The 2022 Reckoning

I can’t predict specifically what’s going to happen in 2022. But I think I can predict the general theme of the coming year: a reckoning, in the sense of a settling of accounts.

Up until the Trump era, America’s role in the world was shaped by a somewhat bipartisan consensus, sometimes snidely referred to as the foreign-policy “blob.” If you look at the worldview of the Davos conference, the United Nations, the World Bank, and most of the employees of the State Department, you see this worldview at work: Diplomacy solves problems. We offer tsk-tsk statements about human rights. Engagement with other countries always pays off in the end.