couched in moral platitudes. If we were so enlightened, we would not have supported Saudi Royalty, we would have made Israel reach a solution, we would have not let Rwandan and Serbian genocide happen.
Since Eisenhower, every President has done the hide maneuver very well. Reagan was a past master.
We have steadily gone downhill post 9/11 when we entered Iraq by lying, and that war and Syria's famine gave birth to that tumor, which we went chasing after into Afghanistan.
No, by this time.... luck had nothing to do with it, anymore.
We are at serious cross roads now...
all those things taken for granted, the safety, the solid infrastructure, a booming middle class.
Even with a thriving economy, there is no real ease, there is anxiety like a dark cloud on the horizon.
I think we all know, how short lived it is, can be, when the 'real climate change' is being ignored.
I guess we will all wake up the day everyone is standing in ankle deep waters in Miami, levees not working, and water refusing to recede.
I just dread what we are leaving behind for our children.
18
"Democratic values"? So that's what we were teaching the world with our excellent adventures in Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, etc. etc.?
18
What you are describing is a narrow electoral majority of the anglosaxons taking leave of their senses. The rest of the EU have far better leaders than the US & UK, more in line with the names of earlier leaders that you list.
9
I'm confused by the accusation of the Russians creating a new kind of warfare using cybertools. America is mostly responsible for the success of internet technology. Could the Americans be accused of creating a new kind of warfare?
5
@Vivien "Could the Americans be accused of creating a new kind of warfare?"
It's really what we're best at.
4
@Vivien I think it would be like blaming Gutenberg (or the Chinese, who of course had printing long before), for the publication of something like Mein Kampf...Americans (and others!) may have invented the technology but it wasn't necessarily so weaponised. As far as we know anyway...
The following quotation from Daniel Bell seems apropos: "The nation-state has become too small for the big problems of life and too big for the small problems."
9
after WwIi actually our nation subverted democracy & worse; from overthrowing legitimate governments to undermining trade unions, to sabotaging citizen movements here, political assassination, Fred Hamton and others, to the horrific slaughter of millions in unjust wars based on deceit; from Iran, to Chile to Vietnam; Trump’s crimes are child’s play next to LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin falsehood
7
@John Andrechak The chickens have come home to roost. It's odd that all these thing you mention were done in the name of "democracy" except Fred Hampton that was done in the name of racism. With regard to trump - please don't underestimate his ability to destroy. He and the republicans done pretty good on the making America stink again or to keeping us continually stinking.
My impression is that the West under the leadership of progressive liberals got it wrong. They could not influence China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Most of Africa, etc., which were much less open societies than the US or the EU. Their miscalculation based on unrealistic approah produced exactly the oposite. Autocrats, theocrats, ayatollahs, kleptocrats, Islamic terrorists, etc., have been granted free access to penetrate the West, resulting rather the globalization of their values.
2
You mean liberals such as reagan and the iran contra escapade or bush and the iraq afghanistan war?
I’ve always thought we got very, very lucky in 1860 and 72 years later in 1932 with the elections of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Both men faced supreme, existential challenges and led the nation through its greatest periods of peril. Without them things would not have gone well, to say the leadt. Now the country is presided over by an imbecile leavened, if that is the word, by his transparent cruelty and his enjoyment in hurting others. America got very unlucky in 2016. And along the way lost any national conviction or purpose other than feeding the American war machine and enriching further those already too wealthy to spend their loot in a hundred lifetimes.
27
America has never been “exceptional or enlightened”. Friedman an other apologists for the false American Narrative conveniently
revise history by lies of omission.
Almost the entire history of the brutal crimes of European colonialism and American Imperialism are virtually written out
of the historical record.
This system has served the privileged classes in America well. People like Friedman don’t want to fundamentally change the system of capitalism/imperialism.
Yes, the world is a nightmare for most of Humanity. Only a fundamental shift in consciousness and economy can save our planet and most of Humanity from needless suffering.
The Center cannot and will not hold Tom.
8
Just curious how "the rise of a quasi-capitalist China" was managed by a litany of heroic leaders not including a single Chinese person.
3
Blame Trump if you want there hasn’t been an easier target. Our foreign policy has been disastrous for a long time. Our CIA lead coups in South America, our ridiculous relationship with Cuba, Vietnam, and the Middle East. Our excessive consumption of resources around the world. Our endless wars since Korea. We haven’t solved anything for a long time.
11
@Michael Piscopiello If you really look at US history we have never been at peace either with other countries or ourselves. I'm 70 and I can't remember a time when we didn't have armies somewhere in the world bringing democracy one bullet at a time.
5
Maybe the day will come where I can hug Mr. Friedman as a son of the Twin Cities as I am. He's getting on course lately.
I think St. Louis Park exists in kind of an isolated context from most of the Twin Cities. They're there, but they keep to themselves. I know why now. But there shouldn't be a need for this. Jews are one with American culture, and we need to be more open and accepting. We're all messed up as a society. We need to try harder.
These lessons are valid in a much broader context, global politics, and this is where my interests lie.
We can do this, we can fix the system. It is going to be hard, and I don't know where the salaries come from. But it has to be done.
2
As with many important challenges and opportunities we Americans are divided on Interconnectedness.
2
The rich and the greedy have control of the government and the levers of power.
It’s no longer about country, it’s about plundering because it’s easy to get away with it.
12
Don’t despair, Tom.
To turn Matthew 24:35 on its head, Heaven and earth will NOT pass away, but your words will pass away. As Trump moves closer each day to international disgrace and eventually impeachment, decency will be restored. America will once again lead the way as we did after WWII.
3
@John McAward
I sure hope so and I have always been an optimistic person, but I'm fast losing my optimism.
2
Our climate chaos plastic moment is the most pressing as there basically is no post-environment anything. Homo sapiens needs to prove itself worthy of our self-given name and make preparation and mitigation efforts on a large scale.
I'm also just praying that the pen is mightier than the bone saw...
4
You might add the fact that in our citizens now exhibit a healthy dose of arrogance that is built on ignorance, a deadly combo. So yes it appears our luck has run out.
9
Please don't use such fancy words to describe how Trump interacts with the world; call it what it is selfish, insecure and what's in it for his business and his image. That's what he cares about 24/7.
3
Most people today understand Trump's racist dog whistles. More subtle are his dog whistles about Putin's autocratic kleptocracy. Do not think there are many powerful people who hear them and are intrigued by that maybe they could enjoy some of the same benefits as Putin's billionaire cronies. Yes, our world is rapidly changing. It is also the same a it has always been in some very important respects.
4
To solve big problems in the US we merely need to return to critical thinking...intelligent analysis. This requires greatly diminishing the clout of the right wing echo chamber (Fox propaganda, etc), which is driven by blind ideology untethered to reality or facts, and therefore incapable of intelligent analysis of complex problems. One helpful step might be to launch a national effort to pressure companies to stop advertising on Fox, Breitbart, Limbaugh, etc, etc.). Once we get back to a critical thinking approach to tackling our problems we can hope to solve them. If Fox etc continue to bamboozle 35% of this country unabated, from a place of blind ideology divorced from truth and facts, we will never solve our complex problems, and we can kiss goodbye to everything that was ever good about the US of A.
6
We ran out of luck a long time ago when Reagan and Thatcher started the road to our current predicaments.
5
People have stopped trusting Establishment leaders like those named in this article.
After all, we were led into the foolhardy Iraq War by our Establishment leaders--George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Hillary Clinton, and (yes) Tom Friedman, all telling us that Democracy would flourish when we eliminated Saddam Hussein with his (imaginary, hyped-up) WMDs.
Our Establishment leaders have told us that globalization and capitalism would be good for everyone, as our economy would grow. But the unfortunate truth is that all of the benefits have gone to the 1%, while the hardships (such as opioid addiction) have fallen on our working class.
Our Establishment leaders have told us that immigration is good, and even necessary, for our economy to grow. (Again, the false promise of riches!) And we have put a legal system in place to allow immigration, but that system is nonfunctional as millions of immigrants are here illegally.
Warmongering, capitalist globalization, and illegal immigration have turned the populace away from trusted Establishment institutions and personalities.
No wonder!
4
Tom—It’s been so many years I’ve kept up with you AND THE WORLD—your pessimism is must-read, because your experience is unparalleled. Your column is another proper wake-up call.
But it’s also a glass-half-empty case. Think of a Democrat in the presidency—Biden, just for example. How quickly the world would welcome and cooperate in undoing what Trump has largely failed to institute!
New leadership in Germany is strengthening the moderate left. Macron is still an inspiration. Brexit is dead. Rightism in the EU seems to be waning.
China is hitting a wall of their own avaricious arrogance in the Belt & Road Initiative; facing unsustainability of subsidized export econony (nearing recession); and hitting a wall in their pathetic need to steal intellectual property because China hasn't cultivated domestic creativity for innovation.
And one could go on mano-a-mano for each of your GOOD reasons for pessimism. The glass-of-full can be easy to imagine realistically.
What saves us from decline is imagining realistically how to make humanity and Good prevail, and seeing that it gets done.
We—the better angels of our nature (as Steven Pinker put it)—WILL make what needs to prevail ("Enlightenment Now") prevail—just as the best and brightest of earlier eras reflected their times, not defining it.
I'm excited by new generations. We're in luck. I KNOW it.
Happy May Day.
4
I’m sorry but this is absolute and UTTER rubbish: “machines can think, reason and manipulate as fast, and increasingly better, than human beings.” Machines cannot think, nor can they reason. Do a little reading on neural nets and AI. There is no machine that can think nor reason on anything remotely approximating human intelligence. Special purpose software trained to recognize images of dogs is easily confused by an image of fried chicken! A self driving car trained with neural nets can be fooled by picture of a stop light on a pedestrian’s T-shirt. Image recognition and other task oriented software must not be conflated with “thinking” and “reasoning”. I believe we will get there (we should be terrified of this) but at present there is absolutely no form of artificial “intelligence”.
1
Broadly speaking I agree with Mr. Friedman, but it is apposite to recognize that a lot of the mischief-stoking by Russia could have been avoided if the West had kept to its understanding that it wouldn't (unduly or precipitously) expand NATO or the EU Eastwards. I understand the logic for doing so, but the fact is that it creates the impression of being threatened among the Russians and this in turn creates an atmosphere in which the behavior of V.V. Putin and his comrades becomes acceptable. Also, it is historically incorrect to label Deep War a recent development. It is in fact the underlying principle of Soviet military doctrine as developed under Tuchachevsky in the second half of the 1920ies.
1
According to Jared Diamond in his great study of failed civilizations, "Collapse", it takes 3-4 human generations for a society to completely collapse once the point of no return has been reached.
I'm going to wager that the millennials are the first of the four.
While most people squabble about the politics du jour, the fact is that the food chain is being jerked out from under us due to pollution and CO2 and methane emissions worldwide.
