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World peace is the apotheosis of the globalist fantasy. Fortunes were spent constructing globalist organizations like the United Nations and the League of Nations in the hope that they could replace world wars with world peace, but all they did was globalize local conflicts.
And start new wars.
The idea that we could build a rules-based international order is a failure. It’s time for us to learn from that failure. The Trump administration has done some admirable things in foreign policy, but it also has spent too much time stuck on globalist fallacies like international stability. We keep acting like it’s our job to head off wars that don’t involve us or prop up nation-states, even if like Syria they now consist of guys named Mohammed waving bloody swords, because there is an inherent virtue in maintaining higher levels of order from the local level to the global one.
On trade, Trump embraced the magic of chaos, rattling market economies, and forcing resets at dollarpoint, but he has spent too much time and prestige trying to settle conflicts like the war between Russia and Ukraine, intervening in India’s justified retaliation against Pakistan, and pursuing negotiations with Hamas in Gaza. Some want Trump to be in the peacemaking business, but peacemaking is a globalist fallacy. In reality, war, not peace, is inevitable.
And the United States does not need to be involved in trying to negotiate every conflict.
In his 1979 State of the Union address, President Jimmy Carter declared, “we have no desire to be the world’s policeman. But America does want to be the world’s peacemaker.”
Later that year, Shiite Jihadists seized control of Iran, a civil war began in El Salvador, China invaded Vietnam and the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Three out of four of those conflicts would have a significant impact (and still do) on the United States of America.
Peacemaking has rarely been a profitable proposition for presidents. Teddy Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for helping end a war between two major future enemies, Russia and Japan, when we might have been better off weakening them both. That kind of thinking has fallen out of fashion, but common sense ought to bring it back.
The lack of world peace isn’t because we haven’t put enough money into the UN or spent enough time building personal relationships with foreign leaders. It’s human nature.
At some point everyone (even in D.C.) ought to be able to figure out that other countries fight wars because they want to fight them. The Russians and the Ukrainians hated each other long before we got into the act. Islamic Jihadism goes back well over a thousand years. Various tribes in Africa have been fighting each other since before anyone except the Indians had heard of America. We can occasionally tamp down historically based conflicts, but unless an entire region turns into world government eunuchs after a truly devastating world war like, say, Europe, the wars will resume after a scheduled commercial break for a Nobel Peace prize.
And that’s fine. Or rather it’s terrible, but it’s also the inevitable state of human affairs.
It is not America’s role to be the world’s policeman or peacemaker, but to pursue our own interests and while local wars often cause havoc with international trade and that affects our economy, we will have better luck finding ways to adapt and profit from those wars than trying to convince peoples who have hated each other before Thomas Jefferson ever put quill to flax that they ought to stop trying to kill each other and run arm in arm through a minefield instead.
Rather than trying to convince the Ukrainians and Russians to stop fighting each other, we should approach the problem from the standpoint of our national interests within the realistic framework of how people actually behave in the real world rather than how people would behave in a Star Trek episode. And then decide if it’s even our problem in the first place.
Then we can think about how to turn it to our advantage the way Chinese regularly do.
When we leave behind the globalist fantasy of international stability and embrace the chaos, all sorts of opportunities open up that are not available when we’re running around playing hall monitor. We have spent generations upholding an international order that the Russians and Chinese run around sabotaging. What if we began doing some sabotaging of our own?
The Trump administration did that with international trade. On foreign policy, President Trump has been ignoring the experts and doing things that they said couldn’t be done. But we’re still tethered to the old Wilsonian notion that the world is our responsibility instead of our playground, that it’s our job to tell the other children to behave themselves, and leverage our economic and military power to make sure that they do. This is the dull mindset that stuck us with being a world power because we took all the stuff that even the Europeans didn’t seriously.
And our reward is more of the same.
Some not terribly bright ‘experts’ stuck President Trump with the false choice between peacemaking and endless wars. That’s a leftist proposition of the kind Jimmy Carter would have loved. Anyone in the least familiar with human history knows that wars are inherently tribal and therefore endless. Recognizing that reality doesn’t mean we have to fight endless wars.
Peacemaking, like dropping a tenner in the palm of a crackhead, may provide a momentary noble feeling, but the crackhead will soon want another one and wars will break out again.
Real realpolitik isn’t pretending that we can end wars, but turning those wars to our advantage. Wars are another form of competition and competition is healthy. If our enemies are at war, we should cheer both sides on, if an enemy is fighting an ally, we should support our ally, and if the combatants are neither allies nor enemies, we could explore how to benefit from it, instead of asking everyone to end the fighting in the name of the ghost of Jimmuh Carter.
Or we could choose not to be involved. That’s an option too. And one worth considering.
The alternative is wasting too much time trying to persuade the rest of the world to be good boys and girls from our lofty moral high ground of allowing Muslim terrorists at least three free suicide bombings before we bomb them and then spend the next ten years rebuilding them.
We don’t have to be stupid. Stupidity, like choosing to keep on paying Netflix $24.99 a month long after that last show you liked was cancelled four years ago, is a choice. Governments run on autopilot most of the time because it saves professional government types from having to think. Playing the world’s policeman or peacemaker is a legacy from over a century ago back when Woodrow Wilson’s wife was running the country while he lay in a White House coma.
America is out of both the Wilson and Biden comas. And it’s time to stop trying to run the world for the benefit of the world (which the world never appreciates) and rather than trying to control the chaos, we should embrace it, ride it and adapt to the possibilities that it brings. We should not give up our values, but neither should we pretend that the rest of the world shares them.
Globalists thought that the world could be ordered through common values. They were wrong. So badly wrong that they might have been trying to order linguini from a Chinese restaurant or spell ‘Adieu’ entirely out of consonants. The world is in a state of perpetual chaos. We can meet it where it’s at or keep trying to bring peace, democracy and free stuff to a thankless world.