Opinion | Amid the Australia-China row and Donald Trump’s bluster, the world needs leaders who talk less and do more for the common good
- The growing Australia-China dispute and Trump’s divided America are important signs of a changing global system, where elite minorities are being challenged by the rest
- More than ever, the world needs leaders who can set aside the ‘I’ for the ‘we’
Global strategist Ian Bremmer thinks that Trump is only a symptom and neither the problem nor the cause of global troubles.
Instead, he outlines four main causes: the American middle class wanting change; becoming anti-immigration; not wanting to be involved in foreign wars, and; technology creating social bubbles that cause more polarisation within society, not just in the United States but everywhere. Nice words, but any of these issues might take at least a decade to solve.
Bremmer’s thinking represents much of what is flawed with neoliberal Western logic: do not look at the symptoms, instead look for the causes, fix them and the world will be fine. This approach misses the point that symptoms are entangled outcomes of complex interactions between the individual and the system.