Populism causes extinction

Polanyi recounts how economic and financial crisis led to global calamity. Something similar could happen today. In fact we are already in a steady unpicking of the liberal peace that glowed at the turn of the millennium. Since approximately 2008, the historic decline in the number and lethality of wars appears to have been reversed. Today’s wars are not like World War I, with formal declarations of war, clear war zones, rules of engagement, and definite endings. But they are wars nonetheless.

What does a world in global, generalized war look like? We have an unwinnable “war on terror” that is metastasizing with every escalation, and which has blurred the boundaries between war and everything else. We have deep states—built on a new oligarchy of generals, spies, and private-sector suppliers—that are strangling liberalism. We have emboldened middle powers (such as Saudi Arabia) and revanchist powers (such as Russia) rearming and taking unilateral military action across borders (Ukraine and Syria). We have massive profiteering from conflicts by the arms industry, as well as through the corruption and organized crime that follow in their wake (Afghanistan). We have impoverishment and starvation through economic warfare, the worst case being Yemen. We have “peacekeeping” forces fighting wars (Somalia). We have regional rivals threatening one another, some with nuclear weapons (India and Pakistan) and others with possibilities of acquiring them (Saudi Arabia and Iran).

Above all, today’s generalized war is a conflict of destabilization, with big powers intervening in the domestic politics of others, buying influence in their security establishments, bribing their way to big commercial contracts and thereby corroding respect for government, and manipulating public opinion through the media. Washington, D.C., and Moscow each does this in its own way. Put the pieces together and a global political market of rival plutocracies comes into view. Add virulent reactionary populism to the mix and it resembles a war on democracy.

What more might we see? Economic liberalism is a creed of optimism and abundance; reactionary protectionism feeds on pessimistic scarcity. If we see punitive trade wars and national leaders taking preemptive action to secure strategic resources within the walls of their garrison states, then old-fashioned territorial disputes along with accelerated state-commercial grabbing of land and minerals are in prospect. We could see mobilization against immigrants and minorities as a way of enflaming and rewarding a constituency that can police borders, enforce the new political rightness, and even become electoral vigilantes.

Liberal multilateralism is a system of seeking common wins through peaceful negotiation; case-by-case power dealing is a zero-sum calculus. We may see regional arms races, nuclear proliferation, and opportunistic power coalitions to exploit the weak. In such a global political marketplace, we would see middle-ranking and junior states rewarded for the toughness of their bargaining, and foreign policy and security strategy delegated to the CEOs of oil companies, defense contractors, bankers, and real estate magnates.

The United Nations system appeals to leaders to live up to the highest standards. The fact that they so often conceal their transgressions is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. A cabal of plutocratic populists would revel in the opposite: applauding one another’s readiness to tear up cosmopolitan liberalism and pursue a latter-day mercantilist naked self-interest. Garrison America could opportunistically collude with similarly constituted political-military business regimes in Russia, China, Turkey, and elsewhere for a new realpolitik global concert, redolent of the early nineteenth-century era of the Congress of Vienna, bringing a façade of stability for as long as they collude—and war when they fall out.

And there is a danger that, in response to a terrorist outrage or an international political crisis, President Trump will do something stupid, just as Europe’s leaders so unthinkingly strolled into World War I. The multilateral security system is in poor health and may not be able to cope.

Underpinning this is a simple truth: the plutocratic populist order is a future that does not work. If illustration were needed of the logic of hiding under the blanket rather than facing difficult realities, look no further than Trump’s readiness to deny climate change.

We have been here before, more or less, and from history we can gather important lessons about what we must do now. The importance of defending civility with democratic deliberation, respecting human rights and values, and maintaining a commitment to public goods and the global commons—including the future of the planet—remain evergreen. We need to find our way to a new 1945—and the global political settlement for a tamed and humane capitalism—without having to suffer the catastrophic traumas of trying everything else first.