Theme: Sovereignty

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA WITH IAN BREMMER ON THE NEW LEADERLESS GLOBAL ORDER – AND TDS 😉
Trump is trying to distribute the cost of preserving that world order by the threat of its absence if others don’t pick up their share of the leadership and cost. The world order is to the benefit of all except the empires that survived the world wars as the end of empires and the emergence of nation states federated strongly or loosely around Core States.
Frank and to some degree Ian seem to believe it’s even possible for the States to continue to carry the burden. It isn’t. My understanding is that we are in the third phase of ending empires, and Trump is acting correctly by mirroring the construction of the postwar rules based order by baiting the world into fear of poverty now that they’ve escaped it, just as we baited the world out of poverty to defeat the communists. I doubt I err in this framing.
And I think Trump’s instinct to construct durable cooperation using incentives to ‘deal’ is underrated. The warning I would give frank is that he is fascinated by the illusion of central control by elites and ignorant of dynamic control produced by incentives. And underestimating the failure of the overproduction of credentialed elites and underproduction of demonstrated competency.
-Cheers.