After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

I asked my British friend about the impact of the 2008 financial crisis in bringing about this dynamic, the sense of desolation it fueled, people’s belief that the whole system was rigged to screw them. Instead of talking about markets or elections, he talked about gas chambers—the shock that accompanied the discovery of the extent of fascist crimes at the end of World War II. “That was so appalling,” he observed, “that it created an elongated reason cycle, aided by the creation of the American order.” A cycle in which the nations of the world bound themselves to a system of international treaties, norms, and institutions that shaped everything from the development of nuclear weapons to the rules that governed trade between nations to the expectation that human rights should be protected within them—or at least within what was known as the “free world.” Perhaps, he was suggesting, it wasn’t some evolution of human reason that had brought about the relative peace and progress of the postwar decades, it was the shock of fear that came from staring into the abyss of where nationalism and tribalism lead.

and where will the stark truth of russia's atrocities lead us?