Sure, lots of hopeful technology is trying to get through the 'proof-of-concept" phase. They should do more of this, faster, because this time, our technological advances are not keeping up with the pace that the challenge is coming at us.
This year our emissions were higher than last year, and next year they'll be even higher. The actual track that we are on, in earth-based reality, is worse than the "business as usual" tracks that the climate models put out.
Insects - the crucial supporters of the land-based food chain, are going through a mass extinction. Phytoplankton, the core of the ocean food chain, is also seeing unprecedented reductions - mostly due to the loss of polar ice at both poles.
What's coming at us is going to make our squabbles about stuff like "should we allow abortion?" seem like quaint tea-time conversation.
Still, we babble on, oblivious.
28
Actually, the plastic moment of the 21st century so far has been the financial crisis a decade ago. Without it, I doubt we would have Brexit, Trump, European national-populists, and in general the growing power of the extremes. Putin would be much more boxed in and begging the West than he is now. And China would still come ahead but much slower and probably with less clout.
But here we are...
11
@Sam Theodore
Be careful of anti Semitism when you talk about the financial crisis. I don't think we are supposed to remember that, or the foreign wars.
A point in the article which resonates with me is that the “Deep War” erodes the truth needed to govern.
The point helped me immediately draw a mental picture of Donald Trump as a leader for the “Deep War Army” armed with the 10000 lies he has fired in 870 days at the Freedom Wall defending us.
9
I trust and admire Mr Friedman's writing very much. He is a person that stands as an economic and political bellwether for me. I also despair at how on target he is sometimes, but it's a reality we must face.
Thank you, sir, for pointing us towards this unappealing mirror.
9
And who’s fault is this? Look no further than the Baby Boomers, the generation that got everything and then slowly took it away from everyone younger than them. It’s the same in the UK, those voters over 50 brought on Brexit, scared because their neighbors had either browner skin or slight accents and thinking they were losing their country because someone told them so. When the Baby Boomers finally become too old to vote we will finally be able to clean up their mess.
7
@Josue Azul At 69, I'm fond of saying to my cat, "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore." We had a vision of community and a sense of decency; our critics offer only a cynicism that forces us to choose between the bigots and the scolds.
To those who'd scapegoat the Boomers, I'd ask: "What would you have done differently" -- and don't speak too soon, 'cause the wheel's still in spin.
How much freedom will you sacrifice before the very memory of freedom itself is unrecognizable (even as planetary-scale problems remain unsolved) -- and what will you say to those who blame you?
1
@Josue Azul
The Boomers are outnumbered already, Josue.
Wake up; it's time.
@Josue Azul The young people of the UK, decided that Glastonbury was more important than voting.
They complained about not being able to vote online and couldn't be bothered with posting in their vote.
Only themselves to blame.
Since the end of World War II until recently, the United States, Europe and our allies have had leaders who, though often flawed, were not stupid men and women. They also were not disloyal to the countries they led.
The Soviet Union was always a problem in Europe and to the West, and Russia under Vladimir Putin has continued that tradition. Led by America and the N.A.T.O. nations, however, the Russians have been contained and unable to match the economic achievements of the West.
In Asia and Africa, including in the Middle East, the Soviet Union and now Russia competed with America and its allies, Japan and India, but the giant presence of China is more muscular than Russia and probably wiser.
In South America, the U.S. still has the most influence by reason of proximity.
Seeing its geopolitical limits, Russia decided to take shortcuts through the internet, changing the goal from military dominance to political destabilization of its competitors.
America got unlucky when the competition turned to cyberspace.
First, as the most advanced country in the new technology and the most open society, we became the biggest and easiest target of the Russians.
Second, Donald Trump, in effect, became an asset of the Russians, and they helped make him our president. Trump, an impulsive man of limited ability, is no match for Putin.
With the problems now facing the planet, the ascension of Donald Trump was bad luck for the world.
13
The necessary condition for humanity “to build a global, systematic, strategic adaptation to these challenges” is the recognition of “Global Tasks” and thus striving to build a global coalition to preform them -- before our luck will run out, so to speak. In 1989 I defined a task as global when it fulfils four (and a half) necessary conditions:
1. Performing the task is necessary to confront and solve a problem, posing an existential danger, which is recognized as common, and relatively equal, to the majority of the actors in world politics.
2. The task cannot be performed and the problem solved by the actions of some actors against other.
3. The completion of the task will not result in a radically more privileged relative position for some of the global actors.
4. In the context of world order, the danger confronted must be recognized by all the relevant (necessary for the solution) actors as surpassing the Survival Predicament (as defined by the Realist World View).
5. Accommodating but not necessary: the completion of the task necessitates the (relative) participation of all major actors. It cannot be solved by the actions and contribution of few of the actors (“free riders” problem).
Since the making of the atomic bomb, there’s nothing confronting humankind more justifiable to be termed as a Global Task than the (practical) abolition of nuclear weapons -- not a variety of “Climate Changes” or even a clear and present threat of aliens’ invasion.
1
Humanity is constantly evolving and moving ahead, sometime for the good and sometimes for the bad. Over the thousands of years of our evolution, industrialization and technological advancement, there are critical transition points where the world goes into chaos and up till now, recovers and moves ahead. Power shifts around the world to the most motivated countries or regions of the world.
In response to the article, the world powers need to work together like they have never done before. Humanity has never had the ability to destroy all life on the planet till 1945, so all the previous transition points were messy but we struggled till we came out of them, without destroying the world.
This time may be different. So many changes are happening at the same time, its going to take incredible cooperation among the world powers to move us ahead without the typical wars that accompany these transition points. Sadly, the whole world is moving in exactly the opposite direction.
I am hoping humanity realizes the individual, nationalistic theme that's playing around the world will result in massive destruction and starts working together. If not the prognosis of humanity moving onto the next stage of evolution is pretty dim.
As Mr. Friedman said " It just feels like our luck is running out" .
7
As anyone in business knows, the most valuable asset a company possesses is its (good) reputation - easy to lose and difficult to regain. “Brand USA” has sustained serious reputational damage over the years, particularly by engaging in unwinnable wars under false pretenses, but the fact that American voters elected Barack Obama, a decent, dignified and compassionate man as our leader in 2008, meant we still garnered immense respect and even goodwill on the world stage.
By electing a witless, crass and mean-spirited conman as president in 2016, and with all that has transpired since, we may be feared, but we are not trusted, and have squandered any of the goodwill the civilized world still felt toward us. Donald Trump, his political allies and plutocratic donors are every bit as autocratic as Putin or Xi, and America’s “reputation” will take years to recover after Trump- if ever. We have done this to ourselves - good or bad, luck had nothing to do with it.
47
Agreed. I believe good luck was made through the vision and sacrifices by great and good people, just very few of which were cited by Mr. Friedman.
Ultimately, whether luck is good or bad, “Luck is the residue of design” - Branch Rickey.
2
Luck has nothing to do with it. In both of these examples, the US and UK have inflicted critical wounds upon themselves. And in both cases, the voters have been conned by right-wing charlatans for cynical political purposes.
The US, the UK and the world have serious problems that needed addressing, and in fairness the opposing parties didn't provide much in the way of alternatives. Serious, thoughtful, nuanced solutions were necessary, and both countries chose to solve them with a sledgehammer.
The US is led by an embarrassing, clownish buffoon whose policy solutions resemble those that an ill-tempered kindergarten student might concoct and whose connection to reality seems to have been severed. Not only is he not addressing the two primary crises facing the planet -- global warming and, to a lesser extent, economic inequality -- but he is making them much worse. The UK seems equally disconnected from reality, believing that they can leave the EU while retaining all of the benefits of membership. And Parliament, faced with no way forward (or back), is completely paralyzed.
To the extent that "luck" plays any role, in the past voters' bad decisions have been reversible, while these decisions may not. While Trump, god willing, will be removed in 2021, the damage he has done will last generations. And Brexit's damage, if it moves forward, may be permanent. Some damage can't be undone.
19
Mr Friedman
So many valid points in your grim assessment of world affairs torn asunder by seemingly unstoppable climate change providing rising reactionary forces with a new 'secret sauce' to ensure their spread and perennial nature.
The current Boeing jet scandal is also another grim indicator of a resigned sense of nihilism characterizing the private sector with ZERO sense of care for the community. When basic safety becomes an acceptable option risking the lives of passengers and others, it is hard to remain hopeful in the face of society's lack of reaction to this travesty.
I have never sensed humanity's death wish impulses to be stronger than today, so much mediocrity accepted as par for the course.
14
Our "luck ran out" when humans became the controlling species on the planet. It just took a while for the greed and violence to take over as population pressure and dwindling resources finally became the issue.
30
@claudia It’s temporary. We’re not likely to be around much longer. “Nature bats last” - Earth First!
3
@claudia Your meta-analysis is probably correct. But let's go down swinging. Luck works both ways, and predicting, especially the future, is a fool's game.
In this article a visionary leader comes from the european judeo-christian community espousing a multiparty democracy form of governance.
Having lived in the USA ,Europe, Australia, Africa and China I have to say that President Xi and his socialism with "local characteristics" is by far the superior system of governance for the 21st century.
The developing world ( 6 billion people) wants to be like China - not America - and Trump is helping the leaders and people of developing nations make up their minds once and for all. American exceptionalism today means "exceptionally bad".
The "West" has fallen apart. Tribalism has replaced democracy. The tribe that wins has the most money for electioneering.
Instead of wasting billions every year having meaningless elections for gridlocked parliaments China spends those billions on improving the lives of their people through poverty alleviation, infrastructure and education.
The Chinese model allows more funds to be invested in the future where as the "Western Democracies" have failed their people by abdicating government to selfish billionaire politicians or their representatives rather than spend the funds on projects that matter.
Case in point: 5g, quantum communications, fintech, EV's
8
@Alkoh Everything you're saying is true, or has a lot of evidence to back it up. What you've overlooked --- and it may not matter to some --- is the West's zealous protection of personal and religious liberties coupled with near-absolute freedom to express one's own voice. China, in stark contrast, outright crushes these.
It is odd to me that anyone would look to either the US or China as a benchmark of cultural evolution, when both embody a betrayal of the human spirit in different but fundamental ways.
32
@Gregory Scott
The last sentence— brilliant!
How much improved is life for China's Uyghurs, locked up in internment camps or subjected to digital surveillance at every turn?
You miss the point. Many Americans have decided that we have done more than enough for the Western World and others. We have spent enough time, money and most importantly, lives in trying to stabilize and help other nations and organizations. Time for some return on investment. Best example of the absolutely obnoxious behavior of those we have helped is Germany’s failure to spend a paltry 2% on Defense. Oh they will explain how they really do, we are counting wrong and so on. Well, if I were they I would make sure that 2% was very obvious
Probable outcome, we continue to slowly pull back and let the game come to us.
