How Trump Could Wind up Making Globalism Great Again

OK, so it was never great in the first place. But the rise of rank nationalists could finally—perversely—spark an era of progress and cooperation for all humanity.
OK, so globalism was never great in the first place. But the rise of rank nationalists could finally—perversely—spark an era of progress and cooperation for all humanity.Story TK

A few days before the 2016 election, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote this about Donald Trump: “He has no concept of a nonzero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace.”

I’m not sure dominating other people is the only occasion when Trump feels at peace. Presumably there’s a moment during what is reportedly his standard McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filets-O-Fish, and a chocolate milkshake—when all seems right with the world.

Still, in Trump’s hierarchy of bliss, dominance does seem to rank at the top. “I love to crush the other side and take the benefits,” he wrote in a book called Think Big. “Why? Because there is nothing greater. For me it is even better than sex, and I love sex.” He went on to observe: “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win—not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”

So it makes sense that, two years after Trump entered office, Sullivan’s game-theoretical framing has caught on. The zero-sum game—in which the players’ fortunes are inversely correlated, so that for one player to win the other must lose—has become a standard paradigm for the Trump presidency. If you Google “Donald Trump” and “zero-sum” you’ll get such headlines as “Trump’s Zero Sum Delusion,” “Donald Trump and the Rise of Zero-Sum Politics,” and simply “Zero-Sum Trump.”

Some of the articles attached to these headlines are about economics. They may lament Trump’s gleeful anticipation of “winning” the trade wars he starts—as if trade were a zero-sum game—and his seeming obliviousness to the fact that trade wars can have lose-lose outcomes. Other articles focus on world affairs more broadly. Nations come together to pursue win-win outcomes in the face of all kinds of problems, from financial meltdowns, climate change, and weapons proliferation to overfishing of the seas. And Trump’s attitude toward the institutions that embody such nonzero-sum engagement is notably lacking in warmth.

As journalist Jonathan Swan wrote on Axios this summer, “Trump has expressed skepticism, and in some cases outright hostility towards NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the Group of Seven.” Swan added that Trump has “already withdrawn the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran deal” and “announced his intent to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.”

The zero-sum label applies not just to Trump’s policy preferences but to his political style. He’s expert at evoking reactions that seem to have been engineered by evolution for zero-sum situations, notably fear of, hatred of, and contempt for a perceived enemy. Bill Clinton presumably had Trump in mind when he said, five months into Trump’s presidency, “We’ve seen a resurgence in the oldest of all social reactions—the tendency to look at people first as the other, to think of life in zero-sum terms, it’s us versus them.”

I claim an increment of credit for Clinton’s conversance in game theory. During his presidency I published a book about human history and the future called Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which he read and said some nice things about and assigned to White House staffers to read. Clinton even said the book had a big influence on his presidency.

As a result of all this, I once got some face time with Clinton. And when the subject turned to my book (which I made sure it did), he said what he had liked about it was that it was realistic—not naive—yet hopeful.

And it’s true that, after documenting humankind’s historical drift toward bigger and bigger cooperative networks—a process driven by technological change—I had sketched out a pretty sunny possible future. It was a future in which the world’s nations grasp that they’re enmeshed in lots of nonzero-sum games and act accordingly: working together to solve various problems, gradually building the foundation of good global governance. I even said this political progress could involve moral progress. People of different nationalities, religions, and ethnicities, aware of their interdependence, of the correlation of their fates, could muster the tolerance that facilitates peaceful coexistence and active collaboration. We needn’t let our tribal impulses prevail over nonzero-sum logic, I opined 19 years ago.

That was then. Now we’ve got a president who not only resists playing nonzero-­sum games but actively fans emotions that impede the wise playing of them. And as if that weren’t enough, the fanning of those emotions can recalibrate the games, making lose-lose outcomes even worse than they would be otherwise. The more tribalized the world is—the more antagonistically divided along national, ethnic, religious, ideological lines—the more danger there is in, for example, letting arms control challenges go unaddressed: The more nations will be in the mood to lob missiles, the more terrorist groups there will be that might get ahold of a nuke or a bioweapon. Trump’s policy instincts make good governance hard, and his political style makes the consequences of bad governance grave.

