Trump’s top advisers have praised him for his “clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” This formulation puzzles because, although it’s fair to say the world isn’t exactly Sesame Street, it is a place where people from all countries must live. To reduce the sum of our existence to a competitive struggle for advantage among more than two hundred nations is not clear-eyed but myopic.