@Tim Dowd Your description of the dissatisfaction that has long been brewing is accurate enough, but there is more to the story. That time and money spent nominally on the rest of the world was in large part skimmed back into our own pockets to pay various contractors and manufacturers and acquire favorable conditions for the expansion of our own commercial interests. The lives we plowed into those efforts were only a fraction of those we ended or uprooted to serve our myths of dominance and exceptionalism.
14
@William Wescott
...and let's not get started on just _whose_ lives they were.
You omitted the China problem.
We thought Cold War had been over after dissolution of Soviet Union. No, never!
China is communist 2.0, upgraded dictatorship bolstered by western capital and technologies which they stole from us outrageously. Deng Xiaoping deceived US and European capitalists successfully and eventually his successors created an unprecedented smart and advanced dictatorship in human history. And, Kim Jung En and crazy Iranian regime are following China’s footstep of deceiving western people, too.
Trump is the American people’s best answer to China and related problems in the previous elections. He has been incomparably better than Obama and there seems no alternative from Democratic Party for the coming elections, too.
We need general-like tough leader to fight against Chinese dictatorship. It’s hard to imagine anyone among naive and crazy democrats and liberals.
4
@Young
Surrendering Western industry and know-how was a BIPARTISAN decision, both right and left wingers on all sides of the political spectrum cast their principles aside back in 1979 with Deng Xiao-Peng. You know, the nice guy at Tiananmen Square.
7
@Young
Where are the results of the "best answer to China and related problems"?
He has NOTHING to show for all his posturing
Nothing.
However, zero is not an appropriate answer.
If one counts all the relationships #45's recklessness has poisoned - for instance, with the EU - the results are negative.
The longer he stays - yes, he stands a chance of going beyond 2020 - the worse the results would be.
4
@Young - the Chinese did not “steal” anything. They simply beat us at our own game: the game of ruthless capitalism, acquiring anything and everything they could, in any way they could. Look in the mirror.
2
If there is a purpose to life, perhaps like Tikun Olam, then we need leaders who can direct us to fulfill that mandate.
If there is no purpose to life then we have to recognize our pretenses and adjust accordingly. May the most odious bacteria win!
5
@Texan
Not sure about Tikun Olam, but Christianity is flourishing in the growing parts of the Western World. If you know Jesus, then you reject the endless wars of dominance for land, and you reject storing up your earthly treasures here today that can be turned to dust in just minutes.
America is still a predominantly Christian nation. That is why millions yearly come here still, even to practice other religions. Christians don't fear, nor do we easily surrender. We will protect our minority brothers and sisters too, sometimes from their own peoples. America is NOT a religious state though, for good reason.
Buck up, Mr. Friedman. It may seem your past has caught up to you. Others have more courage and faith in their futures. Read them.
Luck? It was never luck. Democracy, freedom, and economic growth are hard work. A distracted, ill informed populace leads to the election of incompetent leaders. Thanks, Fox. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Kochs.
47
I suggest that the plastic moment of 1989 was, looking back, the precursor to two decisions that are costing us to this day.
There was the counterproductive decision to expand NATO to Russia's borders, rather than to dissolve it. I can't think of anything that nationalist elements in Russia would see as more of a provocation, and they exploited it.
Secondly, there were the über-free-market Chicago school advisers egging on the Russians to shrink their government's services and sell off its assets overnight, with a very predictable rapid enrichment of a few (ironically, largely former communist apparatchiks) alongside the more prolonged impoverishment of many.
These two factors guaranteed the rise of a nationalist strong-man like Putin, and led to the reincarnation of the cold War in cyber form - much less expensive for an aggressor than military confrontation and much more effective.
Obviously, there have been many other mis-steps since - such as Iraq, Brexit and election 2016 - but that moment of triumphalism in1989 is when our luck started to run out.
22:05 EDT, 4/30
29
@mancuroc Bravo for this analysis! This comment plus many others and Friedman's article itself diagnoses the problem well. Now we await leaders who are up to the task of public policy which logically flow from analysis. Those leaders will be the anti Trump and in the model of those who arose after WWII, that is, those who believe in enlightened self interest and those who realize how truly interconnected we all are, including problems to be solved, that is, in concert. In our country some of the Democrats show real promise and I trust that there will be new leaders to emerge in Europe as well, Macron being one of them. Unfortunately the English seem to have strangled whatever they might have contributed with the Brexit catastrophe.
4
@mancuroc
So are you still waiting to reap the benefits of that 'peace dividend' promised by Bush Senior after the Berlin Wall collapsed? The military-financial complex would never have allowed peace to stand in the way of a few 'profitable' good wars (Kuwait, Balkans and Iraq) that needed to be waged in order to justify the US military's raison d'être.
1
The worldwide culture of the celebration of celebrity has hollowed out many western democracies. As Trump has said people have to look the part, rather than having the credentials to assume the responsibilities. The shallowness of this thinking has brought about obvious devastating results. Imagine having a brain surgery from a doctor that looks the part, but has no experience in the operating room. What a scrambled mess that person would leave behind.
Our luck has run out not because of the calibre of men in high positions, but because an ignorant and totally facile population has put them there.
Study the vacant look of people at a Trump rally, it tells you all you need to know.
31
@Babel
At least the new president of Ukraine played the role of his nation's president in a sitcom show. Not sure whether Trump's reality show stint was of any use for him….
2
@Babel Did you note the Biden rally attendees? Talk of vacuousness... they were
yawning and dozing off from the first minutes.
But then, how much fake animation can there be for political speeches?
For many of the countries mentioned, the Second World War and the decade following was the last time that virtually the entire population worked together for the common good. As with any collective effort the whole proved to be greater and more productive than the sum of the parts. And the post war period benefited enormously from as this same industry continued. But this social cooperation slowly lost steam and morphed into the "cult of the individual" or self-interest on the micro scale. A valid loathing and fear of Communism (a genuinely terrible system) was hijacked so that any social policy or cooperation was demonised as Socialism. There will not be any more of your enlightened self interest Mr Friedman as personal self interest is here to stay and any sense of working together for the best of society is dead.
15
It was never luck. It was skill. I would hold that the luck falls with the extremists if today. And their luck will run out. They took advantage of a changing communications climate indeed. They did what was so obvious was possible. They spread false ideas through the interconnected, global network that is the internet. Why we weren’t prepared for it, I have no idea. It was one step on the chess board. No 3D necessary. We should have seen it coming and should have stopped it.
It was the look on the IC directors’ faces that worried me when they testified to Congress that the Russians had essentially hacked the election. They looked stumped. Shocked.
But how is that possible? Didn’t they know this would happen? Rogers looked like he hadn’t slept in years. I had always thought that not only did they know this would happen, but that they were prepared for it. I was surprised. And frightened.
In any case, perhaps this is a light reminder for us to be involved, to renew our hope in a brighter future, to remember the darkness that lies beneath.
Their luck will run out. Ours has only just begun.
8
@Jane L I suspect that it was both - luck and skill with some good timing as well.
1
@Philip: Indeed, it is the U.S. inability to recognize the unique historical circumstances that led to an unprecedented and unsustainable degree of world domination in the post-WWII boom that hampers all discussion about what the country’s next steps should be. As long as we’re smoking our own dope about how the Great American Character will naturally rise to the top, we will continue to flounder in the naive fantasyland of MAGA and the belief that further isolation is somehow the key to success.
14
The growing social connectedness and grassroots trust as exhibited by the world wide women's, climate, or science marches, or by international use of social media and apps like Airbnb, VRBO, or Uber, WILL counteract the trends described in this pessimistic article. Sharing is increasing everywhere , from scientific collaboration to Freecycle to person to person finance. At the touch of a screen you can learn and spread the details of any individual's story, or any country's actions. For instance, the New Zealand massacre response has inspired and emboldened activists in the United States. Real people, billions of them, are paying attention, looking for answers, and taking action. I still believe that the majority of them ascribe to human decency and sympathy. All is NOT lost.
6
I hate to add to the gloom described in this article, but I foresee a potentially greater danger. Our rapid growth in technology may make the majority of humanity obsolete and unneeded. Robotics and artificial intelligence may soon become dominant.
12
I'm 59, and grateful that I will only live 25-40 more years. I keep running into people my age who feel the same way. I worked in technology for a very long time, live as a single woman in a beautiful gated community, vote Democratic, worked for years on progressive causes, and feel at the whims of forces beyond my control. In some sense, I'm worn out. And that's maybe the greatist risk...that people who've had the fire in their bellies give up. I hope a presidential contendor emerges who inspires me and people like me to engage. In the meantime, I encourage younger progressives to push the fight forward. Older people don't have the same concerns you do. We don't need to worry that in our lifetimes, everything will be upended because of climate change or the changing global social and economic environment. Social Security will be there a while longer and in the meantime we can pretend it's all OK. You've got a much bigger challenge ahead. Take charge. Demand your seats at the table. In the years ahead, I might lean on a walker, but I'll be by your side.
73
@Mary McCue
One of my major frustrations is that often Democrats "hope" a presidential contender emerges who "inspires them to engage".
My question to you is this. Did you wait to be inspired to write a school paper or present a report to your colleagues? Did you wait to be inspired to find your first job? Many of us needed to buy food and pay rent. We had to find a job, even if the first one wasn't our "dream" job. The next step? We worked hard in order to keep it or get promoted into one we liked better. We showed up early, stayed late when necessary, even when we didn't feel like it.
It’s a fundamental lesson about being successful: we make a personal decision to be part of a winning team. We aren't all stars or quarterbacks. The end goal is to encourage ourselves, our friends, strangers to show up for practices, to go door to door, work the phones to build a better team. The team that brings in the most votes wins. This Democratic process is a team enterprise. We help deliver smart, competent and resourceful representatives who will advocate for Democrats’ policies being passed and judges being appointed. Staying home because you are not "inspired" makes the team lose by default. The other side holds its nose and supports the most imperfect candidates. Pretending it's okay to have no personal power is a loser's game.
8
@Mary McCue I'm confused,well, not really.
You say you're grateful you'll only have to live
25-40 more years of your burned out life. You're "worn out from working on progressive
issues for years". Why then would you recommend young people pick up your fallen
baton and face the same unhappiness?
1
@Mary McCue
I worked in technology for a very long time, live as a single woman in a beautiful gated community, vote Democratic, worked for years on progressive causes, and feel at the whims of forces beyond my control. In some sense, I'm worn out. And that's maybe the greatist risk...that people who've had the fire in their bellies give up.
--------
Good. Maybe the lives you have built for yourselves, and the progress you've given the country through your work and your votes, in the end were not worth it.
Time to go in a different direction. Plenty of security for you and those of your generation to rest now and watch better work be done. Fire in the belly lives in the living, it's natural to age and rest and let others empower themselves, as you have done in your times.
