How to beat the backlash that threatens the liberal revolution

We are living in an age of backlash to three decades of revolutions in different realms. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world saw the liberalization of markets, the democratization of politics and the explosion of information technology. Each of these trends seemed to reinforce the other, creating a world that was overall more open, dynamic and interconnected. For many Americans, these forces seemed natural and self-sustaining. But they were not. The ideas that spread across the globe during this era of openness were American, or at least Western, ideas, undergirded by U.S. power. Over the past decade, as that power began to be contested, those trends began to reverse. These days, politics around the world is riddled with anxiety, a cultural reaction to years of acceleration.

The opposition to American power is easily visible in the geopolitical realm. After three decades of unquestioned American hegemony, the rise of China and the return of Russia have brought us back to an age of great power competition. These nations, as well as some regional powers such as Iran, all seek to disrupt and erode the Western-dominated international system that has ordered the world in recent decades.

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