In an era of nationalism in American politics, can
globalists still make an effective case? What do international institutions
like the UN and EU even do for America in the first place? And why is it worth
preserving them — besides the fact that we set many of them up in the first
place? AEI’s Dalibor Rohac joins the podcast to answer these questions and
more.

Dalibor is a resident scholar at AEI, where he studies European political and economic trends. He is concurrently a visiting junior fellow at the Max Beloff Centre for the Study of Liberty at the University of Buckingham in the UK and a fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Most recently, he is the author of In Defense of Globalism.

What follows is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

In practice, don’t
all countries put their interests first? That’s the reason for an America First
policy — so that we don’t give up advantages that other countries have.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with America First as a
general proposition. The problem is that there was a US foreign policy outlook
at the end of the Second World War, in which a bipartisan consensus emerged in
Washington about the nature of long-term US interests. So everything that
seemed to be immediately in the material US interests was also aligned with
these more enlightened interests.

Our outlook went hand-in-hand with institutions that promoted economic openness and democracy, and they overall made the world a much better place. In the meantime, I think they were, by and large, good for America’s interests. They made the US the world’s uncontested leading superpower — they placed it in a position in which its leverage can be exercised in every corner of the world in a way that the world, if guided by an America First mentality, wouldn’t have produced the same outcomes.

What about the
nationalist critique which says that globalism is outdated because we’re
dealing with a new set of problems that we didn’t have in the 50s?

I’m not sure that if the rules of global trade were written
by the Chinese, or if the WTO didn’t exist, or if Europe was trapped in a power
competition between large countries like they were in the past, that it would
be conducive to better prospects for US workers or industry. So, I’m not
convinced by that line of thought.

The line of thought that might be more compelling is the one
which inquires about whether particular aspects of this system need updating.

Your book seems to be
aimed at the center-right. What do you want those people to know, where they
might be getting things about nationalism and globalism wrong?

The book has a twofold aim: The first is to push against the
idea that nationalism in its various forms is an integral part of conservative
or center-right thought. It is to push against the idea that this crude,
narrowly-understood realism is the only way to think about global and
international affairs from a center-right perspective. That’s really a position
that’s been gaining traction and influence in center-right circles.

The second goal of the book is to point out that many of
these international institutions, organizations, and the multilateral
architecture that we can call “globalism,” if you will, is not some sort of
top-down imposition created with the aim of dismantling or replacing the nation
state. Rather, it is a bottom-up evolution aimed at fixing particular policy
challenges that have emerged.

There is an obsession with national sovereignty on the
political right, which has become rather unhealthy as of late, and which leads
people to ideologically-driven, knee-jerk refusal to even engage with policy
challenges that arise at the international level.

What do you
understand the nationalist agenda to be? Is it reducing immigration, implementing
a more protectionist trade policy, and bringing the troops home? What is the key
element of their agenda, and what about it do you reject?

I think unites these approaches is the rejection of the idea
that countries and nation states should be able to pool sovereignty and
decision-making and create common structures that potentially constrain the
discretion that the elected officials in these nation states possess.

I think that idea is a striking departure from the baselines
of classical liberal thought and even of conservative Catholic thought. For the
latter, the nation state was perceived — I think rightly so — not as a
God-given fact, but simply as a result of the processes of unification that
occurred in the 19th century.

This is something I’m trying to explain to Americans: Part
of the European condition has to do with trying to reconcile diversity and
unity. The European continent lived through a millennium and a half of efforts
to secure coexistence for a great number of highly decentralized political
units. The best answer that the thinkers on the conservative right were able to
come up with was some version of international federalism. That notion is
reflected in the institutions that the US helped to set up after the Second
World War.

What does the world
look like if America withdraws from the world, after a decade or two?

I think it’s a world that is much less attuned to US
interests. It would be a world that’s much less friendly to whatever voters in
the Midwest care about.

If you have these vacuums created in different parts of the world, you have ruthless powers stepping in and filling those voids. So I firmly believe that part of responsible leadership with America right now is to work with America allies in countries with whom the United States share values and broad outlooks on governance and markets, and help to remake the world. Not necessarily in our image, but in a way that’s aligned with American interests.

The post 5 questions for Dalibor Rohac on the case for globalism appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.