Take care, as this next generation is not about leaning in the right direction. We're on the move.
1
How this has happened in just two years is mind blowing. What we have worked so hard to achieve, torn asunder with nary a whimper from the left. I hope the 1% get Mars ready, cause they won't be able to live on planet earth either after all their machinations are realized.
15
@Valerie Wells
Living on Mars is much harder than generally thought!
However, yes, in a 100 years' time we can readily envisage the 1% living in besieged enclaves that will be much like hermetically sealed bases on hostile planets.
1
@Valerie Wells Two years? Did you like life under the Bush and Obama administrations, or do you just not remember? This isn't a partisan problem, nor will you find a partisan solution. The Washington establishment, and the leaders embedded there permanently , are rot. Do you trust the intelligence agencies? A fan of Comey still?
Let us know when your rocketship to Mars is ready for liftoff so we can salute your work. Better to escape there than through drugs or excess. Realism is for the strong.
@Valerie Wells, in the meanwhile Canada might start a building boom to house all the displaced wise people who are smart enough to move out of the kakistrocracy that America is becoming.
This op-ed is dated April 30, 2019, 230 years to the day George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States. In my lifetime of 71 years I have seen the legacy of this nation, as stated in the Preamble to the Constitution, defiled and so many opportunities that legacy had created squandered. I'm talking about Vietnam, the backing of death squads in El Salvador in the 1980's and invading Iraq, to name just three. Now, what we have wrought is a mountain of trillions of dollars of debt, a polity so divided it severely limits action and a world in near chaos. Still, we must persist in honoring our cherished legacy. There is great hope in that.
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@Robert
Another 71 year old here.
There can be no hope if our cherished legacy has been disassembled,rendered inoperable, and sold to the highest bidder by the elements you list. There can be no cherished legacy if the evils of a self-serving government giving final control of our nation and lives to the oligarchy have put all decency and justice on ice in the morgue.
What you describe as great hope is, I am very sad to say, only wishes and fond memories of that which will never be again. We are like the old lady in Titanic who says, "it exists now only in my mind". America had its chance; we were fortunate to be alive when it did, but the best we can hope for now is a long, slow, but grand funeral.
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@Dan Fannon
Respectfully, don't all aging old men feel like this? That the world is going to keep on turning, but you all won't be here to see it?
Be glad the only things you have to complain about in your security here now is the future. Your way of life is indeed dying out, to be replaced by others who will enjoy for them a more prosperous future. Your death is not universal, we will be here when you are gone, and we too will manage, just as you have done. God bless on the next steps of your journey. Leave what you can behind here to help the ones remaining. Not as an inheritance, but as a sign that you were here and contributed to a successful future for others beyond yourselves.
Plant a tree, perhaps?
1
i think things are not so dark. trump is likely to be replaced by an enlightened Democrat, the brits will get themselves together and western europe will stay sane. the japanese and chinese have every reason to seek a stable world of free trade, and putin will not rule russia forever. there will always be hotspots but in the end the arc of history bends toward sanity for the simple reason that it assures the survival of the species. here in the u.s., our first priority has to be getting rid of trump and any extremist republicans who might succeed him and as part of that we can do such simple things as returning the Fairness Doctrine so our public airwaves can't be used to distort our politics. we've had 2 plus years of decline under trump, but that is being challenged now by a democratic majority in the house and the better angels of the american public rising up in protest. propaganda and lies have distorted our recent politics, but that era is passing and a better one lies ahead.
17
@reid, if the Democratic maelstrom of candidates doesn't commit politicide before the nomination and manages to unite behind whatever candidate is inaugurated, Trump will not likely be replaced - he'll likely be re-crowned. God save us all.
4
@CP Things aren't so bad for people under Trump right now. Why risk destabilizing the precious little government structure we have? To further divide the country in two, and plunge us into another financial crisis?
@Midway, the country is already divided in two. What is desperately needed is a way to heal and restore unity in a gradual and attentive manner, but I see as a more likely prospect a giant and sharp reaction away from trumpism and all its tenets and tentacles among the majority that this administration is trying to hold down. Barring that hoped-for electoral revolution, I foresee the sad firm establishment of the right-wing "empire of America" and most of us being run into the ground while the corporate, political and religionist aristocracy/kakistocracy soars. I hope for and will work for the restoration of true American values, but fear the latter. Worse, I see few Democratic candidates capable of the kind of leadership we need, and - obviously - no Republicans.
Democracy only works when everyone plays by the rules. Republicans never will do that in their current state, so Democrats must at minimum match them and play on their terms, at least for the next election cycle. Good luck to us all; we'll need it.
Our luck ran out on 9/11/2001. Our nuclear arms no longer protected us, our oceans no longer protected us. Our feckless leaders responded by starting an endless unwinnable war in the world's toughest country to fight in (Afghanistan) and an unnecessary war in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 (Iraq). This further destabilized the most important unstable region of the world and ended by strengthening two countries that have long been our foes (Iran and Russia). In America's past, every great crisis has brought forth a leader great enough to master it: Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt. Since 2001, George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump. America has had far more than our fair share of luck since 1776, but our luck ran out on 9/11/2001.
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@Danielle Shelley, two Vietnams in one generation. That has to be some sort of human history low.
2
@Danielle Shelley These 'unnecessary' wars will not end or change, for the war machine supports too large a portion of our economy. It's that simple.
2
BZ
I agree, It feels like our luck and the luck of humanity is running out. But, I am hoping this brilliant essay becomes the core of the Democratic field of Presidential candidates. I have not read or heard anything so effectively written that summarizes the challenge and model for reversing this mess. I haven't read Burns' new book but I agree with his thesis and it reinforces the "plastic moments" history and the four climate changes matrix that puts a spotlight on the leadership currently needed.
I have been trying for a long time to say what you have written and I have researched and driven the librarians crazy in trying to understand how the realistic sanity of Bretton Woods came to pass.
I was trying to write my revival sermon for globalization and the need to deal with the very difficult challenge of creating a new non-fossil source of energy that would scale to the projected World population and also increase the standard of living and health of all humankind. "Enlightened Self-Interest", fundamental to ethics, economics, survival of our species, and the golden rule.
Wow!
You said it all in this one essay.
You will be quoted in my next paper. I hope you will read "Silent Earth" and "Spaceship Earth" solutions by my friend, James Powell, the inventor of superconducting Maglev transport and the Maglev Launch System that can provide the World with 2 cents per kilowatt hour energy (very cheap) from space based solar energy generating satellites.
12
The pathway to a reunited future begins with the Trump impeachment. We need the rule of law, which is at issue in this impeachment inquiry. A liberal world order revolves around rules. We cannot have both a President and a Republican political party who are more committed to authoritarianism and obstruction of justice. In short, we need to clean up our own house first.
I know that the Republican party is going to obstruct. That is what they do. In fact, that is all that they do. The GOP stands for '(G)ot n(O) (P)lan. But the rest of us need to stand for the rule of law. And if the Republican Party continues to resist, then history will judge them harshly.
Beyond that, we need to communicate in the next election (2020)that we are also committed to restoring our leadership role in the world. We need a Democratic party that commits itself to leadership through peace, not through creating divisions.
13
Leadership can have very good outcomes for those around the world, or can stir up civil war, hatred, etc. I believe that this happened when George W. Bush went into Iraq. The consequences of the excursion to deal with Al- Qaeda, and find Osama Bin Laden were poorly thought out. The plan should of had 100,000 more troops, a one and done year, capturing those who took over the country, sealing off the caves where they thought he was, and gotten out. It morphed into one of the worst examples of war, destruction, death, and refuges, starting in 2002, with totally false premises of going into Iraq, a very dangerous policy. I believe those decisions, started out with small groups who had nothing in common, then Barack Obama stirred the idea of easy Democracy, others for the overthrow of governments all across Africa, and the middle east, in the name of religion. This was a disaster, because of the lack of leadership from the intelligent leaders in the world. Milllions killed, millions of refugees laid at the feet of western Europe, and trillions spent with absolutely nothing to show for it. What is the state of Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc.? The question that needs to be asked, was whether what the west did, actually destabilized much of the world, as dictators, like Putin, and Xi Jinping, saw an opening with ulterior motives, not for the good of the countries, but so they could retain power in their own countries by appearing powerful? Here we are.
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@MaryKayKlassen
Wonderfully written. This is what the editorialists and thought-tank leaders in Washington need to be reading. But they have been bought and paid for by foreign interests who want America's military to war, at the U.S. taxpayer's expense. We cannot afford open borders and endless wars. The American people know this.
1
Our luck has run out.
Democracy was first tried in Athens during the Age of Pericles. But democratic governments made bad decisions leading to a war with Sparta. In the aftermath, philosophers like Plato criticized democracy because the majority made bad decisions. A century later and cities like Athens were under the control of autocratic governments.
Democracy lasted over 200 years in the US, but it is now coming to an end. Once again the majority made bad decisions, in Vietnam and Iraq. But its most serious mistake was ignoring population growth before it made global warming inevitable. The rise of Trump is a signal that the poor no longer believe their elite masters who read the NY Times, and choose autocracy instead.
Tom Friedman, like most of the NYT pundits, is in denial. The measures proposed to handle global warming cannot work because nobody is addressing the cause, which is too much population growth.
So even before the sea levels rise, the poor of the world are running out of resources and migrating to the "advanced" countries in the northern hemisphere and destroying their democracies.
Thomas Friedman and his fellow pundits cannot admit reality---that China was on the right track with its one-child policy. That the US needs to lead an effort to promote lower birth rates in the third world.
Without that, population growth will continue to cause third world countries to increase their use of coal and other polluting energy sources.
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@Jake Wagner
Excessive population growth? Are you aware that China has scrapped its one-child per family policy as it’s realized that there won’t be enough working people to take care of the growing population of elderly, let alone pay for their healthcare and other needs?
4
China’s one child policy wasn’t self sustaining and China has backed away from it. It’s clear that promoting birth control vs enforced one child policy may be a more pragmatic approach. Amending diet (changing the carbon impact of America’s current diet) and growing environmentally friendly solutions to transportation, manufacturing systems, agriculture, and construction are also vital. The current American minimalist and mindfulness trends are also positive steps.
3
@Jake Wagner, for the world to survive, its population must shrink. That happens by conscious control (acknowledging it will be hard on smaller subsequent generations), by natural disasters or by war. Control is the right answer; the others are unthinkable. China was wrong to reverse its policy.
2
you are far too sanguine. The golden period lasted after WWII for perhaps 15 years (ten if you take the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising as an endpoint. Coming out of the war there were indeed efforts to rebuild Europe and spread democracy. On the domestic front things had never been better, at least unless you were black. While the liberal elites sneered at the growth of suburbia, plenty of people felt like they were living in a golden age where housing was affordable, public colleges were good and inexpensive, crime was low.