Still, hope springs eternal, and so does my belief that hope can be reconciled with realism. There’s reason to think that, in a weird way, the Trump presidency, rather than drag us into a death spiral of tribalism and lethal technology, could be a roundabout path to a higher plane. But to see this cause for hope you have to see that the conventional view of Trump as the zero-sum president has its shortcomings.

For starters, to view Trump as someone who ushered in an era of zero-sum politics and policy is, in a sense, to give him too much credit. Many of the tensions that fueled Trump’s rise—tensions between globalization’s losers and winners, between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, between unfettered national sovereignty and global governance—were building up long before he arrived, and were bound to keep building up, thanks to the relentless impetus of technological evolution. If Trump hadn’t won the lottery to represent one side of this dialectic, someone else would have. Once you step back and view this moment in the full sweep of history, Trump starts to look like so much froth on a very big wave, a wave that’s been growing for a long time and was bound to crest at some point.

The same could be said for Trump’s counterparts across the Atlantic—stridently nationalist European politicians in France, Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere whose zero-sum rhetoric has gained them a following. The very fact that the ideology they share with Trump transcends continents suggests that it grows out of something deep and broad—and that they personally are, in a sense, incidental to it.

There’s a second problem with the zero-sum president label. To see Trump, in his disregard for nonzero-sum logic, as a radical break with America’s past is to give too much credit to his predecessors. In exploiting the tensions of our time, Trump feeds on the failure of past American leaders to really confront those tensions and, more broadly, on their failure to successfully play the many nonzero-sum games that are part of the modern world. (A note on lingo: When social scientists talk about playing nonzero-sum games, they just mean pursuing certain kinds of strategic logic, not doing anything especially playful.)

Even the most rhetorically nonzero-sum of our past leaders—the ones who most emphasized global cooperation, like Barack Obama—haven’t shown full awareness of the magnitude of the change that is necessary, haven’t charted all the new political paths that need charting. The Trump moment is a product both of inexorable tectonic shifts and of officials who failed to reckon with them, and if we want to deal with this moment skillfully we need to understand both.

There’s one more thing we need to understand, and it’s pretty strange. Donald Trump—who used his most recent address at the United Nations to denounce global governance—may be, here and there, and unbeknownst to himself, laying the groundwork for future global governance. And it’s a kind of global governance that could help resolve some of the tensions that made him president. Two years from now, or six years from now, as we crawl through the wreckage of Trump’s tenure, we’ll find things worth building on. And maybe we’ll build something great—great in a way that Trump wouldn’t like.

So how long have the subterranean forces that brought us to this juncture been at work? Oh, 10,000, 15,000, maybe 20,000 years. At least that was the view presented in Nonzero. The book charted the evolution of human social organization from hunter-gatherer village to global village—or, rather, to the verge of a global village, to the threshold of a cohesive global community of the kind Trump so often seems determined to keep from crystallizing. Along the way humankind has passed through various fairly distinct stages of social structure: multivillage agricultural polities known as chiefdoms, ancient city-states, ancient regional states, empires, modern nation-states, alliances of nation-states, and so on.

This erratic but stubborn growth in the scope and depth of social complexity is driven by technology. In particular: New technologies keep arising that permit the playing of new nonzero-sum games involving more people over greater distances. For example, ancient innovations in engineering permitted the building of stable roads along which goods could travel. And the technology of writing permitted contracts and systems of accounting that further lubricated long-distance exchange—nonzero-sum games between people who, in the absence of roads and writing, couldn’t play those games.

Throughout history, polities that have efficiently harnessed the latest in nonzero­-sum technology have tended to survive and flourish, while rival polities fell by the wayside. But harnessing these technologies means not just putting them to use; it means providing a stable platform on which the nonzero­-sum games they facilitate can be played. It means good governance. The Roman government both built roads and developed a legal system that applied empire-wide, smoothing the flow of long-distance commerce.

This sounds pretty straightforward, but the reality is messier. Keeping these platforms stable is hard, because conduits that carry good things can be exploited by bad things. Fourteenth-century European roads conveyed not just food and merchandise but the bubonic plague. Networks created to realize mutual gain in one nonzero-­sum realm—typically trade—can thus give rise to a new nonzero-sum game: If people across the network don’t collectively meet some new threat, the outcome can be lose-lose.

