No, Janan, I don't mourn the passing of the "liberal world order." It might still have some zombie strength left—who knows? But if it does fade away, good riddance.
An old and dear friend of mine, a bit of a leftie, sent me Janan Ganesh's Financial Times piece* out of the blue.
Ganesh urges liberals to grieve the end of this post-1945 system—the most successful international order in history, he says: unprecedented prosperity, relative peace, progress for the West.
No country benefited more than the US. Don't apologize or resign yourself, he argues; mourn it openly, toast what it achieved, and don't let populists own the narrative. Elegiac, defiant, even haunted by a Top Gun line.
Sounds lovely in summary. But it wasn't all rosy.
I'm a traitor to my class. Yes, I am! The elite class—upper-middle, in charge of "things." I got there by job and circumstance, not choice. Fine. But now I'm a traitor because we Elites have abandoned the working and middle classes in the West. They've suffered—and it's our fault. Because of this "liberal world order" that exploded global wealth since WWII, while quietly gutting them.
I once loved it. Loved it. Post-war it ovresaw:
- Non-punitive treatment of war losers.
- The Marshall Plan rebuilding Europe.
- The UN, mostly funded by America.
- GATT — the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade— which birthed the WTO.
- The Korean War keeping South Korea safe for democratic capitalism against the North.
Who gained most? Elites. Like me. Like my friend. Like most of our circle. Supporting Trump now—his focus on middle America, the working class—is apostasy from the tribe. But if Republicans won't stand for the working and middle classes, who will? The Democrats ditched them long ago for inner-city elites. We. Inner city elites.
Since 2000—especially China's 2001 WTO entry as a "developing" country—the gains turned K-shaped: elites and big-state mercantilists soaring up; Western industrial heartlands and workers sliding down.
Globalization lifted global GDP but hollowed out factories, fueling the resentment populists exploit. Deregulation boomed—then crashed in '08, shattering trust. Inequality exploded at home even as absolute poverty fell globally.
The UN? Thoroughly corrupted. "I am the United Nations".
[My Dad was an Australian representative to the U.N. in the early sixties. He was pretty critical of the U.N. even then; it's got a lot worse since]
This breakdown wasn't Trump's doing. Peter Zeihan (no Trump fan) makes it clear: the rot started earlier. End of the Cold War. China's lawless mercantilism. ["The Global World Order is Collapsing"]
Trump is responding—America First, tariffs as leverage, allies paying their defense share, force used for actual peace, not nation-building fantasies.
The old order enriched rivals like China, traded sovereignty for cheap imports, and left ordinary people behind. Its passing isn't tragedy. It's correction.
I don't mourn it. I welcome what's next: nations that put their own people first.
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ADDED: In the 1970s I was an Australian diplomat. I worked with American colleagues on the latest round of the GATT. We loved this new World Order we were creating. Of course we were paid to love it! But we did. At least I did, and as I recall, we all did. The mantra, by the way, was "Free Trade Good; Tariffs Bad". Which I believed right up till recently. [But that's a whole n'other issue].
*Ganesh's FT article is behind a paywall. If you have FT access, the URL is https://www.ft.com/content/3dd3f37b-a783-4f12-a837-764e9f429b01
Otherwise, copy the link in italics above and paste into the bottom box at Archive.