While much of Europe continued to prosper, you can make a claim the era was over by the twin tragedies of the Vietnam war and struggle for civil rights. Certainly it had ended by the 1970s, with hourly wages flat since 1973 while productivity has more than doubled since then. All the growth went to the .1% who continue to fund the Republicans to keep it that way.
1989 ended up being a tragedy. One can imagine a Russia that joined the democratic movement but instead they have plutocrats and Putin. A place our wealthy admire, no doubt, but hardly an ending to take pride in.
Given the contempt the .1% have for the rest of us, their bending of laws to keep it that way, a Supreme Court as political as it has ever been that lets anything the wealthy want go, the road ahead is not a happy one.
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I asked my son, aged 31, if he was worried about the future, given climate change, the growing inequalities, etc. He is a thoughtful young man, smart, very much a skeptic, but warm-hearted. I trust and value his thoughts. His answer: "We'll be allright, my generation, but I worry about the future for those younger than we are, my 3 year old nephew, say. Their world will be a tough one."
13
Friedman talks about four climate changes, but only one is truly important, and that is what he calls the climate of the climate.
You can see it happening in the far north. Russia now plans to have ships cross the Arctic along the north coast of Siberia, made possible by warming temperatures.
The climate change of climate will raise sea levels, slowly drowning cities along the coast, and perhaps driving humans extinct within a few hundred years.
But we needn't worry about that. Climate change is a consequence of too much population growth, and before humans go extinct they will have a period in which the resources run out.
The population of Africa is slated to double by 2050 and there will be many Syria's, producing streams of refugees to destabilize the governments of Europe. And population growth continues in Guatemala, overwhelming any limits that one might want to set on immigration.
Trump claimed there is a crisis at the border, and that crisis has materialized, whether through the policies of liberal activists in Pueblo sin Fronteras who recruited members of the migrant caravans, or a consequence of a stalemate on immigration in a US government that no longer functions.
And Trump is right about one thing. If the immigration becomes permanent, he may be reelected, or be replaced by another "populist" who at least listens to the fears of America's own poor.
Thomas Friedman entertains with his essays as America enters the path to a Malthusian self-destruction.
11
Let's not look at the past with rose-tinted glasses. Pax Americana was not great for everyone. Western Europe and East Asia did very well after World War II, but the Middle East and Latin America did not. The fall of the Soviet Empire was great for Eastern Europe, but not for Ukraine, Russia, or the Central Asian parts of the USSR.
The result of Pax Americana was the largest gap between rich and poor countries in the history of humankind. Just like extreme income gaps within a country, extreme income gaps between countries are not sustainable. Eventually, poor countries are either going to get their act together and challenge the existing system (like China) or collapse (like parts of the Middle East and Africa).
Fortunately, more poor countries fall into the former category, and the gap between rich and poor countries has started gradually shrinking since around 2000. In the long run, this (and the aging demographics in all countries) will likely make the world geopolitical environment more stable.
3
I think it is worse than our luck running out. Russia's intelligence services have evidently succeeded in undermining US democracy to the point that Putin might be able to ignite civil war in the USA. He has gotten a puppet installed in the White House who is assisting Putin to achieve his strategic goals. The US is estranged from NATO and the EU is partially dismantled. US trade relationships with its main partners are fractured. The US has initiated a trade war with China, weakening both, which is no doubt deeply satisfying to Putin.
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The world's problems encapsulated in a single op-ed. Where to gain a foothold here? America cannot solve all of these problems. But Americans can lead. A good start would be voting Trump out. We need to include his enablers, too.
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Climate change fostered the drought in Syria that eventually led to the civil war and the refugee crisis in Europe.
The influx of refugees exposed the chasm between the elite of Western Europe who were to have no or little contact with the refugees in their daily lives but told their ordinary citizens that it was their moral duty to suddenly to accept and integrate thousands of people whose culture and religion seemed medieval to them while they were feeling insecure about their own futures.
In England the Conservatives austerity programs in the face of the 2009 recession stressed the ordinary citizens and then the Tories blamed the problems on the refugees and said leaving the EU would solve their problems.
In this country the left behind in an information in global economy were told by Republicans that undeserving Blacks and Latinos were living well on welfare while they were working at barely above minimal wage and immigrants pouring in would take even those jobs from them.
No people on power in England, Western Europe or here paid any attention to the left behind or the insecure majority.
Here Trump said he understood how they felt and he alone could set right the injustices that had been inflicted apon them and he was elected. Of course he lied and only has his set interest first and last.
Until there is unlightened self interest in that our elected officials put their first duty not to be re elected but to help the left behind and the 65% nothing will change.
11
Yes, "our luck" if you should mean with this the luck of an US wage earner, has run out.
But not if you are a wage earner in China. There you will be lucky for another 20 years. (Although some industry, such as textiles are beginning to move to lower wage countries)
More generally
In a global economy, high wage islands , such as the US, with wages 10 times higher than the global average, are destined to be unstable in the long run
Under free trade, wages must converge to the global average. That is downwards in the US and up in China.
The evidence is overwhelming that this is happening.
The crucial problem is how politicians in high wage islands handle it. So far, not well.
They are not helped by economists who continue to deny that the problem exist (specialization will save us, tariffs are evil , data are not fine grained enough to be sure etc , see Krugman)
No. specialization will not.
China can make anything the US and then some the US has yet to achieve such as quantum based communication pr putting a rover on the dark side of the moon.
An interesting possible solution is that of international agricultural trade. It has settled down on an elaborate , mutually agreed set of tariffs , that minimize friction .
Occasional flare ups, over Canadian dairy imports being protected by 200 % + tariffs not withstanding.
4
The European Union has failed. Admit the inevitable. It was only a viable "economic institution" with the military buttress of NATO. (Read US military participation here.) Europe reached failure during the 20th Century. Only to be salvaged from complete collapse by American intervention in two global conflicts. America is now drawn inward. Largely the result of inept and ill-advised agendas of its globalist elites. (Viet Nam being the most notable example.) As the"military shield" recedes, outlying areas of the globe will destabilize. Prosperity will increase in North America as capital seeks safe haven. And then, after an interval of time, global consensus will reappear. (Hopefully, with more global participation.) It is merely the ebb and flow of history.
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@R By what standards has "The European Union failed"????!!!! By mine, it's arguably achieved more, & overcome more obstacles, in little more than half a century than any other human endeavors in history.
2
@Philip When one of the larger and most stable members of an institution seeks to withdraw (Britain), it signals systematic failure. The European Union will be incapable of taking the next step, responsibility for its regional security. As previously stated, Article 42.7 of their Treaty only functions with the assistance of NATO. America, a nation of 325M+, should not be required to defend a region of 500M, which has parity of wealth.
@R
This vision is like the famous New Yorker cover.
Europe, as seen from Texas.
Mr Friedman relishes big truths, except when they hurt. American Exceptionalism was always more about self interest than enlightenment. The question Trump forces us to face is whether— now that our luck may indeed have run out— we retain a real capacity for honest introspection. Reparations, for instance.
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Merkel is a leader in the Western tradition. So, we have one. There are several such leaders in the Democrat's set of presidential candidates. All is not lost.
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I wish Friedman could discuss these issues without his catchy phrases - 4 climates, plastic moments, interconnected world to an interdependent one, etc. It tends to lessen important issues relative to his demonstration of cleverness.
15
Mr. Friedman should have probably also cited the continuing issue of militant jihadism as another problem requiring collaboration with our allies and with other world powers but regarding which our feckless leader prefers a go-it-alone approach. ISIS no longer has its "caliphate" but neither it nor al-Qaeda (nor any of their regional subsidiaries) have been wiped out. Trump has taken his victory lap (though most of the dirty work was performed by the Kurds and by Russia and Iran) but these organizations are sure to strike again in a big way, and yet The Thing in the Oval Office has yet to reach out to our NATO allies, let alone to Russia and China- both of which are similarly threatened by such non-state entities- to establish a common strategy in order to defeat this terror. Taking the issue to the U.N. would be a good start but Trump appears to have no greater regard for that body than he does for the idea of working with any other.
comment submitted 4/30 at 11:19 PM
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@stu freeman
I think we can broaden this to all non-state criminal groups. The more states weaken, the more such groups will fill the vacuum and the harder it will be to implement solutions through treaties or other forms of cooperation.
9
@stu freeman
Obama took his victory lap in 2012, when he withdrew American forces from the middle east and declared ISIS junior varsity. When it was apparent that terrorism was not a thing of the past after Ambassador Stevens was assassinated using weapons the CIA had provided to Libyans to effect regime change, Obama/Hillary lied and pretended it was a spontaneous event to which spontaneous protesters brought mortars.
The reason Hillary said "What difference does it make?" is because the lies had their intended effect, getting Obama reelected.
@ebmem: Even if all of that were true (and it's not) how does that excuse Trump?
1
Luck is very much the correct word because it means random, unpredictable events that cut toward ill or favor.
Bad luck #1, constantly and incorrectly analyzed as a "white nationalist" turn, was the fact that Trump got to the White House on a quirk. The biggest quirk was the Electoral College. We did not have a far right or a radical shift in 2016, the EC gave us one despite Mrs. Clinton getting almost 3 million more votes and almost 11 million more, in total, voting against Trump than for him counting third and no party candidates. This is not something to be just thrown away.
Brexit? What sane nation would set up an "advisory" vote on leaving Europe with a simple majority vote? Then, the advisory vote was taken to be mandatory. Why? Shouldn't at least 60% have been required? Shouldn't there have been two votes instead of just one? If that had been followed, the last three years of silly chaos would have been avoided.
The fault is not in us nor in our stars. It is in a failure, here and in the UK, to see the weakness in our voting systems and change them before disaster could strike. Yes, this is an historic moment, but it will take years before we fully understand it. Meanwhile, the root causes have been repeatedly misdiagnosed.
The west and east coast "elites", or thought leaders, have missed a really big point: Trump is in the White House because of the Great Recession. Those on the coasts mostly saw the recession on the evening news, not when they lost jobs/housing.
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@Doug Terry "Trump is in the White House because of the Great Recession" and also because of our archaic, "winner-takes-all", "first-past-the-post" electoral system. This system is also what made it seem perfectly rational to most Brits for a simply majority of less than 52% of voters (something less than 35% of the electorate) to represent the "will of the people" to destroy the country's economy.
7
@Philip
Did you know, Philip, that the Leave camp, anticipating a defeat by such a small margin, made many protestations about how it would not be decisive, nor a clear mandate to stay in the union, etc etc?
1
@Philip
Indeed. It started with the Republican presidential primary system that awards ALL of the delegates from specific states to the candidate with the most votes, meaning Trump could "win" early on with 33% of the vote with the rest being divided between the many other candidates. This ridiculous system had served the Republicans well, from their vantage point, because it gave a dominant, establishment candidate an easy path to the nomination. It backfired on them in 2016 and now they are facing the prospect of the end of the Republican party on the altar of Trumpism, which is truly an "ism" because, with most Republicans, whatever he comes up with on any given day is now mandatory.