In the case of the plague, that’s what happened. At least a third of Europe’s population was wiped out. But people have often responded to platform-threatening afflictions with creative governance. About a century before the Black Death, pirates were infesting a network of shipping lanes in the Baltic Sea. The Hanseatic League—an organization of German towns that long predated the German nation and cooperated on such win-win endeavors as building lighthouses—went into pirate-quelling mode.

Today, of course, we have a platform—a communications and transportation network that can host both good things and bad—that is global in scope. And, as if to toughen the inherent challenge of taking some dimensions of governance to the global level, technological change keeps giving us more bad things to worry about.

When the specter of terrorists using bioweapons first emerged, people worried about pathogens like anthrax or smallpox—not the threat of designer viruses being engineered via the new, scarily powerful Crispr gene-editing technique. They didn’t worry about electronic pathogens either—computer viruses that can wreak international havoc as a weapon of terrorists or criminals or governments. And when people first started imagining nations doing battle in outer space, outer space wasn’t full of satellites whose destruction could cripple global communications or snuff out a nation’s real-time surveillance of its enemies, thus giving a nuclear power a potentially itchy defensive trigger finger.

Threats like these, which could bring pain to various regions and destabilize the whole planet, give nations an incentive to cooperate in fending them off. But there’s also a disincentive: Cooperative solutions often carry shared costs or constraints. Nations need to refrain from making certain weapons if they want other nations to refrain, open their biological labs to inspection if they want other nations to open theirs, and so on.

Encouragingly, nations have at times judged the benefits as warranting the costs. They’ve managed, for example, to negotiate meaningful arms control—not just nuclear arms treaties but, impressively, the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. And via the 1989 Montreal Protocol, people around the world gave up aerosol deodorant and hair spray, slowing the depletion of the ozone layer.

One of the more significant extensions of global governance has come in the economic realm, where intricate webs of interdependence can allow bad things—like rising prices caused by trade wars—to spread far and fast. The World Trade Organization features not only trade rules but also a mechanism for enforcing them: an adjudicatory body whose rulings member nations agree to accept.

The logic here—of building the rule of law on an international scale—parallels the logic of building it on a national or local scale. Though it can be frustrating when a WTO ruling goes against you, respecting these rulings struck the WTO’s founding members as being, on balance, to their mutual benefit—much as it benefits individual Americans, on balance, to let courts resolve disputes among them, even if it’s occasionally frustrating not to be able to tell your neighbors that if they don’t turn down their music you’ll burn down their house.

But the further evolution of global governance faces a big obstacle. And it isn’t just Donald Trump.

Sure, Trump is an obstacle. He’s announced America’s withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, imperiled the functioning of the WTO by blocking the appointment of new judges at the organization, unveiled plans for a “Space Force” without even nodding to the wisdom of strengthening arms control in space, and the list goes on.

But Trump’s politics are manifestations of deeper forces. And at this deeper level, the evolution of global governance faces two big problems that must be addressed if Trumpism is going to be safely deposited in the dustbin of history. One problem originates in grassroots opinion, and the other is brought to us by elites.

The grassroots problem is that global governance will naturally strike some people as threatening to their national identity. If you trace the lineage of some of the more extreme elements in Trump’s coalition, you’ll find decades-old warnings about the coming of the “New World Order,” whose harbinger is supposedly black helicopters dispatched by the United Nations that will land in your backyard any moment now. The Americans who are whipped up into a frenzy about this—the people who heed Alex Jones’ warnings about the globalist menace—are today only a tiny if energetic part of Trump’s base. Which is as it should be, since global governance needn’t entail the kind of centralized, all-powerful “world government” these people fear.

But a much larger number of Trump supporters, though less frenzied, can still be convinced that various international acronyms unacceptably constrain America—that, back in the good old days, we didn’t take orders from foreigners. A similar sentiment was among the ingredients that fueled Brexit. England’s greatness and glory, the story went, was being smothered by rules from the European Union.

Such nostalgia is, in one sense, misguided. Our choice, given the drift of technology, is between a world with international acronyms and attendant restraints on national behavior and a world of peril and instability, if not all-engulfing chaos.

Nevertheless, this nostalgia does seem more defensible when you view it in light of the second problem facing the evolution of global governance, the one brought to us by elites: Like governance in general, global governance is sometimes done badly. And that fact helps explain not only Brexit (some of those EU rules are excessive) but why Trump is president. His predecessors, and other national leaders around the world, haven’t done a good enough job of building a body of international governance and international law.

