Sad to say, Donald Trump cannot be blamed for everything. Watching the US president lavish praise on autocrats, throw up trade barriers and disdain global rules and institutions, it seems a fair conclusion that he wants to upturn the liberal international order. Much of this work, though, had been done before he reached the White House. Mr Trump is as much emblem as cause of the descent into disorder.
The west misread the collapse of Soviet communism. It was not, after all, the end of history. Happy assumptions about the permanent hegemony of laissez-faire capitalism and the historical inevitability of liberal democracy were rooted in a hubris that invited nemesis. For all that, the end of the cold war did produce a big idea. Now, as we are daily reminded by Mr Trump’s Twitter feed, it is being swapped for a very bad idea.
Communism’s demise promised, in a favourite phrase of my Chinese friends, a world of win, win. The revolutionary thought was that the selfish interests of rich and rising states could be accommodated if everyone played by the rules. The deep interdependence woven by globalisation would square the circle between competing national interests and multilateral obligations.