World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have raised issues about the process of globalization:  Trump questions the mobility of labor and attacks immigration;  Sanders questions the mobility of capital and attacks Free Trade Agreements.  The candidates are thus challenging one of the fundamental tenets of the liberal ideology that has dominated the global system since 1945.  The questions about globalization will likely become more visible and discussed as the sanctity of the ideology has now been raised.  John Maynard Keynes once said of free trade:

“I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt, but almost as a part of the moral law. I regarded ordinary departures from it as being at the same time an imbecility and an outrage. I thought England’s unshakable free trade convictions, maintained for nearly a hundred years, to be both the explanation before man and the justification before Heaven of her economic supremacy. As lately as 1923 I was writing that free trade was based on fundamental “truths” which, stated with their due qualifications, no one can dispute who is capable of understanding the meaning of the words.”  John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” The Yale Review, Vol. 22, no. 4 (June 1933), pp. 755-769.

The backlash against globalization mirrors a similar backlash at the beginning of the 20th century, well documented by Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke in their book Power and Plenty.   The backlash, of course, led to the rise of fascism, something which some analysts (Christopher Hedges and Thomas Franks).   Both Trump and Sanders should be taken seriously as a clear symptom of the decline in the power of the ideology of free trade and the legitimacy of democracy itself. 

Russia has announced that it will pull its “main forces” out of Syria.  Some Russian forces will remain in Syria to enforce the “cessation of hostilities” but the Russians indicated that its primary mission of supporting President Assad had been completed.   The cease-fire does not include the two main rebel groups–Daesh (the Islamic State) and Jabat al-Nusra–but it has tamped down much of the violence.  The Russian decision will make it easier for the US to make concessions about the conditions under which President Assad can remain in Syria in some limited capacity.

To its great credit, China is trying to wean itself from consuming coal to produce electricity.  But the decline in coal consumption has a real price:  thousands of coal miners have not been paid in months, and China intends to lay off as many as 2 million coal miners over the next three years.  The policies have understandably caused great harm to the miners and there has been a dramatic increase in the number of coal miner strikes, as well as a large number of strikes over all.