A good way to see this failure is to look at the specific fears and resentments that got Trump elected, because they reflect it very clearly.

Trump’s core issues during the election were immigration and trade. Or, to put them into the human form that gave them valence: menacing Muslims who will blow up your town, menacing Latinos who will steal your job and may rape your daughter, and workers abroad who will take any jobs the immigrants fail to take. Behind these villains were other villains: American elites who don’t care about their fellow Americans in so-called flyover country. They want to maximize profits and see their stock portfolios grow, and if that means shipping jobs abroad or giving them to illegal immigrants, so be it.

Some of these elites are captains of industry. They go to Davos and hang out with their fellow capitalists and do their (win-win!) deals with one another. Although these capitalists may lean to the right, if you view them from a distance they start to merge with liberal elites—the ones who harp on climate change and embrace the identity politics that drives some Trump supporters crazy.

One ironic thing: All of these elites, left and right, are pro-immigration; they all either advocate or accept affirmative action; and they all seem more at home with their fellow elites in Europe than with heartland Americans. All of them seem willing to elevate their own priorities above the welfare of the American worker. Elites broadly, conservative and liberal, are responsible for a system of global commerce built with little regard for the common folk.

That’s the view from Trumpland, anyway, and here’s an underappreciated fact about it: Much of it is true. The American elites who, along with their foreign peers, run the world and shape the culture don’t wake up every morning asking what they’ve done for the working class lately. One consequence is that some bodies of global governance, as they’ve evolved so far, are at best a mixed blessing for many Americans.

Consider the World Trade Organization. Yes, it performs the welcome service of preempting trade wars. But it does nothing about another source of disruption: the breakneck change brought by globalization—in particular, the relocation of jobs from affluent countries like the US to lower-wage countries.

The upside of this relocation, to be sure, is big. Hundreds of millions of people in Asia and elsewhere have risen out of poverty. From a global perspective, these benefits outweigh the costs, the lost jobs and dampened wages in affluent nations. Still, this is a reminder that a nonzero-sum game—international trade, in this case—can have a net positive outcome but still have losers.

There’s no reason to assume the losers deserve their fate, or that their losses won’t bring more problems. These particular losses have deepened the income inequality that has helped make America seem like two countries and deepened the discontent that got Trump elected. There is such a thing as change that is ultimately good but is proceeding too fast, and with too little attention to its short-term costs.

How do you know when change is happening too fast? Well, when a crudely tribal and recklessly belligerent conspiracy theorist is elected president—and has allies gaining power in other countries—that may be a warning sign.

There are ways you could amend the WTO rules to buffer some workers against rapid change, but before addressing them we have to address a prior question: How would you get such amendments made? How would you counter the influence of the Davos crowd, the people who like to see corporate profits maximized and tend to think that capital should flow to its optimally efficient use, period—and who have enormous influence over the politicians who make policy?

Oddly, Trump is illuminating an answer to these questions. Here is where he may be, without realizing it, laying the foundation for a global politics of the kind that is integral to a sturdy system of global governance—a global politics that could keep people like him from winning elections in the future. about the backlash against globalization is its globalization. Even before becoming president, Trump was bonding with like-minded political actors abroad: saying nice things about pro-Brexit politicians, lauding their desire to reclaim British autonomy by escaping the European Union. And Steve Bannon, after being exiled from Trump’s inner circle (note to Bannon: Never call the daughter of your boss “dumb as a brick”), went on a transatlantic ethnonationalist tour, touching base with far-right leaders from France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland.

So far this emerging international league of nationalists is mainly (if Bannon will pardon the expression) an elite phenomenon. It’s not as if many pro-Brexit voters have become Facebook friends with America’s Trump voters and France’s Marine Le Pen voters.

But more grassroots bonding is likely. This kind of interconnection is a logical extension of the technological change that has helped fragment America, Britain, and France. As broadcasting has been supplanted by narrowcasting and, with the rise of social media, by ultranarrowcasting, people within nations have been segregated more finely by their interests, including political interests. It’s only natural that these channels of common interest should eventually reach across continents and oceans, especially as automated translation technologies mature. And some of these channels will, in fusion with elite networks of the kind Bannon is building, form an international interest group united by, well, opposition to internationalism. (One scholar has referred to these seemingly paradoxical but sometimes, as here, reconcilable tendencies of information technology—fragmentation and integration—as “fragmegration.”)