2
In addition, Trump, and 'leaders' like him, are not really leaders at all. They are followers of their mad (as in crazy) rabid (literally and figuratively) base/voters. The commentariat keep giving 'the people' a pass; as if 'leaders' like Trump floated down and started 'doing this' bad stuff to us. No; all of them, all these 'leaders' were put here, and remain here, by the millions upon millions of their base voters. All these citizens vigorously, rabidly, agree with these 'leaders' and have them doing exactly what they want them to do; which is the clownish self destructive stuff Trump et. al. are doing, as described here by Mr. Friedman.
15
Tom, You should add India to the list of broken relationships. Trump is demanding India stop purchasing Iranian oil but that's not easily accomplished. India built refineries that are designed to work with the oil that comes from Iran. It's simply not possible to instantly change the refining process to meet Trump's latest demand which is subject to change at any moment.
Therefore, Trump has alienated another US ally known as India.
China must love Trump because Xi has made more progress replacing the US as the global superpower thanks to Trump than they ever could have imagined.
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Corporations are global and wealth accumulation has gone global --- which basically means that nation-states, individually, are not able to tax that wealth or redistribute it properly.
So people in Western democracies have effectively have lost their democratic ability to exert any kind of pressure that might protect a middle class or a working class.
Even if they vote out Trump and the wacky cohorts who have gone to the extreme right, ... even if they reject them and vote in a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, it won't make any difference ...because nation-states really have little leverage in a global economy.
The only solution is for people-power to go global. Yes. I am talking about global democratic institutions that can pass effective controls and regulations that would demand total transparency in the flow of money, and taxing it wherever it is in the world.
That's what has to happen.
15
@Wendy The EU is moving that way...it is one reason some "people" are pushing for Brexit; they like UK banking facilities and they don't want global rules affecting money laundering!!
What a tour de force. As I went line to next line and paragraph to next, saw it build up exactly as V S Naipaul once wrote. Kudos Mr.Friedman.
If you look at it, Mr.Trump is but a little, insignificant, being in all that is happening. What he is doing or not doing has little bearing.
World, civilizations, we, moving inexorably towards a bitter future. Climate we cannot control. Our fellow humans, we find we are not ready to confront. China on one side, Islamism another, we find giving away hard earned freedoms, values, of enlightenment. And its not ours to give-up .
The only easy answers are the wrong ones - Trump, Putin, Climate change, EU. Nations err, make wrong choices; Our corrupt leaders lack courage to respect emphatic choice we do make, ie Brexit!
And self-interests were never so ill-defined.
On the day Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi resurfaces, we find looking forward is as unpleasant as all that we thought we'd left behind. Break the mould and start again feels a good option. But who will lead? Trump on one side is amply in good company with those leaders on the opposite side who are unwilling and unable to confront Rep Ilahn Omar or Rep AOC! Not much there either then.
Depressing, what?
2
@ParagAdalja -- I disagree in that trxmp is doing untold damage. While the outrageous things he say and does get the headlines, the minions working for his people are knocking all the pins out from under civil protections, environmental quality, brakes on unbridled corporate abuse, and many other things. Every phrase in every law - yes, that's a lot of laws, but they're motivated - is under scrutiny and anything that checks private sector power or wealth is going to be eliminated. That damage will be staggering.
3
.."luck running out.."??.. Not yet. To turn to doom & gloom after only 2 years of Trump seems.. short-sighted. Certainly this is a pivotal time in history, as Mr. Friedman points out, but it's not the end. There will be much more to come, and no doubt things will progress in ways that no one now can imagine.
... Though perhaps it is our tendency to look at people like Trump as the arbiters of what the future holds.. that adds to our gloomy short-sightedness..
..The idea that we are insignificant or unable to influence the outcome becomes self-fulfilling.. when we don't make the effort, when we think it is only others who determine what comes.., when we say 'our luck has run out.'
-..No doubt we have plenty of 'luck' remaining..but we must step up and use it.
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Our luck ran out decades ago when centrists from both parties foisted misguided neoliberal policies on the advanced countries, leading to massive persistent trade imbalances, the hollowing out of the middle class and the enrichment of a tiny elite that captured our democracy with unrestrained campaign contributions and cynical manipulation of uneducated whites. We tried a global approach and the result is where we are.
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@Rich888 And what alternative would you propose? Unrestrained nationalism? Much worse.
Piling it all onto US Present Donald Trump or EU President Donald Tusk is quackers rather like Donald Duck. Our global institutions are out of date and have no teeth because they were designed under democracy to arrive at consensus before moving forward. US Congress can barely agree to fund government because the two parties are split over almost everything. The EU can't even agree to reform itself because all 27 member states need to agree. Probably what is needed is an evolved federated government that uses smart phones to directly connect voters to their representatives.
1
Each of Friedman’s plastic moments (including the present one) involve Russia has in a big way. It seems the West tries to solve the same problem every 50 years.
4
@James Hutson -- Don't forget the Middle East. Oil: the gift that keeps on giving.
@James Hutson
...all the way back to Peter the Great.
No mention of China. Seems to me to be the wrong time to develop an adversarial relationship with that country. To have a chance at ameliorating global warming, we can't ignore China's industrial and commercial might.All the world's might is required to work in harmony to make a difference.
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@sherm
China doesn’t give a fig about global warming.
1
A few thoughts. These "plastic" moments and great leaders you write about can only be written about retrospectively. If I want to read a history of the 20th century, that may be useful. For dealing with today's problems I find no utility in this particular history.
Second and more importantly because I live in Panama, I know something that apparently very few people outside of Panama know. Climate change appears to be a major factor in the declining level of Lake Gatun. This lake is a necessary feature of the Panama canals. As a result, the Panama Canal Authoriy has been forced to impose weight limitations on ships seeking to transit the canals. If this trend worsens and either of the canals must be shut down, the world will wake up in a big way. Six percent of the world's produced goods transit the canals each year.
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Mr. Friedman is correct in listing the challenges ahead and that their solutions are global, not national, but for the U.S. to have its brief run of luck to end will likely be the catalyst of forcing America to get off its pedestal and rejoin the rest of the world again at a peer level.
Since the end of WWII, the U.S., thanks to the natural buffer of two oceans, was the last power standing. Globalization and technological advances mean every nation has a shot at success and isolation is not possible and no longer an advantage. American leadership has been brief, a little over 70 years, and we are now peers with all others worldwide and facing the same challenges. The scepter is about to be passed and it is likely to be handed eastward and the world will become more Asian-centric. Luck has run out not just for the U.S., but for the whole of the West.
11
Brilliant insight, which is often true of Mr. Friedman's op-eds. While enlightened self interest might help the U.S. and the E.U. countries, it will do nothing for the outliers, like Venezuela, central America, Syria/Lebanon, and of course the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma which is 50+ years and going "strong".
If only the U.N. was enlightened, but then again, having China and Russia as permanent members was a kind of guarantee that when something urgent needed to be done, nothing got done. The only thing they coalesced over was condemning Israel. Oh, and that really helps resolve the Palestinian situation.
7
It will be interesting to watch Venezuela from this perspective. Tonight the violence in Caracas and fracturing will escalate and the only stop gap to outright civil war is the acquisition of arms, training, and the like ... the current regime cannot arrest everyone and it has to pay the army (the rule of remaining in power). It is in some respects a horrible experiment in global self-interest because I doubt the assistance or policies will be transparent or forthcoming. I think while some are running out of luck. Others never had luck to begin with.
4
I was just beginning to be swept up by the sweet rhetoric of some of the younger, dynamic Democratic candidates, but this column gives me pause. I haven't heard any candidates talk about the need for a grand vision for the world, much less articulate their own grand vision. To talk primarily about ourselves -- our health care, our workers, our economy, our border -- is to have no more enlightened self-interest about the world than the Republicans do.
17
@Susan. The USA has got to rescue itself from itself first, before being in a position to be the world leader it once was. The Democratic candidates have got to look inward for this election.
20
@Susan
Barack Obama's policies mostly stemmed from enlightened self-interest for the USA. In 2016, a large number of US voters proved that they didn't like that.
Friedman presents plausible arguments for the importance of global coalitions and their significance in negotiating "plastic" watershed events in modern history - and then concludes that our luck may be running out. Luck? I would suggest that good planets make their own luck, but that would be fatuous.
6
Interesting "our luck running out" and the dearth of far-sighted leaders occurred in parallel with the rise of plutocracy in both Europe and the United States. Hard to get buy-in on "democracy promotion" as an alleged rationale (really fig leaf) for America's continued relentless, failed, and bloody meddling everywhere and at once abroad when by objective standards the US is no longer a democracy at home.
Once more Krugman runs from facing up to the 400-pound gorilla in the room. So much of current global problems and unease (particularly those that emanate from the West) emanate from the slide of what used to be an arguably democratic US whose government delivered enviable governance to a whole polity that prospered to what is today a de facto plutocracy whose foreign policy is run by an off the leash military industrial complex profitably raising tensions around the world and whose domestic economic policies are determined by its corporate interests and a wealthiest .1% largely determined - with the assistance of a grovelling courtier political class DEM and GOP to separate the remaining 99.9% from their last disposable dollar (see pharma, medical and education costs) all while somehow convincing themselves that a focus on diversity and other social justice issues absolves them of any guilt for their fierce avarice, blatant self dealing and attendant bellicosity. Put the whole of the people first address the good governance deficit - everything else takes care of itself.
20
@Belasco Krugman?
Sadly, it's Western elites persistence in simply ignoring a large portion of their populations that has lead us to this mess. Many, many communities and people have been destroyed by the forces of globalization. Elites' response? Let them eat cake. Our elites have made it clear they care about the working class as much as the French Aristocracy cared about its peasantry--that is to say, not at all. If things continue to deteriorate, Western elites will not only have to worry about losing their money but their heads as well...
35
"The year 2019 will be remembered for a lot of things"
Personally, I suspect it will be remembered as the year the US President shut down the government, as a terror tactic to get money for his wall project. He could easily have gotten the money by repealing the 2017 tax cut, but he preferred to risk wrecking the country instead.
69
Thanks. I’m now more worried than ever.
But I guess that’s the idea.
19
Strong-but-not-strong-enough borders are extremely profitable for the wealthiest criminals on both sides of them. Trump is surely aware of this, and Trump seems to have zero interest, and possibly less than zero interest, of acknowledging it.
5
The longer we remain in denial that we are all linked together in this business of living, the farther apart we will grow. The comfort of mental blindness to be found in 'this is not our problem, but one that is happening elsewhere', is starting to wear thin and tearing at our global seams.
