There's a Whole World Out There

One of the great advantages of traveling through the world is to get some perspective. I’m just back from Kazakhstan and Doha, where I gave some talks and met a plethora of peeps, and I also spent a week in Algeria in January. And as is often the case after these trips, I came away with a deepened sense that we are all of us everywhere afflicted with a touch of cultural myopia, and that in the case of Americans, we focus so relentlessly on our own dramas that we easily forget that they are our own, and not the world’s.

For sure, the Donald Trump show gets high ratings globally. Outside the United States, the Trump show is at times delightful and at times horrifying but always entertaining. For sure as well, Europeans just now are confronting what to do without the economic and military security blanket that the United States has provided since 1945, but elsewhere, the show is more popcorn and less anxiety.

What has struck me most in recent years is that the idea of the United States as the “indispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright famously declared in the 1990s, is not only outdated but may have never been true. The rest of the world is moving on, with or without America. We are living in an age of multipolar resiliency. Yes, that sounds wonky, but it captures the basic fact that there is no longer one or even just a few centers of gravity internationally. There are many. What’s more, the web of connections between countries and regions is rapidly growing even as the United States signals that it will be more and more focused on its own country and its own interests and even as China doubles-down on its own fortress approach.

Algeria and Kazakhstan are rarely in the news, and yet they both share vast oil reserves, autocratic but not deeply repressive governments, and a burgeoning middle-class. Kazakhstan is in its fourth decade of post-Soviet independence and still has a large Russian population. Until 2019, it had had one president as an independent nation, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Algeria has had a shadowy military government since its brutal civil war in the 1990s between the army and an Islamic insurgency. Yet what both countries have in common is that they have channeled enough of the oil wealth into infrastructure, education, health care and overall development. Neither country is open politically, and Algeria is remarkably cut off from the world, yet both are solidly what we would call middle class.

What is also clear is that whatever future these countries forge, they will forge it on their own and in their own way. That was even more evident at the Web Summit in Doha last week, where 25,000 people gathered to focus on the same thorny questions of AI, the future of technology and development that every other society in the world is facing, except that the Qataris have trillions of dollars of natural gas reserves, along with their equally rich neighbors in oil such as Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia. These countries also have millions of young people, and they are facing their future with the same kind of enthusiasm for building tomorrow that used to epitomize the United States.

Read The Anti-American Century (2020) by Zachary Karabell

The world, of course, is fraught with peril. It always has been. Yes, there are conflicts galore, as all news outlets highlight daily. But there is also a parallel story of countries around the world seizing control of their own destiny and integrating the basic fact that no one is coming to rescue them and that their future is in their own hands. And for many, the retreat of great powers that have, in varying degrees, taken it upon themselves to dictate and lecture is welcome—even as material support (whether through USAID or military aid) wanes.

And for many of those countries, a United States that is transactional and not moralistic and doesn’t demand that sides are taken is a welcome respite. For sure, the recent flare-up between Trump and Ukraine’s Zelensky in the White House seemed a demand that Ukraine bend to the United States in return for aid, but that was more a sign of transactional bullying than a U.S. seeking to extend its influence. From the Cold War to the Global War on Terror, the United States often demanded that countries choose a side. George Bush famously declared in the wake of 9/11, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Under the first Trump and then Biden administration, countries have been pressured to choose between China and the United States. Increasingly, around the world, whether it is Saudi Arabia or India, Kazakhstan or Kenya, countries are choosing their own side and none other.

If that seems like a Hobbesian world—anarchic and self-interested—remember that the Cold War, from a global perspective, was far from a peaceful picnic. Many countries were trapped between the aggressive and maximalist demands of the United States on one side and the Soviet Union on the other. Today, the stability of the global order no longer rests with any single nation but with all countries.

And it is the height of arrogance to contend that out of a global population of 8 billion people, 330 million Americans have a monopoly on the desire for peace, prosperity and security. As more parts of the world have become affluent and educated, more people than ever and more countries than ever are stepping up to take charge of those needs, forging ties with one another to advance their own peace, prosperity and security, whether through a myriad of bilateral and regional trade agreements or security pacts.

As the United States seemingly abandons its commitment to free trade, other countries are strengthening their trade ties with each other. Global trade reached a record of $33 trillion in 2024 and will regardless of U.S. tariffs grow this year as well. The ever-denser web of economic and political agreements between countries that do not involve the EU, the United States or China augurs a level of resiliency and growing prosperity that is at odds with the prevailing narrative of a world in chaos in the face of the retreat of the United States.

Could everything fall apart? Of course. And warnings of that grow louder by the day. As the adage goes, if you’re going to forecast the end of the world, just don’t give a date. Future warnings of doom are impossible to disprove. But the palpable energy around the globe that there is a new path forward that does not revolve around the United States should be noted and not dismissed. The old 20^th century order is finally giving way to something else, which is unsettling and risky but could also be liberating and energizing to us 8 billion humans who share this planet. I don’t know the future, but for now, I’m betting on the resiliency that is everywhere in evidence rather than the dangers that occupy so much of our attention.