This may conjure up scary images: hordes of torch-bearing populists organizing globally, doing their best to sabotage international cooperation. But here’s where things could take an interesting turn. As time passes, these populists may realize that one thing an international league of malcontents can do, given the existence of international bodies whose policies they dislike, is lobby those bodies to change their policies. They may even realize that through such lobbying they can get results they couldn’t get if these bodies didn’t exist.

Obviously, this has an implausible ring to it. Future edifices of international governance that draw support from people who are now fire-breathing enemies of international governance? Yet there are reasons to think this is not so far-fetched.

For example: One brick in such an edifice was recently laid by the fire-­breathing enemy of international governance in chief, President Trump. The North American trade deal his administration just negotiated—the United States-­Mexico-Canada Agreement, aka Nafta 2.0—features a good example of a populist policy realized through an instrument of governance these populists now detest.

When Nafta was being negotiated in the 1990s, American labor unions, worried about losing jobs to Mexico, lobbied for provisions that would raise Mexican wages—whether by strengthening labor unions in Mexico or by raising wages there more directly. And Nafta did include provisions that in theory could do that, but they were oblique and ineffectual, partly because businesspeople on both sides of the border opposed stronger ones.

Trump’s trade negotiators pushed for and got something stronger: a requirement that 40 percent of the content of cars that trade freely within North America be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour. The idea is that Mexican factories can either raise wages or watch jobs migrate north. And though Mexican governments, in deference to the wishes of Mexico’s business class, have traditionally opposed such provisions, the new left-wing Mexican government likes them. (As for the irony that a Mexican president supported by workers would favor a policy designed to price some of them out of the market: Sacrificing a few jobs for higher wages is a common position of pro-labor politicians, as when Democrats in the US back a minimum wage hike that may dampen hiring.)

This one provision may seem like a small thing, and it is. But it represents something big: Bodies of global governance, like bodies of national governance, can in principle serve various constituencies. They can lean right or lean left. To take one possible, far-off scenario: A future version of the WTO could authorize punitive tariffs against—or even deny membership to—nations that don’t let unions organize. It could set baseline environmental or even workplace safety standards for factories in member nations, which not only would make for a cleaner environment and safer jobs but also would raise production costs in low-wage countries, making globalization less threatening to workers in affluent countries.

So what are the chances that Trump shares this vision, that he sees a provision he put in Nafta 2.0 leading to Global Governance 2.0? Roughly zero. Trump supported the provision not to realize a grand dream but to please a pivotal part of his base—blue-collar workers whose alienation from the Democratic Party helped swing Rust Belt votes his way in 2016. And that’s the point: What makes this vision plausible is that it has strong underlying political logic.

Indeed, the political pull of this policy was so strong that Trump, in pursuing it, was willing to antagonize the Republican establishment whose bidding he has generally done, except when it clashes with strong sentiments in his base (as on immigration). A writer in the conservative National Review, expressing opposition to the $16 per hour wage requirement, noted with disapproval that “many Trump supporters applaud this imposition” and asked, “Isn’t it suspicious that the left-winger [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and the right-winger Trump both like this measure? The unions also dig it.”

Yes, the unions do dig it. Because they realize that to serve their members in a globalized economy, they can’t rely on national policies alone; they have to embrace international governance and steer it left. Any politician who wants to attract the kinds of voters unions represent would be well advised to take this insight seriously. That’s why populist leaders who are now described as “nationalist” and “right wing” could wind up making peace with global governance of a left-leaning kind.

Of course, nudging global governance to the left will still strike conservative elites—the National Review writers of the world—as unacceptably radical. Even centrists and neoliberals may ask questions like: Will this erode prosperity? Is this a slippery slope toward a global minimum wage or some other form of burdensome regulation?

These are fair questions, but they should be seen against the backdrop of this harsh reality: Donald Trump is not a one-off. He embodies a backlash that’s not surprising, given the dislocations brought by rapid social transformation—in this case, the epic, once-in-a-planet’s-lifetime movement of social organization to the planetary level.

To put a finer point on it: Trump represents a political reaction, visible now in many countries, both against the jarring effects of globalization and against inchoate bodies of global governance. Given that globalization is driven by inexorable technological change, and that global governance is needed to keep an interconnected planet from self-destructing, having a powerful political movement that sees these two things as mortal enemies is dangerous. If heading off that danger requires change that sounds radical, maybe radical change is in order.