While luck is a wondrous commodity, along with good timing, a lot depends on those of us, willing, fit and capable to pull civilized nations through these complex times; and climate change plays a role in this global make-up.
Perhaps it would help to remember what caused the defeat of the Napoleonic wars, and a close shave with occupation, when Europe in WWII nearly collapsed: The death of many lives in the unrelenting snow by the arms of Mother Nature.
13
Friedman raises many salient points of how our world is changing, ending with how our leaders are more adept at breaking things than making things. However, he did not reference the metrics first utilized by Facebook that showed that readers would stay longer on a page that angered or disturbed them, thereby increasing advertising profits. This strategy was recently referenced by Brook's column that noticed that ordinary news is now called "Breaking News". It's bad enough that people profit from war and treating the sick, but when daily life itself is being exploited for profit I agree that the luck of the 99% has run out.
23
While I agree in general with what you write, you have left out the impact of big media, in particular, Fox News to sow internal divisions and create entirely false narratives that many people accept as true. In addition to fox, cumulatively, the briebarts of the media world and talk show bullhorns like Rush Limbaugh litter the countryside with their trump supporting lies and hate.
My point, way too much credit is given to social media and the Russian cyber interference in our elections- all bad- but worse are the big money interests that have bought off our politicians and corrupted large segments of the professional media.
Much is often made about the impact of Facebook ads made by Russian bad actors, what about the tv ads legally bought during election campaigns that largely distort the truth and fuel societal division?
Our luck may be running out and we do vitally need our institutions to hold sway but it’s the enemy from within that is weakening the foundations of our society far greater.
We do onto other nations as the Russians and likely other countries are doing onto us- all bad- but when we turn our back to the ideals of truth, we seal our own inglorious fate.
Don’t blame Facebook or Putin for that!
148
@Fred
True.
But mainstream media had a hand in electing Trump as well.
Trump was given free airtime constantly.
Les Moonves said that while Trump wasn’t good for the country, he was great for CBS.
Greed is destroying America.
16
Tom, luck may have nothing to do with it.
IMHO, we are likely approaching a moment in our evolution as a species where the enduring thread that connects all the world's great religious and ethical traditions - the Golden Rule - is all that stands between us and cascading environmental, economic, and political catastrophes.
As I offered in a piece entitled "A Brief Look Forward" at Daily Kos and HPLeft in December 2007:
"Finally, seen against the vast canvas of the emerging twenty-first century, my sense is that the human species has reached a moment in its development where cooperation and collaboration offers the only viable road forward. The era of nation states will not end, but the era where nations think only of themselves, and of their interests - in isolation to all others - must end. It strikes me that human evolution demands that blind selfishness surrender to what Alexis de Tocqueville described (when writing about the American spirit, as he experienced it during his travels in America in 1831) as "self-interest well understood". In our era of nuclear proliferation, environmental crisis, international terrorism, and global markets, we may have finally reached the moment when it has come to pass that what you do to your neighbor you ultimately do to yourself."
69
@Matthew Carnicelli
". . .we may have finally reached the moment when it has come to pass that what you do to your neighbor you ultimately do to yourself."
Indeed.
Along with its corollary, "what you do to your self, you do to your neighbor." Time now to make what has heretofore been unconscious, conscious. It is that "shadow aspect" that has been the underlying problem and is the bogeyman that we all need to face.
On the surface, it appears that we have been been --and are-- doing it to each other, while underneath we have been doing it but to our self and reinforcing it for each other all along.
The problem is not only systemic, it is paradigmatic. So, too is the solution.
5
@Matthew Carnicelli-Thank you for this principled and well-reasoned plea. Moves me to tears. I hope what your vision finds a world stage and helps lead us out of the current madness.
6
@Matthew Carnicelli
I think you are right to couch the issues we face in psychological terms: selfish obsessions are, in an interdependent world, destructive of both self and other. But I don't think "the world's great religions" will be much help, as they contain the dark elements of human nature no less than the light and are ill-equipped to deal with deep psychological dysfunction -- in fact they lend themselves to ultimate abuse and indulgence of the evil in humans: "God is on my side, my beliefs are God's Truth" and catastrophe ensues on every level.
But the urgency to see and understand the roots of selfish obsessions is becoming more obvious every day now that we have the ultimate example of malicious narcissism abusing us all day every day on TV. And we have the ultimate manipulator trying subvert the entire world in a Putin, the ultimate dictator trying consolidate absolute control of a billion+ in a Xi, and numerous small thugs trying imitate their more prominent exemplars around the globe.
I do not pretend to know how humans can, one-at-a-time, wake up, see the delusion of the isolated, singular self, and expand their self-identification to include all others AND our environment. Some religions include that semi-secret, esoteric ideal, but they are overwhelmed by its opposite, selfish obsession.
If anyone knows how we can, as a species, evolve beyond myopic, narrow self identifications, let me know. Because THAT is the problem.
2
Mr friedman makes some good points. However, like virtually everyone connected with the nyts and the left, he conspicuously leaves out perhaps the most important change since ww2. Human population was <2.5 billion in 1945. It is now pushing 8 billion. It is hard to imagine a factor that has influenced all the issues mr friedman talks about, and especially global warming than this number. To ignore it is certainly PC, but leaving it out does a disservice to journalism and telling the whole story.
112
@Al Actually, what you're saying is factually incorrect, not politically. While climate change is certainly affected by global population increase, most of it has to do with Western industrialization, with only China on the heels of the West for the past decade or so. (I suppose it may be politically incorrect too, blaming others for what we have done)
2
@Al Actually, what you're saying is factually incorrect, not politically. While climate change is certainly affected by global population increase, most of it has to do with Western industrialization, with only China on the heels of the West for the past decade or so. (I suppose it may be politically incorrect too, blaming others for what we have done)
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions
1
@Al
Population is important, but what about ignoring it is "PC" or leftist? Is it a major issue or talking point on the right? And even leaving out abortion, which side in the U.S. has done more to promote family planning (read: fewer children) domestically and abroad?
8
And even as Trump alienates our allies, diminishes coalitions, takes us out of agreements, devalues the State Department, puts his green son-in-law in charge of peacemaking, he would still have us believe that his fondness for Putin and Kim Jong Un are crucial diplomatic achievements.
17
It's been said that even the bitterest of enemies can be united by a common infection.
That, of course, assumes they recognize that they've become infected.
If one takes the historical view, and doesn't place to fine a point on the day to day effectiveness of multinational partnerships, it can certainly be argued that we have a lot more international cooperation capable of addressing many issues than we used to. After all, eighty years ago, there was no European Union, no NATO--indeed, no United Nations or International Monetary Fund or any number of other transnational institutions.
Of course, a lot of our current problems stem from the resentment of many towards such institutions, which they equate with elitism and autocracy. Indeed, such transnational organizations can act heavy-handedly, and are often dismissive of the less articulated concerns of dispossessed populations.
Still, though, there's little chance of handling a lot of these problems--particularly the climate and cyber ones--without an internationalist, indeed global, approach. We're going to have to get over our petty over-concern with spheres of influence and local supremacy, because if we don't, there eventually won't be any authority to maintain the trappings of civilization, and we may get closer to the Walking Dead than I think any of us would like.
8
It is often a matter of individual perspective whether global or national issues are crucial at any time.
1
@Khaganadh Sommu
When wouldn’t it matter?
Multilateral is democratic and participatory and interacts well with a competitive international capitalist system of rules-based trade.
The election of George Bush in 2000 brought an end to the age of multilateralism. His administration started pulling out of multilateral agreements and treaties from its first days. It used the word "sovereignty" to mean the right to act unilaterally and wraps it in the flag. The Iraq was not an aberration; it was the rule. The Republicans in treating the rest of the world like a banana republic turned the US into an even larger banana republic.
After Trump, the remainder of the world will never completely trust the US to be the keeper of the multilateral treaty or an institution again. The world will always know that another Republican president is just one election away.
The US is now the largest unstable world power in history. There are many shortcomings to the Chinese one-party state, but systemic erratic instability is not one of them.
Europe and the Far Eastern democracies are going to start to profoundly adjust their relationships in light of the new paradigm of enduring US foreign policy instability.
Many people both at home and abroad have now lost confidence in Washington's ability to manage foreign relationships with the countries of the eastern hemisphere of all and any stripe. That's a large part of the world to have alienated.
82
There is no such thing as luck (unless you with the lottery).The Presidents and statesmen of the past were there because we elected them to those positions. Back then, Americans got the country they deserved. Today, Americans are getting the country they deserve as well.
18
Lucky there was not yet a 2 term limit that would have kept FDR from being in the Oval on 12.7.1941.
1
@AL,
Yes, Luck exists..being in the right place at the right time...that syncricoty of life
Multiplying crises in every direction but the greatest existential threat is global warming. Thomas Friedman has almost nothing to say on the subject but it is far more important than the ambitions of a Putin, the rise of right wing extremism globally, the horrors of the Trump presidency, or the fracturing of the EU. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, global warming could very well spell the end of organized society. It seems to me obvious that global warming requires a global solution. And that is conceivable only if we begin to think the unthinkable--that the capitalist system is the culprit and only the extreme modification, or better the overthrow, of capitalism can save humanity.
6
@Harry B
I agree that unregulated capitalism is absolutely the problem but would suggest that the use of a phrase like, "overthrow of capitalism" will distract readers from an otherwise worthwhile point of view.
2
@Harry B
Overthrowing capitalism would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. The swamp water of unregulated, monopolistic, wealth concentration requires reins governed by an educated and dare I say enlightened democracy. (Your "extreme modification") Greed and selfish-thinking has to be countered with some basic humanity.
1
Harry, Tom Friedman has written several books on climate change. This column concerns leadership.
Friedman is unparalleled at reifying the cross dynamics governing the arc of world events. But the underlying energy overcoming the learned capacity for self interest comes from the overwhelming powers of greed and hate to obliviate reason.
The reason children don’t make adult decisions is because they can’t. The reason our nonadult leaders eschew enlightened decisions is because they can. Asking the electorate to become the adults in the room is probably, as Friedman indicates, just as feckless as thinking Trump would grow into his presidency.
He has connected with our greed and our hate. What preacher, or candidate, is going to reverse that? From whence commeth our enlightenment—Fox “news”?
Hate the poor, hate the disenfranchised, hate the reformers—they’re socialists, you know. And how about that Trump tax cut—brilliant justice for those truly convinced the poor are still too rich, and the rich are too poor.
You can have your enlightenment. It won’t float my yacht.
But what’s with all this lousy weather?
20
America elected a racist con-man as its leader. Tragic. We have squandered the idea that we are an exceptional, enlightened country.
562
@AM
An idea only held by Americans. It's the most patronizing and condescending mantra in international politics, and a very short leap from it to where you are today.
2
@AM completely squandered...
