The most important American holiday comes on the fourth Thursday of November. We like it because most bosses will give employees Friday off too, whence a four-day holiday. We are also grateful. The pilgrims came on the Mayflower in 1620 and celebrated their arrival to religious freedom with the only food available — turkeys and cranberries, which grew in the marshes around Plymouth. That’s what we eat on Thanksgiving day.
Descendants of the Mayflower once tried to make of themselves an aristocracy, which didn’t last long. My great (x5) grandfather Nicholas Browning fought in the Civil War and was descended from a Browning who came in the Abigail a few years after the Mayflower.
The DAR — Daughters of the American Revolution — also tried to become an aristocracy. President Franklin Roosevelt put paid to that by addressing them: “Greetings, fellow immigrants.”
We were a “People of Plenty”, the title of an important book showing the exceptional character of American power and wealth: more immigrants needing more land could expand ever westward to the Pacific, hitting gold there in the mid-19th Century. We indispensably helped create a rules-based world order, which inevitably at times we used to our advantage. The surprise is
how little, compared with past world empires, like the Romans’ or Napoleon’s attempts to create one.
That 71-year period of relative peace and growing prosperity for the world, a period of decolonisation and dramatic wealth-building in the East and parts of Southeast Asia, now seems like ancient history. It’s not as if the American president-elect is something new; Russia’s Putin and smaller fish like our Duterte in the Philippines preceded him and now laud him. Putin seeks dearly to create a multi-polar world where he can invade neighbours with impunity. He is succeeding. Duterte can call my president the “son of a whore” and almost get away with it. Civility is gone.
What’s next? Well, write off the United Nations. Trump bragged that it wouldn’t make any difference if he knocked off the top 20 floors. Since the UN can only work on consensus, great power acquiescence in the Security Council, forget it, if America isn’t providing some of its few sinews. It is easy to forget how many little wars and civil disturbances it helped smother or even settle in this 71-year period.
Brexit — the British vote to leave the European Union — probably was a death blow to the European Union, and will be for sure if the hard-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen wins elections next year. Ultra-nationalists are popping up all over Europe.
Thank heavens for China and India. Together, they constitute almost a third of humanity and are the third and first fastest growing economies in the world (the Philippines is No. 2). Both are stable. It’s amazing that multi-cultural (though mostly Caucasian) India does so well.
China is interested, fairly enough, in East and Southeast Asian hegemony. Since Trump doesn’t care about, or doesn’t want, a rules-based international system, he will impose no obstacles. Anyway, China isn’t interested in world hegemony. India is busy enough keeping itself together; in five trips there I was amazed at its success.
The problem we face for the next 70 years is at the fringes, or in overlapping, areas between the great regions (China-East, Southeast Asia; Russia and its “near-abroad”; Europe-US; Middle East and North Africa; Latin America; and, always last, black Africa).
It’s easy to forget that China and Russia nearly went to war less than 50 years ago. The Cuban Missile Crisis was 54 years ago. Vietnam and China went to blows. The “six-day war”, through which Israel conquered much of the Middle East, was 49 years ago. Wars in Sudan and the so-called Democratic Republic of the Congo have more recently had casualties in the millions. And, this is during and within an essentially peaceful overall world system that endured 70 years.
What to do now? Find your own haven and make it as peaceful as possible. Follow the Malaysian example where the three main ethnicities have maintained respect for each other for more than 50 years. Pamper Trump and tell him how wonderful he is, to keep him out of your affairs, during the next four years.
It looks so bad, from an overall international perspective — that maybe we will work harder to put fires out early. Who knows, it might not be as bad as I for one think. Whether people liked it or not, and many didn’t, the United States kept the peace. I know: I began hitch-hiking worldwide at 17 and tried hard not ever to be the “Ugly American” in almost 50 international sojourns. But, all this is personal and international ancient history.
It was a lousy Thanksgiving, alas.
W. Scott Thompson is Professor Emeritus of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the United States