People horrified by Trump have been known to wonder: When will the people who put him in power come to their senses? When will voters see through his xenophobic fearmongering and dishonesty? It’s a natural question, but it misleads in suggesting that our political salvation awaits the dawning of enlightenment on only one side of the political spectrum. In the end, a bigger question may be whether the elites who make up the American establishment can see the light—whether they can reconcile themselves to forms of global governance many of them now find unacceptable.

That's only the half of it. If global governance is going to work, not only will it have to change in form; its rules will have to be widely acknowledged and heeded. International law—the amorphous body of treaties and other agreements that has been honored as much in the breach as in the observance, and which typically lacks a mechanism of firm enforcement—will have to carry more weight than it has carried. If that is to happen, then the United States, the world’s most powerful nation, will have to evince consistent respect for it. This means the American establishment, including lots of elites who oppose Trump, will have to start evincing such respect.

You could be excused for thinking they already do. After all, part of the standard elite indictment of Trump is that, in his disdain for international acronyms, in his contempt for international norms and laws, he is abandoning the “rules-based international order” earlier presidents painstakingly built and maintained. George Packer, writing in The New Yorker, has warned that as Trump escapes the constraint of these rules, “American foreign policy largely depends on what goes on inside Trump’s head.”

That is indeed an alarming prospect. And it’s true that Trump feels less constrained by international rules than his predecessors. But those predecessors broke the rules pretty routinely themselves, and they often did so with the support of the very elites who now wring their hands over the fate of the rules-based international order. This ongoing rule breakage has had disastrous consequences—including, quite possibly, the election of Donald Trump.

Consider America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was a clear violation of international law, since the UN Security Council wasn’t willing to authorize it, and under the UN charter such authorization is the only way to give legal validity to a war that’s not plainly a matter of self-defense. Yet the war got broad support in Congress and on op-ed pages.

It’s always hard to envision the road not taken, but let’s try: Suppose there had been no Iraq War. The war wound up amplifying a central talking point of jihadist recruiters—that America is at war with Islam. (A number of anti-­American terrorists, including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, have cited the Iraq War as motivation.) So absent the 2003 invasion, there might well have been less terrorism—especially less “homegrown” terrorism—and the electorate Trump faced might have been less freaked out, less susceptible to his fearmongering.

In fact, this alternative history lacks one distinct and large fear inducer: ISIS. Its precursor incubated amid Iraq’s post-invasion chaos before rebranding as the Islamic State and then metastasizing during the Syrian civil war. Imagine a candidate Trump who couldn’t point to ISIS—an actual territory-­occupying army that commits (and videotapes!) vivid atrocities and targets Christians—as an evil that matured on the watch of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (and that Trump alone can conquer). Does that candidate Trump get elected?

As long as we’re imagining roads not taken: Consider Obama’s decision in 2011 to turn a bombing campaign in Libya aimed at protecting endangered civilians (which was explicitly authorized by the Security Council) into a regime-change operation (which wasn’t). After the regime collapsed, Libya became home to various terrorist groups, and weapons from its stockpiles flooded the region­—flowing to jihadists in Africa and also, in large quantities, to jihadist rebels in Syria, as well as to more secular Syrian rebels. The rebels still lost the civil war, but not before they had used Libyan weapons to intensify it, creating more dead bodies and more refugees.

In a world with fewer Syrian refugees clamoring for passage to the US and Europe, does Trump’s proposed “Muslim ban” carry so much power? (And does the Trumpian right in Germany, France, and Italy have so much energy? Does Brexit pass?)

Again, alternative histories are speculative. But the general principle makes sense: If your policies bring instability that in turn breeds fear and hatred, then candidates who thrive on those things are more likely to get elected. So if there’s a chunk of international law designed to prevent instability—such as the UN charter’s constraints on transborder aggression—maybe you should pay some attention to it, especially if you’re going to go around singing the praises of the rules-based international order. Yet many American politicians who sing those praises also championed the Iraq and Libya adventures.

That those people include Hillary Clinton—the only alternative to Trump in the 2016 election—tells you how far the American political system is from taking global governance seriously. On the one hand, we had a candidate who ostensibly supported the UN charter but casually disregarded it. On the other, we had Trump, who denounced various US military adventures but disdains the international law that stands in opposition to military adventurism.

