How to beat the backlash that threatens the liberal revolution - Fareed Zakaria, WaPo

A very long and detailed opinion article.

We are living in an age of backlash to three decades of revolutions in different realms. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world saw the liberalization of markets, the democratization of politics and the explosion of information technology. Each of these trends seemed to reinforce the other, creating a world that was overall more open, dynamic and interconnected. For many Americans, these forces seemed natural and self-sustaining. But they were not. The ideas that spread across the globe during this era of openness were American, or at least Western, ideas, undergirded by U.S. power. Over the past decade, as that power began to be contested, those trends began to reverse. These days, politics around the world is riddled with anxiety, a cultural reaction to years of acceleration.

The opposition to American power is easily visible in the geopolitical realm. After three decades of unquestioned American hegemony, the rise of China and the return of Russia have brought us back to an age of great power competition. These nations, as well as some regional powers such as Iran, all seek to disrupt and erode the Western-dominated international system that has ordered the world in recent decades.

But this is not simply a response to the United States’ hard power; it is also a reaction to the broad spread of Western liberal ideas. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are allied in one crucial respect: They believe that Western values are alien to their societies and undermine their rule. Far more worrying: There has developed within the Western world itself a negative reaction to many of these same values.

The democracies of the West all face a rising tide of illiberal populism that is skeptical of openness, globalization, trade, immigration and diversity. The result has been that across the world we are living through a democratic recession, rising tariffs and trade barriers, growing hostility to immigration and immigrants, ever-expanding limits on technology and information access — and even skepticism about liberal democracy itself.

More, a lot more

https://wapo.st/3TxHYpP

======

I was thinking of this article while watching the "60 Minutes" segment about the Law of the Sea that our country has not signed because of objections by RWer.