1
Gross World Product (like GDP, but for the whole world) ten years ago was around $70 trillion in today's money. A reasonable estimate for 2019 is $90 trillion. Population, meanwhile, has grown from 6.85 billion to about 7.7 billion. Therefore, the average person on the planet should have about 14 percent more to spend compared to 10 years ago. Why the pessimism? Because most problems turn out to require more work than the typical solution put forward at a TED talk or Davos Gulfstream gathering?
3
@Philip Greenspun
Because increasing income inequality - in a skewed distribution, many more are below-average than above.
Our luck hasn’t run out. It’s just in a temporary hiatus during the Trump administration’s incompetence and corruption.
Once the American people deliver their verdict next year, our country can get back to working in a coalition of countries on climate change, human rights, social justice and protecting democratic institutions.
We’re in a funk now but men and women in our country will realize that global problems require global solutions instead of the farce of “ America First”, rejection of international organizations and the sheer incompetence to run a foreign policy.
10
You need to write the book of your life Tom that can summon the common world citizen to do what is necessary to unite this world and fix our greatest problems.
Then give it away for free so we all can have it.
Now is the time.
Step up.
4
I know Democrats are pre-programed not to believe it, but Mr. Trump may well be doing the exactly right thing in an unstable world--he's concentrating on economic basics; he's keeping the economy on track with tax-cuts, deregulation, and easy money. Everyone conveniently forgets how, about a year ago, when the Fed was dead-set on raising interest rates, Mr. Trump practically ordered them to stop that and get rates down. It was a few days later that the Fed Chairman appeared before reporters to say, yes, he could do that. Everyone now agrees that was the exactly right thing to do, but Mr. Trump gets no credit for it. His tax-cut and deregulation moves have been just what the doctor ordered, and he has wisely pooh-poohed most climate ideas which everybody knows are really more leftist daydreaming anti-capitalist religion than science. Democrat ideas of 'world-unity' are actually a way to avoid responsibility for doing practical, useful things in our power to do, saying we need first to unite all peoples in a world crusade of cooperation and love, dancing around the altar of international climate control--Humbug! Don't wait for it. Praise to Mr. Trump for being a realist--not a distinction his opponents can claim.
4
@Ronald B. Duke
Yeah, I don't believe it. Extremely flawed. You'll believe it when you are ready.
11
@Ronald B. Duke
I don't think anyone, no matter how "lefty," wants climate change to be real. No one is daydreaming about it.
Climate change isn't something you believe or don't believe in, like Santa Claus. It's a question of risk assessment:
You can't sanely say there is zero risk of catastrophic human-caused climate change. There is SOME risk. The question is how much risk we are willing to take. If you knew the Boeing you were about to board had a 1 in 20 chance of crashing, you'd probably not get on it. So is even a small 1-in-20 chance of catastrophic climate change enough to convince you? And if not, what are the odds for which we should take action?
Of course we, Trump's opponents, realize that he's a realist. He only spouts what he thinks people like Ronald want to hear. If all of the Ronalds decided they wanted to fight climate change, he'd do a 180 like he always does, and then deny he was every against it.
6
@Ronald B. Duke
"Praise to Mr. Trump for being a realist"
A person who doesn't believe in science, or at least what the scientists tell us on climate change, is no realist.
5
The 60's were really bad, the country was tearing itself apart over Vietnam, a President assassinated, his brother assassinated, a civil rights iconic leader assassinated, civil disorder, riots, segregated schools. Then the 70's with the Watergate scandal and President Nixon's resignation, then the mid 70's with stagnation and the beginning of hyper inflation. Those two decades were horrible compared with today.
When 2020 comes along, the likelihood is we'll have a new Democratic President, and the country will start to address those four climate changes Tom Friedman writes about. And hopefully the first one of those four will be the climate change of the climate, otherwise.....
42
@cherrylog754, perhaps you have not noticed that the trip since 2000 (20 years) has hardly been smooth.
2
History is doomed to repeat itself. After decades of aligned democracies, we descend again into self-interested nationalism driven bu self-aggrandizing autocrats with no interest in the common good. The result will be the same as it has always been - an inevitable war. Who knows where or with who at this stage, but this is the path we are heading down.
19
I have to regrettably agree with your description of our global failings. I'm beginning to think that President Obama was the last decent chance our civilization had to come together as a civilization.
122
We have Mitch McConnell to thank for passing on that chance.
8
It’s doubtful, unless the volcano that is Yellowstone Park erupts, that our American luck will ever run out. We’ve survived horrific events before, events filled with our bloodthirstiness, racism, and pure stupidity, weird events like the Salem Witch trials, the Civil War, the destruction of the earth’s natural ecosystems. We’ve struggled and we have survived. It seems that we Americans can only muster Lady Luck’s charm when we hit rock bottom. We’re bottom dwellers. Today, Trump has got us on the bottom. It is the time for luck to appear.
5
Our luck ran out on Nov 8, 2016.
307
It’s a matter of luck running out only to those who had eyes but could not see wha was happening underneath their noses. Those, for example, like Mr.Friedman who engaged with the world by creating plausible fictions, colorable positions ,as the legal profession calls them, rather than recognizing and confronting the dangers unfolding in our rightward lurching kleptocracy for the past five decades. I’m sure he has been well served by his choice.
Yes, of course we can deal with global problems. But first we must dump Trump, the America First idiot who has no clue that we live on a planet.
394
"The year 2019 will be remembered for a lot of things, but in foreign policy it may well be remembered as the year our luck ran out."
More like our stupidity finally caught up with us.
Most conspicuously on November 8, 2016 of course, but one should acknowledge the ever increasing stupidity that brought us to the point of electing a President clearly incapable of performing his job and the continued stupidity evidenced by the steady 40%+ support for that same President even after he demonstrated his unfitness on a daily basis.
This is a self-inflicted wound. Luck had nothing to do with it.
654
@LT
"This is a self-inflicted wound. Luck had nothing to do with it."
I couldn't agree more. Instead of regarding the past several years as some sort of historical denouement, we need to spend more time examining how exactly we managed to squander the advantages that previous generations painstakingly accumulated for us.
65
@LT spot on!
4
There is such a disconnect between Mr. Friedman's discussion of the current "world order" and the state in which we find ourselves, as Americans. Mr. Friedman, a very thoughtful commentator, continues to treat Trump as if he were a "normal president". That is, Friedman describes Trump's actions as if they were based on reason and careful consideration.
This is patently absurd. The fact is, Trump is this nation's first dictator. He plans on being in office as long as his master, Putin, wants him to be there. And he will be in the White House for as long as he is useful to Putin.
The United States no longer has any independent public or private foreign policy. We have an ignorant, unfit man in the White House who is only there for one reason -- to do Putin's bidding. We have a complicit Republican party that will do anything necessary to ensure that Trump's reign remains unchallenged. And we have Trump's ignorant, rabid, heavily armed base who will follow him anywhere.
The fact is, this nation has become, under Trump, nothing more than an ignorant, racist backwater. Our "president" lies hundreds of times a month, and he has forty percent of us who will do whatever he says. We are a laughing stock on the world stage. We no longer have any international respect or prestige.
This is the America that Mr. Friedman should be describing. Because it is the America that those of us who must stay here will be forced to live in for many years to come.
767
@Henry Hurt
Spot on!
Luck has nothing to do with America's plight. It's exactly as you've described it here! Thank you!
38
@Henry Hurt
Unless Americans come to fully grasp what is at stake in 2020, then our luck will surely have run out. We have one foot inside a fascist dictatorship already -- with close to 40% of the electorate (or the full weight of a major political party) supporting Trump and holding him in such adulation. Reagan used to implore Americans to "clean house" -- meaning the Democrats in Congress. Unfortunately, democracy needs to be saved in America today from the corruption of the GOP. First step is to sweep as many Republicans from political power across the country as possible in 2020. America needs to wake up before it is too late....Please stop listening to Limbaugh and Hannity.
87
@Henry Hurt
I had no idea Putin was God. He selects our Presidents and will allow them to remain in office until he decides they are of no more use to him.
Ridiculous does not even begin to describe such foolish thoughts.
For the record: I loathe Trump.
19
Globalism failed. Stop trying to bring it back. The world is too full of evil men like Putin and Xi Jin Ping, who only want to see the downfall of America and the West. Only the most naive can believe otherwise.
6
@Greg, how exactly did globalism fail? By raising living standards of millions around the globe? By reducing global extreme poverty (most of which accounted for the massive increase in the numbers of Chinese middle-income earners)? Or perhaps it by consistently given Americans among the highest income-per-capital numbers humanity has ever seen. If you refer, as I assume you do, to the rising inequality at home, and “deaths of despair,” you should look to home. There is just now way to sugar coat this, so I’ll just say it: There are two parties, one of which is evidence-based and broadly wants to raise the welfare of all Americans; the other—well, is not. I hope you are smart enough to know who is who.
23
@Ricardo Smith-Keynes
There is no way to sugar-coat this- so I’ll just say it- You are wrong in every way shape and form.
1
@Greg
Your premise is based on the US and the West being the great purveyors of truth and justice, and that is not necessarily true. Rather it is global economic interdependence that will create a world of peace by making conflict to fearful to imagine. It is concentrated wealth and power that you implicitly espouse that risks the peace and prosperity.
6
It is easier to throw tomatoes than to grow them.
Today's leadership in a nutshell.
270
@Scott
And the real shame is that although it is easier to throw them, growing them is pretty easy too.
4
Our luck is depleted. We must take matters into our own hands.
Next year, we have to vote in a president steeped in diplomacy, knowledgeable about the globe, and responsible in outlook. We should now definitively promise our longtime allies that we will be back. Then we will make our own luck.
34
Yes, there were giants in those days.
10
@Salix
Back then, we saw far, far less of how the sausage was made.
This allowed for plenty of corruption and back-room dealing (more than now? I have no idea.), but also for people to be driven on occasion by sober reflection rather than the news cycle and a fragmented media landscape with every outlet "set to spin" for its own audience.
2
The problems that the US has are not global at all in my view. Immigration and keeping foreigners out of our country is not global. Infrastructure defects has little global impact. Improving our health care system (not insurance) is only somewhat global as we rob other countries of professionals. Being divided is also a local issue. I could go on but why bother.
10
@vulcanalex But another way to see our problems is that they were caused by the very people that Friedman so admires. The people who built the global military empire pushing our democratic values where they are not wanted. The same people who sold out our manufacturing to build the global economy. The same people who believe in no borders and no national culture. And now Friedman continues to push it because he is and has always been a media mouthpiece for those people.
4
@Abbott Hall The global economy is what has allowed the United States to thrive. It is greed (corporations are people, tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, deregulation) that has allowed this thriving to become wealth concentrated in the pockets of the 1%. The national culture of the United States has always been based on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and not by the color of one’s skin or by one’s spiritual beliefs.
4