It seems safe to say that Trump doesn’t spend his spare time pondering this irony. The same can be said of most voters who warmed to his anti-interventionism, certainly including the ones who worry about the New World Order just off the horizon. They might be surprised to hear that the late Kofi Annan, who as secretary general of the UN was compared to the Antichrist in apocalyptic warnings about that order, flatly declared the invasion of Iraq illegal. Maybe if American politicians paid more attention to people like Annan—taking international law more seriously, and realizing its potential as a check on military adventurism—this would send the same message to Trump supporters that a reimagined WTO could send: The rules-based international order, the evolving infrastructure of global governance, can be their friend.

Obviously, most of these supporters won’t embrace this message anytime soon. Selling the idea of—and the reality of—populist-friendly global governance is a project that will take decades. And success may hinge on such contingencies as whether some charismatic politician with populist street cred gets behind it. But there’s no good alternative to trying, because if this vision doesn’t get a critical mass of political support, we’re all in trouble. If we lack the means to play the growing number of international nonzero-­sum games to positive-sum outcomes, things will take a turn for the grim—and maybe very grim, as lethal technologies and tribal animosities get locked into a vicious circle and environmental problems of biblical proportions fester.

This reckoning was in the cards. Technological evolution, ever since the Stone Age, has placed humans in nonzero­-sum situations of growing scope and complexity. The only way to stop the trend toward bigger and more elaborate games is to play them so badly that chaos ensues. And even then, among the ruins, we’ll be playing nonzero-­sum games, if less far-flung ones. Assuming we’re around at all.

There’s a good chance—maybe 50 percent, maybe higher—that we will, in some fairly thoroughgoing sense, fail. The pull of tribal psychology is strong, and few countries lately have shown the wisdom it takes to build visionary policies at the international level, or even at the national level (where creativity is also deeply needed if all the roots of today’s discontent are to be addressed).

Still, things could be worse. It could be that the conventional wisdom is right—that Trumpism is in no small part a reaction against global governance per se, and so stands in immovable opposition to it. But the story turns out to be more complicated than that. The reaction is largely against global governance done badly—against some rules that were designed with disregard for people in flyover country, and against the fallout from America’s disregard of other rules. And global governance can in principle be done well. Reconciling populist nationalists to the international tools the world needs will be hard, but at least it’s not logically impossible.

We can take some heart in the history of our species. The fact that we’ve gotten this far—to the threshold of a functioning global community—is a tribute to the human capacity for playing nonzero-­sum games wisely. Our ancestors didn’t know game theory, but like us they had cooperative instincts as well as belligerent ones, and they deployed them often enough to play their games with intermittent success. They built passably effective governments of growing scope and intricacy, and sometimes placed those governments in firmly peaceful relationship with one another, even cementing these bonds with institutions that transcend borders. The rudiments of global governance, however flawed, are an impressive legacy, testament to a long and arduous ascent punctuated by chaos and bloodshed from which hard lessons were learned.

It would be nice to have a president who could carry the torch forward, someone who sees the big picture and has both an accordingly big vision and the rare skills that would inspire commitment to it. But look at it this way: At least we have Trump! In his own way, he vividly and powerfully alerts us to our predicament.

Trump channels the discontent generated by the basic drift of history—the drift toward global social organization—and by contingent facts of history, in particular by the failure of his predecessors to fully grapple with that drift. He voices grievances about economics and foreign policy that are the residue of that failure. Further testament to failure lies in the ease with which he activates and exploits the most volatile human capacities: fear, resentment, hatred, bigotry, xenophobia.

In addition, Trump offers clear guidance, even if it’s mainly a kind of reverse guidance. His basically zero-sum perspective shows us how not to conceive of a world that is rife with nonzero-sum games. His belligerence and narcissism, even solipsism, show us how not to act if we want to play them well. And yes, here and there he champions a truly important policy idea—an idea that fits both the present and future, if in ways he doesn’t wholly understand.

Maybe someday we’ll be thankful that Donald Trump came along and, however unknowingly, however perversely, pointed us in a new direction. After all, it’s not as if things were going all that great until he showed up. That, in fact, is why he’s here.


Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) is the author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and Why Buddhism Is True. A visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, he publishes the Mindful Resistance Newsletter.

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