The View | For all of America’s faults, its retreat from the world is not good news
- Stung by the Afghan war, the US will turn isolationist after a century of globalisation. This will cost the world its economic growth and, more importantly, put peace at risk
Many foreign observers of the United States ask a similar question of it to the one posed in the famous Monty Python comedy sketch: “What have the Romans ever done for us?”. The answer: “Nothing”. Er, except for “the aqueduct”, “the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a freshwater system, and public health”. You get the picture.
Late 20th-century America, like the Romans, brought peace, and along with the American way of life, internet technology, Disney, streaming, GPS, an open economic system, and a massive consumer-fuelled debt that was the engine of the world’s economy for six decades.
It was only when I lived in the US that I realised that many citizens don’t have passports. International news in America is what happens to US citizens abroad. Huge swathes of the country don’t ever have to worry about the rest of the world.
America is just too big, too self-contained, and the pleasures and perils of life come to people without them having to be bothered by the rest of the world.
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