The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the World

by Ian Bremmer

How can anyone expect the United States to consistently combat global threats like infectious disease, climate change, and new life-altering technologies when another headlong dive into “America First” might be right around the corner?

Successful multilateral foreign interventions don’t justify the failures of others; nor should the failures obscure the need for multilateral action in the most urgent cases.

I’m a patriotic American. I’m truly grateful for everything my country has done for me and the people I love, and for every opportunity it has created for us. But I am not a nationalist. I don’t believe that our values are naturally superior to others’. America is a community of people with diverse opinions and conflicting beliefs, an assembly of all races, of people who follow different faiths and no faith. Nor do I believe that “American values” offer the best solution to every problem. Representative democracy is the best form of government, in my opinion, but every nation ruled by a dictator would not be better off if it held free elections three months from today. Democracy takes time to build, and it’s not the best form of government for every stage of a nation’s development. It was tyrannical Soviet Communism that pushed Russia from czarist feudalism in 1917 and put Gagarin in orbit just forty-four years later. No democracy has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty as the Chinese Communist Party has done. Soviet and Chinese Communists are responsible for some of history’s worst crimes against innocent people. But it’s also true that much of today’s European democratic prosperity was built atop centuries of imperialism, and much of America’s current wealth was accumulated on the backs of people brought here in chains. Because I’m not a nationalist, I can accept that all these things are true.